Short-answer questions from Unit 2 of my online C++ course, and my short answers:...
August 22, 2006
I'd always planned to follow my How to Choose a Major post with one on the fact that English is not a career-ready major, but thanks to a busy couple days of bugfixing and an even busier weekend of weeding, cleaning, furniture-moving, and toddler-wrangling, Pioneer Woman and Sheryle have managed to give a preview of my point in the comments on the Major post. Sheryle writes:...
August 15, 2006
No one seems to want to listen to my assvice around here lately, so I've decided to share some with the broader Internet—and, more specifically, with those college-bound individuals who've yet to choose a major. There are probably many ways to go about this, but I wanted to share the way *I* did it because it's [a] simple, [b] logical, and [c] might surprise you. I know I was surprised by the outcome of this exercise when I did...
June 19, 2006
My mom didn't believe in homework. If I ever probed beyond this simple declaration to discover the reasons behind her belief, I don't remember it specifically, but I do seem to recall that she felt that reading and undirected play were hugely important....
February 3, 2006
I graduated high school in 1986—in other words, 20 years ago. I'm still not sure if I'm interested in going to my high school reunion, but it's been fun learning about where my former classmates from Sanderson High School in Raleigh, North Carolina are now via a Yahoo! group set up for that purpose. I wish there were a similar group for Needham High School Class of 1986; while I didn't graduate from NHS, the kids I knew there...
November 26, 2005
If you had any doubt that No Child Left Behind would make things worse instead of better, consider this:...
September 4, 2005
From School Monitor, an interview with Jonathan Kosol in today's NYT Magazine:...
August 29, 2005
The very day that Michele commented about Quaker schools on my Independent Study post, and I responded that the nearby Friends Select School would be at the top of our list, cost permitting, I noticed that the cover story in this month's Philadelphia Magazine was a ranking of the area's top public and private schools. (This is probably no coincidence; what better time of year to write stories about education?) Since I'd failed to find any mention of tuition...
August 23, 2005
There's an interesting excerpt from Chris Whittle's new book, Crash Course, in this week's TIME Magazine—interesting because it captures what I think I found so frustrating about my K-12 school experience, and why if I could change one thing about the course of my life, it would have been to go to college at 16 rather than 17. By the sixth grade, let's assume only half of a student's time was spent in what we now think of as...