In prepping for the workshop tonight I’ve: gone over a mental picture of everyone and their names; written out a handful of review questions covering the biggest conceptual lessons we learned in the last session; settled on a schedule with the group facilitator to accommodate a short dinner, birthday celebrations Read more…
Yesterday I debuted my Rites of Passage workshop at New Alternatives for Children (NAC). I expected a lot of awkward silence, but there were so many talkative and knowledgeable people in the room, and many of their questions and comments pushed me in exactly the right direction. I have a lot to process, but I’ll offer some initial observations here: (more…)
Part of my fascination with the chicken nugget issue is that it raises the question not only of what we feed our kids, but who decides what they eat in the first place. The story of Stacey Irvine, the seventeen year-old who collapsed after a steady diet of almost nothing but chicken nuggets since the age of two, is an extreme case of what could happen if we let kids set diets entirely for themselves. In her own defense, Stacey’s mother said that her daughter presented problems that her other two children never did with respect to their eating habits. They even happily consume plenty of fruits and vegetables. Stacey, however, shunned all foods to the extent that for her mother it was a relief when she discovered her daughter’s penchant for chicken nuggets.This got me wondering just how persistent adults should be in ensuring that kids get a healthful and varied diet. (more…)
I am still making my way through the Teagle anthology on assessment, which I can’t recommend nearly enough to educators who are invested in bettering their teaching practice. Today I read “Fearful Symmetries: Rubrics and Assessment” by Sarah Webster Goodwin. You might be able to tell from her title that Goodwin is a scholar of British Romanticism, and her approach to education owes a lot to Blake’s notion of poetic or prophetic learning, which goes beyond what is known and taps into something (you guessed it) sublime or ineffable. The most engrossing part of her article detailed a particularly novel project assignment she handed a freshman class in Skidmore’s interdisciplinary Human Dilemmas seminar. (more…)
I’m still tossing around some ideas on how to conduct a sex, dating, and relationship workshop. I found a “Sexual Pressures” curriculum aimed at middle schoolers that had a nice list of discussion questions to get students thinking deeply about sex and relationships: What is the difference between love and Read more…
In “Blame it on the brain” I touched on how emerging research on the “teen brain” should make us reevaluate how we address the problem of risky behavior among youth. One especially sensitive area is sex ed. My interest, however, lies not in discussing various forms of contraception or the responsibilities of teen parenthood, but in getting young people to think deeply about emotional intimacy and healthy relationships. This aspect of teen sexuality is often overlooked, and this oversight leaves young people without any guidance on how to develop meaningful, intimate bonds even beyond their teens and early twenties. (more…)
I just finished reading William Bridges‘s Creating You & Co. for my own personal purposes, but it ended up being useful for my Finding Your Calling workshop because the author’s description of how to work effectively in an increasingly “dejobbed” world resonates surprisingly well with the premise of my Coming Read more…
I’ve been doing some research on the teenage brain lately. Frontline’s program on the teen brain is a particularly informative and entertaining look at why teenagers behave in ways that are maddening to the adults around them and confounding even to themselves. So what’s the scientific explanation for the mood Read more…
In the commencement speech given at Bard College at Simon’s Rock earlier this year, Ronan Farrow expounds on a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Out of a Silent Planet on the topic of experience and memory, and how they are one and the same. Farrow tells the audience that what he Read more…
In my post on “The Shawl” I show how a somewhat bibliotherapeutic approach to the story can be facilitated by following a central image through close reading. We can take a similar approach to Susan Perabo’s “Some Say the World,” which originally appeared in TriQuarterly (sometime between 1994-1996, according to various sources), but which I am reading from Frosch’s Coming of Age in the 21st Century. I’m considering teaching this story in my Critical Approaches to the ‘Family’ Program because it tells the story from the perspective of a teenager living in a broken and dysfunctional family who ends up finding a family bond with a parental figure who is not her blood relation. The protagonist is a young, heavily-medicated pyromaniac stuck at home playing Parcheesi with her stepfather while her irresponsible, self-absorbed mother carries on a regular affair with her ex-husband, the protagonist’s estranged father. Predictably, the central image in the story is fire. (more…)