Triple The Dad

Let me kick this off by saying my kids are normal, well adjusted children who are awesome as well as being great learners. They are some of the most polite kids you will ever meet. Literally, people come up to us on almost every adventure out and compliment us on how well behaved our children are. Honestly, I think some of it is lowered expectations. I think most of them just expect triplets to behave like little monsters running around tasting other people's food at eateries and wildly running down the aisles of grocery stores knocking stuff off the shelves. So when ours behave like perfect little people, they are shocked. It is a point of pride among my wife and I. But sometimes, you can't win for trying. For instance. Each of our kids are a Kindle Fire they can play on (before you go to comment about screen time, they use them during "quiet time"). They are magicians on them. They teach themselves how to play games; they research new games; they have learned ...

This is going to be a short one. Partly because its hot as I write this - like 95 and humid hot - and partly because there isn't much more to say than what I'm going to say. If you've been following along with me, you know that as a good parent, I have certain opinions on education I question whether rote memorization is a good thing , I appreciate a good reality-based  education , and as a result I really don't care if cursive d ies a quick painful death. What does that have with today's post? It has to do with the kind of education I want  my kids to get in school rather than pointlessly memorizing the presidents in order. I recently saw the following headline on WebMd:  6M Drink Water Containing Toxic Chemicals: Report Which admittedly sounds scary. I mean, just look at that headline. Six million! That is a lot of people. And they are drinking water- such a basic necessity! - full of toxic chemicals. Toxic ones. Its right there in the headline. Chemicals...

As I noted in a previous post, we have been trying to speed up child development for years.  Generations, really.  Whether through skills-building activities, or Sesame Street or Little Einstein toys, we have made it our mission to get our child to speak first, speak the most words or do Task X first or failing that, do it the best. It hasn’t been working .  Children today hit developmental markers at the same ages as children 600 years ago.  The amount of words your child will know and use at 18, the amount and difficulty of mathematical calculations they can do in their head and how otherwise “smart” they are is genetically pretty much set at conception. You may have also heard that we have fallen behind many other countries on standardized tests, especially in the realm of math and science.  Maybe you believe this, maybe you don’t. The point of this post is that all our obsessive, “must get our children into Harvardesque pre-schools” compuncti...

I saw an article at http://www.slate.com/ about the impact on technology in our schools. The article , approached the issue mostly from a "will it be good for our schools/kids and will it lower costs?  The column ran in "Future Tense," and so this administrative and technology point of view makes some sense.  However, it makes almost no sense for the majority of readers, Moms and Dads, or anyone who cares about children's education. That is because technology, whether in the form of computers or the internet or e-books or whatever is next, is only a tool.  All the e-books and internet access in the world won't change a thing in the majority of U.S. schools.  Most students already have internet access in one form or another, whether at home, on their phones or at a library or school. Further, access to the wide-range of information available on the internet will not help students in any appreciable way.  In reality, students already have access to all...