Category archive: education

January 6, 2012

DT Friday Freakout: Boing Boing Edition

It's the weekend! Which will now be ruined by freaking out over these news stories from the worlds of parenting, health, science, and whatever: Fetal cells basically stay floating in the mother's bloodstream forever. It's called microchimerism. [boingboing, which, hmm,...
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January 2, 2012

Sixty Ten, Four Twenty? Qu'est Ce Que C'est Ça?

K2's sitting here counting on the floor, and obviously not getting the whole base ten concept yet, because she asks, "Daddy, what comes after 29?" "What comes after 39?" every time. And then suddenly, she doesn't mention 59, and she...
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December 19, 2011

There Are Underground Preschools On The East Coast, Too

I knew I should wait to post about this. There are now over 350 comments on Soni Sangha's NYT story of the stresses of operating an underground co-op nursery school in Brooklyn, so I'm pretty sure that everything that can...
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December 16, 2011

Lego Is For Girls. Now. Again. Whatever.

Our girls already play the hell out of their Legos, so on a purely personal level, I don't really feel too worked up about the new Lego Friends thing that supplants traditional minifigs with girlier "ladyfig" dolls and sets...
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December 9, 2011

Guess What I Think About Marcel The Shell With Shoes On?

It's adorable! How am I doing YouTube so wrong that I didn't find out about this until a year and 18 million views into its existence? Marcel was the offhand, one-week creation of Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp. Guess...
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December 6, 2011

Where In The World Is The Carmen Sandiego Generation?

Is it too early to see what happened to the overeager, overachieving yuppie children of the 90s, who were raised on Carmen Sandiego? They dorked out, cheated a little, really showed that private school jerk from Manhattan, and went on...
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December 2, 2011

DT Friday Freakout: Lead Juicebox Edition

Here to ruin your weekend, a healthy dose of freakout headlines from the worlds of parenting, science, health, education, and safety: Not to freak you out or anything, just that Consumer's Union really wants something to be done about all...
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November 28, 2011

'Block Consultants' Teach The Test

Oh, brother, what to make of the NY Times' "Back To Blocks" trend story that leads off with a "self-described 'block consultant'" leading a class for parents in block play?As in fashion, old things often come back in style...
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Scrapwood Playground At Tule Lake Internment Camp

In WWII, Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the west coast, stripped of basically everything they couldn't carry, and imprisoned in inland internment camps, rows of tarpaper barracks in the desert surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers....
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November 22, 2011

The Boomer Over-Parenting Paradigm Is Failing Before Our Eyes

I was really not too motivated to read the NY Times' report on analysts being demoralized after getting laid off from investment banks--haven't these people ever heard of going to business school? But then Choire Sicha reminded me why I...
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November 20, 2011

DT Friday Freakout: Selfish Edition

Oh there is so much to freak out over already, I'm not sure ruining one weekend will be enough: Day care in the US runs from awful-to-deadly, those are your only choices. [tnr] Which is too bad, because there's no...
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November 11, 2011

How'd That Work Out?

Beyond the headline, I love the NY Times Magazine's entire concept of following up with the kids of one of the pioneering advocates of what we now know as homeschooling. In 1975, Patricia Heidenry wrote about wandering the globe, teaching...
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November 1, 2011

Holy Crap, It's Contagion-Meets-12-Monkeys In Waldorf Schools

I'm no wingnut, and I don't like to be put in a position of agreeing with one, but day-um, Bay Area Waldorf people! Look me straight in the eye and expl--well, never mind. Just why the hell are 77%...
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October 28, 2011

Small Criminals Among Us

The opening horror story vignettes may be overflowing with obvious, overlooked developmental and parental red flags, but even if it's not enough to be the best parenting advice book written by a juvenile detention psychologist, Gad Czudner's Small Criminals...
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October 27, 2011

More Of The 99 Percent Are Kids

The New York Times has a nice article on the increasing numbers of kids visiting and participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Its presence in the Fashion & Style section, however, means this is just a trend story, and...
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October 17, 2011

OG Sesame Street Signing Alphabet By Joan La Barbara

Once again, mid-70s Sesame Street quietly blows my mind. This time it's an animated sign language alphabet sequence with beep bop boop vocal and electronic music soundtrack by avant-garde icon Joan La Barbara. K2 is picking up a lot...
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September 26, 2011

Think Of The Children: Ku Klux Kiddies On Parade

If I were to make a list of the most unexpected things to discover while searching through a tumblr of letterhead designs, the existence of a junior auxiliary for the Ku Klux Klan would be at the top. But...
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July 15, 2011

Harvard Study Shows You Can Be Too Smart For Your Own, Country's Good

Oh, where to start? How about right where we're supposed to, with the headline: Harvard Says July 4th Parades Make Kids Republicans Which, LOLOL, is this the most ridiculous example ever of the media sensationalistically misrepresenting the findings of an...
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June 30, 2011

Bjork Is The New Piano Lessons

Bjork's next album, Biophilia is also going to be a suite of iPad apps that serve as control panels for remixing and altering the songs, for playing musical instruments she created, and for learning and composing music using databases...
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April 28, 2011

Anthroposophical Kids Furniture, Also Coniferous

It really is the little differences. The Vienna auction house Dorotheum is selling this c.1930 Erwin Behr kids furniture made from "oiled coniferous wood" as an "anthroposophical child's chair and table," because similar styles were knocked together in the...
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April 19, 2011

Life Imitates The Onion Replaced By Life Imitates Wonkette

Basically, I don't have anything to add to Wonkette's coverage except the word Texas:The great thing about writing over-the-top joke exaggerations about America is that often they come true! For example, just this morning we were sarcastically criticizing Jan Brewer...
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April 13, 2011

Today In Kids And Food News

Maybe this should be a Wednesday WTF? I don't know, but I seem to have accumulated a lot of WTF-grade stories about food in my browser tabs: I am still trying to figure out what actually happened in the Detroit...
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April 12, 2011

Brought To You By The Letters O And G: Roosevelt Franklin

Funky Frolic's excellent Sesame Beat playlist contains some groovy classics from the 'Street itself, with a few covers and remixes thrown in for flava. And once again, it's probably only news to me, but hey-ho, Roosevelt Franklin had an...
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April 8, 2011

Happy To Find Happy To Be Nappy And Other bell hooks Books

So what else is in the beautiful TV mosaic of HBO Family's children's programming schedule? Because basically, it looks like an idyllic, multi-cultural paradise. It's Zion from The Matrix minus all the Matrix part. And the role of The...
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April 3, 2011

No Preschool Child Left Behind

UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik has a great article on Slate about how--well, it's probably about how preschool education is going to hell in a handbasket because of misunderstandings about how kids learn and about what toddlers should be learning...
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March 31, 2011

DT Mommy Mailbag: State School Edition

I know it's not Monday, but this just dropped into the DT Mommy Mailbag. Plus, it's good advice for all the Moms whose kids just bombed the ERB and are going to end up putting in an extra year at...
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March 24, 2011

Sounds Like Fun Times In The Playgroup

Sometimes, blog posts are like a half-drunk sippy cup of milk. Sure, you could finish them right away, but if you tuck them away in the folds of your stroller canopy and just let them sit for a couple of...
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March 15, 2011

Hahaha, They Put 'The Ivy League' In Quotes

Holy Moses, I've been writing this blog post a thousand times in my head since yesterday. From the NY Daily News comes news that an Over-Upper East Side mother is suing the ["$19,000-a-year"] York Avenue Preschool for "damaging [her] 4-year-old...
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March 3, 2011

Spectacular Ed.

This incredible 4x9-ft yarn art panel was apparently a gift to the Kansas City Public School System in the 1970s. It was made by special education students to celebrate mainstreaming. And now that the public school system is being...
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February 6, 2011

My Baby Can Tweet

I smell a DVDportunity! via @HawthornLAT [twitter]...
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January 27, 2011

HA, Tiger Mom's At Davos, And You're Not

Well, most of you are not. I've been surprised to get a few tweets, you know who you are. Anyway, not only is random Yale Law professor Amy Chua at the World Economic Forum; she's on a panel at the...
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Gather Yer Kids' Rosebuds While Ye May

The Middle East is in revolt, the double dip is starting, it's snowpocalypse all over again, and I'm missing a quarter's worth of tax receipts. What else can we stress about? Ah yes, the fate of all the kid's art!...
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January 21, 2011

I Was A Practice Baby

You've heard the story about practice babies, right? How random kids were plucked from whatever crib or orphanage was handy, and were given to a group of home ec students to raise for a semester? Sure you have. My mom...
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January 9, 2011

Chinese Mothering Involves Neither Joy Nor Luck

Woo-hoo, this just in from New Haven, aka the place where Amy Chua's kids already are, and your kids will never get, because they have lazy, weak, over-coddling you for a parent instead of a real Chinese Mother: Uh, well,...
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January 4, 2011

'Mexican Fiesta': John Cage For Kids

I just got Begin Again, Kenneth Silverman's new biography of John Cage, for Christmas, so I'm not very far in. But it's already full of surprises. Like, for example, an offhand mention that while he was teaching at The Cornish...
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December 21, 2010

Rip + Tatter Cardboard Chair By Pete Oyler

This may be the coolest cardboard kid chair I've seen since the disposable car seat in Papanek & Hennessey's Nomadic Furniture. Which is, I'm sure, exactly what SaferCar.gov wanted to advertise next to ["Safer than a cardboard box!"] Anyway,...
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December 8, 2010

Praise The Lord And Pass The Video Camera

"Baby Worship." So many amusing/annoying ways to go with this video of a Lakeland, Florida 2yo named Ava Grace doing exactly what 2yo's do: mimicking the actions and expressions of those around her in exchange for positive reinforcement. There's...
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November 9, 2010

DT Friday Freakout: Makeup Edition

Yeah yeah, whatever, our trip out of town this week means I've got a bagful of freakout with your name on it: Now now, New York, don't even try to compare your piddly little elevated lead levels in drinking water...
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October 11, 2010

Coal, Minders, Daughter

Just when I was beginning to wonder whether anyone actually ever bought one of Brockhage and Andra's Schaukelwagen, DT reader and schaukelwagenmeister Andrew spotted this 1970 photo in the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz:The GDR built up a network of day...
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September 29, 2010

What's The Secret, Max?

See, this is why I was wondering if Grover's near/far lesson wasn't completely lost on someone who basically sees the television as a glowing flat spot on the wall. I mean, when does it really seem any different from a...
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September 28, 2010

Grover Tries To Teach Linear Perspective

I love this, of course, but does it still work for the postmodern kid who recognizes and embraces the flatness of the screen? Maybe this needs to be reworked as a two-iPhone near/far teaching app that uses GPS. Or...
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September 20, 2010

Ringo Atelier, Qu'est Ce Que C'est?

If you wish to make a Ringo Atelier from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Paris is filled with a network of ateliers I've stared at it for a few days now, and near as I can tell, Ringo...
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August 20, 2010

Now THAT'S A Reason To Find A Mandarin-Speaking Nanny

Someone on Twitter called the 2006 show titled, "Musical Language" the single best episode of Radiolab ever. I don't know about that, but it is certainly very awesome. And from a parent's perspective it is a must-listen. There's a bit...
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This Just In From The Kids Memorize The Darndest Things Department...

From DT reader Eric comes this video of YouTube user drchelpka's expressive 3-yo son reciting "Litany," by former US Poet Laureate and apparent Outback Steakhouse fan ["You are still the bread and the knife"? Amiright? Am I the only one...
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August 19, 2010

Yo Quiero A Spanish-Speaking Nanny

So The New York Times reports that city families are seeking out non-English-speaking nannies to teach their kids a foreign language. Or I should say second language, since the whole point of New York is that there's no such thing...
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August 11, 2010

It Takes A Playgroup To Raise An Only Child

The Wall Street Journal reports that the parents of several only children have created a once-a-week playgroup to socialize them. This is now or will be a trend, seeing as how some people only have one kid. How will this...
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July 29, 2010

Little Red Riding Hood, The Operetta

In 1930, the Delta District school in Delta, Utah presented "Little Red Riding Hood" in operetta form. That's my grandmother Lora, the bee on the top left right, ith the 'X'. These stories and more are coming up this...
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July 22, 2010

BldgBlog On BldgBlocks

Everyone's favorite architopian blogger Geoff Manaugh just geeked out over the massive collection of vintage blocks and building toys in the archives of Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture. The primary target of his fascination is Dr. Richter's Anchor Blocks,...
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July 19, 2010

Blame Canada Mary Tyler Moore

A three-year study of 234 families of kindergarteners published in Child Development found that behavior problems in school are linked to two types of families: Emeshed, like "the emotionally messy Barone family in the family sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond," and...
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July 14, 2010

Pompidou Skate-Park For Child-Artists

So the Centre Pompidou just opened a new l'Atelier des Enfants, an activity and education center for kids ages 2-12. Core77 has photos and some chitchat with the fashion-y designer Mathieu Lehanneur, whose ideas for the space included "a...
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June 4, 2010

DT Friday Freakout: Helicopter Parent Edition

Personally, my own weekends have been full of comment spam-related freakouts. But just in case you haven't hand Ukrainian spambots take down your server lately, here are some recent, overwrought headlines from the worlds of science, safety, and parenting to...
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May 22, 2010

Enzo Mari Pities Your Coloring In The Lines

You know I'll go to the mat for Enzo Mari anytime, anyplace. And I would love to find some vintage copies of his awesome Drawing Cards sets, too, like the one Michael recently posted at his blog, Stopping Off...
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May 20, 2010

Raising Arizona

Huh. Who'da thought that the Kids Love Spanish pre-school summer camp in Scottsdale AZ wouldn't have filled up immediately this year?...
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April 21, 2010

John Baldessari Is Not Demonstrating Developmentally Appropriate Interaction Strategies

From Electronic Arts Intermix's description of John Baldessari's 1972 video art structuralist critique, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet:Teaching a Plant the Alphabet is an exercise in futility, an absurdist lesson in cognition and recognition. The scenario is elementary: A...
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April 16, 2010

DT Friday Freakout

Friday Friday Friday--Ooh, what does it mean? It means it's time to ruin your weekend with alarming and/or depressing news from the worlds of science, safety, and parenting! Mother Jones has a shocking story about how, according to a mind-blowing...
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March 19, 2010

It Appears That Chicken McNuggets Are Extruded.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } how McNuggets are made, originally uploaded by Jake Pierson. This McNugget mold is apparently hanging...
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March 2, 2010

One MILLION Drawings! Rhoda Kellogg Childhood Art Archive

Between 1948 and 1966, early education and development researcher Rhoda Kellogg and the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association of San Francisco compiled an archive of over one million drawings by children aged 2-8. In 1967, she published a reference collection...
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February 16, 2010

The Golden Book Of Chemistry Experiments

At first, the idea that the 1960 Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments was teaching America's Youth how to make deadly chlorine gas at home makes me sad for the decline of Education, Science, and Progress in These United States....
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February 3, 2010

MoMA/Creative Playthings Collage Kit Definitely Worth Preserving In The Box

Wow, Airform Archives posted a mint-in-box Collage and Construction Set, "A Project by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Creative Playthings, Princeton, NJ" It looks like the perfect companion for Art for the Family the 1960 book...
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January 27, 2010

Brown Bear Vs Board Of Education

Yesterday I learned from Dadwagon that members of the Texas State Board of Education recommended banning the work of Bill Martin Jr, who authored Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, from being used in the state's public education...
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January 24, 2010

DT Friday Freakout: Sunday Science Edition

A selection of headlines from the worlds of science, medicine, education and parenting designed to freak you out: Sperm in promiscuous mice are able to identify and cooperate with their "brethren" to outmaneuver other males' sperm and reach the egg....
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January 13, 2010

Wednesday WTF: Texas Preschooler Suspended For "Beatles Hair"

From The NY Times story on why 4-year-old Taylor Pugh's long hair means must continue to "be separated from other children" in his public preschool class:The boy, Taylor Pugh, says he likes his hair long and curly. But on Monday...
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January 12, 2010

The Soviet Union Died So That This Children's Book Might Live

Wow. The Miracle of Life is a 1992 elementary school book from Russia, which just the year before had been the Soviet Union. I'd say it was a fair trade. As far as basic explanations of life, birth, and...
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January 10, 2010

DT Friday Freakout: Weekend Washout Edition

It's 10 o'clock. Is it too late to ruin your weekend with alarming news from the worlds of science, medicine, safety, and parenting advice? The BBC reports that a parental survey of some kind finds that "'One in six' children...
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January 8, 2010

Snow!!

Grups, schmups. Nothing crystallizes the vast difference of perspective between parent and kid like waking up to a snow day....
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January 5, 2010

Heinz Coloring Book

Photo and ephemera collector Jim Linderman suggests--or jokes, I can't tell--that the 1927 promotiocational classic, Heinz Kindergarten Book: Pictures To Trace might have provided early source material for Andy Warhol. Who knows? Warhol was certainly a voracious a collector...
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Four Colors Four Words

I didn't anticipate the sheer, bemused pleasure I feel watching the kid laugh out loud every time she sees her most recent favorite artwork, a major, early Joseph Kosuth at the Hirshhorn Museum whose title is as obvious as...
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January 1, 2010

DT Friday Freakout: Out With The Old Freakouts Edition

Part of me thought I should do a Top 10,000 Freakouts of 2009 List, but I realized there are really only three Freakouts, and they don't ever change: Your kid's gear is dangerous and/or deadly. Your kid's world is full...
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December 28, 2009

Eh-Oh! World's Biggest Ghost Mall Hosts World's Loneliest Teletubbies Edutainment Centre

The South China Mall in Dongguan, "The First Super-mega Theme Shopping Park In China," has been a spectacular failure pretty much from its opening in 2006. It has 6.5 million square feet of space for over 1500 retailers, but...
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December 17, 2009

Look, Anyone Can Teach Any 2-YO 'Hamlet'

I really don't like just reposting random things. I like to be able to add a little context, a little more useful info where I can. And I'm very wary of just posting other peoples' random kid videos or...
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December 16, 2009

2nd Grade Kid On A Cross, People! What's Going On In Christmas City?

Though we know here as America's Capital Of WTF Dad Stories, the official unofficial nickname for Taunton, Massachusetts is "The Christmas City." Which makes it all the more ironic [read OUTRAGEOUS ATTACK ON FREEDOM] that an 8-year-old boy was suspended...
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December 14, 2009

A Very Special Monday Mommy Mailbag

So what vital information do publicists have for you parents/ladies? Toys"R"Us Helps Take The Worry Out of Holiday Shopping for Moms With its Annual Toy Guide for Differently-abled Kids Last-minute holiday season can be stressful for moms, and particularly so...
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December 12, 2009

Self Portrait, The Kid, 2009

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Self Portrait, The Kid, 2009, originally uploaded by daddytypes. So that's what they mean by...
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December 11, 2009

Time Out Of It

I'm a little slow to this, but my grandmother only saw the article at her doctor's office this week. Time Magazine has one of those big trend-calling pieces, "Helicopter Parents: The Backlash Against Overparenting," about how This Generation of Parents...
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December 9, 2009

Through The Enchanted Gate: MoMA's Kid Art TV Show

I've worked with MoMA in various ways for almost twenty years now, but I only really became aware of the incredible legacy of Victor d'Amico since having a kid. He oversaw the education programs at the Modern for decades,...
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December 4, 2009

Actually, The Sun Is NOT A Mass Of Incandescent Gas

Things were all so simple then, in April, when I brushed aside They Might Be Giants' energetic 1993 cover version of, "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas." The song was written by Hy Zaret in 1950, for Space...
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November 25, 2009

So You Think Your Kid Can Count

So the other day, I'm listening to the episode of WNYC's manneristic funhouse show Radiolab about numbers, where mad-rad new dad Jad Abumrad is talking to some developmental neuroscientist or whatever about how even babies' brains have an innate sense...
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November 15, 2009

From LIFE: Junior NASA Astronaut

Just fantastic. Andy posted a couple of great b&w photos of this "Young Space Pioneer" taken by veteran photojournalist Arthur Rickerby in 1962 the same year John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, but the entire...
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November 6, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Shocked, Shocked Edition

Calm, relaxing autumn weekend with the kid? Not if the publicizers of these stories from the worlds of science, medicine, education, safety, and parenting have anything to do with it: What better way to start the Friday Freakout than...
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October 27, 2009

What Was The Vienna Kindergarten At Expo67?

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Vienna Kindergarten, Expo 67, Montreal, originally uploaded by Iqbal Aalam. I'll take Impossibly Idyllic Children's...
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October 23, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Nuclear Edition

Here are some stories from the science, safety, and parenting worlds designed to help give your confidence a little extra push--over the cliff. Have a great weekend! Actually, these first two are just funny-sad: Do you remember going outside to...
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October 19, 2009

The Upper West Side School For Gifted And Talented TMBG Fans

So the NY Times has a writeup on the Speyer Legacy School, a new independent elementary school on the Upper West Side founded by "a group of high-powered mothers" who apparently wanted to take the whole Hollingworth Preschool@Columbia experience with...
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October 16, 2009

It's Just A Planet

He drives my actual astrophysicist wife crazy, and rightly so, but I still can't help but feel a little thrill that this Carl Sagan video, with special guest star Stephen Hawking, composed by John Boswell, is K2's very first...
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October 12, 2009

Tibor Gergely X Lucy Sprague Mitchell Throwback Colabos

The awesomely named Tibor Gergely fled the Nazis for New York, where he illustrated one million Golden Books, plus the two Important Wartime Lesson stories the AFISA-Hollywood Animation Archive recently posted. They're just a taste of what's to come;...
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October 8, 2009

Inflatable Solar System Just Like The White House

So for the last few months, the wife has been working on a big astronomy event at the White House, which just went down tonight. [High five, baby, you pulled it off!] She had 150 middle school kids, a...
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September 29, 2009

Sidewalk Grandma Has Several Pieces Of Advice, If You'd Just Put Down That iPhone For Two Seconds

Seriously, when she was a young parent did she ignore her kid all around town while chatting on her Blackberry or her iPod or her iPhone all day? She most certainly did not. And another thing--well, technically several:Count the...
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September 14, 2009

First Day Of School?

I'm feeling a first day of school photo contest coming on, but I can't tell if it's a "No way, check out this kid's awesome outfit!" contest or an "I was haunted all my life by the outfits my...
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September 8, 2009

The Triumph Of The Crayolatariat

On the Fourth of July, we took the kids to The Crayola Factory: A Hands-on Discovery Center in downtown Easton, Pennsylvania. Though it's impossible to say such crafty entertainment could not be found without three hours in the car, the...
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They Might Be Indoctrinatin'! Here Comes Here Comes Science

The official release date is today, but if you pre-ordered They Might Be Giants' new CD/DVD Here Comes Science from Amazon like you were supposed to, would already already be in your hot little hands. Of course, you could get...
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Holy Smokes, Taking The Kid To Her First Day Of Kindergarten

I sure hope she doesn't get indoctrinated into anything....
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September 4, 2009

It's Just A Brownie

At first I thought this findings published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report would go into the Friday Freakout, but I think it deserves its own post. Emphasis added for humorous/dramatic effect:On the morning of April 7, 2009,...
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September 2, 2009

Wednesday WTF: Don't Bring A Knife To A Homework Fight

After punching his 7-yo daughter a couple of times because she just started guessing the answers on her homework, a Delaware dad pressed one of his knives against her cheek to show that he was serious about the guessing. How...
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August 26, 2009

On Child-Onset Schizophrenia

And to think some of my worst days as a parent are when K2 pulls all her and her sister's clothes out of their dresser for the third time. After escalating fits of hallucinations, violence, and uncontrollable outbursts and behavior,...
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August 18, 2009

Alison Gopnik On How Babies' Brains Work And How They Learn

One of the forgotten pleasures of visiting the grandparents: reading the print edition of the newspaper. I just finished reading Alison Gopnik's editorial in the Sunday NY Times. Gopnik, a UC Berkeley child psychologist, has turned up on DT before,...
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July 17, 2009

DT Friday Freakout: Neighborly Edition

The lead time on overexcited science study press releases must be around two weeks, and so the 4th of July gives us time to freak out over some other news this weekend: Lord knows I've seen a few, but Barack...
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May 4, 2009

Daddy Talks, Tues. @ Adult Ed: Children's Educational Television, An Illustrated History

This month, the topic for Adult Ed, the awesome, esoteric, funny, and useless lecture series--in fact, it's "Brooklyn's favorite useless lecture series"--is Ambivalent Parenting. I know, right? I feel so targeted, too. But I'm actually on the program. Here's the...
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May 2, 2009

DT Friday Freakout Followup

We had the in-laws in town for a 4-day playdate, so if the Freakout list is late and lazy, I hope you'll understand. Besides, isn't swine flu enough of a freakout this week already? Obligatory swine flu freakout: a charter...
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April 2, 2009

Space Songs Through The Ages

As the husband of a NASA astrophysicist and the father of a space-fascinated kid, and as a fan of obscure, vintage kid culture, I really want to like Space Songs. Space Songs was one of a 6-album set, "Ballads...
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March 29, 2009

LAT: Thanks To Half-Informed Hippies, The Best Schools Have The Worst Vaccination Rates

Weekend not ruined yet? There's still time. The Los Angeles Times notes that the number of unvaccinated kids in California schools jumped 20% in the last year--from 8,300 to over 10,000--and has more than doubled since 1997. But the times...
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March 17, 2009

You've Come A Long Way, Baby Science

It's funny. At first, you see the title of the lone 1932 silent film, Comparative Tests On A Human And A Chimpanzee Infant Of Approximately The Same Age, Part 2, and it seems like too little. But by the...
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Pity Party Of One From Bloomfield Hills Public Schools, Your Table Is Ready

As I read the Wall Street Journal article bemoaning the Bloomfield Hills, Michigan school system's loss of 250 students over the last two years, which necessitated the recent unfortunate announcement that the district is planning to close two schools...
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March 6, 2009

The Lucha Library Poster: From La Atlantida To Zebra Kid

El Jefe Design created this sweet Lucha Library alphabet poster last fall, para los ninos, of course. Because times are changing, and a kid these days has to know more than just "Nachoooooo!" if he's gonna survive on the...
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January 9, 2009

DIY Pre-School & Playground, Topaz Internment Camp, Delta, Utah

The Central Utah Relocation Center near Delta was later renamed Topaz Camp, after Topaz Mountain, which loomed over it to the west. When it opened on Sept. 11, 1942, several rows of tarpaper barracks had been finished and outfitted...
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January 7, 2009

Research: Numbers Are Hardwired

It's interesting, but if you don't have time to read this entire Economist article, here is a quick summary: Newborn babies can tell the difference between 2 and 3. Apparently, numbers and counting are built into our brains. Even Aboriginal...
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December 17, 2008

Obama Loves The Little Children

Early education advocates are giddy as a bunch of preschoolgirls at Barack Obama's advocacy of expanded federal support for early education and preschool. From what I read in the New York Times, it seems every president since Nixon has hated...
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November 25, 2008

And Joan Ganz Cooney Said, 'Let There Be 'Street'

You probably already know that the Children's Educational Television Workshop was co-founded by Joan Ganz Cooney to create Sesame Street in order to help ghetto kids learn their ABC's and 123's as easily as they learned advertising jingles. In other...
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November 24, 2008

DT Freakout Monday? The New Yorker Looks At Overparenting

So you want to prep yourself for Thanksgiving table discussions of the Overparenting Crisis, but, what with the baby yoga and Mandarin playgroups, you don't have time? No problem. Joan Acocella has summed it all up for you in this...
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November 10, 2008

The School Search

Regular readers will have noticed a drop in posting volume recently. Myself, I have noticed a steady increase in the number of open browser tabs and flagged-yet-unread/unanswered emails with tips, questions, and press releases. I usually try to tee up...
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October 22, 2008

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Kristian Vedel

Sure, Kristian Vedel's molded plywood chair/desk is an elegant classic. But could your kid stand on it? Or ride it around the house? Gablenz is a German woodworking firm that makes traditional furniture, toys, those little whirligig things with...
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October 13, 2008

Wow, Did The Kid Love Digging Up This Fake Dinosaur Skeleton

Somewhere in the past few years, a farmer in the city my in-laws retired to, St. George, Utah, found a motherlode of super-detailed dinosaur tracks and fossils, and they built an entire museum around them. Just like that. So...
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September 29, 2008

Tessell: I, For One, Welcome Our Korean Tessellation Play Mat Overlords

OK, so in the US, we're making foam playmats with alphabets on them. And in Denmark, they're making Bobles, ride-on, climb-on animals made from computer-cut foam. All well and good. Until you find out that in Korea, they're making foam...
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September 27, 2008

Or Is It High-Margin Quackery 1st? "Safety 1st Babyplus Prenatal Education System"

If you will recall, after seeing one too many "Ooh, look! New gadget!" blog posts about the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System last year, I decided to investigate. At first, I was satisfied to find that not only was the...
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September 22, 2008

Kid O Toys Arrive, Are Awesome

You know, I was just wondering to myself the last few weeks, "Where are those Kid O toys I was promised would be hitting the market soon?" And here they are. Wow. Educational clarity and simplicity of design that...
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September 19, 2008

DT Friday Freakout: Coming Soon Edition

I'm sure this week's Freakout will involve the ever-expanding poisoned Chinese formula crisis; BPA--especially in liquid formula cans, not that you can realistically avoid it completely anyway--the asthma risk associated with kids taking paracetamol--fortunately, we use acetominophen in this country,...
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September 8, 2008

You've Come A Long Way, Retarded Baby

Was 1992 really so long, long ago? That's when Ellen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher of retarded special ed mentally disabled special needs kids wrote her PC heart-bearingly titled children's book, Somebody Called Me a Retard Today ... and My Heart Felt...
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September 2, 2008

Heh, West Xylophone

An awesome little alphabet song by They Might Be Giants [youtube via swiss-miss] Buy TMBG's Here Come The ABC's CD/DVD combo [amazon]...
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July 15, 2008

Whoops, Old School Sesame Street Not Graded For Spelling

Was just scrolling through the YouTube with the kid for a minute and found this. It looks like the work of Fred Calvert's studio, which also did the animation for Steve Zuckerman's "I in the Sky." Did I mention...
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June 6, 2008

Except There Are No Brooklyns

I know the big issue is really the pre-K admissions trauma, but still this is a useful snapshot of Williamsburg kid names circa 2004. Half the list could be from any yuppie enclave anywhere in the country:Ms. Yourke added: “I...
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June 2, 2008

On Waldkindergarten

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach... - Henry David Thoreau I'd say I must have...
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