By Sarah Vander Schaaff As I prepare for a two-day road trip with my family, I am tempted to say that the journey can be educational. Not in a planned, “let’s stop at historical landmarks” kind of education, but in the unstructured, “tidbits of unique information” manner. I know I learned a great deal as…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff As parents, we often talk about peer pressure, but how often to we talk about the effects of pluralistic ignorance? It doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it? But, it’s worth knowing about and perhaps even adding to our conversations. I didn’t know anything about pluralistic ignorance until I heard an…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Eight years ago, when I first started teaching drama at a small private high school, I introduced a routine I learned from my own high school drama teacher back in Austin, Texas decades before. Before class, or a rehearsal, you ask your group to lie down. If the class is being…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff I fell asleep twenty years ago and awoke to find that numbers are added together in a whole new way. It’s called partial sum addition and if you’re the parent of a seven-year-old you might know what I’m talking about. Some schools send home a study guide or handbook to help…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Well, maybe not last summer, but summers long ago. As many of us begin to think about what our own kids will be doing this summer, I decided to ask my colleagues about summers they still remember. Was there an experience that shaped them? As a kid, of course, there was…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff I was amazed to read that Stanford’s six Massively Open On-line Courses, or MOOC’s, reached over 300,000 people. But it wasn’t until last week that I realized the MOOC, or a future incarnation of it, would most likely be part of my daughters’ experiences, even if they weren’t pursuing something in…
The first time I heard of an IQ test for children was in grade school. A newspaper article said the actress Geena Davis had such a high one and that she was in Mensa. It’s interesting that these tests are often talked about in the context of trivia, or as a friend recently said, in a…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Decisions won’t be announced until mid to late February, but Emma feels certain that her daughter won’t get into any of the schools to which they’ve applied. There are more than four times as many applicants as there are slots; she doesn’t “know anyone”; and she hasn’t waged a letter writing…
By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff “To know a poem by heart is to own a great work of art forever.” That’s what England’s Education Secretary Michael Gove said last month when promoting his country’s new competition, “Poetry by Heart,” according to a story in England’s Telegraph. The country is investing a half million pounds in…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff I didn’t go to Harvard, so I don’t often spend my afternoons perusing Harvard Magazine, but it’s sometimes nice to have a friend or colleague share the news of her esteemed alumni publication. In this case, it was a story “Investigating Academic Misconduct” that caught my interest. We’d all heard some…