Hindsight is 20/20

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Sitting in the examining room during my eight-year-old daughter’s recent visit to the optometrist, I had a rare insight into how she sees the world. For the most part, it seemed, as I looked at the chart she viewed, “D’s” looked liked “O’s”. In fact, anytime a letter was difficult for

Road Trip

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

Learning to Disconnect

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

The IQ Test for Children: Improving Learning Outcomes

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