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…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Several weeks ago, well before Sandy and the holidays took over our thoughts and conversations here in New Jersey, I attended an evening lecture given by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University and co-author of the 2011 book, Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How…
By Sarah Vander Schaaff Imagine you had a child in high school who faced this choice: take a history class taught by a school legend, the kind who challenges her students to be deeper thinkers and better writers and is known for being a tough grader. Or, take the same class taught by a competent…