Designer Lockers
School is just around the corner, and kids are starting to dread/think about the upcoming year. An article in the St.Louis Post Dispatch paper caught my eye yesterday, and I wanted to run it by
Finding A Best Friend
Starting in about the 3rd or 4th grade, girls begin to notice that their friendship groups start to change. Good friends from kindergarden start hanging out more with other people, and they experience a tremendous
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It’s Time for Camp!!!!
The excitement is building, because tomorrow 20 camp counselors will convene at my house to prepare for the equally jacked-up 50 campers who will descend on our camp Sunday afternoon for a week of fun-in-the-sun.
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Techno-Tattling
I was a little disturbed after reading an associated press article about a new technology that allows kids to report on bullying episodes via text as it is happening. Blackboard’s TipTxt program is being offered
A Fish Out of Water
I have decided that all the people who have been telling us for the past 40-50 years that girls lose their self esteems in middle and high school are off the mark. They have missed
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Stop Having Children!
Okay, this is going to sound a bit crabby, and perhaps insensitive, though it is not meant to be mean-spirited. I saw yet another story about a poor, single mother who is having a hard
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Middle Schoolers and Instagram Don’t Mix
There was another new story recently about someone at a local middle school misusing a social networking site to bully fellow students, this time Instagram. Which begs the question, at least for me: why are
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Kids Process Newtown Tragedy
I sat this week in a classroom of 5th grade students, a class I have worked with with my wife many times since they started the 4th grade last school year. We have been helping
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Lessons from Sandy Hook Elementary School
My first thoughts about what happened yesterday are really not thoughts at all; they are just feelings. Sad; angry; powerless stand out. I work in so many schools and I can’t imagine if it had
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Are Teachers Harder On Girls?
The old logic held that teachers were harder on boys and that boys got into trouble a lot more than girls. I ran a weekend retreat recently for middle school girls and they had a
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Where Did You Go To High School? HUMBUG!!!
It is an annual St. Louis tradition to ask people where they went to high school, because we all have HUGE judgments about each school and what it means about the people who went there.
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Inappropriate Tweets Deserve Consequences And Education
I read with interest the articles in the Post Dispatch about 10 teens suspended from a local high school for inappropriate tweeting. The ACLU got involved, saying its not in the schools jurisdiction to do
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Pearls Before Swine Comic Strip
I have asked the following sequence of questions to over a hundred groups of people, and by people I mean teenagers, parents, and teachers. And their answers are always the same: Q: Why do you
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