Education
If You Prick Us
[Editor’s note: This is a speech delivered to high school students, parents, teachers, and school board on a day honoring new inductees into the Cum Laude Society, an organization that honors scholastic achievement at secondary schools, similar to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which honors scholastic achievements at the university level. Although delivered in 2005,…
Read MoreDollar signs and sob stories
From my fragmented Mandarin to my distaste of “chow mein,” I avidly explored the facets of my Asian-American identity in creative writing. When I picked up the pen, I found myself writing about my mother’s rice rations during the Cultural Revolution and the internal strife of life between two cultures, inspired by writers like Ocean…
Read MorePlaying the Get-Out-of-Jail Card: Improving Mental Health in Schools
“I’m walking. I’m walking right out of the door. I won’t ever be back.” The gray-haired teacher who was filmed during her meltdown in her classroom shouting those words to her students and doing exactly what she said became an instant nucleus of condensation for the torrent of frustration and stress felt by thousands of…
Read MoreReading Madness
An article this week in Chalkbeat Tennessee told of Kamryn Sanders, an 8-year-old Memphis 3rd grader who walked out her school’s front door on the day her reading scores were to be revealed. She walked a mile, finally asked for help, and the police returned her to school. Kamryn was afraid, with some justification, that…
Read MoreComments on Test-Optional College Admissions
Having been the dean of admission at Princeton from 1978 to 1983, I read with interest that Harvard and Yale, along with scores of other colleges and universities, made a decision to adopt a “test optional” policy with respect to those applying for the 2023-24 academic year. This initiative prompted me to write this brief…
Read MoreThe Myth of Lost Learning
This week yet another New York Times piece by Harvard and Stanford “experts” warned of the devastating learning loses sustained by American kids due to the pandemic. Read the piece if you love arcane, statistical analyses and nearly impenetrable pseudo-scientific prose. Or if you need a sleep aid. The educational establishment is rife with this…
Read MoreRigor Mortis: Let’s Redefine Rigor to Meet Student Needs
In a country where self-serve businesses seem a fitting symbol for a pervasive approach to life, I’m not surprised that I get a lot of criticism for promoting schools that make room for the self of the student: “Kids today already seem over-indulged, narcissistic, and entitled,” say my critics. “They need to learn about the…
Read MorePutting the Brakes on Accelerating in Mathematics
“My child is bored in 6th-grade math and I would like them to take Algebra I over the summer.” This is a request that I have heard dozens of times over the past decade, which is dozens more times than I ever heard this request thirty years ago. I am a recovering math department chair…
Read MoreEvaluating the Goodness of Fit for Students Planning to Go to College
On Sunday, April 2, 2023, I read an interesting and provocative article by Frank Bruni that was published in the New York Times. The title of the article was “There’s Only One College Rankings List that Matters.” Having worked as the Dean of Admission from 1978 to 1983 at Princeton University, and having evaluated the…
Read MoreLearning Disabilities, Learning Differences and Neurodiversity, Oh My!
As a kid growing up with learning differences, especially those not diagnosed until I was older (19!), I have learned a few things about what works and what gets in the way as a learner and as a person whose brain works differently. Back then, there was never a discussion of being “neurodiverse,” in fact,…
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