“Now Play Nice and don’t Plot to Kill your Schoolmates”
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I haven’t been posting much. Sorry. Been in a kind of existential funk.
But today I had to include this. It is a link to an article that was in our local paper today, about a heinous phenomenon in a local school. Apparently, some second-graders have been actively plotting to kill a little girl in the school. You can read about it in this digg.com post.
OK, no big deal right? After all, this is America, where everyone is “entitled” to their lunacy, no matter how depraved.
But this is in a rural, upstate New York school. No inner-city, no whacked out Waco, no out-in-the-hills survivalist community.
I have done afterschool Math Mojo programs in this school. It is a nice place with (generally) nice kids. I’m not amazed, though, because our society has become all about abuse of power, from the highest, to the lowest, levels.
I know that you can’t make a sweeping judgement about public schools in general from a local anecdote. But the anectodes are getting to be pretty thick in our public schools.
It is depressing as hell. I don’t mean to depress you. There has got to be a solution, and I believe that readers of this blog are generally part of it. Homeschooling, unschooling and afterschooling are good, positive movements.
The big difference is the amount of parental involvement. If your child knows that you truly take an interest in them by spending time with them, your conscience becomes part of their conscience, without having to lecture them or make them feel “watched.”
But you know that. I just want to say that from the comments this blog gets, and the e-mails I receive, it’s people like you that give me hope. I hope I give you some to, at least as far as encouraging you to play around with math.
To that end, I went out and bought a cool little piece of software at the Apple Store yesterday. It’s a Wacom writing tablet, and I hope to make some really easy-to-follow math tutorials for you with it in the next few days. I’ll have one up here by tomorrow probably.
See you then (if I didn’t bum you out too much.)
Tags: afterschoolers , afterschooling
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Comment by Dana
Wow…and the Lord of the Flies cover is most appropriate.
I think there are several factors involved in this change we seem to be undergoing. Parents, definitely. They seem disengaged…either too busy with basic survival and lacking general parenting skills or too interested in climbing the corporate ladder to bother much with their kids. But there is more, too. I wonder how much stories like these have to do with what we are seeing:
Stanford professor shows how avatars mimic behavior
Can modern technology change our brains?
Interesting to ponder.