I really enjoyed this. I hope you do, too.
Category: smart reads
Sometimes it takes a village, except when it shouldn’t
I wanted to write something about this preposterous incident but I couldn’t quite get it right. Rogue Cheerios to the rescue!
Last week a story surfaced about a woman in South Carolina, Debra Harrell, who was arrested because she made the conscious choice to let her 9-year-old daughter play in a public park while she went to work. I had already seen the story in my Facebook feed and followed updates posted by a complete stranger when a friend sent me a link to the story. [The same stranger is raising money to support the legal case that will inevitably unfold.]
I wrote a simple reply to my friend: Makes me so sad.
My friend asked for clarification, “Yes, but sad for who?” and in person, he repeated the question, clarifying further, “Don’t say you’re sad for everyone involved.”
“No,” I replied, “I feel so sad for this mother.”
By all accounts Debra Harrell was making the best of a difficult set of non-choices. In an economy where unemployment is rampant and where the unemployment rate for…
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How handwriting affects brain development
The New York Times just published a story that describes the relationship between learning to form letters by hand and changes to our learning and retention patterns.
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.
I know from personal experience that there are times when I want to write in my notebook more so than sitting down at a keyboard. There are also times when I sit down at the computer and it seems my fingers are doing the thinking (it seems my fingers write like a first-grader poopbwahahah). I’ve wanted to try dictation before but I just don’t think I could talk a blog post.
No, Strike That 