“Teach your children well,” Crosby, Stills and Nash It’s not easy raising children today. Although I don’t have kids myself, I learned all about modern child-rearing by observing my best friend and her offspring. Like when I dropped by and was met at the door by her then-four-year-old daughter. “Me Butt-head,” she proudly proclaimed, a
Time magazine is reporting that according to a recent Microsoft study, our average attention spans are now down to about eight seconds. This actually puts us as less attentive than goldfish, whose attention spans average about nine seconds. Time reports that Canadian researchers surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using
I’m still working at the local high school while a social studies teacher gets his homelife together. I always like to post a different quote each day, tying into the lesson if possible. Here are some of my recent favorites. “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” — Abba Eban “Never tell
I ran across an interesting article in the May 2015 issue of Smithsonian magazine. Entitled “Welcome to Farmtopia”, it describes an agricultural movement that calls itself agritopia. Several of these developments have popped up across the country. The website agritopia.com describes one such community in the Phoenix area as “…something of a modern day village
I found out about this by accident. Another teacher happened to mention today that there is a YouTube video with some important information about eye cancer. A mother took a flash picture of her toddler. One eye had the familiar red reflection in the pupil (“redeye”), but the other eye reflected white. Shortly thereafter, she
How many time has a life been changed when something totally unexpected happens? I was reminded of this recently when I read about a member of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik political party, and what happened when he was told his grandparents on his mother’s side were Jewish. Plus his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. The revelation
I didn’t write this, but I wish I had. I used to write for a website called Helium, where aspiring writers could post pieces and rate each other’s work. Helium has since closed down as a writing site and someone else owns the address, but this was so good an essay that I saved it.
Do you have a pet that does really clever things? I haven’t had pets since I was a child. But I can appreciate people’s pride in their pets because I have seen some pretty smart animals myself. But in my case, the animals were wild, or at least semi-wild. From squirrels who raid bird feeders
Sometimes greed is a greater enemy than an opposing army. In late April 1865, the American Civil War was over and no soldiers were more eager to return home than released prisoners of war. Thus Camp Fisk, on the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, was a beehive of activity. Camp Fisk had been established for the
The Nazis have just invaded your country and your life is in danger because you have two Nobel prizes you are safeguarding for friends — one is Jewish and the other is an opponent of National Socialism. What do you do? That was the dilemma faced by Niels Bohr in 1940 when Germany occupied Copenhagen,