By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff A few days ago, thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon an article on the Little League official website that shared an interview with Charles Jeter, the father of the former Yankee shortstop. I don’t often spend my time reading about Derek Jeter. Really, I don’t. Not even in the checkout lines. I also confess that I am much more likely to be sitting in a theater than on the bleachers at a little league game. But the first tip the post shared from Charles Jeter, based on an interview he’d done for Growing Leaders president Tim Elmore, was this: “Never let anyone outwork you. Derek said he watched his dad work relentlessly as a substance… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff A few years ago, I interviewed the British Philosopher Alain de Botton for my Lunch Box Mom blog and asked him if it was ethical for me to use Santa and his “nice list” as a way to motivate my children to behave.  My kids, as many of yours, are no longer firm believers in Santa, but a variation of the question pops up in other aspects of parenting. Maybe it’s the Dean’s List, and not Santa’s list, and maybe the rewards are privileges instead of presents, but the fundamental idea of using an outside arbiter and the promise of something good in exchange for particular behavior is the same. Here is a reposting of the… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff This past Thanksgiving morning, when I sat on a yoga mat in a surprisingly packed room of yogis looking to find some calm before the storm, my yoga teacher mentioned something we should all be grateful for: our setbacks. We can learn a great deal from them if we listen to what they have to tell us. Giving thanks for failure and disappointment is not a philosophy embraced by many parents, myself included, who often rush to kiss a wound, physical or emotional, before a larger lesson can be seen or felt. Perhaps the most aggressive among us act to erase the setback all together, picking up the phone or pen or walking into the principal’s… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Remember “The Opposite” episode of Seinfeld when George realizes, “…that every decision I’ve ever made, my entire life, has been wrong.” He then sets about to turn old patterns upside down—ordering tea instead of coffee and being blunt instead of agreeable in a job interview—and his life radically improves. I sense a similar epiphany in the real-life version of parenthood, but whether we’ll change our ways is yet to be seen. A new study out of the University of Colorado Boulder, says, “…the more time children spent in less structured activities, the better their self-directed executive function. Conversely, the more time children spent in more structured activities the poorer their self-directed executive function.” The senior author of… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Perhaps you, too, once had a weekend in college when you realized you had two days to read 700 pages of Dostoyevsky. I planted myself in a coffee shop and inhaled The Brothers Karamazov, along with the fumes of java, until I got the job done, my own form of crime and punishment. With a few weeks left of summer, I can’t send my kids to a coffee shop, not without a hefty Starbucks bill and some raised eyebrows. But we have work to do! Sure, we’ve been reading, and yes, we’ve been doing math, but there are papers to fill out and more math to be done. How are we going to get it all… Read More

In the process of raising our kids, when we come up against an obvious “miss” in the things we depend on, whether it’s a highchair that could be better designed or a book that could have been better written, we have two choices: settle with the way it is, or take matters into our own hands. It’s the later choice that often drives us to obsession, as it’s done with a few parents I’ve profiled who’ve seen a need for something and then set off on a process of educating themselves and making their concepts a reality. I’ve interviewed moms who’ve figured out how to manufacture better lunch boxes; foster parents who have started charities for kids in the system;… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff “I don’t have a chance of winning. I don’t want to do it.” Was this the attitude Google anticipated when it launched this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition? Probably not. On the surface, the competition is simple: children in grades k-12 are invited to submit a doodle version of the Google logo integrating this year’s theme of One Thing to Make the World a Better Place. One national winner will see her or his artwork on the Google homepage this June and earn a $30,000 college scholarship along with a $50,000 Google for Education grant for their school. It all sounds noble and in keeping with the spirit of helping our children embrace 21st century skills:… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff In the middle of a polar vortex, one should not illustrate the concept of a perimeter by saying to an eight-year old, “Imagine you are walking the perimeter of the dog park.” Cold wind, frozen toes, the threat of stepping in….well, you get the idea. I was getting the look any parent who has helped a kid with homework knows well, the one that says: what good are you if you can’t telepathically understand my teacher’s intentions or remember things you learned when Reagan was president? I had to think quickly. “Forget the dog park,” I said, ready to pander to the aspirations of a soon-to-be tween. “When you paint your room,” I began, “you’ll only… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff The Educated Mom blog launched a year ago this month. And because we have some new readers and because I love year-end lists, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back on some of the themes we’ve covered. Perhaps the blog topics reveal a bit about what’s it like to be a parent and student at this particular moment in education. As much as fundamentals stay the same, I am fairly certain no one used the word MOOC when I was in elementary school. It was report card time when I started the blog, much like it is as I write this now. In the post, The Grade, I took a look at… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff “It’s a really, really, chill place. Every tutoring session involves tea latte and some candles.” That’s what Vanessa Vakharia told me on the phone a few weeks ago when I asked her about her math tutoring studio in Toronto, The Math Guru. Vanessa personifies the name. She’s on a mission to get people, especially girls, to think of themselves as capable in math. “Anyone can do well at math and science,” she states on her website, “students simply need a teacher who can communicate with them in a language that they understand.” She’s confident in her philosophy because she experienced it in her own life. “When I was in high school, I failed math twice,” she… Read More