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 I wonder how many readers remember their first day of high school. I don’t think about that day often, but when I cleared away a few summer distractions, my memory of it came back. Yes, I know exactly what I wore. My priorities as a fourteen-year-old were a bit out of order, but probably not atypical. In reading about the transition from middle school into high school, I found many articles that cite social pressure and a teenager’s desire to associate with a group as being strong rivals to the expectations of home or school. And the way a student handles the transition into high school has serious stakes: More students fail 9th grade than any… Read More

The documentary film, “Race to Nowhere” is described on the film’s website as, “Featuring the heartbreaking stories of students across the country who have been pushed to the brink by over-scheduling, over-testing and the relentless pressure to achieve…” It was nearly three years ago that the film came to the Princeton-area community, thanks in large part to Jess Deutsch. Today she reflects on the experience, sharing some answers to questions she’s been asked over the years. How did you hear about “Race To Nowhere”, and why did you lead the effort to have it screened at Princeton High School? JD: The short answer is that I watched the film at a very small venue, and decided on the spot that… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Of course, Vince Vaughn and I are often thinking about the same things. This week, for example, I planned on writing about internships, and sure enough, he beat me to it with a new movie called The Internship. Perhaps he was also driving in his minivan when he heard a story on Marketplace back in March that put the power of the internship in context. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Marketplace surveyed employers and found that internships were the most important thing considered when “evaluating a recent college graduate.” The Marketplace website quotes Dan Berrett, a senior reporter at the Chronicle, saying candidates’ internships were “…more important than where they went to college, the major… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff I didn’t go to Harvard, so I don’t often spend my afternoons perusing Harvard Magazine, but it’s sometimes nice to have a friend or colleague share the news of her esteemed alumni publication. In this case, it was a story “Investigating Academic Misconduct” that caught my interest. We’d all heard some of the details of the recent episode, but this story had an inside perspective. The world could hardly conceal its schadenfreude at the scandal that involved more than half of a large Government class last spring. More than a hundred students, it seemed, had cheated on a take-home exam, their written answers so similar they were suspected of collaborating on their compositions. But the article… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Several weeks ago, well before Sandy and the holidays took over our thoughts and conversations here in New Jersey, I attended an evening lecture given by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University and co-author of the 2011 book, Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College. The room was full of parents, whose children, one imagined, spanned the time frame mentioned in the title of his book. Wang told us, as both a professor and father of a five-year-old, “For nearly everything, don’t worry.” Young kids not sleeping through the night, not talking properly, these issues usually resolve, he said. The brain is a… Read More

By Sarah Vander Schaaff Imagine you had a child in high school who faced this choice: take a history class taught by a school legend, the kind who challenges her students to be deeper thinkers and better writers and is known for being a tough grader. Or, take the same class taught by a competent teacher who just happens to be known for giving a lot of A’s. Any seasoned parent would stop me there. “How do we know the first teacher is a tough grader?” That’s a good question because it speaks to the very nature of grades: they are personal. But as we all know, in practice, they cease to be. Grades may or may not accurately reflect… Read More