One sweltering Monday in the third week of July, I stood in a parking lot with a hundred other students in lines exactly five yards apart—the outline of a football field had been painted in white over the yellow parking lines. One of my band directors stood on the scaffolding built at the side of the parking lot on the top of the [...]
In late 2014, a 12-part podcast focusing on a high school murder case called Serial became mainstream news. Serial reached 5 million downloads faster than any podcast before it. But it wasn’t just radio and podcast fanatics who tuned in. English teacher Michael Godsey decided to use Serial in his tenth and eleventh grade classes. Students were instantly hooked on the murder mystery. They held mock debates, examined evidence gathered [...]
For the past few years, my Sunday nights have been dedicated to catching up with my favorite characters on television. Beginning in early January, there is a pretty good chance that I will be spending my Sunday nights watching the final season of Downton Abbey. Earlier this year, I had to say good–bye to Don Draper and the rest of the complicated characters on Mad [...]
When asked to picture a high school play, most people probably see a shaky spotlight focused on a student standing in front of a backdrop painted on an old bedsheet, reciting lines dutifully—if somewhat unenthusiastically—and waving around a rubber prop for emphasis. These days, you might see what I saw as a stage manager in high school. Productions have been getting bigger and [...]
When I was younger, story time was arguably my favorite part of the day. My mom and I would sit on our living room couch as she read to me from the books I had carefully picked out at the library. On many occasions, a Dr. Seuss book would be in the mix, my favorites being The Foot Book and the more popular One Fish Two [...]
When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble going to sleep. And with two younger children, my mom didn’t have the time to read out loud to me until I drifted off. That’s why every night I listened to audio books. I drifted away to books like Holes and The Giver, and to authors like Ronald Dahl and Cornelia Funke. While I love [...]
I’ve got a question for those of you not involved in the art world: When was the last time you painted something? Maybe when you took that last mandatory art class about halfway through high school? Even though it’s been a while for many adults, those creative juices are still there just waiting to be tapped into—and now there is a booming industry [...]
When I was five and growing up in Oakland, my parents would drive my older brother and me out to Berkeley, California, for a weekend afternoon at Adventure Playground. It was our favorite place in the world: a half-acre of dirt and lopsided structures that looked built by children because they had been. I remember working together with a dozen other five-, six- and [...]
Math, science, languages—these are the subjects we tend to consider standard required courses for students, both in the United States and in other nations. Well, Spain could soon be adding a new one: chess may become a compulsory subject for students. In 2012, the European Parliament endorsed the Chess in School program, calling on each European Union (EU) member state to encourage the introduction of [...]
In 2009, Barbie celebrated her fiftieth birthday. She has been a veterinarian, astronaut, dentist, five-time United States presidential candidate, chef, paleontologist and Olympic gymnast. And I’m just naming a few of her careers. Yet Barbie learned to talk only recently. A prototype of Hello Barbie was first shown at Toy Fair 2015 in New York, where Barbie displayed her speech recognition technology, made [...]