Jay Mathews of The Washington Post writes "he liked showing up the first day of school with a fresh binder and newly sharpened pencils." as much as today's kids love it, but Mathews also rise concerns: "How would school have turned out for me if I had been able to ignore what grade I was in and skip ahead to the pleasures of J.D. Salinger, or stay out on the ball field for a week until I finally learned how to catch a fly ball?" And he goes on models and the experiential education proclaimed by John Dewey. However this is the part that really make us think about our practice: ...We should keep in mind how artificial that learning environment is compared with what students will find as adults. At The Post, for instance, I have had to learn to blog. For a while, I pretended that I did not have to do this. When I finally, grudgingly, started writing blog posts, I acted as if they were just short stories for the paper. I sent them to my editor and asked him to put them on my blog. I put off learning to do it myself. I used vacation, bad weather or sniffles to excuse myself from training. But I wasn't in school anymore. The Post wasn't going to give me a report card with a C-minus in blogging and ask me to do better next year. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.
In New Jersey the back-to-school day is tomorrow and while I am helping my wife to set up everything around our 7th grader, I though it is a great opportunity to remember what are the choices parents have to enroll their sons in a High School, this year. There more than one list about Gold Medal High Schools in the U.S., Top Performing High Schools in N. J., and the New Jersey Monthly Rankings. We will abide by Jay Mathews's methodology and had extracted the first 10 High Schools we've found in his list, appeared back in June, 2009: 1. McNair Academic - Jersey City (86) 2. Millburn - Millburn (172) 3. Ridge - Basking Ridge (177) 4. Bernards - Bernardsville (200) 5. Princeton - Princeton (213) 6. Cresskill - Cresskill (311) 7. Demarest - Demarest (388) 8. Governor Livingston - Berkeley Heights (426) 9. Summit - Summit (429) 10. Glen Ridge - Glen Ridge (462) Parentheses indicates the rank established by Jay Mathews at Newsweek. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.