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Kid You Not believes in the Wizard of Oz style of parenting: All you need is a brain, some courage and a heart. Oh, and some Jager.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The diversity circus


Whenever schools attempt to prove they are "tolerant" of world cultures, they often create a big, three-ring mess. Hosting a benign "diversity day" is often as far as it goes. The kids learn valuable lessons about Eskimos and the Masai and then get on with the math and reading. That’s fine.
But things get really out of hand when a school like the Bacon Academy in Colchester tries to force a lesson in religious differences down kids’ throats.
According to the Associated Press, Caitlin Dean, a 15-year-old freshman, "volunteered with a few other students to wear traditional Muslim clothing to school for an entire day in February after a Middle Eastern Studies teacher at Bacon Academy announced that she was looking for students to promote her class by wearing the garb. Caitlin covered her slender frame and short brown hair with a periwinkle burqa, which concealed her face."
Not surprisingly, cementheads at the school hurled all kinds of anti-Muslim slurs at her. Racist comments at anyone is wrong and should be punished, but I wonder if the Middle East studies teacher, Angie Parkinson, really thought about what her lesson was teaching her students.
What’s the message of the burqa? That women are separate and unequal, not worthy of sharing public space with males. The full-body, face-completely-covered burqa is a horrendous symbol of oppression against women, under the guise of religious morals. The teacher is trying to teach a lesson about tolerance by endorsing one of the most intolerant symbols ever devised. What’s next? Is she going to have kids walk around in black face and pimp hats during Black History Month?
The deeper schools get themselves into the culture of diversity, the more they twist themselves into knots. For instance, Bacon Academy has a gay-straight alliance club. That’s wonderful, but will Parkinson tell them that in many Muslim countries, being gay is a crime? That there is only one gay pride parade in the Middle East, and it’s in Tel Aviv. There is also a Save Darfur club. Do these kids know who is dying and who is doing the killing in the Darfur region? Black Africans are being slaughtered by Arab radicals as the Islamic government in Sudan looks the other way and Muslim leaders around the world have nothing to say about it. Parkinson wants to set up a teacher exchange with a Saudi Arabian school. Perhaps the Saudi teacher could bring some of the nation’s official school textbooks, which teach first graders that "every religion other than Islam is false."
If that’s diversity, then the circus clowns are running the show.

Are you smarter than a first grader?


My 6-year-old daughter’s homework assignments always create an interesting dilemma. She can handle most of them just fine, and it’s important that kids do their own homework and learn from mistakes. Parents must fight the temptation to give them the correct answer and make sure they get an "A" or a smiley face or a sticker or whatever.
But I couldn’t have given her the answer to her latest assignment even if I tried, because apparently daddy is just a big stupidhead.
The homework was editing skills. She had to fix two things wrong with this sentence: "quit the swim club with he." The obvious answer is "He quit the swim club." But what about the "with"?

One solution is "He quit swimming with the club", but that’s techically three things wrong: capitalization, -ing, and arrangement of the words.
It’s kind of upsetting when you can’t figure out a first-grader’s editing homework AND YOU’RE AN EDITOR!

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Take the kids


Is there anything more fun than hockey, ice skating, mascots and live music?
You get all four March 25 at the Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport. The Sound Tigers play at 1 p.m. After the game, there’s a free public skate at the arena featuring The Zambonis, the world’s greatest hockey band, playing on the ice. Sound Tiger mascot Storm will skate with the kids, joined by the Hockey Monkey.
This kind thing makes you glad to be a parent.

I read the news so you don't have to

A few items recently caught my eye:
From the Associated Press:
- Human beings get the best sleep of their lives between the ages of 6 and 12, says one of Canada’s foremost experts on children’s sleeping disorders. It’s never the same after that. "In babies, toddlers and preschoolers, common sleep problems include difficulty separating and settling at night, frequent waking at night," said Shelly Weiss, a neurologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and author of "Better Sleep for your Baby & Child."
"Adolescents, they often have erratic sleep schedules, they’ve hit puberty and their bodies are going through many changes. One of these changes is the tendency to want to stay up later at night and wake up later in the morning."
But school-aged children are in their prime for "perfect sleep."
This sounds legit: My 7 year old sleeps like a log. But someone needs to study why I have to drag my 7 and 3 year old out of bed on school days, but on Saturday and Sunday they bound out of bed like caffinated chipmunks at 7 a.m.
- MCDONOUGH, Ga. — Rhiannon Barnes may be the luckiest 15-month-old ever. Or maybe her baby sitter is the fortunate one.
While playing with a thrift store book bought earlier in the day for 25 cents, Rhiannon uncovered $1,300 in cash stuck between the pages. Her baby sitter Sheila Laughridge said she only bought the book at Rhiannon’s insistence and was surprised when the toddler found a brown paper bag full of $100s, $50s, $20s and $10s.
Whenever I go to a thrift store, all I ever find is Montovanni records and Member’s Only jackets.
- A federal judge (recently) threw out a lawsuit filed by parents who wanted to keep their young children from learning about gay marriage in school.
U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf said federal courts have decided in other cases that parents’ rights to exercise their religious beliefs are not violated when their children are exposed to contrary ideas in school. Schools are "entitled to teach anything that is reasonably related to the goals of preparing students to become engaged and productive citizens," Wolf said in his ruling.
Tonia and David Parker of Lexington sued after their 5-year-old son brought home a book from kindergarten that depicted a gay family. Another Lexington couple joined the suit after a second-grade teacher read the class a fairy tale about two princes falling in love.
I posted an item about the Parkers two years ago. I supported their lawsuit not based on how they feel about gays, but on parental rights. Kindergarten and second grade is too early for teachers to make decisions about how sexuality and family structure is taught. The Parkers clearly belong at a parochial school, but parents must have a say when something as sensitive as homosexuality is taught at such a young age.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Drunk on thin mints


Oh, you little disk of tastebud temptation, I hear you whispering to me from the dark living room.
"That guy at work who ordered four boxes? Give him three. Take me from my cardboard case. Open me. I’m so new, so fresh, so virginal. Feel my sleek, cool surface. Yes, yes, give in. Surrender to me."
No one can resist Girl Scout cookies. Least of all me.
My 6-year-old Brownie daughter just sold the most cookies in her troup, so we’ve got a bunch of boxes stacked in the living room ready for delivery. If my wife and me don’t devour them like rabid wolverines (Wolverines!) first.
Girl Scout cookies have been part of all our lives for as long as we can remember, but I’m really learning about Girl Scout cookies for the first time.
Did you know Girl Scout cookies have a MySpace page with more than 200 friends? Look, there’s Trefoil partying without panties!
Did you know Ellen DeGeneres bought 1,000 boxes from an Ohio fourth grader this year? I know Ellen likes girls, but come on.
Did you know the Girl Scout cookie industry generates $700 million a year, with 200 million boxes sold annually? The big plot twist coming up on "24" has nothing to do with Russians or Arabs. Jack’s evil father actually controls a secret cartel of Girl Scout cookie sellers attempting to devalue the world’s currency and have the Keebler Elf take the fall for the nuclear explosion.
The least popular cookie? Trefoils (9 percent of sales).
The most popular, with 25 percent of sales?
Yes you, you little minty minx.