It is the end of January, the time of year when the winter blahs can settle in for parents as well as children. Especially this year, when the monster flu season is upon us, taking out entire families for days, even weeks at a time. Even if your family has avoided the flu (and congrats if you have), you [...]
Public School 163, an elementary school on the Upper West Side of NYC, has a general student body that is 63 percent Black and Hispanic, 27 percent white and 6 percent Asian. But the demographics are quite different in the school's Gifted and Talented ("G&T") program: 47 percent of the children enrolled in the nine G&T classes are white; [...]
A recent NY Times online article, "The Dicey Parent-Teacher Duet" provides thoughtful commentary from Sara Mosle, a parent who is also a teacher, about how parents and teachers both approach these relationships with trepidation. While everyone agrees that parent involvement is a critical component of a child's success in school, overly involved parents risk interfering with their child's maturation [...]
Good teaching matters, and good teachers can make the difference in how well students learn regardless of how the students performed in previous years. Parents know this instinctively, as we angle to get our children in the good teachers' classrooms from pre-school days on. Our instinct has been recently confirmed by a study funded by the Bill and Melinda [...]
As I write, the Washington Redskins are battling the Seattle Seahawks in the wild card game to see who will play in the NFC divisional playoffs. All Redskins fans are hoping that the dynamic duo of their rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III and rookie running back Alfred Morris will lead their team to this important victory. Tens of thousands [...]
We were delighted to recently learn that a GCP post, "How Do We Talk to Our Children About Newtown?" has been featured on The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School website, which can be found here. The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHIRJ), established in 2005 by Harvard Law professor [...]
Let's start the New Year off on an inspirational and positive note. For those of you who don't follow football or missed this, it was recently discovered that Colin Kaepernick, starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, wrote a letter to himself when he was in the fourth grade detailing his plans for the future. (You can see a [...]
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Ground Control Parenting! Hope you have enjoyed good times with your families during the holidays. At GCP we are looking forward to another year of keeping you posted on a variety of issues, tips and resources to help guide our sons through school and life. We have quite a few New Year's [...]