Looks like The Failure Toy is coming soon from the good folks at 21Toys. The Empathy Toy worked and the The Failure Toy has lots of promise. This should be fun. And this is what they say about it: The Failure Toy It’s really hard to talk about failure. Failure is an ugly word, but studies show that “kids fail less…
The good folks at 21 Toys are at it again. First it was TThe Empathy Toy and now The Failure Toy The Empathy Toy is beautifully constructed and a pleasure to hold. Not to mention fun to play with and helpful in provoking communication and thinking about oneself and others. I’m looking forward to playing to fail! So much healthier…
There was a lively Twitter #satchat this morning and the topic was that fad du jour: Failure. There were plenty of excellent observations and earnest calls for embracing failure as essential to the learning process. As someone who failed rather a lot in school (and done my share of it since) it’s a topic dear to me and one I…
A recent Twitter chat included the following exchange with Mark Crotty, head of school at St John’s Episcopal in Dallas. Mark blogs at To Keep Things Whole and I am a frequent visitor. He used it in a post entitled: Failure of Promoting Failure that you can read at the link. He alerted me to the post in a tweet.…
The November Educational Leadership is devoted to the topic of grading. It includes an article by Alfie Kohn an expanded version of which you can read here: The Case Against Grades. I’ve given grades. For years I worried about how to get a system right, tried to focus students and their parents on the learning not the grade. I’ve spent…
Probably the only two responses to constant change are: A. Ignore it (shrink back, retrench, resist, go off the grid, become irrelevant, turn inwards, stay put, get run over, and so on) or B. Keep on keeping on with the learning life. Clearly Option A can take you only so far. But what happens if the modern mantra of: “Keep…
The ratio between success and failure remains pretty constant. To succeed means we must fail. And the more often we fail the more we succeed. The key is to fail frequently and fail fast. Then move on and try something else. That was the message of Tina Seelig who works at the entrepreneurship center at Stanford. The focus of her…
A decade or so ago the focus was all on girls and how schools were failing to give them the attention and support they need to compete in school and to get a fair shake in the classroom. In recent years the focus has turned to boys and, if the media are to be believed, there is a crisis of…
When I was in the emergency room last year having busted my elbow, a nurse asked whether I had ever broken anything else. I expect she was probing to see whether I had acquired that oldies’ habit of throwing yourself to available floors and sidewalks.. I had a ready and precise answer; “Yes. I broke my arm on November 5th,…
We’ve been lucky with the weather in NYC this September. Many bright, warm days The aftermath of the powerful hurricane that has devastated areas of the South East is now giving us a little rain. Not so lucky there where hurricane Helene was deadly across five states after making landfall on Thursday. Some of the worst flooding the South has…
It has been nearly four months since the publication of the Independent Review of gender identity services for children and young people, known as the Cass Report. There has been no mention of it by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) or its member associations. There has also been no discussion on the NAIS membership Diversity listserv, which frequently…
Midge Hazelbrow, the indomitable co-head of Wayward St. Etheldreda’s Academy, took herself for a brisk constitutional down Riverside Drive to the Eleanor Roosevelt statue. By the time she stepped back into the St. Etheldreda’s building that had been her professional home for almost thirty years, her mind was clear. Of course, she’d already apologized to Tim Endibel for her injudicious…
Before the eruption, it was a typical senior leadership meeting at Wayward. Head of School, Tim Endibel, was talking. On this occasion, he was explaining the new academic initiative for the lower school with a professional tone somewhere between evangelical zeal and a station announcement in the subway. John Swadely, Chief of Marketing, Outreach, and Communications (MOC) director, maintained an…
It was the Gert Loveday review of Rancid Pansies (it’s an anagram) that set me off to read James Hamilton-Paterson’s trilogy of comic novels that chronicles the outlandish misadventures of Gerald Samper. Part Henry Wilt and part Bertie Wooster with a touch of the growing pains of Adrian Mole, Gerald Samper – of the Shropshire Sampers – is his own…
When Claudine Gay resigned as President of Harvard this week the gloating by some conservative activists and commentators was unappealing to put it mildly. Their unseemly glee seemed vindictive and disproportionate. It said more about them and their agenda than it did about Dr. Gay and the dysfunction at Harvard. When Gay did herself few favors with her NYTimes guest…