Colleges Weigh How to Judge Students Today’s Times has the next step in the college admissions re-evaluatoin: www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/education/29admissions.html The head of the commission I discussed the other day spoke at a convention to many other college admissions officers. If you read the article to the end you see two opposite strands — all of the college [...]

I Am Just Back from the FAME Conference in Orlando For those of you not up on your acronyms, this was the Flordia Association for Media in Education conference, not a workshop on how to get on American Idol. Since ALA was in Anaheim, and I recently went to an NCTE at Opryland in Nashville, [...]

Did You Catch the New Report about the Shift Away from College Tests? Here is the Times article, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22admissions.html As the piece explained, a panel headed by the Harvard admissions director has suggested that in determining who is a good candidate, schools shift away from tests such as the SAT or ACT and instead look at [...]

More On Boys and School Nadine’s report that her first grade son was forbidden to read nonfiction is horrifying — anyone else have similar experiences? Or opposite experiences? I wonder how common that kind of blindness disguised as concern is. Her story reminded me of another recent classroom experience and helped crystalize one of my concerns. [...]

Two Interesting, and In Ways Opposite, Pieces of Information on Boys and School This blog features a personal anecdote, and sophisticated academic research but each, I suspect, is a piece of the boy-school puzzle. Last night I went to the "Back to School" night at the elementary school where my older son is starting third grade. [...]

It Was Not Indiana Jones — No Space Ships — But staying with the archaeologists at Stonehenge was thrilling. Last year when I went I was with my family. We found a wonderful Bed and Breakfast in a 17th century manor hous, ate oatmeal every morning and joined in the digs later on. This year [...]

My Wife Used to Live in Greenwich Village, and So On an Anniversary Date we strolled through her old neighborhood and visited a great magazine store on Sixth Avenue that we both used to haunt. But the store looked different, shifted around — clearly under new ownership. The delicious clutter of obscure publications replaced by clear, clean [...]

GG Noob I am copying this headline (which translates, so I read, as Good Game Newbie – either a form of congratulations to a new player or a disdainful put down) from a review in the September 5 issue of the TLS. The article is not yet available online, but you can read about the two books [...]

Illustration research for Painting the Wild Frontier began as soon as I chose George Catlin as a subject.  I knew the project would be feasible only if I could get permission to use reproductions of his work. And permission fees had to be affordable.    Fortunately, most of Catlin’s original "Indian Gallery" is in the [...]

Friends, I am off to the Stonehenge site for a short trip, Susanna has kindly agreed to give us the next two installments of her WIP while I am away. I chose George Catlin as a subject for a biography because his life story was dramatic, his art  beautiful, the primary source material plentiful, and [...]