Category Archives: Context

High School Open House

Entrance to Kennedy High in Granada Hills, California
Entrance to Kennedy High in Granada Hills, California
After attending a small alternative middle school for three years, our daughter decided, for her first year of high school, to try a more conventional public school, Kennedy High School in Granada Hills here in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. She made it through the year and even got good grades in all her classes except for math (see “Tutoring Geometry”) where I helped her get through with a passing grade, even though she practically speaking learned nothing but a healthy dis-ease with lines, shapes, angles, areas and volumes. Continue reading →

Thoughts on the Notorious Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers today
Bill Ayers today

I want to share with you my feelings about the whole noteriety around Bill Ayers and his thinking on democratic education, especially after being referred to during the fall election campaign and then being more recently featured in the Huffington Post article, talking very eloquently about democratizing our education system. But it is hard for me to get at my strong feelings about it without a lot of context of where we are now and where I am coming from, which says alot about my whole “lefty parent” thing and the tension between the leftist milieu I grew up in and my left-handed outside-the-box view of it. So this will take more than a few paragraphs to try to convey what I feel. Continue reading →