Whenever I hear about families who are adopting older children internationally, I think about a conversation I had with a woman several years ago. She sounded desperate when I met her that Sunday after church. “You’re an ESL teacher?” I looked up, surprised this strange woman knew anything about me, and nodded. “Your fiancé told me,” she explained (yes, this was…
Read More
At first, she was so excited. Her first baby, her first time to hear a heartbeat inside her womb, her first I’m-really-a-mom moment. You were excited with her–but then suddenly she disappeared. No social events, no church, no driving, and no shopping–ESPECIALLY for groceries! The beast of scary pregnancies just struck: hyperemesis gravidarum. That’s a long and very difficult name for…
Read More
Classical versus Montessori education—could there be two philosophies more different? One is very structured, with a formal progression from early ages to high school. (Read Dorothy Sayers’ influential essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” to better understand the trivium concept of classical education.) Classical education attempts to use rigorous, structured academics to train students to be individual thinkers by the time…
Read More
Because education begins informally as soon as a child is born, I’ve been researching and playing with ideas for the past year for Baby J’s education. Part of that is the teacher in me, but I know every loving parent at some point has to make decisions about his/her child’s training. TV or no TV? What if we’re watching educational…
Read More
About a week ago, when my husband and I were at a restaurant in Wichita, I noticed a scene that to me summed up the changes in the past few generations: At the table close to us, two girls in their early 20s were sitting across from each other. They were texting and taking pictures for Snapchat and Instagram while not…
Read More