Parent-y news-y bits

[mzrowan]

My yoga teacher points out The Birth Survey. The project is aimed at compiling women's experiences with American maternity-care practitioners and facilities in order to provide assistance for women choosing which ones they want to interact with for their care. If you've been pregnant in the States in the last three years, they're looking for your

Comments

[misskitty_79]

Financial education should be included in mathematics/economics, sexual education in physical education classes (NOT moral education classes, like it was in my highschool years). And there's a ton of classes that were given to us as options back when I was in highschool (91-96) that we knew damned well weren't ever going to be of any use. I mean, shorthand & typing (on a typewriter)?!? Seriously? Many of those classes could very well have been supplanted by other more useful to real life subjects...

[mzrowan]

I'll give you shorthand, but I learned to type on a manual typewriter (one with deliberately-unmarked keys, no less), and now that we've reached the age of computers, it's done me a lot of good. ;-)

But yes, there is probably room in high school, at least, for more financial education (couldn't hurt to start earlier, though).

[misskitty_79]

Our typing teacher didn't give a damn about proper finger placement, or speed. All he cared about was the layout. Exactly x" away from the edge of the page, etc...
It was a total waste of time.

Similarly, our ITT ("intro to technology", which really, should have been called "shop class") course didn't teach us anything about technology. It did, however, teach some of us (especially those with small, flexible fingers) how to repair old workshop tools, since they were all nearly as old as we were & often broke down. I think I spent more time tinkering with the bits of the class jigsaw than I ever did actually jigsawing anything!

[fuzzyila]

I was lucky to get a new and young economics teacher who showed us what a "$1 million telephone" looked like (the old kind people used to rent from Bell forever and forever) and told us never to pay fees for a credit card. He brought in financial analysts who taught us about stock trading and made us all look through the newspaper, "buy" stocks for a month and "sell" them. It was quite fun and I learnt a lot from him, but I honestly learnt more just being forced to work.

I disagree with a lot of the comments to the article saying kids who work never go to school. I worked so I could go to school - there was no choice. And I think that's the difference. There are a lot of kids with a whole lot of choices in front of them and the privilege to not care at all - Mommy and Daddy will fix it if they fuck up.
For me it was do or die and not going to school was not an option.