Pumpkin Express: Rain or Shine Come Join Us

Come on over! I'll be painting pumpkins.

Rain or Shine You and your family are invited. If it rains, we have the entire inside of the firehouse banquet facilities. So, please come and have some fun! The Leta Kid's Pumpkin Express Date: Sunday, October 18th, 2009 Time: 9am to 1pm Where: Laurelton Fire House Rt. 88 West & Olden Street, Brick N.J. (Across from The Jersey Paddler) and all the proceeds benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. Painted Pumpkins Kid's Games (Everyone is a winner) Kid's Balloon artist Santa Popcorn, Refreshments and Baked Goods Raffles and Much More! Bring a Friend! or forward this email to a friend Call Dave Leta at 732-458-6674 Email: Pumpkin@DavidLeta.com Visit us at www.PumpkinExpress.org And a special thanks to you and your family There are just not enough words that can describe your kindness that has touched our hearts by your generous gift of time and treasure through the years. The world truly needs more people like you. A person that can shed light and bring hope to find a cure. Love, The Leta Family

Posted via email from Michael Bellina's posterous

New Jersey is part of plan to teach high school students about 9/11 terrorist attacks

New Jersey is part of plan to teach high school students about 9/11 terrorist attacks

by The Associated Press

Tuesday September 08, 2009, 12:32 PM

NEW YORK -- Sept. 11 family members and college professors have unveiled a plan to teach junior and senior high school pupils about the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The 9/11 curriculum was announced today. It will be taught in programs this year in California, Indiana, New Jersey, Illinois and Kansas. Friday marks the eighth anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

MCTFormer New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was among those interviewed by the educators who developed the curriculum.

Giuliani said there's a natural tendency to forget the events as the years go by.

But he said the threat of terrorism still exists, and it's important for children to develop an understanding of 9/11. He said this curriculum offers a sensitive way to do that.

Remembering September 11

See more in Education

via nj.com

What can they possibly say? The US was caught with its pants down and the result is ridiculous FAA travel rules. My 4oz bottle of hand sanitizer will kill us all, I say.

How much of the curriculum is spent on the attack at Pearl Harbor? Two paragraphs in a text book and over 2,400 American lives were lost. So let's beef up the paranoia again by taking a week out of our children's lives to prove we NEED to be protected and justify getting searched in every airport in America.

I'm sure this will focus on the great tragedy of human lives lost. Agreed, it was a great loss and a tragedy. I don't understand what lessons can be learned from this. There is no conclusion. Only speculation. We are still too affected by these events to look at it from an objective point of view. We still feel the hatred and I believe it will bias what is taught.

They should take that time and teach tolerance and understanding rather than finger pointing and denouncing. Spend a week learning to live with our differences rather teaching the results of intolerance. Why should my child be taught to look at an Islamic or Muslim with suspicion when right now he sees them as no different then himself? Why should we teach our children fear and vigilance? Teaching about 9/11 will only produce more harm then good. I really think it is a mistake.

Posted via web from Michael Bellina's posterous

My son playing his new video game

M
 
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Posted via email from Michael Bellina's posterous

The case of the not good enough present

I had this great idea for a present. My son has taken a liking to the Indianapolis Colts. Great. For his birthday we got him ready for the upcoming football season with a Colts hoody and a t-shirt with the number of his favorite player Marlin Jackson. Now, this was an inspired gift or so I thought.

 He was excited all week to get his present. I began to see the delusions of granduer setting in. I felt the need to head it off at the pass.

 "I'll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with electronics."

 "Legos?" he responded immediately. Darn, I didn't think of that.

 "No, not Legos either." That set him off into wondering and fruitlessly guessing what it could be.

 We haven't had a good record in the past with gift giving on his birthday. It's not that he's been keeping score. It's just that we can tell by his reaction whether we've hit one out of the park or struck out swinging.

 I knew he would be up early wanting to get his present before my wife went to work. So at 6:30 in the morning he was up and ready to go. We handed him his present and waited for his reaction.

 He opened it up and looked at it. The "it wasn't was I was expecting and now
I'm kinda bummed" expression over took his face. "Cool", was his response.

 "Strike three!" Nothing more was said about it.

 I occasionally made a reference to his lame gift. "No, I like it," was his response. I could hear the implied "but" at the end of the sentence.

 As the day rolled on, I could see he was bummed about something. Earlier in the day we were at WalMart and I didn't let him go to the video game section to see a game he was interested in. "Why do you need to go there. You don't have the money for it and I'm not buying for you."

 As the day went on it finally got to a point where I had to confirm my suspicions. He was upset he didn't get to see the game. I told him that wasn't going to change anything, but I wanted to know what was bothering him.

 My wife called later in the day, "what do you think about taking him to see 'GI Joe'?" Although she didn't say it directly to me, she also noticed the disappointment in our son's face. I said we'd talk about it when she got home.

 It's here I find myself at a crossroads. Do you give in or do you stay your ground? Is it better to see a smile on your child's face or teach him the lesson of don't look a gift horse in the mouth? We caved.

 We rationalized it this way. We were willing to spend over $30 on movie tickets and snacks to go to a movie we weren't wild about him seeing in the first place. All of that to add a special flare to the birthday. The other option was to spend over $30 for a video game that he really wants, will enjoy and will be greatful that he got it. To make ourselves feel better, we gave him a the choice. Needless to say he picked the game.

 The elated smile on his face and the shower of hugs and thank you's made it worth the purchase. The occasional blerting out of how much he loves the game gave us a warm feeling of satisfaction. We didn't even get a thank you with the shirt and hoody, but now we are parent-of-the- year candidates. To some it was a simple case of spoiling our child and to others it was trying to make a boy's birthday special. To us it was a case of picking the wrong gift and correcting the error with the right gift. That's our story and we're sticking to it.

 M

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Posted via email from Michael Bellina's posterous

What if your child has to sit next to an HIV positive classmate?

What would you do? Would you pull your child out of the school? Would you complain to the school board? The principal? The courts? What would you do?

That exact situation happened in at the An Nhon Tay Primary School in Ho Chi Minh City’s Cu Chi District in Vietnam. I heard this story on NPR and it made me think, what would I do? Would I allow my child to be exposed to a potentially deadly disease? When I posed the question to my wife, she didn't have a problem with it. I'm unsure.

I understand the basics of how HIV is passed from person to person and in most cases, normal childhood behavior won't spread the disease. But what about those unusual circumstances? In fairness, the children in Vietnam were taught on how to deal with their circumstance as, I'm sure, children here would be educated the same. Do you risk the long-term health of your child? Maybe this situation is too far out of bounds for most to think about. I understand that we are more focused on the potentially "deadly" flu strain. With over 60 people confirmed dead this year from Swine Flu, I can see how we can be pre-occupied, but I digress. 

I understand that I pose this question hypothetically, but it leads me to another question, what would we teach our kids about tolerance if this was a real situation? 

As parents, we are constantly swinging back and forth between instilling our own beliefs in our child and letting them decide for themselves; between life lessons learned and the easy fix. If we pull our child out of class are we teaching them safety first or intolerance? Are we instilling our own fears into our child and how will that effect how they make their decisions later on in life? I'm not sure. I am sure that our decisions as parents WILL effect how our children see the world and the people around them. We preach tolerance but when faced with that situation, do we practice what we preach? In the end, we want what's best for our kids, but what is the best for our kids? 

The story of the children from Vietnam does not have a happy ending. Over 90% of the students in that school either didn't attend or were pulled out by their parents after the HIV infected children showed up. On that day, 255 students left and 44 remained in school. Eventually, the HIV children left and most did not want to return to that school. They returned to the Mai Hoa Center for HIV infected children where they will finish out their education with the help of the community that shunned them. 

I feel for the children of that school. I'm sure most of them, left to their own decisions, would have attended or stayed in school that day. I'm positive that most would not have looked upon these HIV infected children any different than other students of the school. I'm sure it was the beliefs and maybe, the misunderstandings of the parents that drove this to become a heated situation. From my seat halfway around the world, I can say shame on them. But, if my child has to sit next to an HIV positive classmate, what would I do? What would you do?

Posted via web from Michael Bellina's posterous

Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education

Earlier this year in midtown Manhattan, a local venture capital firm staged a daylong conference on school reform. Authors, professors, financiers, and entrepreneurs took over the French Institute's skylighted penthouse and earnestly discussed how embracing "digital culture"—from deploying videogame-style rewards to encouraging kids to develop online reputations—could completely transform education. Outsiders were invited to participate via Twitter, and their ideas were projected on the wall. It was a high-minded, tech-centric affair—until Alex Grodd brought it back to earth.

Although Grodd now runs a site that lets educators share lesson plans, he started out teaching at inner-city middle schools in Atlanta and Boston. The businesspeople in the room represented a world in which innovation requires disruption. But Grodd knew their ideas would test poorly with real disrupters: kids in a classroom. "The driving force in the life of a child, starting much earlier than it used to be, is to be cool, to fit in," Grodd told the group. "And pretty universally, it's cool to rebel." In other words, prepare for you and your netbook to be jeered out of the room. "The best schools," Grodd told me later, "are able to make learning cool, so the cool kids are the ones who get As. That's an art."

It's an art that has, for the most part, been lost on educators. The notion itself seems incredibly daunting—until you look at one maligned subculture in which the smartest members are also the most popular: the geeks. If you want to reform schools, you've got to make them geekier.

"Geeks get things done. They're possessed. They can't help themselves," says Larry Rosenstock, founding principal of eight charter schools in San Diego County collectively called High Tech High. He has come up with a curriculum that forces kids to embrace their inner geek by pushing them to create. The walls, desks, and ceilings of his classrooms teem with projects, from field guides on local wildlife to human-powered submarines. (A High Tech High art project called Calculicious, based entirely on math principles, now hangs in the San Diego airport.) The students all work in small groups as a way to foster shared enthusiasm: Get two kids excited about something and it's harder for a third to poke fun at them.

But more important, Rosenstock keeps the students surrounded by adults. There are no teachers' bathrooms or lounges. Parents roam the halls. And the students are required to present their work to outsiders. This, it turns out, is the key to geekifying education. "A big chunk of the school experience is having them hang out with the adults they could imagine becoming," says private-equity manager Tom Vander Ark, former head of education investments for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a onetime school superintendent. "A big high school has a youth-owned culture. You've got to break that."

The result: One hundred percent of High Tech graduates get into college. Nationally, the college attendance rate for High Tech High's demographic—half are eligible for free lunch, and even fewer have parents who attended college—is about 55 percent. Yet all High Tech students take advanced math and science classes, and many of them end up at universities like MIT and Stanford.

Back on the East Coast, in one of Boston's toughest neighborhoods, Roxbury Prep (where Grodd once taught) uses a similar formula. Almost 80 percent of its eighth graders—nearly all of whom come from families earning less than $28,000 a year—go to college. Their teachers work nonstop to stamp out youth culture: Kids eat lunch in the classroom, they're not allowed to talk in the halls, and they're disciplined for using the word nerd. But it's about the nerdiest school you can imagine; every week, the faculty awards one child a "spirit stick"—a bedpost painted a rainbow of colors—for good grades.

In the public school I attended, that would be a homing beacon for a beating: "There's the nerd with the stick. Jump him!" But in geeked-out schools, that wouldn't happen—because everyone would be a nerd. At the final spirit-stick ceremony last year, 220 kids erupted in applause as a teacher read aloud the 14-year-old honoree's thesis. It started by calling America an "unfair and superficial nation." Hey, kids are going to rebel; better to have them cheered for doing it with contentious ideas.

Senior writer Daniel Roth (daniel_roth@wired.com) wrote about innovation in the wake of the financial crisis in issue 17.07.

via wired.com

I read this article and it was dead on. Learning has never been cool. Being smart has never been cool. The athletic focus of schools only contributes to this. When was the last time a straight-A student got an endorsement deal without rushing for 200 yard in a season or averaging 35 point per game? If we want students to learn, especially in a low-income urban environment, we have to teach them to believe that education and not athletics is their ticket to success. Until that point, all the gimmicks and gadgets in the world isn't going to help the educational system.

Posted via web from Michael Bellina's posterous

Summer is just about done and now we need a vacation

My son is downstairs right now with two friends getting sugared up on ice cream and all the fixings. It's the last hurrah before school begins in 10 days. Unfortunately for him, his birthday falls on or around the beginning of school. For the last few years we've tried to hold a birthday party of some sort before school starts. Tonight is that night and with that Summer vacation unofficially ends.

This summer, like most summers, was a constant shuffle of events, day care, vacation, play dates and whatever else came up. It seemed that every week was something new.

He's been to a Yankee game, Great Adventure, Ocean City, MD, Washington D.C. and inside the White House. He's been to an all sports camp, religious education sessions and a marine science camp. He's had swimming lessons, tennis lessons and math lessons with his Math teacher. He's slept over friend's houses and had friends sleep over here. He's been to Aunts and Uncles and Grandma and Grandpa's house. This week we're both home together. Can the poor kid rest? Nope. He has summer homework to finish before school starts next Wednesday. At times I wonder are we doing the right thing? Were we better off just hanging around all summer?

Studies have shown that school age children lose up to 3 months of learning over the summer. The extreme cases are usually lower income families who can't afford summer camps, trips and various other educational enhancements that more affluent families can. I'm sure the facts don't lie, but aren't we raising a generation that doesn't know how to unplug? Will my child grow up and not be able to disengage himself? Is this a good thing?

Don't get me wrong, I want the best for my child as all parents do, but sometimes I wonder if we are pushing our kids too hard. Generations grew up using their imagination, hanging out and playing in the neighborhood. Now everything is scheduled and planned. We need a calendar to get through the summer season so we don't accidently double book ourselves. Are we doing the right thing?

I guess when we remove ourselves from the present and look back, we can run through the checklist of the things we did for our kids and feel somewhat satisfied we did the best that we could. We can stare out into the garden of the nursing home our overly successful child has put us in and reminisce on all the lessons, trips, vacations and play dates we scheduled. We can rest assured that he had a complete and fulfilling childhood. We are also thankful that he has remembered to schedule his annual visit. (He's very busy, you know.) We're so proud of him.

A White House Tour of the Air and Space Museum

A day that began at 4:30 am and by 5:00 am, we were in the van for a three hour trek to Washington, DC all to take a glimpse into history.We lined up for our 9:30 am tour, went through the usual line of scanning and into the West Wing we went.
 
I was surprised at how architectually plain the home of our nation's leader was in contrast to how rich the history within the walls were. As an adult you can appreciate all that has happened on the grounds as a child it was just the place were the president lived.
 
This whole trip to DC was the result of a question about what my son would like to see in Washington if were to take a side trip there. "I would really like to see the White House," he answered. So began a six month wait for the possibility of getting a rare pass into the White House.
 
We kept it quiet as to not disappoint him. Nothing was said except for the occasional question amoungst the adults. Newspaper articles about how hard these passes were get didn't discourage us. All hope was lost until less than one week before vacation, we were approved for passes! Excited that we cleared our security check, we let our son know we were going to see the White House.
 
"Remember I asked you what you wanted to see in Washington?"
 
"No," he responded. So I rephrased the question.
 
"What is the one thing you would like to see in Washington?"
 
"The Air and Space Museum"
 
"WHAT?"
 
Deflated, I told him we were going on a tour of the White House. He wasn't impressed. He wanted to know if we could still go to the Air and Space Museum. Sure. I guess.
 
All that history and what was the thing he wanted to see? The painting of George Washington that Dolly Madison saved during the War of 1812. Ugh.
 
I'm sure as he gets older he'll appreciate what he actually saw. It's kinda like learning history backwards but when a room in the White House is mentioned, he can have the sense that he was in that spot looking at that room. For now, if you ask him about the White House tour, he will gladly tell you all about the Air and Space Museum. At least the trip wasn't for nothing.
 
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Viva la platypus

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Posted via email from Michael Bellina's posterous