Summer Activity for Kids: Memorize Poems

Posted on June 18, 2012 at 9:00 am

“Whose woods these are, I think I know….” You know how I know? My mother told me that would be a good poem to memorize when I was eight. I still know it by heart.

One of the best things you can do for your children this summer is encourage them to memorize poetry. Children’s minds are naturally open to memorization as any parent of a kid who loves dinosaurs or who can repeat verbatim some promise you made months ago knows only too well. These days, many kids (and their parents) are so used to having all the information they could ever want immediately accessible via Google have given up on the mental exercise of memorizing. But it is an excellent way to challenge their imaginations and a great family project. Jean Kerr’s classic essay about her efforts to get her children to memorize poems is one of my very favorites. And Salon has a marvelous piece by Laura Miller on a proposal by Britain’s education secretary Michael Gove to go back to some of the classic school assignments like memorizing poems.

“People associate it with fusty, old-fashioned teaching styles,” Kauffman told me. “Memorizing anything is associated with rote learning, the mindless parroting of information under an authoritarian teaching style.” Perhaps that’s what Gove has in mind, but it doesn’t have to be that way. “If you want your child to appreciate beautiful writing,” she said, “then memorizing poetry is one way to do that. It’s not just exposing them to it, but actually getting them to take ownership of it.”

It stretches the brain, it expands the spirit, it connects the family, and for the rest of their lives, as they remember what they have learned, it gives your children something to do while waiting in line that is, unlike Angry Birds, soul-enriching.

Have you memorized a poem? Which one?

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Parenting

Parental Alert: Pornography and Abuse on Teen Websites

Posted on June 15, 2012 at 12:53 pm

Habbo Hotel, a popular social media website for teenagers, is reopening after suspending its interactive functions following an investigative journalist’s reports of abuse.

Following Tuesday’s announcement that mobile app Skout temporarily closed its under-18 community amidst rape allegations, Finnish virtual world Habbo Hotel has shut down its chat functions after “reports of abusive behaviors.”

Marketed as “the world’s largest social game and online community for teenagers,” the game boasts 10 million visitors per month to the virtual hotel, where children as young as 13 years old create avatars, chat publicly or privately with other users, and buy credits to furnish animated hotel rooms.

But the service made headlines this week after Rachel Seifert, a producer with the U.K.’s Channel 4 News, said she encountered pornographic chat, avatars engaged in cyber sex, and more. Seifert spent two months investigating the goings-on of the seemingly innocent game. While posing as a young girl, Seifert was asked to strip fully naked, “and asked what would I do on a webcam,” she said.

Seifert had similar sexually charged and inappropriate experiences all 50 times she played the game.

I looked into this after receiving a spam email “accepting” a registration at Habbo I had never signed up for. The recent announcement that Facebook plans to expand to include middle schoolers adds to the concern about the combination of poor judgment, increased independence, and anonymity in social media. Parents should be on the alert and make sure they have meaningful conversations and oversight of their children’s online activities and relationships.

Miss Representation

Posted on October 24, 2011 at 3:43 pm

Every parent, educator, and teenager should watch the documentary “Miss Representation,” about the way that media shapes our perceptions of what it means to be male and female.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gkIiV6konY

Screen-Free Week April 18-24

Posted on April 16, 2011 at 3:45 pm

It used to be called TV-Turnoff Week but that was so 1990’s. Now it’s Screen-Free Week — one week for families to turn off the screens and reconnect with old-fashioned in-person interaction, to look each other in the eyes, spend time outside, cook together, read books on paper, daydream, play board games and cards, and, perhaps most important, go for more than 20 seconds without being interrupted by buzzing, beeping, ring-tones, or tweets. It’s also a chance to participate in the many Screen-Free Week events organized around the country. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has a fact sheet for kids and resources for parents and teachers, including an excellent Live Outside the Box Toolkit from Seattle and King County. Screen-Free Week is endorsed by a wide range of educators and health professionals including the American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

I was disappointed to see Double X blogger KJ Dell’Antonia explain why she and her family will not be observing Screen-Free Week, apparently because it is inconvenient. Without television as a soporofic,

my four children will be running wild around me, invariably losing their generally excellent ability to self-entertain and peacefully interact at approximately 5:00 daily, precisely the moment when I’m desperately trying to finish up the last bits of work for the day and start dinner—without once resorting to the highly addictive, all-child-inclusive form of entertainment that is Phineas and Ferb.

She doesn’t try to suggest that there is anything beneficial to her children in her decision. It is Dell’Antonia who wants to continue to rely on television to keep her children quiet and does not even want to take one week to try to teach them that they have other alternatives — like reading a book, drawing a picture, playing a game, or setting the table. She has to admit, “I support the idea of a “screen-free week,” but I support it as a family project, not a top-down imposition of a temporary new screen rule.” The entire idea of Screen-Free Week is as a family project. I am certain that children will be so happy to have their parents put down their Blackberries that they will be more than willing to miss another rerun of Phineas and Ferb and that it is well worth it for everyone to learn that media is not the only way to spend quiet time.

Women in Media — And Media in Crisis

Posted on April 6, 2011 at 8:00 am

As Katie Couric leaves her pioneering role as the first women anchor of a nightly network news broadcast, it appears that she arrived just as what was once the flagship of end-of-the-day journalism was shrinking to not much more than a rowboat, and a sinking one at that. Where once Walter Cronkite united audiences and was seen as the most trusted man in the country, most people under age 30 cannot even name the network anchors — they get their news from “The Daily Show.” Is it a coincidence that John Stewart’s show has been sharply criticized for its overwhelmingly male staff? Or that Couric now reportedly will leave news for a talk show?

Perhaps I am especially concerned with these issues because of my recent participation in the International Women’s Media Foundation conference at George Washington University. The event opened with a Kalb Report interview of Diane Sawyer, who spoke about the impact of budget cuts and new media on the nightly news broadcast.

Women from all over the world shared their stories about the way women were treated as reporters, editors, and managers and as sources and subjects of news stories as well. Domestic violence stories at one paper were characterized as “a family tragedy,” until women in the newsroom insisted that they be described like any other homicide: murder. A paper in Norway made a commitment to have at least one photo of a woman on the front page every day — and not an actress. A German newspaper requires that one-half of its staff be female and makes an effort at parity in sources and stories as well.

The IWMF released a major new report, the first comprehensive global study of women in media, covering not just the roles and ranks of women working in the media but the way stories are selected and covered. Conducted over a two-year period, the report is based on data gathered by more than 150 researchers through interviews with executives at more than500 companies in 59 countries based on a 12-page questionnaire. The report found:

In the Asia and Oceana region, women are barely 13 percent of those in senior management, but in some individual nations women exceed men at that level, e.g., in South Africa women are 79.5 percent of those in senior management. In Lithuania women dominate the reporting ranks of junior and senior professional levels (78.5 percent and 70.6 percent, respectively), and their representation is nearing parity in the middle and top management ranks.

The global study identified glass ceilings for women in 20 of 59 nations studied. Most commonly these invisible barriers were found in middle and senior management levels. Slightly more than half of the companies surveyed have an established company-wide policy on gender equity. These ranged from 16 percent of companies surveyed in Eastern Europe to 69 percent in Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Only a little more than half of the news organizations have adopted a policy on gender discrimination.

Conference attendees used the report as a baseline to develop goals and strategies for improvement to take back to their publications. Panel members from around the world talked about the importance of a public commitment to specific benchmarks — without imposing counterproductive quotas — that will cover not just reporters, columnists, editors, and managers but choices of sources and stories.

As with all debates on gender issues, there was a conflict between arguments that women are the same as men and arguments that they are different. A discussion on putting journalists in danger included the “genderized” treatment of the attack on Lara Logan. Participants complained that Logan’s injuries led to sweeping statements that women should not be sent to cover the Middle East, while attacks on male journalists are seen on a case-by-case basis.

But there were also many discussions of the different perspective that women bring to sources and stories, the importance of making women’s points of view available to both male and female readers, and the impact of women as visible, credible role models for the next generation of journalists.

The limited data available from earlier studies show some progress for women in media, more as reporters than as managers. This report, while incomplete due to the refusal by some news organizations to cooperate, especially on issues relating to compensation, provides the first meaningful baseline for measuring future progress.

But the measure of success is a moving target. The conference presentations made it clear that the challenges of strengthening the presence of women in journalism are small in comparison to the transformational changes affecting the industry as a whole. U.S.-based print newspapers, which have relied in the past on advertising and classified ads for the majority of their revenue and are now losing readers to the web, are at a disadvantage over newspapers in other countries with less internet access (so far) and more subscription-based business models.

In a luncheon speech, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, President Obama’s appointee for Global Women’s Issues, spoke about the mobile phone as one of the most powerful factors in providing access to the crucial information that helps women achieve equality. The conference participants recognized that the greatest obstacle to keeping well-researched information available is not sexism but the Gresham’s law-impact of avalanches of free online content.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture