The last couple weekends around home have been math weekends. Not by choice, not by design, not for fun. My daughter brings home a fair amount of math homework from middle school. She’s actually pretty good at it but she doesn’t realize this, because (her words) she thinks her friends are all better than she is at doing it. To be fair, the work is hard.
Dana Campbell
Dana Campbell finished her PhD in evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 1999. Since then she has enjoyed the benefits of exploring many topics in biology as an independent scholar and at-home mom in Maryland. She spends summers with her husband and two daughters, ages 5 and 9, at the University of Washington marine biology research labs in the beautiful San Juan Islands.
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February 1, 2012
In a casual bedtime discussion on potential careers with my almost-13-year-old daughter, she recapitulated to me her long-standing intent to become a writer, a teacher, and a mother. But above all these aspirations, she admitted, she wants to be famous.
January 18, 2012
Riddle: How can you attract a roomful of academic parents from all fields together for two hours starting at 7 pm on a weeknight (without food)?
January 4, 2012
The end of 2011 was a mad, crazy flurry in our household. Between the season’s added extras: visits from family and friends, shopping for gifts, driving kids around, a science fair experiment (etc) and finishing some high priority work items over the holidays we did manage to catch up on some tasks (and sleep!) postponed through much of the fall. Still, a lot still remains to be done.
November 30, 2011
When you hear fanfare, cat-calls, whoops and whistles tonight you’ll know that’s our household celebrating the end of National Novel Writing Month (known online as NaNoWriMo.org – check it out!).
November 9, 2011
October 19, 2011
Last August, while selling cookies and lemonade at a stand she set up with a friend, my 12-year-old daughter met a visiting Chinese scholar who overlapped with us at the marine biology station we call our summer home. The scholar was a little bit lonely. She had received a grant to do research in the US for five months, and had left her husband and teenage son in China while she traveled. Starved for conversation, she was also eager to learn English better.
October 5, 2011
Joshua Kim wrote an interesting post in his blog on Monday about voluntary part-timers.
September 14, 2011
For some unknown reason over the weekend, I felt compelled to check the electronic service that our school system uses for parents to access their children’s grades for each class. I’ve never used this before. But since my daughter just started middle school, I figured I should take a peek at this system, and I’m glad I did! I found that in fact her cumulative math grade was 42. 42% that is. Failing grade. A little panicked, I scrolled down through the assignments and realized that a big part of it was that she hadn’t handed in about half of them.
August 31, 2011
Even without the East coast’s natural disasters of the last week, which punctuated our return to routine with two days of school cancellations, this year brings a big, exciting, but nerve-wrecking adjustment for my older daughter (and thus, the rest of the family), who just started middle school. This fall is a culmination of angst that hovered over us spring and summer, as we sorted and analyzed and discussed the none-ideal options for which school to attend, finally choosing an arts magnet program she got into at a large, urban, public middle school.
