Manhattan, home of Wall Street, financial sorcery, hyper-competitiveness—and tutoring for 3 and 4-year-olds.
This story is one of the saddest I’ve read lately.
That is an age when a child should spend time being a child, exploring their world, running around, creating imaginary worlds, friends, situations and enjoying unconditional love.
Instead, they are learning that to please mommy and daddy they have to get a certain teat result and get into a certain school.
…3- and 4-year-olds whose parents hope that a little assistance — costing upward of $1,000 for several sessions — will help them win coveted spots in the city’s gifted and …read more

What do you do and where do you go when you leave a high-stress career that nearly kills you?
If your name is Tom Dunn and you spent 20 years, first as a defense counsel in the Army Trial Defense Service, then stints in Florida, New York State and most recently as head of the nonprofit Georgia Resource Center, you find a less stressful environment in which to indulge your passion.
You teach in a tough middle school in Atlanta, Georgia where “ninety-three percent of students are black and 5 percent Hispanic; some 97 percent qualify for free or reduced …read more

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I write and talk a lot about what happens when you choose to change your MAP through awareness and the resulting boos to your energy and creativity.
What I can’t remember sharing with you is a critical ingredient in the change sauce that I call the Philosophy of ER.
I consciously developed it formally and have shared it for decades to offset all the talk about failure when people are working to change.
First, you have to understand that I don’t believe in failure; I don’t think that someone has truly failed unless they’re dead. As long as they’re breathing, the worst bums …read more

Last Friday I wrote Narcissism and Leadership and how much narcissism has increased over the last few years.
I’ve never understood the preoccupation with the glitterati, but I have wondered how much our celebrity-worshiping culture affects kids?
According to Drew Pinsky MD, AKA, Dr. Drew on radio and TV, and S. Mark Young, a social scientist it may be especially dangerous for young people, who view celebrities as role models.
“They are the sponges of our culture. Their values are now being set. Are they really the values we want our young people to be absorbing? … It harkens back to the question …read more

On September 25, 1957, 300 United States Army troops escorted nine black children to Central High School in Little Rock after unruly white crowds had forced them to withdraw.
In 1976, the shooting of a 13-year-old sparked a children’s uprising against apartheid that spread across the country to Cape Town, where students from a mixed-race high school, Salt River, marched in solidarity with black schoolchildren.
September 15, 2009, Seattle schools plan to lower the passing grade from C to D, partly match the rest of the state’s districts and partly to keep their funding by keeping kids in school.
On September 24, 2009, …read more

In a comment on my September 11 post Kate Lavender said, “I have always believed that quote “we are not made, or unmade, by the things that happen to us but by our reactions to them” – I had lost sight of that of late and your story brings the importance of personal choices being who we are back full force.”
I’m grateful to Kate; it’s good to know my point was made with at least one person.
This is as true for companies as it is for individuals and especially true in the current economic environment.
We can use this economic debacle …read more

Last week when I was looking for Ted Kennedy quotes I ran across this one from Frank Dane, “Life is strange. Every so often a good man wins.”
I liked it so much that this week I went looking to see what else Dane said; I found other insightful comments, so tried to track down a bio on Dane—no luck.
More quotes, but nowhere could I find information on who he is or what he does.
I’m sharing the quotes anyway and if any of you know more about him please share your knowledge in the comments.
Obviously, Dane did not have a great …read more

Are you aware of the new teaching approach in middle school English classes that gives kids a say in which books they read?
The approach is known as “reading workshop” and “…students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading…”
I sent the article to my niece, who alternates between teaching and being a school librarian. She started as a teacher, was driven out of it by internal politics and unreasonable parents, got a Master of Library Science and spent a few years as school librarian and is now back …read more

I read a great description of politics in You Run, a short story by Sarah Shankman, “politics is one long power plan; an exercise in ego”. That seems to be a good description of what leadership is to many people.
It certainly describes the MAP so prevalent in the business scandals of the last two decades, as well as that of the titans of Wall Street who contributed so heavily to the current economic mess.
It’s also a major characteristic of the more mundane populace in general, as witnessed on social media platforms.

The foremost cyber-goal is to …read more