Winter

I can't believe how hard it's snowing today and how cold it is. We haven't had this snowy of a winter for a few years. I think the snow is pretty, but it's the wind that I can do without. The other thing that stinks about it is that I'm getting to pregnant to wear my warmest winter coat-- hopefully winter will end before I outgrow my next warmest coat.

Student Blogs

I have my students write blogs, and I am glad that I do. It gives me a feel for how they feel about class, but more importantly, it helps me to understand their experiences with tutoring. This week a couple of them witnessed a bad tutoring session, and that really disappoints me. I want them to have positive experiences with tutoring--as well as I want the students who come in for tutoring to have a positive experience, so when I hear about a bad one, I get frustrated. The good thing is that if I hear about it early enough I can do my best to do something about it.

Buy Buy Baby

I said that I would post about Buy Buy Baby by Susan Gregory Thomas when I finished reading it, and then I got busy and forgot.

This text made me realize the discrepency between my life as an academic and my life as a parent. I think the only way I can reconcile it is through age-- my work as an academic focuses on how media are affecting older children, not younger-- but I fully realize that the reason media have the influence that it does over older children is because they have been saturated with media since birth.

Thomas talks about how unnecessary television is for toddlers and how actually dangerous it is for babies. She also discusses how unnecessary video games are for children that young-- and I have to believe her. The thing that I think shocked me the most was how well pegged the marketing firms have my generation of parents-- they really know what we want for our kids and they try to market that to us-- it's a little bit scary.

I know this is really just a reference-- my true excitement over the text has worn off, but I think it's important to think about who we are letting tell us what we need.