My dad had two rules in my house when it came to sports. The first rule: You start it, you finish it. The second rule was geared toward putting the responsibility on my brothers and me to decide which sports we wanted to play. He never asked, suggested or reminded …
Read More »Features
Standing up for School Choice
By now, area families who’ve applied to independent, charter and select public schools have received acceptance (and, in some instances, rejection) letters for the 2017-2018 academic year, mulled over options and made their final decisions. It would seem the hard part is over. But for many, it’s just beginning. …
Read More »Obsessed with the Game
Originally published in Baltimore Style Magazine Some days I find myself praying to all that’s holy for rain—because rain is what gets my kid’s soccer practice cancelled, or that cross-country meet called off. On some of those rainy days my kids are relieved, too, because there’s a point in every …
Read More »City Living
In 2001, California native Patrick Gutierrez and his wife, Sacha, moved to the Baltimore City neighborhood of Brewers Hill, where they lived happily for several years. But in 2010, with their family expanding to include two young daughters, their living quarters started feeling cramped. So they did what many other …
Read More »Plug the Summer Brain Drain
Every parent of a school-age child knows the “summer backslide,” “summer brain” and “sun-head.” How did Joey forget algebra in six weeks? Call it what you will, in academic research circles it is known as summer learning loss, “the phenomenon where young people lose academic skills over the summer.” According to the Johns Hopkins School of Education’s Why …
Read More »The Clutter-Free Home
When my editor asked me to write 750 words on parenting without clutter, I had to fight an impulse to write HAHAHAHA 750 times. Any parent of a Lego aficionado can probably relate. I consider myself an organized person, but based on the number of Legos I’ve stepped on—always in bare feet—I concede defeat to …
Read More »Making the Grade
These days, in the halls of high schools across the nation, there’s a lot of talk about Advanced Placement (AP) courses. Advanced Placement (AP) courses, created by the College Board, have become increasingly popular among high school students across the nation. In 2016 alone, 1.1 million students had taken at …
Read More »Baltimore’s Child Camp Fair Featured on CBS Baltimore
Summer Camp Season Starts…Now
In the middle of December, my friend Alicia Danyali started emailing me with questions about which summer camps our kids should attend next summer. Is the holiday season too early to debate whether to invest in two or four weeks of children’s sailing camp? Not for us. Alicia and I …
Read More »Keep Calm and Study On
A young man sits outside of a classroom door in the main hallway of Patterson High School in Baltimore. He breathes calmly, meditating, as other students stream by him, unnoticing. Seeing a student sitting outside a classroom at Patterson may be a slightly unusual sight, but what he is doing—mindful …
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