education | conTIMplating

My second eldest daughter, Thing 2, graduates high-school this spring whereupon accolades for successfully making it through the simplest part of life will no doubt be generously bestowed upon her. After that comes…well, therein lies the proverbial and axiomatic rub. College seems to be all the rage these days for young high-school graduates so I suppose in order to avoid rocking the cultural and aphoristic boat, college is where we will probably send her.

But we are of course concerned. Concerned that she will make good decisions. Concerned for her safety. But most of all concerned that once she gets out into the real world she might get her feelings hurt. This is why we have scoured the finest of educational institutions in search of the one most likely to protect her from those nasty microagressions of self-expression that are bound to emotionally scar her and render her unable to function due to a general feeling of victimizing disagreement.

Looking around, we liked Continue reading →

So the latest word we can’t use for females is the ‘b’ word. No, not that ‘b’ word; that one is still okay. The other one. ‘Bossy.’ Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (no relation to Andy Samberg) has started a campaign to ban the word ‘bossy’ from our absurdly language-dependent culture. She claims that the adjective discourages girls from pursuing leadership rolls wherein they can actually be bossy and tell people what words they can and cannot use.

If you ask me, which nobody does for obvious reasons, this whole thing is kind of like the anti-bullying movement that is bullying us into not bullying or congresspersons staying up all night and burning the midnight oil to tell us to stop using so much energy or Al Gore flying around in his private jet to get us to reduce our carbon emissions or Al Sharpton making $5 million a year by telling us how oppressed he is or….You get the idea: we are being bossed into banning ‘bossy’.

Continue reading →