I was trying to help my daughter with some long division last night. Only, we were working with some online practice website that assumed she had learned a slightly different version of long division…I honestly couldn’t quite understand it, and was thus scouring YouTube for videos that would explain this variation of long division, but because we couldn’t find it, and I wanted be to be helpful, Daddy was fighting the urge to to teach the practice software his own lesson by bashing his daughter’s Chromebook into lots of flying little pieces. Bad Chromebook!

Despite the power of the written word, when it comes to the education that our kids are receiving, writing is the runt of the litter, with reading and math receiving far more of the vital nutrient of focus in the classroom. Meanwhile, many kids of the pandemic era, thanks to online learning, can barely print legibly, let alone be comfortable putting sentences together. The good news is that we, as parents, can absolutely help fill in the gap…

If we are going to build quality neural pathways in the minds of our children that help them process nonfiction text, as well as ideally informing their own writing in the future, adding them to the prized readership of the New Yorker seems like a savvy strategy.

What do you do? Well, you realize that the span is just about your height, so you hook your feet between the slats closest to you, then lay yourself out in a way that you grab on to the other side, now spanning the gap, and you tell the kids to go ahead and run across your back and get to safety. “Use me as a bridge,” you cry out. That is the type of parent you are. It is the type of parent I am. We are amazing!

Lincoln educated himself by immersing himself in books at the library. Not bad. And I know what you’re thinking: imagine what that little Lincoln, just showing the wispy beginnings of his trademark jawline beard, could have done with the new iPhone 14!

As luck would have it, those of us parents who do secretly seethe a bit over the fact that we have so grossly handicapped our children by failing to make them bilingual, we live in a golden era of technology-enabled language learning that is a pleasure to tap into and may in the end level the playing field a bit for our deprived tykes.

She compares this practice to a music student working the scales. And like practicing music, this isn’t something that is necessarily going to be fun; but it is important. At some point, many schools seemed to lose their stomach for going old school and making sure kids were getting in the reps, and then pandemic came, which made all learning challenging, further imperiling our children’s progress toward math fluency.

Much as a couple decades in the corporate arena have schooled me in the benefits of leveraging technology, efficiency, and processes, it is possible that this was not the best way to start the process of supplementing the education of my kids.