I was not expecting to enjoy the preview episodes of Fox’s new reality show House Husbands of Hollywood. I can’t remember a time when at-home dads were ever treated fairly on television and film, so why should a Fox reality show be any different?

By Kirsten Olson, Author of Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture

It's the end of the school year, exam time for school age children. Everywhere around the country children are studying (and Facebooking and YouTubing, and searching online while listening to music). Simultaneously.

While most adults support the act studying for children (teaches them discipline! keeps them off the streets!), my own three teenage children report they will be doing a lot of stuff in preparation for final exams that, well, may not be very meaningful in the long run. Their time is occupied, but not their brains. They are memorizing 180 irregular verbs tenses, memorizing Boyle's law, Charles' Theorum, preparing for a 90 item multiple choice test on Indian independence, memorizing the dates of the Chinese dynasties, memorizing all the elements in the periodic table that are soluble.

In education, we increasingly look at learning in terms of how challenging it is cognitively and emotionally for kids. These exercises are low level, in some cases, the lowest level: memorization and comprehension. Although students do need to spend time some time memorizing some information, it needs to be connected to bigger, higher level concepts and challenges or they very quickly forget it. You know that yourself from your own educational life, and just because you had to do it doesn't mean it's good educational practice now. It's a general problem, one that author John Medina, of Brain Rules (http://www.brainrules.net) sums up by saying, if you had to design an environment that was least interesting for the human brain for learning, it would probably be the classroom!

Why is kids' time occupied by school, but not turned on in their brains?

As Father’s Day quickly approaches the bookstore shelves quickly fill up with books on Dads. Mostly focusing the non-AHD types but heck we still have a lot of ground to cover. One book making its appearance this year is Teachable Moments and Essential Discussions: Twenty-Five Things a Father Should Do With His Son by Nicholas Stavola with Joseph Durso.

So imagine two twins whose dad is a homeless, alcoholic roofer who dies alone in prison.  You love your dad, regardless, and want to honor his life.  So you do what any normal children of a home less, alcoholic roofer with drive and ambition would do; you write a script, direct and produce a movie starring an Academy Award nominee, with not a dime to your name AND you do it in a year. If nothing else the concept (and sub-title, "Two brothers, twelve months, and one filmmaking hell-ride to keep a promise to their father") cause you to pause an consider whether it can be done.

I was one of a handful of bloggers invited into a conference call with Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician, a mother, and author of Baby 411 and Toddler 411. The interview was organized by Amy Pisani of Every Child By Two, an organization started by Rosalynn Carter as an advocacy group for vaccination. Naturally, the subject of the interview was about vaccine safety, and focused on the recent deadly outbreak of Hib in Minnesota.

Jim Carrey + Dr. Seuss is a math problem that most people have no problem solving. In the case of the live action The Grinch Who Stole Christmas it equaled a steaming pile of green eggs and suck. Now with Horton Hears a Who, Carrey has a second chance to charm our tiny hearts that have atrophied three-sizes-too-small from the various Hollywood Seuss debacles (did anyone see Cat in the Hat?), and by golly, this time it better be good.

I only caught the last few minutes of this interview on NPR today, but it sounds like a great interview of Greg! Go to the website and I think you can download a podcast/replay of it.

http://www.thestory.org/

Direct Link: http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_273_Stay_At_Home_Dad.mp3/view

This article is from the Washington Post today.

Didn't know how many folks had heard about it. Wasn't in the Chicago Tribune as of yet (10/11/07, 1:15 CDT).

Kenny Curtis had a farm, e-i-e-i-o. On this farm he had a radio show....

Athomedad.org speaks with Kenny Curtis, DJ for “The Animal Farm” on XM Radio.

From Elmo, to Pigeon, to Knuffle Bunny with some stops with sheep and spying kids Mo Willems sits down (at his computer) with Athomedad.org to talk about his life in animation and children's books.

Philip Lerman is a middle-aged Bronx-native jewish "hippie", who co-produced the long-running fugitive series "America's Most Wanted". This subjective memoir is written proof that he is a big soft-hearted weak-willed lug of a guy. He loves his kid to near worship levels of emotional exxageration, and he seems to think that these sappy emotional anecdotes would be interesting to anybody other than his own immeidate family.

One of our regulars, Greg Barbera, was recently featured on American Public Media's "The Story" radio show. Greg and host Dick Gordon do a great job of discussing the experiences of a stay at home dad. Listen to the story here:

http://www.thestory.org/archive/the_story_273_Stay_At_Home_Dad.mp3/view

Grammy Award nominee Ralph's World gets on the phone for a chat with AtHomeDad.org. We cover a broad range of topics including the Wiggles, Rice Krispies, babysitting, righ tfield, Mozart, Purple Termites, and the Fillmore. See the full interview here.

I was excited to see that my local museum had invited a parenting author to give a dinner lecture for an audience of fathers. It seemed like something I should attend since it's my job, although the $40 price tag was way out of my budget. But then my soccer team coincidentally gave me $40 pre-paid credit card as a gift, and what better way to spend that money than to attend something that will help me to be a better parent?