I had an interesting and inspiring conversation last week. A woman called to say that her grandson—one of our middle school students—was having difficulty with math. The teacher had, it turns out, already spent a significant amount of time trying to help the student, but was not available as often as needed by the student. It is impossible for teachers to offer individual tutoring because of the structure of the school. Skype hours and emails did not begin to address the issues the student faces. The student had missed almost all of sixth grade math. As anyone can imagine, missing an ......

When I first read the claim in an article that ‘boredom breeds creativity,’ I was fascinated. I wish I had known this when I was young and bored, and my mother told me: “Find something constructive to do.” Whoever would have imagined that what my mother thought was malaise could actually be productive? Certainly not my mother and certainly not me, at least until I started thinking about it, when I was bored! ‘New Tech City,’ a radio program in New York, issued a challenge, the “Bored and Brilliant Project: Delete that App.” ‘New Tech City’ highlights trends and emerging technology ......

I read an article last week about happiness and education. At first, I thought it must be just one more alarm sounded to scare people into not dropping out of high school, or college. Then, I thought, people who are going to drop out probably don’t read articles stuffed with statistics about education anyway. They just drop out. But according to the article, and many others that I found, people with more education are happier. I will explain and add some of my own thoughts. For years, we have been led to believe that money makes us happy. Of course, money ......