Archive for October, 2009

Flu hits home

October 17, 2009

High fever? Check. Body aches? Check. Cough? Check. Sore throat? Check. Miserable? Check. One scared teenager? Absolutely.

After eight weeks of washing our hands incessantly, coughing into our sleeves (which still feels weird), and stocking up on hand sanitzer, my 14-year-old has come down with the flu. 

Unfortunately, due to the media hype, she’s fairly convinced she’s on a fast train journey to the grim reaper. Assurances from her father and I that she’ll live to try out for baskbetball have little impact, especially since our graduate degrees are in education and communication, not medicine.

Having older children, I realize this tendency to think your parents are idiots will dissipate sometime in her twenties. Right now, however, it looks like it’s going to be a long flu season.

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Managing daily distractions

October 1, 2009

Today I spent about two hours chasing down facts to refute an erroneous story involving one of our schools that was aired by a talk radio station last spring. It popped back up today as yet another talk radio station, fed by blogs, recycled the story as part of its coverage of the latest “Obama song” flap, this time at a New Jersey elementary school. All of which left me wondering, what if we could capture all this outrage and focus that energy on tutoring kids in reading, mentoring teens or feeding the hungry? We might actually solve some important issues and do some good rather than spending limited time and resources managing non-issues and non-news events.

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