Quick hits

A lot of interesting stuff I’ve been reading lately that I don’t have all that much to say about:

1) Grade inflation is just nuts.  Currently at my alma mater, Duke, fully a quarter of the students have a 3.7 or above GPA.  In my day– class of 1994– that figure was about 3.4 for the top 25%.

2) In theory, I love the idea of attending a Premier League game in England some day.  In practice, sounds kids of crazy.

3) Catholic school in Columbus, OH fires beloved PE teacher after finding out via her mother’s obituary that she has a same sex partner.  Damn this stuff drives me crazy.  Love this quote:

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,” Carla said. “Come on.”

4) All of our babies slept in bed with us at some point.  It’s just so much easier and I’m pretty sure we were as safe as could be about it.  I really enjoyed this discussion of the issue, especially the sad fact that pediatricians will not even discuss how to make co-sleeping safer because they are so dead-set against it.

5) Enjoyed this George Packer post on how technology has made our lives better, but there’s not much it can do about inequality.

6) Apparently parents read more to their daughters.  One theory is that its harder to read to boys because they’re more likely to be squirmy.  That one sounds good to me.  This author’s anecdotal N of 1 family (her own) shed no light on the topic at all, but was an interesting review of the issues.  In my family David loved to be read to and so does Sarah, who actually demands it on a regular basis.   I’d like to see more research to help figure out how much of this is about the parents vs. how much is innate differences in young  boys vs young girls.