Sabtu, 02 November 2013

Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It

The Repurposed Ph.D.


By REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW
Published: November 1, 2013 4 Comments
ON a recent Sunday afternoon, a monthly meeting convened around a long table in a Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As people settled in, the organizer plopped down a bag of potato chips and tackled housekeeping matters, like soliciting contributions. But she did not insist. “I know that some of you are in fragile situations,” she said.
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Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
ADAM CAPITANIO
PH.D. American studies, Michigan State University
JOB Editorial associate, Berghahn Books
Dr. Capitanio spent nine years in grad school between a master’s in cinema studies and a Ph.D. “A little more than halfway through,” he said, “it dawned on me how bad the job market actually was.” On phdsatwork.com, he writes: “I looked everywhere a confused humanities post-academic would look: nonprofits, museums, media companies, I ended up in that refuge of former academics, publishing.”

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KAREN SHANTON
PH.D. Philosophy, Rutgers
JOB Analyst, National Conference of State Legislatures
While working toward her Ph.D., Dr. Shanton realized she was more interested in politics than a faculty position. After completing a series of internships in Washington, she won a fellowship researching issues for state policy makers.

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One attendee recalled scraping by on $9,000 a year. “I was exhausted by years of living in poverty,” she said. Her neighbor chimed in: “Amen, sister.”
An eavesdropper might have been surprised to learn what the group had in common: formidable academic credentials. Sitting at the table were a historian, a sociologist, a linguist and a dozen other scholars. Most held doctorates; a few were either close to completion or had left before finishing. All had toiled for years in graduate school but, by choice or circumstance, almost none had arrived at the promised destination of tenure-track professorships (the one who had was thinking of leaving). Now they found themselves at a gathering of a group called Versatile Ph.D. to support their pursuit of nontraditional careers.
After a round of introductions, the participants broke into clusters to swap stories and tips. A 32-year-old man who had studied ancient religion at Princeton wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his employer, a finance website; he talked up his job to a physicist who was finalizing her thesis. The historian, a teacher at an elite private school, advised a recent American studies Ph.D. on where to find job postings and how to package himself. That young Ph.D., Adam Capitanio, who completed his degree in 2012, had looked for an academic position for three years, focusing his search on the Northeast and applying for at least 60 jobs. He hadn’t received a single interview. Now he was working as an editorial associate at an academic publisher, trying to devise a long-term plan. “Things were kind of desperate before I had that job,” he said. “This gives me some flexibility to figure out what I actually want to do.”
Dr. Capitanio’s experience is far from unusual. According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected to land tenure-track jobs. And many voluntarily choose another path because they want higher pay or more direct engagement with the world than monographs and tenure committees seem to allow.
Though graduates have faced similar conditions for decades, the past few years have seen a surge in efforts to connect Ph.D.’s with gratifying employment outside academia and even to rethink the purpose of doctoral education. “The issue itself is not a new issue,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “The response, I would say, is definitely new.”
In addition to New York, Versatile Ph.D. groups have formed in at least seven other cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. Abundant online resources help Ph.D.’s turn curricula vitae into résumés and market their skills to nonacademic employers. And former academics can find kindred souls at blogs like “Chronicles of a Recovering Academic,” “Your Barista Has a Ph.D.” and “Dr. Outta Here” (obscenity alert).
The spirit of change has even begun to take root inside the ivory tower. The University of California, Berkeley, held a “Beyond Academia” conference last spring, hosting Ph.D. speakers who have succeeded in other domains, from consulting to biotech. Similar events are planned at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which established its new Office of Career Planning and Professional Development in February.
The problem is especially urgent in the humanities. For Ph.D.’s in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), industry has long been a viable option. But students who study, say, Russian literature or medieval history have few obvious alternative careers in their fields. They confront questions about their relevance even inside the academy, let alone outside it.
In August, the Scholarly Communication Institute released a report titled “Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track.” In it, Katina Rogers, the lead researcher, discusses the nascent concept of alternative academic, or alt-ac, professions. The term has gained widespread currency (and its own Twitter hashtag) and can refer to jobs within universities but outside the professoriate, like administrator or librarian, as well as nonacademic roles like government-employed historian and museum curator.
Dr. Rogers suggests that alt-ac is less a matter of where you work than how — “with the same intellectual curiosity that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place, and applying the same kinds of skills, such as close reading, historical inquiry or written argumentation, to the tasks at hand.” In an interview, she credited the neologism with infusing “positive energy” into the often gloomy conversations about alternative careers. The alt-ac ethos holds that nonacademic work is not a fallback plan for failures but a win-win: Ph.D.’s can bring their deep expertise and advanced skills to a whole gamut of challenges, rather than remaining cocooned in the ivory tower.
Karen Shanton explored unconscious cognitive processes for her philosophy Ph.D. from Rutgers but works at the National Conference of State Legislatures, which provides legislators with nonpartisan analysis. She won the two-year fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Its Public Fellows program, created in 2011, places Ph.D.’s from the humanities and social sciences in nonprofit and government organizations.
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Welcomed With Kisses, Stanford Freshmen Risk the ‘Kissing Disease’


Zetong Li/The Stanford Daily
A couple kissing after midnight.
By
Published: October 31, 2013
STANFORD, Calif. — It is minutes to midnight. A sultry full moon hangs over Stanford’s Memorial Church, bathing the campus’s red roofs and adobe-toned walls.
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Zetong Li/The Stanford Daily
The Tree, the Stanford marching band’s mascot, always gets the most kisses.
In the Quad, thousands of students mill around, some bobbing drunkenly, some giggling nervously, most of them wearing clothes.
Finally, a male senior saunters over to a group of the youngest-looking women and asks: “Hey! You freshmen? Can I kiss you?”
As the Stanford Band plays and a giant screen shows famous movie clutches, the bravest women step forward and receive the traditional welcome to one of the nation’s most prestigious universities: a big wet upperclassman smack.
Days later, another tradition arrives: flu and mononucleosis, the “kissing disease,” sweep the dorms.
Full Moon on the Quad — normally celebrated beneath the academic year’s first full moon but this year held on Oct. 22 because of a conflict with Homecoming Week — is an event unique in American education: an orgy of interclass kissing reluctantly but officially sanctioned by the university.
It is a domestic example of a new field in public health, “mass-gathering medicine.” The best-known example is Saudi Arabia’s multimillion-dollar efforts to keep the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as epidemic-free as possible.
For Stanford, the struggle is: Since officials can’t outlaw it (yes, they have tried), how can they make it safer?
The first step, said Dr. Ira M. Friedman, director of the Vaden Student Health Center, is to make consent paramount. “We try to create an environment in which they don’t feel they must participate in the exchange of oral secretions,” he said.
His center also offers shots against what it can fight: flu and meningococcal meningitis, a rare but sometimes dangerous infection known as “freshman meningitis.”
To make it safer, the evening is overseen by student sobriety monitors and decorated with hand-drawn signs — of the ilk that usually say “Beat Cal” — but bearing slogans like “Consent is Sexy.”
But the most crucial role is played by the “peer health educators” who live in each dorm.
They meet with freshmen before, and ask any with cold symptoms to feel free to watch, but not to kiss anyone.
And they teach safe kissing.
“We tell them, ‘Don’t floss beforehand, don’t brush, don’t do anything that could create microabrasions in your gums for germs to get in,” said Michelle Lee Mederos, a former educator who graduated in 2011. “And we have tables where we offer mints and little Dixie cups of mouthwash.”
Mouthwash is the main line of defense. This year there were two tables dotted with paper cups, along with condoms and other sexual health supplies.
The educators also have square latex dental dams to offer, “but they’re generally made fun of,” said Ms. Mederos, who used them in dorm demonstrations of how to safely perform oral sex on a woman. “In two years of ordering supplies, I had to order them only once — for those demonstrations.”
Although the conventional wisdom is that mononucleosis spikes after the event, the health center has never compiled that data, Dr. Friedman said.
“It’s also flu season,” he said. “But we do think the event is a potentiator.”
The event’s origins are lost in the fog of history; legend holds that it began in the late 1800s with senior men presenting freshman women with roses.
Later, it waxed and waned, reputedly practiced sometimes by some fraternities. Many graduates over age 40 have never heard of it.
In 1988, several student officers made it formal.
“It was folklore,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, one of those officers. “We took it off the shelf and dusted it off. We had roses, a string quartet, maybe some champagne. A couple of hundred students showed up.”
When she returned a decade later as an administrator (she eventually became the beloved “Freshman Dean Julie”), it had “become a thing,” she said. “Thousands were showing up. It was crazy, it was wild. There were concerns about alcohol and safety.”
Starting in 2002, deans debated outlawing it, rejected that as futile and decided to impose order instead.
Now the Quad is barricaded. Campus police check student IDs. Paramedics stand by. A concert is held so nonkissers have something to do.
It has been canceled only once: in 2009, the “pandemic swine flu” year.
After East Coast schools, which open earlier, reported outbreaks, “we decided we couldn’t live with the risk,” Dr. Friedman said. “So we made a very unpopular decision.”
Francisca Gilmore, a freshman that year, said in an email interview from an internship in Cambodia that she and some classmates braved the odds anyway.
“Unofficially, a bunch of overeager freshmen and intoxicated upperclassmen gathered on the Quad and upheld the tradition,” she wrote.
Dr. Friedman conceded that the ban “didn’t work 100 percent, but I think it made some difference.”
Lots of students got flu, “but we weren’t as high as national or even regional rates,” he said.
Since 2002, new traditions have emerged, leaving yesterday’s roses looking wilted.
One co-op’s contingent attends wearing just body paint. There is a “same-sex kissing” area.
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Rabu, 30 Oktober 2013

A Film School With a Sense of Place


By GINANNE BROWNELL
Published: October 27, 2013
LODZ, Poland — Andac Karabeyoglu, a third-year student at the Lodz Film School, sat in a campus cafe on a recent day and explained why she had come all the way from her home in Ankara to study in Poland.
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The Lodz Film School
Roman Polanski, center foreground, who graduated from Lodz, in  ‘‘End of the Night.’’
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Part of the draw, she said, was that Lodz was one of the few film schools left in the world where students still learn on 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter film; but another attraction was the school’s unique way of teaching.
“Coming here gives you a different way of looking at things,” said Ms. Karabeyoglu, 27. “We have to write our own scripts, we have to edit, we have to do our own sound, so there is a huge process that you have to learn. The main aim is not the industry but about discovering yourself, what your strengths are.”
On Oct. 11, the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theater, to give the school its full name, marked its 65th anniversary with huge ceremony and a bigger party. The Oscar-winning Austrian director Michael Haneke was awarded an honorary doctorate — Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese are among a handful of other directors who have been granted that honor — and graduates and filmmakers from across the globe were invited to campus to celebrate.
The school counts award-winning film directors like Mr. Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kiezlowski among its graduates, together with renowned cinematographers including Pawel Edelman, Dariusz Wolski and Andrzej Bartkowiak.
“When I was at school, as all other students, we believed we were wasting our time,” Mr. Polanski said by telephone. “But with the perspective of a few years, I realized how much I got from this school.”
“Teaching filmmaking is a paradox,” said the school’s rector Mariusz Grzegorzek, a Lodz graduate who has taught directing there for two decades. “If you are smart enough, you can learn the basics of filmmaking in two months. I don’t like it when film schools say, ‘We will teach you, we will train you — all the wisdom, all the rules.’ The most important thing about our school is this good balance between learning the craft, learning the theory and learning how to get your message across in your art.”
World War II saw Poland devastated by German and Russian invasions. By the time it ended, with the country under Soviet domination, many of its pre-war filmmakers and actors were dead or living in exile.
“1945 was pretty much year zero for the Polish film industry; they had to start from scratch, and Lodz was part of that,” said Michael Brooke, a British film historian and writer. “There was little money for filmmaking,” he added, “so many of the talented people went into teaching — so you had that right from the start, and they have maintained that tradition.”
The filmmakers Andrzej Munk, Witold Sobocinski and Mr. Wajda — whose film “Walesa, Man of Hope” opened this month in Poland and Britain — were some of Lodz’s earliest students, becoming leaders of Polish New Wave cinema in the 1950s.
“The difference between Lodz and other films schools was that students were taught to be very analytical, very precise and very to the point,” said Jozef Robakowski, who teaches multimedia at the school and is one of Poland’s most influential video artists. “That was partially influenced by Soviet art and partially because of strong relations between the school and the Lodz Art Museum, founded by avant-garde artists in 1930. So those things had impact on movie making here.”
Students also learned — mostly from one another — how to use symbolism to put across political views while living in a totalitarian state. “Symbolism is a very big thing in the film language in Poland,” said Kathrine Windfeld, an Emmy-nominated Danish director who studied in Lodz in the early 1990s.
“Everyone, for example, knew that if a white horse crossed through a frame, it meant ‘we want a free Poland.’ I learned the language of symbolism there, that everything in filmmaking has to have layers,” she said.
In the 1980s, during the years of martial law in Poland, innovative teachers including Mr. Robakowski — who had pressed the heads of the school to create a more multimedia platform — were dismissed from their positions or left in protest. But with the collapse of Communism in 1989 came a fresh openness to new technologies and media.
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A Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set


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Published: October 26, 2013
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The humble board book, with its cardboard-thick pages, gently rounded corners and simple concepts for babies, was once designed to be chewed as much as read.
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William P. O’Donnell/The New York Times
Parents are flocking to the popular BabyLit series, which features works of literary art that have been adapted for babies and toddlers. The board books skip the complicated narratives and instead use the stories as a springboard to explain counting, colors or concepts like opposites.
But today’s babies and toddlers are treated to board books that are miniature works of literary art: classics like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Les Misérables”; luxuriously produced counting primers with complex graphic elements; and even an “Art for Baby” book featuring images by the contemporary artists Damien Hirst and Paul Morrison.
Booksellers say that parents are flocking to these books, even if the idea that a 2-year-old could understand “Moby-Dick” seems absurd on the face of it. A toddler might not be expected to follow the plot, but she could learn about harpoons, ships and waves, with quotes alongside (“The waves rolled by like scrolls of silver”).
Publishers of these books are catering to parents who follow the latest advice by child-development experts to read to babies early and often, and who believe that children can display aesthetic preferences even while they are crawling and eating puréed foods.
“If we’re going to play classical music to our babies in the womb and teach them foreign languages at an early age, then we’re going to want to expose babies to fine art and literature,” said Linda Bubon, an owner and children’s book buyer at Women & Children First, a bookstore in Chicago. “Now we know there are things we can do to stimulate the mind of a baby.”
Suzanne Gibbs Taylor, the associate publisher and creative director of Gibbs Smith, a small publisher in Salt Lake City that conceived the popular BabyLit series, said she realized that no one had ever “taken Jane Austen and made it for babies.”
While the BabyLit books do not try to lay out a complicated narrative of “Wuthering Heights” or “Romeo and Juliet,” they use the stories as a springboard to explain counting, colors or the concept of opposites. The popular “Cozy Classics” line of board books, introduced in 2012 by Simply Read Books, a publisher based in Vancouver, B.C., adapts stories like “Moby-Dick” and “Les Misérables” for infants and toddlers using pictures of needle-felted figures of Captain Ahab and Jean Valjean.
“People are realizing that it’s never too young to start putting things in front of them that are a little more meaningful, that have more levels,” said Ms. Taylor, whose BabyLit series has sold about 300,000 books so far. “It’s not so simple as, ‘Here’s a dog, here’s the number 2.’ ”
While the publishing industry is still scraping through the digital revolution, children’s books have remained relatively untouched. Most parents are sticking to print for their young children even when there are e-book versions or apps available, and videos like the once ubiquitous “Baby Einstein,” founded in 1997 as a fast-track to infant genius, have fallen out of fashion.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that television should be avoided for children younger than 2 years old, and studies have suggested that babies and toddlers receive much greater benefit from real interactions than from experiences involving video screens.
“There has been a proliferation of focus on early childhood development on the education side,” said John Mendelson, the sales director at Candlewick Press, “as well as on the retail side.”
Board books, traditionally for newborns to 3-year-olds, have always been a smaller and somewhat neglected category in the publishing business, compared with the larger and more expensive hardcover picture books designed for children of reading age.
But board books may be catching up. Libraries that used to shun the genre are now buying them from publishers. Bookstores are making more room for board books on their shelves. And while a board book might have once been too insubstantial a gift to bring to a child’s birthday party, the newer, highly stylized versions (that can run up to $15) would easily pass muster.
“A board book was little more than a teething ring,” said Christopher Franceschelli, who directs Handprint Books, an imprint of Chronicle Books. “I think as picture books have developed in the last 20 years, parents, librarians, teachers have thought, ‘Why should board books be any less than their older siblings?’ ”
In 2012, Abrams Books, the art-book publisher, created a new imprint, Abrams Appleseed, to focus on books for babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Since then, it has published high-end books like “Pantone: Color Puzzles,” released this month, which uses intricate drawings and puzzle pieces to teach children the differences between colors like peacock blue and nighttime blue.
“If you look at board books from 15 years ago, it looks like the stuff on there was pulled off the Internet somewhere,” said Cecily Kaiser, the publishing director of Abrams Appleseed. “Now there’s a real embrace of a much more artful style.”
At Chronicle, a San Francisco-based publisher, sales of board books have been rising for at least two to three years. Editors there have experimented with books that attempt interactivity, such as a line of books with finger puppets. “We’re in this era of mass good design for everybody,” said Ginee Seo, the children’s publishing director at Chronicle. “You’re seeing good design at Target; you can buy Jonathan Adler at Barnes & Noble. You’re not willing to accept the cheesy clip art on a board book.”
Jon Yaged, the president and publisher of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, said the demand for board books has driven him to release more of them in recent years. He has also added ornate flourishes: on the cover of a new edition of “The Pout-Pout Fish,” the title reads in a shiny gold foil, a touch that would normally have been reserved for a more expensive picture book.
Cindy Hudson, a guidebook author and mother of two in Portland, Ore., who runs a Web site suggesting books for parents to read with their children, said she doubted a baby would “benefit intellectually” from being exposed to Tolstoy or the Brontë sisters.
Still, “anything that encourages that interaction between babies and parents is a good thing,” she said. “That’s where the learning and the bonding comes from.”
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Concussions and the Classroom


By JAN HOFFMAN
High school football players practice in Brownsville, Tex.Reynaldo Leal for The Texas Tribune High school football players practice in Brownsville, Tex.
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Because of heightened awareness about the hazards of sports-related concussions, many states have implemented standards determining when an injured student may resume playing contact sports. But only a few states have begun to address how and when a student should resume classwork.
On Sunday the American Academy of Pediatrics issued recommendations for “return to learn” checklists to alert doctors, school administrators and parents to potential cognitive and academic challenges to students who have suffered concussions.
“They’re student athletes, and we have to worry about the student part first,” said Dr. Mark E. Halstead, the lead author of “Returning to Learning Following a Concussion,” a clinical report in this week’s Pediatrics.
For adolescents prone to risk-taking behaviors, concussions are not just the nasty by-products of sports. Dr. Halstead, an assistant professor in pediatric sports medicine at Washington University, recently treated a 15-year-old girl whose concussion came not from a soccer match, but because “she was running backwards in a school hallway and cracked heads with someone.”
The academy emphasized that research about recovery protocols and cognitive function is scant: There is no established rest-until-recovered timeline. The new recommendations are based on expert opinions and guidelines developed by the Rocky Mountain Youth Sports Medicine Institute in Denver.

Doctors generally recommend that a student with a concussion rest initially, to give the brain time to heal. That may mean no texting, video games, computer use, reading or television. But there’s a big question mark about the timing and duration of “cognitive rest.” Experts have not identified at what point mental exertion impedes healing, when it actually helps, and when too much rest prolongs recovery. Although many doctors are concerned that a hasty return to a full school day could be harmful, this theory has not yet been confirmed by research.
The student’s pediatrician, parents and teachers should communicate about the incident, the recommendations said, and be watchful for when academic tasks aggravate symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and difficulty concentrating. The academy acknowledged that case management must be highly individualized: “Each concussion is unique and may encompass a different constellation and severity of symptoms.”
Most students have a full recovery within three weeks, the article said. But if the recovery seems protracted, specialists should be consulted.
Many school officials do not realize they can make simple accommodations to ease the student’s transition back to the classroom, the academy said.
To alleviate a student’s headaches, for example, schedule rests in the school nurse’s office; for dizziness, allow extra time to get to class through crowded hallways; for light sensitivity, permit sunglasses to be worn indoors. Students accustomed to 45-minute classes might only be able to sit through 30 minutes at the outset, or attend school for a half-day.
“Parents need to follow up with schools and make sure plans are being followed,” Dr. Halstead said.
Dr. Robert C. Cantu, a clinical professor in neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine and a co-author of “Concussions and Our Kids,” said, “The overriding theme is not to exacerbate symptoms.”
Dr. Matthew F. Grady, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who may see 50 patients with concussions a week during the fall sports season, often suggests that before students return to class, they should first try modest amounts of school work at home, to identify if and when symptoms recur.
“But that ramping-up period will depend on the severity of the concussion and the cognitive demands on the student,” he said.
Dr. Christopher C. Giza, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, cautioned against what he calls “cocoon therapy” — keeping a student sequestered excessively.
“Being a hyped-up, anxious parent doesn’t help the kids recover,” he said. ”Don’t ask them every hour, ‘Do you have a headache?’ That will cause them headaches.”
Annual reports of concussions suffered by young people are routinely considered low. Some researchers count only emergency room visits, though many families see private physicians or do not even seek medical care.
By one estimate, 300,000 high school and college athletes a year get concussions. However, neither middle-school athletes, nor students who play on travel or town recreation teams are included in that figure. Adolescents who suffer head injuries from reckless behavior, like falling out of trees, are also not represented in that figure.
Almost two years ago, when Jack Moseley was 16, he jumped on his longboard (a type of skateboard) to head down the street to a convenience store in northwest Philadelphia. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, nor was he bending his knees in a protective stance. Suddenly the board flew up and he fell back, cracking his head on asphalt.
Dr. Grady confirmed that Jack had suffered a concussion. For several days, Jack slept between 12 and 15 hours at a stretch. He had severe sensitivity to light and noise, migraine headaches and, as he put it, “my appetite was funky.”
He could only tolerate sitting in darkened rooms, not even able to watch the flickering lights of a television. “It’s like being a mushroom, which is hard for a kid,” remarked his father, Rick Moseley.
It took Jack nearly a month to recover. He exercised his brain in increments: 300-piece puzzles, then 10 minutes of homework, then 30. The greatest stressor, he recalled, was being aware of his limitations, even as he knew that rigorous schoolwork was piling up.
But in retrospect, Jack said, he is glad he took it slow. He has seen fellow students with concussions who returned to school right away. Their symptoms lingered far longer than his.
Now, he said, he feels academically strong and has not noticed any sustained effects of the concussion. Although he has yet to get back on a longboard, he has even resumed playing his favorite sport, soccer.
But, he added, “I avoid heading balls.”
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Military Families Who Want to Home-School Their Children Find Support


Susan Walsh/Associated Press
More than 40 families participate in a home-schooling cooperative at Andrews Air Force Base.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 27, 2013
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Md. — More military parents are embracing home schooling, rejecting the age-old tradition of switching schools for their children when they are redeployed.
They are finding support on bases, which are providing resources for families and opening their doors to home-schooling cooperatives.
“If there’s a military installation, there’s very likely home-schoolers there if you look,” said Nicole McGhee, 31, of Cameron, N.C., a mother of three with a husband stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina who runs a Facebook site on military home schooling.
At Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, the library has special presentations for home-schoolers on Benjamin Franklin and static electricity. Fort Bragg offers daytime taekwondo classes. At Fort Belvoir, Va., there are athletic events and a parent-led chemistry lab.
At Andrews Air Force Base about 15 miles outside Washington, more than 40 families participate on Wednesdays in a home schooling cooperative at the base’s youth center. This month, teenagers in one room warmed up for a mock audition, while younger children downstairs learned to sign words like “play” and searched for “Special Agent Stan” during a math game. Military mothers taught each class.
Military families move nearly every three years on average. The transition can be tough for children, and home schooling can make it easier, advocates say. The children do not have to adjust to a new teacher or worry that they are behind because the new school’s curriculum is different.
Some military families also cite the same reasons for choosing home schooling as those in the civilian population: a desire to educate their children in a religious environment, concern about the school environment, or to provide for a child with special needs.
Two 16-year-olds, Andrew Roberts and Christina Cagle, interviewed at the Andrews co-op, said they were happy their parents had made the decision to home-school them. Andrew said he thinks he gets more done in a school day than his peers in a traditional school, and he sees his friends at Bible study groups and during other social events with teenagers on base.
“There’s not a lot of peer pressure considering you’re mostly with your siblings and it’s kind of a relaxed environment,” Christina said.
Participating military families say home schooling also allows them to schedule school time around the rigorous deployment, training and school schedules of the military member.
“We can take time off when Dad is home and work harder when he is gone,” Ms. McGhee said, “so we have that flexibility.”
Sharon Moore, the education liaison at Andrews who helps parents with school-related matters, said that at the height of the summer military moving season, she typically gets 20 calls from families moving to the base with home-schooling questions. She links them with families from the co-op and includes the home-schooled children during back-to-school events and other functions like a trip to a planetarium.
“It comes down to they are military children, and we love our military children,” said Ms. Moore, a former schoolteacher. “We recognize that they have unique needs that sometimes other children don’t have, and we want to make sure that we do our best to serve them and meet those needs because they have given so much to this country.”
Strong support for home schooling by the military was uncommon in the 1990s, said Mike Donnelly, a former Army officer who is a lawyer with the Home School Legal Defense Association, based in Purcellville, Va. He said that changed in 2002 with a militarywide memo that said home schooling can be a “legitimate alternative form of education” for military children. Most military bases today are friendly toward home-schoolers, he said.
Lindsay Burchette said she first considered home schooling in 2011 when her husband joined the Navy and they were living in suburban Knoxville, Tenn. Her son, then 8, feared having to start a new school in Pensacola, Fla., when they moved there for her husband’s training and then again within a year when they reached his permanent duty station at Andrews.
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New Milestone Emerges: Baby’s First iPhone App


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Published: October 28, 2013
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Charlotte Deutsch, who will be 2 years old next month, has a look of pure delight as she swipes the screen of her mother’s old iPhone, and finds a picture of herself.
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Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
Frankie Thevenot, 3, plays with an iPad in his Metairie, La., home.
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“Baby Chacha!” she crows, swiping again to encounter another treasure. “Dada!”
On the new iPhone — the one her mother actually uses — her big sister, Izzy, 4, is utterly intent on “Dora’s Ballet Adventure,” her tiny thumb tapping away at the stars and arrows.
The iPhones, loaded with 20 children’s apps and some 1,200 photographs, are among the girls’ favorite playthings. “The little one loves to go through the pictures and name who’s in them, see her grandma and her nanny,” said their mother, Tina Deutsch, a former nursery school teacher. “The older one loves the games, and taking pictures. She loves the clicking sound, and if it’s blurry, she knows how to delete it.”
As adults turn, increasingly, to mobile devices like tablets, Kindles, and iPhones, their children — even the smallest ones — are doing so as well, according to a new study, “Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America, 2013” by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that examines children’s use of technology, and rates children’s apps, games and Web sites.
The study is based on a nationally representative Internet survey of 1,463 parents with children under 8.
Over the last two years, the shift has been drastic. Among children under 2, the survey found, 38 percent had used mobile devices like iPhones, tablets, or Kindles — the same share as children 8 and under who had used such technology in a similar survey two years ago.
Tablets, in particular, have become far more common. Forty percent of families now own tablets, up from only 8 percent two years ago. And this year’s survey found that 7 percent of the children had tablets of their own.
“I was blown away by the rapidity of the change,” said Vicky Rideout, the author of both the new report and the 2011 version. “IPhones and tablets are game changers, because they’re so easy to use. While there was some floor on how young you could go with computers and video games, a young child who can touch a picture can open an app, or swipe the screen.”
Though many parents express pride and amazement that their young children are so tech-savvy, she said, what has really happened is that technology has gotten much easier to use.
Certainly, mobile devices are more convenient than traditional technology, whether for a parent’s own use or for distracting a fussy child in a restaurant.
“I know if I need Zoe to be quiet for an hour, I can hand her the iPad and I won’t hear from her,” said Dr. Laurel Glaser, a Philadelphia physician with two daughters, Zoe, 5, and Maya, 1,
Dr. Glaser was one of the few parents interviewed who said she tried to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that children under 2 should have no screen time.
“I’m not superstrict and sometimes we have the television on and both girls see it,” she said. “But we don’t have any baby apps for Maya.”
Mostly, the group’s recommendation is ignored. The survey found that children under 2, on average, spend an hour a day in front of screens — engaging in activities like watching television, using computers, viewing DVDs, playing with mobile apps. Children ages 2 to 4 averaged two hours a day, and those 5 to 8, two hours and 20 minutes.
There are vast numbers of apps for babies and children, available free or at low cost: educational apps to teach letters, numbers, shapes, sign language; apps featuring television characters like Dora the Explorer; game apps (Angry Birds is a favorite with all ages); and art and music apps.
Many families, like the Deutsches, have smartphones with collections of family photos and videos of their children’s recent outings, haircuts or play dates.
“It used to be that a screen was a screen was a screen, and children just sat and watched,” said Ms. Rideout. “But now it can be lots of different things.”
The time younger children spent on mobile devices was still relatively short, the study found. On average, children under 8 spent 15 minutes a day on mobile devices, up from 5 minutes a day in 2011. Among those who used a mobile device during a typical day, the average was an hour and seven minutes, up from 43 minutes in 2011.
But as mobile devices have become more popular, the amount of time children spend with the screens of more traditional technology — television, DVDs, video games and computers — has declined by half an hour a day over the last two years.
Television still dominates, though, taking up about half of all children’s screen media time.
Almost all parents of children under 8 have televisions, the survey found, and most have cable as well. Three in 10 now have Internet connectivity with their televisions, so they can stream shows to their set from Netflix or other services. And increasingly, television is time-shifted — streamed, on demand, or recorded for later use — to suit the viewers’ convenience.
The study was conducted with a probability-based online panel by GfK, a research company. The data was collected May 20 to June 12 and has a sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.
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