Browsing: Shy Kids

Lately, I’ve been flooded with e-mails from readers asking me questions they’d like to see answered on this blog. So I’m hereby introducing a new feature, the Question of the Week, in which I’ll post the questions I see most frequently, and ask you to answer and discuss them via your comments. There’s such a [...]

The passionate response to yesterday’s post on “The Myth of the Killer Introvert” reminded me of an important series on “Geek Profiling” that the website, Slashdot, ran in the wake of the first horrible school killing in Littleton, Colorado.  Here is a highlight from the series. “In the days after the Littleton, Colorado massacre, the [...]

My post, “What Teachers Really Think of Quiet Kids,” and its follow-up, “A Different Kind of Cool Kid,” generated passionate reactions here and on Twitter. Many of you responded with heartbreaking stories of introverted children suffering at school. But there were inspiring stories too, of thriving kids who found themselves and their way. I also [...]

In yesterday’s post, Why Nerds Are Unpopular, I talked about the need to tell kids struggling with school social life that things gets better in the real world. Many thoughtful parents commented that kids live in the here and now, and either don’t believe or don’t care that one day life will improve. So what [...]

Upon entering middle school,  my once-sensible friend Amy suddenly wanted us to spend our time sifting through teen magazines and deciding which models were pretty. I was utterly perplexed as to why this was interesting, but I tried to offer insightful comments on the Bonne Bell lip gloss model’s peaches-and-cream complexion. As the school year [...]

Did you catch yesterday’s news story about Natalie Munro, the high school English teacher from Pennsylvania who blogged her true feelings about her students? Apparently failing to comprehend the public nature of the Internet, she mused about the nasty things she wished she could write on her students’ report cards. It was an awful abuse [...]