Giving kids the social skills they need to succeed
I spent a lot of time this summer listening to audio books. It was not entirely of my own volition. I brought my 9 year old daughter with me to our camp for 3 weeks. Between our commute – about 30 minutes each way – and then our family trips to upstate New York and Downeast Maine at the end […]
» Read moreDuring the summer, Academy MetroWest runs a small day camp. Some weeks at camp adhere to a specific theme and this week is one of them. It’s our second annual LARP week and it’s the brainchild of a long time member of our staff, Adam Hurley. For the uninitiated, LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. According to Wikipedia, a LARP is: […]
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“The real scholars were left in almost total freedom to ply their studies and their Games, and no one objected that a good many of their works seemed to bring no immediate benefits to the people or the community and, inevitably, seemed to nonscholars merely luxurious frivolities.” – Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game Two summers ago, my […]
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Before I went to graduate school and embarked on a professional career, I flirted with the world of hippie-dom for a few years. I was captivated by Jack Kerouac’s writing that extolled the life of on-the-road spontaneity and the freedom to “dig” all that was around us. I spent my share of time at Grateful Dead shows, captivated as I was […]
» Read moreThis past week, there were news stories in the media about the State of the Union Address, chaos in Yemen, and the death of a king in Saudi Arabia. Here in New England, all those stories played second fiddle to news of our beloved New England Patriots and the deflated football scandal. As the Patriots head to the Super Bowl to face the […]
» Read moreA few years ago, a couple of teenage boys I was working with asked me a question that must be on the mind of many an adolescent: “Bruce…is bastard a swear word?” I answered that it depends on the context in which it’s used, whereupon one of my young charges replied “Screw context! What the hell has it ever done […]
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In 1988, I was a first year graduate student in the Counseling Psychology program at Tufts. I did my internship that year at The Academy of Physical and Social Development in Newton. The choice to do my internship there had more to do with the fact that it was accessible by public transportation than anything else. Call it karma or […]
» Read moreA good neuropsychological evaluation is worth its weight in gold. A thorough assessment provides invaluable data about an individual’s cognitive, emotional, and psychological functioning, the way s/he processes and organizes information, and perceives and interacts with the world. A trained neuropsychologist takes the thousands of puzzle pieces that go into an assessment to create a coherent, rich picture of the many processes that make […]
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In memory of Marcia Strassman, Gabe Kotter’s long suffering wife Julie on the 1970’s sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, I’m reposting an entry I wrote two years ago. Strassman passed away last Friday. R.I.P.
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As a species, we humans are decidedly a mixed bag. Interactions with other people elicit emotions ranging from rage to indifference to joy. For most of us, the frustration inherent in everyday communication can be looked upon as a minor irritant – the cost of doing business. For other people, those annoyances are deal breakers. They see other humans as means to an end at best and […]
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