In 1981 I purchased my first home, an 1100-square foot, two-bedroom house with jalousie windows and a wall unit air conditioner. Purchase price: $81,000. The mortgage–principle, interest, taxes, and insurance–came to $803/month. Having earned $780/month as a middle school math teacher the year before, I was concerned about my ability to
You can skip all the arithmetic and still get the point about how to help your kids grow up happy and healthy. If numbers are not your thing, you can start reading this essay at the photo of the teddy bear. For those of you who do believe that “numbers
“The frying pan was given to us by the Stewart family” replied Mrs. Edwards icily. “No. It. Wasn’t.” Mr. Edwards said stopping after each word as if it were a live grenade. “Tommy Stewart was my friend before we got married. You never even met him until after we got
I am the first to admit that perhaps I take privacy a tad too seriously. In the sense that possibly Noah was willing to acknowledge that he had seen enough rain. I live in a big city where “stranger danger” is all too real, so I taught all four of
1) I would prefer that my children read Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, and Horace in the original Latin rather than in English translations. The advantages of knowing ancient languages are legendary: insight into sentence structure, awareness of parts of speech, and understanding of the roots of modern languages. Kids who learn Latin
If my gracious readers can accept yet another marathon analogy, I respectfully ask them to plod through the initial sentences of this post; I promise to make a point about your children and your children’s education. Eventually. First though, join me for a thought experiment regarding that deep-seated, enduring foolishness
In 1972, sixteen year-old, Tess arrives from North Jersey to stay with cousins and to visit her Miami grandmother whom she hasn’t seen in some years. Rather than call in advance, Tess looks forward to surprising her mom’s mom. But when Tess arrives at her grandmother’s home, her grandmother looks
Running with half a dozen buddies in the early morning on New Year’s Day, I asked a friend what she and her teen-aged children had done the night before. “Just stayed home and played Parcheesi,” Danielle said. “Then the kids and I started to watch a movie, but I
In June of 1973, eight of my Troop 64 buddies and I hiked a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Western North Carolina for a week. Although the exact locations and distances of this trek are lost to memory, it is no exaggeration to say that the last words we
The woman at the 72nd Street pay phone had strands of dirty tinfoil in her matted hair and an enormous collection of broken pieces of plastic in her rusty shopping cart. She turned to show me the enormous ring of keys in her hand, insisting that one of them would
Copyright © David Altshuler 1980 – 2024 | Miami, FL • Charlotte, NC | (305) 978-8917 | [email protected]
