Summer's almost over...

It has been a wonderful summer for my kids. My son Ben got on a surfboard in Far Rockaway, found hermit crabs in Gloucester, made many friends while away at Armenian camp and got to kayak in Lake Placid. Sarah Rose, rode swan boats in Boston, was the dancing queen at my cousins wedding in Connecticut and dug endlessly on the beaches of the Adirondacks, Finger Lakes, and Massachusetts. What a wonderful way for them to spend their days - unhurried, investigating, trying new things, greeting new friends. Then I thought, why can't experiences conntinue once school starts? Can't schools be places where children do these things - play, explore, team - in an environment that is tolerent of a child's need for time in order to reach discovery?

Voicemail - a thing of the past?

Thought this was of interest, especially for parents. From today's NY Times: "91 percent of people under 30 respond to text messages within an hour, and they are four times more likely to respond to texts than to voice messages within minutes, according to a 2008 study for Sprint conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. Even adults 30 and older are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message, the study found.

There are no definitive studies of how many voice mail messages Americans leave compared with earlier periods, but if the technology is heading toward obsolescence —as many communication experts suspect — the trend is being driven by young people. Again and again, people under 25 recount returning calls from older colleagues and family members without bothering to listen to messages first. Thanks to cellphone technology, they can see who called and hit the Send button to reply without calling their voice mail box. “Didn’t you get my message?” parents ask. “No,” their children reply, “but I saw that you called.”