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""How was skiing?" I asked my 14-year old daughter as she hauled her boot bag into the car. "Well, the ratio of snow to ground was definitely low," she replied, adding that she had tried to figure the ratio of snow-to-ground during practice but had received only mystified looks. "Stop the math!" demanded a coach. "You are confusing us!" Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math? Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading. Our country's communal math hatred may seem rather innocuous, but a more critical factor is at stake: we are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics and with that are priming our children for mathematical anxiety. As a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution."

"People say the craziest things to teachers about their profession. Like what? Like how easy their jobs are, and how anybody can do it. Here is a list of some of the common idiocies along with some useful comebacks, compiled and written by Cindy Long and originally published in NEA Today, a publication of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union."

"It's been 30 years since I developed the notion of "multiple intelligences." I have been gratified by the interest shown in this idea and the ways it's been used in schools, museums, and businesses around the world. But one unanticipated consequence has driven me to distraction-and that's the tendency of many people, including persons whom I cherish, to credit me with the notion of 'learning styles' or to collapse 'multiple intelligences' with 'learning styles.' It's high time to relieve my pain and to set the record straight."

"Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won't commit to. "I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I'm moving again," says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University. Gallery Lynda Barry: The 20 stages of reading: If there are stages of grief and steps to recovery, isn't the act of reading a complicated, evolving thing over time? Cartoonist Lynda Barry, one of scores of writers at the National Book Festival on Sept. 21-22, certainly thinks so. (Related: 12 authors, 12 reasons why they write) Click here to subscribe. But it's not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. "

"The more curious we are about a topic, the easier it is to remember not only information about that topic, but also other unrelated information shown at the same time. A study published in Neuron shows what happens inside our brains when our curiosity is sparked."

"It's a familiar classroom ritual - every June, teachers assign summer reading. And every September, students come back to school having read too few books. This is frustrating for teachers, and challenging for students. When kids aren't in school, they forget crucial skills they learned during the year - at least a month of reading achievement, on average. This so-called "summer slide" is particularly pernicious in children from low-income families. Low-income students often walk through the door of their kindergartens already behind their more fortunate peers because of a mix of poverty, poorer health, less parental education, and higher rates of single and teenage parents. With limited access to books and other academic opportunities in the summer, these children experience the summer slide threefold. Over time, this adds up. By third grade, children who can't read at their grade level (a whopping 73 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) begin to struggle with other subjects. Students living in poverty who cannot read proficiently by third grade are 13 times less likely to graduate from high school. By ninth grade, some have estimated that two-thirds of the reading achievement gap can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. There is good news: Stemming the summer slide isn't impossible. Students who read just four to six books over the summer maintain their skills (they need to turn more pages to actually become better readers.)"