Apt. 11D Newsletter

Photo by Jean-Pierre Brungs on Unsplash In a week, we will reunite with my oldest son, Jonah, who has been living in hostels in New Zealand since last June. The four of us will be in Hawaii for a week, then Steve and Jonah will travel to New Zealand, where they will hike the mountain that was used as the set for Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings. They want to rough it and sleep in Jonah’s van. Jonah spent the past few months living full-time in a hostel in Tauranga, a beautiful city on the beach.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash There’s been a lot of buzz this past week about the high disability rate in colleges. Many speculated that the rising disability rates at college could be chalked up to rich moms who want to give their normal, but mediocre, kids an edge. So, here’s a fun little chart that shows the disability rate across the elite colleges. Stanford’s disability rate is 38 percent.

Ian and Steve in Disney, 2010 When Ian was seven, our family went to Disney Land. Disney is a rite of passage for parents with small children, an event that has to be crossed off the list. Truthfully, Steve and I weren’t excited about this vacation. We didn’t consider ourselves Disney-kind of people. We went because we didn’t want the fact that we were Disney Delinquents to be one more item to be mentioned to a therapist in the future. Also, we heard it was a great place to bring kids with autism.

On November 19th, Rose Horowitch wrote an excellent piece for the Atlantic about unprepared college students, the first situation. But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

For a long time, I’ve been a Cassandra about schools and kids. I’ve written about declining interest in higher education, plummeting test scores, and the damage from closing schools during COVID. Since Cassandras are hated and ignored, I often tempered my conclusions and looked for some positive note to end my articles. But even the positive filter didn’t work. My concerns didn’t get much traction with the “serious people” for many reasons.

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The race for the governorship of New Jersey is tight. Yesterday’s USA Today reported a margin of error race. A new poll shows a tight race for the New Jersey governor’s mansion as former President Barack Obama is set to speak at a Nov. 1 rally for the Democratic candidate. Democrat Mikie Sherrill had a slight lead over her Republican rival, Jack Ciattarelli, in the AtlasIntel poll released Nov. 1. The poll of more than 1,600 likely voters in New Jersey from Oct. 25 to Oct.

My oldest son, Jonah, told me that the worst thing that I ever did was give him an iPhone when he was ten years old. I gave it to him then because he had to walk home from the middle school on his own, while I waited for his brother’s special ed bus. I told him that I needed to know where he was and that he was okay. He responded, saying that at age ten, he shouldn’t have watched ISIS decapitate a man’s head on a news program on his phone.

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I caught about two seconds of Trump’s press conference on autism yesterday, before I turned off the television in disgust. It was too cringe and predictable. He announced that Tylenol causes autism and that lucovorin — a form of folic acid — is the cure. It’s not worth wasting too much time on those claims. The studies on Tylenol and lucovorin are not rigorous and are based on very small sample sizes.