Friday, September 28, 2012

GT Seminar I: The Kindergarten Debate

Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton and Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience are the authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College. They recently collaborated on an opinion piece titled "Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril" in New York Times.

Read the piece and compare their findings to those of Malcolm Gladwell in chapter one of Outliers. Decide whose side you are on in terms of when a child should begin kindergarten. Do you agree with Gladwell's concept of "accumulative advantage" or do you agree with Wang and Aamodt's theory that starting school late can actually be a disadvantage? Write a blog post in which you discuss your opinion and support your claim with examples and specific references to both texts. As with all assignments, you may include outside research as well.

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