what an odd trend.

So this article from the wall street journal gave me some food for thought: New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies.

Firstly, I didn't even realize that this was even a thing. Babies born in winter have it harder? Don't do as well? Totally news to me. But I LOVE that this is something that's been debated seemingly for so long, and is now being looked at in a totally new and different way--that is, that perhaps the reason is because there's a correlation between winter babies and lower income/lower class/less educated families.

It also says in this article that babies born into the same family tend to have birthdays around the same times. In my family, I'm the youngest of five children. Our birthdays fall all within the months between March and mid September, but we cluster in July, August and September. My oldest sister is the oddball who was born in March. I'd never really thought about it at all before. My parents are both highly educated individuals, and both came from families where education was valued and appreciated. I'm not sure though, when my aunts and uncles birthdays fall, but that's kind of outside of their data points, since they were only looking at the years between 1989 and 2001. Honestly, my entire family falls outside of their data points too.

But here's the other thing that fascinated me: this research is being done by economists. It baffles me. Wouldn't this be more of a sociological issue, than economical? But that's kind of the beauty of it too--people from different backgrounds look at data differently, and can see things outside the box. This is why people with backgrounds in liberal arts are valued in medicine. This is why having a well rounded education (in my humble opinion) is important! This is why it scares the crap out of me that in New York State, the Regents board has all but wiped the Roman Empire and Classical History from is curriculum for world history.

And while I'm on that topic-- not to betray my social networking addiction-- I was looking at a facebook quiz that some people on my friendslist were taking, and I noticed that Julius Caesar was classified as "evil" in the same vein as Hitler. It really gets my goat, I'm not going to lie. Julius Caesar was a hero to the Roman people. The only people who didn't like him were the senators, and that was just because they didn't want to share their power. I'm not saying Julius Caesar was any kind of angel, but certainly he doesn't deserve to be classified or even spoken of in the same breath as Hitler, when a person is discussing villainy.

And how on earth do you teach the rest of world history without the foundation of the Roman Empire? I mean, it's the context for the rest of western civilization!

Argh!
ahem.
And that is my first post after returning from vacation. Enjoy my unfocused rantings.
Or, you know, not.