We have a teenager in the house. Ingrid just turned thirteen. I’m still trying to get used to this idea.

Ingrid’s birthday presents weren’t too photogenic. (Here she is doing homework instead.) The main one was a ticket to Hamilton the musical, in London, next weekend. She’s been quasi-obsessed with Hamilton for months, and almost knocked over the lights on the table as she jumped with happiness when she opened that present.

By the way, her class gets no specific homework as such. They just have tests and quizzes every week, so her study schedule is based on preparing for each such test. She likes the logical subjects – chemistry, physics, even ethics which they do as part of social studies – where stuyding means learning concepts and understanding how they relate to each other, and test questions can then be answered to a great extent by logical thinking. She’s not so fond of subjects where she just has to learn a bunch of random facts, like French spelling, or when the topic in social studies was the Jewish religion.