A St. Louis resident since 1991, Inda Schaenen, PhD, is a writer, a journalist, a professor, and a certified English Language Arts teacher in the Normandy Schools Collaborative. She is the author of Speaking of Fourth Grade: What Listening to Kids Tells Us About School in America (The New Press), four young adults novels–the Saddle Wise series and All the Cats of Cairo–and a parenting guide, The 7 O’Clock Bedtime. Her columns and essays have appeared in Salon, the St. Louis Beacon, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and in the anthology Mommy Wars.