594. Norks and Noogly

Over the years, I’ve spoken with a few teachers who seemed, to me, to hold their pupils totally accountable for what they learned. As I’ve seen it, these teachers did what they considered teaching, and left it entirely up to the pupils to take advantage of that teaching, and learn. If some pupils didn’t learn…

Some children, for various reasons, like to be done with their work. It could be that there is some carrot at the end of the stick – that whatever the child is going to do after the work is done is so attractive that finishing is a high priority. Unless the teacher or parent has…

Once, a representative of the phone company was asking me some routine questions. One of them was what kind of work I did. Another was whether my wife worked. At the time, we had two children, both under four years old. I knew what the representative meant, but I could not bring myself to give…

In our culture, it’s customary to acknowledge people when you happen to get eye contact with them. If you don’t know them, you say “Hi,” and maybe talk about the weather a little. S. I. Hayakawa (whom I admired as a student of language, though I didn’t like his politics) called this “the language of…

People have a sometimes annoying tendency to consider their own needs and wants higher priorities than the needs and wants of others. The reason that can be so annoying is that we other people have our own needs and priorities, or, in our finest moments, we think about the interests of still other people, or…

I like Walt Disney Productions’ film “Pollyanna.” For a long time, I thought I liked it because Hayley Mills was so appealing, or because I was so naive. I thought that I’d become a little more cynical when I graduated from the School of Hard Knocks, and I’d become disenchanted with the “glad game” Pollyanna…