609. Measuring

I’m tutoring a nine year old boy named Alex. He doesn’t have all the skills and knowledge other children his age have, and his parents hope that he’ll catch up with them a little by working with me. I spoke with his mother and two of his teachers to find out what to focus on…

Not everything we say is for children’s ears. There are various reasons adults don’t want children to hear certain thoughts or communications. We may worry that they’ll be unnecessarily frightened, excited, angered, or embarrassed. We don’t want to spark those feelings, or deal with the behavior that usually accompanies them. Ideally, we find time to…

I’ve sometimes tried to write fiction. I’ve liked some of what I’ve written, and even sent some of it to a few publishers (with no success). And yet I only recently learned, in a third grade class, that there are some conventions to follow in writing fiction. I learned that even though you may have…

There were certain things I tried as a teacher, and they worked so well that I tried them every year, and they worked almost every year. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be like Mr. Goldman, my eighth grade Latin teacher, and become so predictable that people would tell jokes about me. I…

About twenty minutes after I e-mailed my essay on lecture to the people on my e-mailing list, I got quite a bit of feedback from one of my friends, Bruce Pollack-Johnson, a teacher who works with older learners. He has strong feelings about lecturing. He had two important things to say: that lecture is not…

When I was a child, my parents unknowingly hired a bunch of teachers for me and my siblings. These teachers had never worked in schools, and didn’t know much about child development or curriculum. They were great at classroom management; in fact, we were spellbound, hanging on their every word. My two favorites were Popeye…