594. Norks and Noogly

Yesterday, I worked with a boy named Elijah. He was supposed to be doing a worksheet dealing with the values of various sets of coins, but it quickly became clear that he had very little understanding of what coins were worth. I asked his teacher whether I could work with him on that understanding, rather…

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…

I have to admit that some holidays make me miss family life. During most of the year, I’m glad to be free and alone, welcoming visitors when they show up, but knowing that they’re only visitors, and I’ll soon be free again to do whatever I feel like doing, not having to answer to anybody….

In strictly behavioristic language, a punishment is an event that decreases the frequency of a behavior, and a reward is an event that increases the frequency. I’m not a strict behaviorist – far from it – but I do like the simplicity and practicality of those definitions. They explain a lot about why certain things…

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…

Most people aren’t very good at spelling, and most people who are good at it never had any trouble with it. There have been all kinds of studies done to find out whether there are any ways to explain why some people can spell and some can’t. The last time I checked, which was in…