Parents are often in better shape financially than their grown sons and daughters, and they’re often asked to help their adult children with money, or they help without being asked. Parents give their offspring plenty of other kinds of help, like babysitting, advice, and emotional support, but there’s something different about financial help. I think…
When children are actually children, many of us adults start out getting to know as much as we can about them. We get used to knowing what they consider fun, what bothers them, what will make them laugh, and so on. And many of us love them for who they are. We see them grow,…
Gregory is a boy in third grade who does not particularly want teachers to teach him. He doesn’t mind doing what he considers learning, but not if the way he has to do it is by having teachers teach him. When he reads, he says words, and he says them pretty fast. For the most…
People talk to each other. One of the reasons they do so is that they like to trade ideas that work and warn each other about ideas that don’t. At its best, that’s one of the great tendencies communities have; it makes learning more likely. Alone, we have neither anywhere near as many good ideas…
Lately, I’ve been giving some feedback to student teachers. I casually observe them for a few minutes a day – just enough to think of one appreciation and one suggestion. I only do it for student teachers who ask me to. Since I am not in a position to have power over them, they can…
If a teacher is lucky and skillful, sometimes a class can be a community of learners, all working together. Everyone in the class is motivated to learn what the teacher has planned to teach. They may have different reasons for being motivated: some may be sincerely interested in what is to be learned; some may…
I remember how hard it used to be, as a teacher, to find the time to do some tasks that I could temporarily get away with not doing. Those tasks often piled up and got more and more difficult to think about. Their not having been done got to be more and more conspicuous, and…
Most people in our society learn some math in school. Some start out with, or quickly develop, a dislike for it. I did, at first. Not as intense as some people’s, but to me, math was a price I had to pay in order to get along in school. I paid the price. I had…
In school and elsewhere, we learn. Some learning is thoroughly enjoyable, and some isn’t so enjoyable. Some is easy and some isn’t. Some of what we learn turns out to be quite useful later on, and some doesn’t. If we’ve learned skills, concepts, or information that were hard to learn, and/or that made us feel…
A friend recently suggested that I ought to be teaching teachers how to write and produce musical plays with children. I was flattered by her suggestion, and yes, I do believe that the way I did musicals with children was somewhat unique, and worth teaching teachers. But I also realized, as she was talking, that…