One of the ideas adults like to think of as wisdom is the idea of the brevity of life, together with the importance of taking things slowly: “Time flies.” “This, too, shall pass.” “Look before you leap.” “All good things take time.” That’s easy for us to say. But I’m not sure it counts as…
There are things we adults know we shouldn’t say or do, because saying or doing them won’t do any good, and will probably do some harm. If we were saints, or even consistently reasonable but unsaintly people, we wouldn’t ever do those things. But every adult I know well sometimes does some of them, and…
Most children usually want to be noticed. Ideally, they want positive attention from adults and from other children who also want positive attention, and they quickly learn how to get it. The resulting behavior can be positively positive. And as most of you know, some children, for a variety of reasons, get attention in less…
Life can be fun and exciting for a child who is entering a new classroom and/or school mid-year. The chances are that no one knows who this stranger is, and that gives the newcomer a chance to redefine herself/himself, highlighting aspects of his/her personality that weren’t highlighted in the old place, and maybe concealing some…
In some circles, it’s really hip to say you’re old-fashioned. You talk about the way things used to be, and tell people that you’re immune or at least resistant to the changes that invade life as time marches on. And you can be seen as a quixotic hero. Behind that view of you is a…
Everyone has different ideas about what qualifies as work, play, or rest. If some people are involved in a basketball game, and they seem to be having fun, their activity could be called “play.” If it doesn’t seem as difficult as other things they do, it could be called “rest.” And if they get paid,…
“Vacation” comes from a Latin word that means “empty.” As a child, as an employed teacher, and as a parent of young children, I usually looked forward to vacations. That’s pretty common. The kind of emptying that goes on during vacations is often quite pleasant, and the parts of people’s lives that are temporarily emptied…
You’d think after all the effort we’d put into helping our children grow, and after all the work we’d seen them put into that upward struggle, that we’d be thoroughly happy when they’d finally made it through all that. We ought to be sitting back proudly and rejoicing in having done good work. And there…
When we decide to parent or teach children, we decide to get involved in their lives and have some impact. That means we hope that the children will somehow be different because of what we do. So one way to look at parenting and teaching is as an attempt to change children. I don’t know…
Some years, I had classes that were quite difficult for me to teach. I remember one year that was particularly difficult. There were children with all kinds of learning and behavior problems. There wasn’t even a honeymoon period – those days, weeks, or months in the fall when children put their best feet forward; the…