Ideally, people don’t become parents until they’re ready to. I became a parent when I was twenty-one, and it could be argued that I wasn’t ready yet, but I did all right. Some people have children long before I’d consider them ready (if ever), and some are what I’d consider ready long before they have…
Usually when I roll into one of the classrooms in which I volunteer, it becomes immediately apparent what needs to be done. A child is wearing a pained expression, another child is playing around when there’s work to be done, or some other problem is staring me in the face, waiting for me to try…
Teachers sometimes ask children questions that have right answers. Certain subjects are full of right answers. Words are usually only supposed to be spelled one way. Fifty-one minus thirty-seven is fourteen. It’s not a matter of opinion. But sometimes, there is another kind of “right” answer. That is, the teacher knows what answer he/she wants…
As a teacher, I came to school almost every day with a discussion topic in mind. The topics were similar to the topics of many of these articles, and as with these articles, it took me very little time to decide what to discuss. Not many topics were lead balloons; children had something to say…
My friend Molly, who is five years old, occasionally refers to “the olden days.” She heard about them recently, and I think she’s referring to a more specific time period than “olden” denotes. I think she means a time when there were railroads, steam engines, and telegraph wires, but no televisions, cars, or electric lights….
Children tend not to eat lunch in school. Some do get hungry, and if there is a good dessert or some kind of delicious junky snack, they’ll eat that. But the sandwich or other main course doesn’t get eaten. It ends up either getting thrown out or taken home. And the lunch box you bought…
The year before last, I worked with the first graders at the Fort River School. Last year, I worked with the second graders. This year, I’m working with the third graders. I know these children well. I know some things about them that teachers ought to know, and I tell the teachers. Teachers appreciate that….
I grew up thinking that the work my mother did didn’t really count – that my clothes were actually basically self-cleaning, that meals sort of cooked themselves, and that if I dropped something on the floor, it independently found its way to where it was supposed to be. If my mother complained, I thought that…
I recently attended a party to celebrate Abigail’s sixth birthday, and I stayed longer than her five and six year old friends. Long enough to see her curl up on her mother’s lap with what looked like a sad expression on her face. My first reaction to that look was to think there had been…
Nelson was a boy who didn’t think much of himself. To underscore his poor self-image, he did things that bothered other people, and got them to back him up on his view of himself. Teachers in the teachers’ room referred to Nelson as “needy,” and he was needy, but “needy” is sometimes used as a…