Most children like to go outside. Part of the reason is that like most adults, they like the planet we live on, and it can be experienced more fully when there are no walls, doors, and windows in the way. When we first built buildings, we did it to protect ourselves and our loved ones…
There are many factors that combine to make it possible for people to learn, and when it doesn’t happen, there are also many possible reasons. I don’t mean alibis; I dealt with those in my last article. We can honestly and meticulously study people’s success or failure, and get pretty good ideas about what are…
People waste an awful lot of energy thinking of ways to avoid taking responsibility for things that don’t work out right. That energy could be used to seek out the real sources of problems – both the external ones and the little flaws we humans have. And the problems would end up getting solved sooner….
When I was eight years old, I wrote a poem: Oh my goodness, oh my gosh. My little doggie forgot to wash. Oh my goodness, oh my grace. My little doggie has a dirty face. I had a good sense of rhyme and meter, and the poem did also say something. Looking at it now,…
“Fun” is a little word. It’s nowhere near as big as “responsibility” or “accountability.” But I think it’s much more important than some people seem to think. I guess I have a broader definition of the word that allows me to make the statement, “Learning is fun,” without much reservation. In my mind, ignorance is…
A friend of mine once took issue with the statement, “Nobody said life would be easy.” She distinctly remembers getting the impression that it would. Maybe adults don’t come right out and tell children that life is going to be easy, but they aren’t always completely honest about how hard it can be, and some…
I know there are people who don’t like children. In a previous article, I wrote that my best friends have children or want them. At the time I wrote that, I was thinking of only five of my friends, and applying the phrase “best friends” to them. But there isn’t really such a simple hierarchy….
When I was in college, most people I knew smoked marijuana, and many tried lots of other drugs that altered their moods and perceptions. I didn’t. Not because I thought it was evil, although I’d heard propaganda to that effect. I stayed away from drugs because I didn’t want my moods or perceptions altered by…
I wrote 315 articles in about 500 days, rarely pausing for more than two days. But I’ve just finished about two weeks during which I didn’t write any articles, and then 24 hours during which I wrote four. If I were taking my roles as columnist and author more seriously, the two week gap would…
I think it’s significant that I wrote 317 articles without even mentioning the possibility that some people may decide not to go to school any longer than they have to. As far as I know, all of my friends finished high school, and most of them went on to college. If I found out that…