I’ve already written an article about effort, but I realized, yesterday, that there’s a little more to the issue. A teacher asked me about a child with whom I’d been working. She said, “Do you think he’s trying?” My answer was, “That’s a complicated question. I think he’s trying to try, but I’m not sure…
The last several years I taught, there was a computer in my classroom. I made good use of it myself, but I really didn’t have a clue how to use it with a class full of children who all wanted to use it. I know there are all kinds of ways to make the computer…
Public schools have a lot in common with democracy. In a democracy, you stand a good chance of ending up with situations you don’t like at all, and all you can do is try to bring about change. Does that make you a liberal? The change you want may come very slowly, and it may…
When children are ready to go to school, many parents are faced with a decision: public school or private school? If public school, which town or city has good schools? If private school, which one? It can be a complex decision, and there’s a tendency to try to simplify it by leaning on stereotypes. Some…
In our culture, speed is usually seen as a good thing. We have fast food, instamatic cameras, quick-drying glue, and so on. If a child learns something faster than other children, the child is considered to have superior intelligence. One night I was stopped by the police for travelling thirty-five miles per hour in a…
In a few of my columns, I’ve written about approaches with which I strongly disagree. Some, like spanking or sarcasm, I consider simply wrong. To me, they’re not matters of personal style; they’re things that should not happen in school, at home, or anywhere else. I’ve never spanked a child, but I have used sarcasm….
Teachers sometimes get so used to problems that they forget that they’re problems, and certainly don’t entertain the notion that there could be solutions. This is often the case with the school building. School buildings are mostly designed by non-teachers. Attention is paid to the needs of teachers and children, partly because some attention is…
Most of us usually want our children to grow. We realize that if they keep doing it, eventually they won’t technically be our children any more – our sons and daughters, yes, but not our children. There’s different degrees of sadness about that, but there’s often a lot of joy there, too. I love spending…
“Roger, would you care to share that with the rest of the class?” Roger has finally gotten up the nerve to tell Lois how he feels. Not by speaking to her (that would take even more nerve), but by passing her a note in class. But the teacher, ever vigilant, sees him passing the note,…
It’s nice to have job security. It makes it so you can concentrate on being good, and stop worrying so much about looking good. But teachers do lose their jobs. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the quality of the teacher; a position is eliminated, and a competent, valuable teacher has to look for…