Growing up isn’t really awfuller than all the awful things there ever were. We spend the first years of our lives not being grown-ups, and many of us resolve that we either won’t grow up, or if we do, we’ll do it right. Not the way other people have done it. They’ve done it all…
Ideally, people learn because that’s what they want to do. The work they need to do in order to learn may not even feel like work; the learners may enjoy the process about as much as they enjoy the product. Teachers have strategies to motivate learners, but there are sublime times when those strategies prove…
Many lines of work are peppered with words that outsiders don’t know. Outsiders may actually be quite familiar with the concepts these words represent, but the insiders are often unwilling to recognize that fact. If you’ve spent a long time and lots of energy becoming experienced and knowledgeable within a certain field, you don’t want…
In 1973, the principal of the school in which I taught came to my classroom to demonstrate for me the “correct” way to teach handwriting. She felt that handwriting was being given too little emphasis in my class. Back then, I was a young, inexperienced teacher who didn’t think teachers should be so obsessed with…
There are times when adults herd a hundred or more children into one room, usually an auditorium, to do one thing. Usually, there aren’t too many times like that, but when it happens, it requires different behavior management techniques. Some schools have found ways to make this work smoothly. The teachers and other adults speak…
Young children spend time in school learning what it’s like in other parts of the world. I’m glad they do; I think the world will be safer and more pleasant if people know more about each other. And since children often operate best on a concrete level, and deal better with simplicity than complexity, teachers…
As children learn to speak, they experience ups and downs. It’s exciting to see the reactions they get from people who already know how to speak. People often make a big deal out of it. It makes the new speakers want to speak more. But there’s frustration, too. Sometimes there’s something important a child is…
One year, I took a course about the night sky. I’d always been fascinated with the dazzling display up there every clear night, but I hadn’t taken any astronomy courses in college, because the course descriptions made them sound like advanced physics courses that had little to do with the view. Instead, I later enrolled…
I once overheard two children arguing. They had just seen a cat, and one of them had lost a cat a few months earlier. She insisted that the one they’d just seen was her cat. I knew it wasn’t, and so did the other child. The argument was becoming quite intense, and I intervened. I…
I’m proud of, or at least comfortable with, most of the important decisions I’ve made so far. Most of the mistakes I’ve made were forgivable; I’ve had several factors to balance, and I’ve tried to do what seemed right after I’d considered all the factors. But I made a decision in 1974 that I deeply…