Edgar Allen Poe wrote about bells. So did John Donne: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Pavlov did some work with bells, and learned and taught us about conditioned responses. I sometimes like to think his dogs were secretly conditioning him to ring bells by salivating whenever he did it….
I’ve often heard it said that we should be encouraging children to take risks. To me, there are three categories of risks – health risks, physical risks, and personal risks – and I’ve usually shied away from the first two and been fairly “brave” about the third. I would much rather have my foot in…
I don’t like writing about difficult subjects, but sometimes, though no one is making me do it, the subject seems to demand to be written about. As I do write, I hope that the people who read what I write, and understand it, will be the ones who need to hear it, and that others…
My friend Mara Sapon-Shevin does workshops around the world on inclusion and cooperation. She tells participants about the game “musical chairs,” which, in its traditional form, is competitive, and results in more and more exclusion. In a variation on this game, described by Mara, one chair is removed each time the music stops, but no…
Outside most schools I know, there are playgrounds. To me, that means planners think school is an appropriate place for children to play. I couldn’t agree more. If you watch children at play, you may notice that young humans play the same way other young animals play – they imitate adults. They know that they’re…
The title of this article (“The Accidental Teacher,” for those of you who are reading my column in the newspaper, and so may not get to see the titles) came to me before I had any idea what I was going to write about. Sometimes that happens, and I have to let it happen. I…
Teaching gets in your blood. Once a teacher, always a teacher. Of course, everybody is a teacher, to some degree. When you say something, sign something, write something, or even just exist, you sometimes get somebody to know something they didn’t already know, or something they didn’t know they knew. Teaching is a natural part…
I have to admit that some holidays make me miss family life. During most of the year, I’m glad to be free and alone, welcoming visitors when they show up, but knowing that they’re only visitors, and I’ll soon be free again to do whatever I feel like doing, not having to answer to anybody….
Once, a representative of the phone company was asking me some routine questions. One of them was what kind of work I did. Another was whether my wife worked. At the time, we had two children, both under four years old. I knew what the representative meant, but I could not bring myself to give…
On some days, your child walks into the classroom and sees an unfamiliar adult face. The teacher isn’t there, and some other adult is there instead. For some children, once in a while, this is a treat. Either a day without the teacher is not such a bad idea, or this particular substitute is fun…