Uniqueness is messy.

This American Life’s recent episode on middle school mentions Maria Montessori’s belief that the appropriate environment for a child of middle school age is a farm school. What I’ve read about this idea and many other Montessori ideas sounds wonderful: young people at work and play alongside respectful adults who can teach them to do [...]

Where the kids are

At some point when I was in college I decided to take all the classes I’d need to earn a teaching certificate, so I could work in a school.  I realized the other day that I didn’t make the decision because I wanted to be a teacher.  I made it because I wanted to work [...]

Beyond suffering

A few weeks ago I wrote about how kids are oriented toward fun, and how adults tend to be wary of this orientation.  It’s one thing to enjoy one’s self, we think, but too much attention on fun seems like it might suggest that a child isn’t motivated to do the hard stuff in life [...]

What looks like lazy… (part two)

Continued from yesterday… If you’ve determined that your child does in fact have the capacity to commit herself to things, but that she just isn’t choosing to do her best when you’d like her to, you can go looking for the common ground between what you value and what she does.  It isn’t always immediately [...]

What looks like lazy… (part one)

Here’s another round of question and response; this one is an abridged collection of several versions (from different parents) of this concern.  I’m posting my response in two parts over two days, as it’s lengthy (even in two parts!)… If this struggle sounds familiar, I hope you’ll find my response helpful. My daughter never seems [...]

Not on a school night

Some of our most well-intentioned utterances fail because we’re on auto-respond when we utter them.  There are things we say to kids because we’ve heard them over and over, or said them over and over, though they aren’t what we really mean – they don’t actually serve the goals we have for kids or the [...]

Clippings

When I was a kid my grandmother often sent me newspaper clippings about topics related to what she’d heard me talk about in our most recent visit.  She didn’t always get the content exactly right, but it was clear that she was listening.  She was interested, and she was paying attention to who I was [...]

Big college questions

Three provocative pieces about the value of college have come to my attention in the past 24 hours, so I thought I’d pass them along en masse. First, a very short one from Seth Godin. Second, a longer one from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch. Third, an older one on NPR. All three are asking the question that [...]

Raising participants

One of the arguments I hear for keeping kids in traditional school programs, even when those programs are not working, is that if you “let” kids focus on what they’re interested in and already good at, they’ll become too self-centered and involved in their own thing.  They won’t learn to be of service.  They won’t [...]

On great new ideas for schools

I don’t get as excited as I used to about great ideas for new schools.  I may seem  like a bit of a Grinch about the whole thing so I thought I’d clarify.  It’s not that I don’t think the ideas are great. Great people have great ideas for schools and how to make them [...]