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 [...]

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 [...]

Teen 2.0

One of my particularly alert readers here in Maine has been after me to read Robert Epstein’s Teen 2.0.  I have yet to entirely cast off memory of my high school experience with the Norton anthologies and thus was a little put off by this book’s length. Now that I’ve finally got my hands on a [...]

Scratch

I just moved into a house with an old steam heating system.  I have to add water with a manual feed valve every so often to keep the boiler running properly.  Last Saturday, I couldn’t get the water feed to open. I wanted to avoid a costly weekend service call for something that probably wasn’t [...]

10,000

I’ve been hearing many folks mention the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell noted are required for mastery.  Unfortunately, more often than not, I’m hearing it used more or less as a weapon, at least when it comes to passing the notion on to kids.  ”You know, it takes 10,000 hours to master something so no, you [...]

Really little steps

So let’s say a kid wants to learn something big.  And by big, I mean something that could take a long time to master – something like speaking a language fluently, playing the piano, having a book published, competing in the Olympics, reading Harry Potter.  An accomplishment that will mean a high degree of mastery [...]