Room to grow

One summer I worked with a 10 year-old who’d been attending a small private school where her mother worked and was headed for public middle school in the fall.  Her parents were concerned that she wasn’t prepared. This 10 year-old has an older sister, so she had an idea of what would be expected of [...]

Scott Noelle on enjoying parenting

I was delighted this morning to find myself on the blog of Scott Noelle, parenting coach and writer.  Scott writes a blog called the Daily Groove; his site is called Enjoy Parenting.  (Thanks to Yvonne for the link; Yvonne’s blog is at www.welive learning.blogspot.com but the title is “aprendiendo todos de todo” which, according to [...]

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 [...]

What if resistance is not as it seems?

What if, when confronted with kids’ resistance to things we want them to learn, we stopped asking questions like these: Why does she have to be so oppositional?  Why doesn’t he just do it and get it over with?  Why hasn’t she learned the value of education we’ve tried to instill?  Why is he so [...]

Both, and; Milo

Two either-or traditions in education – that one must identify with one discipline over another, and must choose between learning for practical reasons and learning for its “own sake” – can really undermine progress toward the secure livelihood and fulfilled life most people want for their children.   In Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker piece [...]

The costs package

I came across an interesting pair of articles this weekend on a website called Career Cast.  The articles list the most overrated and most underrated careers this year. I didn’t find their choices all that surprising; the site based their ratings on factors beyond how impressive the title sounds, or how traditionally esteemed a given [...]

Kicking the correcting habit

I got this question recently from a young writer: “How come when I ask my parents to read something I’ve written they immediately start correcting it? I asked my mom to read a first draft and she covered it with marks.  It makes me want to stop showing her stuff.” Here’s what I told her: [...]

Scare tactics and school zones

Fifteen miles per hour is very, very slow, for a car.  It occurred to me that in as hurried a world as this one, it’s quite amazing that (most) drivers are willing to slow down their vehicles that much in order to avoid endangering children outside of a school. Then yesterday I heard a story [...]

Lessons that aren’t

Sometimes lessons (piano, art, etc.) are great.  You find a great teacher, and the results are just what you were hoping for.  Your child learns a lot and loves the learning. Often, though, lessons are not great.  Often they’re so bad that they turn an interest – something a child was excited to learn, wanted [...]

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 [...]