Maurice Sendak’s age

Just after I posted yesterday about age-based schooling, I read a short excerpt from a 2009 New Yorker interview with the late Maurice Sendak.  Sendak says of the photograph that accompanies the interview “I am in my bathrobe in the forest with my dog, Herman, who is a German shepherd of unknowable age, because I [...]

Toughing it out

I’ve been thinking about one of the arguments I often hear for keeping kids in school even when they’re miserable, even when it’s taking a toll on their confidence and vitality.  “They need to learn to deal with hardship,” people often tell me.  “Life isn’t easy, so we shouldn’t make childhood easy.  I’ve had hard [...]

Cause for courage

I spoke with a friend a few months ago who does hiring for a small private high school.  They had an opening at the beginning of the school year for a teaching assistant, a position with no benefits that paid less than $10 per hour.  Most of the applicants, he told me, had master’s degrees. [...]

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 [...]

Early indications

We start pointing young people in the direction of particular kinds of work very early, much earlier than we’d like to think.  If we want to improve the caliber of work that goes on in all professions, we’ll be wise to start noticing the potential for various professions that’s evident in young people who don’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]