Abstract and Concrete 203.
Piaget worked hard to learn about children's learning, and though I try to avoid worshipping people, Piaget is high up there on my list. But today I found myself taking another look at a dichotomy he'd analyzed. I'd read The Origin of Intelligence in Children, and Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. I'd considered Piaget's ideas sacrosanct throughout my teaching career - the separation of the abstract and the concrete, and children's difficulties thinking abstractly before they reach the right stage.
It's not that my actual teaching always reflected my understanding and acceptance of Piaget's wisdom; sometimes I got too abstract for some children. I was so impressed with some children's comfort with and enjoyment of abstract thinking that I sometimes taught to them and left other children wondering what was going on. Sorry about that.
But children's wisdom can catch you unaware. Yesterday, for example, I was reading a fable a seven-year-old child had written. It was about a monkey who captured a butterfly. The monkey punched holes in the butterfly's cage, so that it could breathe, and later on, found that the butterfly had escaped through one of the holes. The moral of the story was "Don't take what doesn't belong to you." Several other children had written fables, with morals that were less surprising than this one.
Perhaps I've read into the story some depth that hadn't occurred to the author; some adults who spend time with children have a tendency to add meaning to children's words, and I'm not immune to the tendency. For now, though, I'll allow myself to believe that this second-grader had taken a step beyond the literal and the concrete. The way I interpret her story, it was about the futility of attempts to capture beauty, or the right of all creatures to live their lives in freedom. To me, this was not just about a monkey and a butterfly. It was an allegory, with a message for any humans who took the time to look.
As much as I appreciate this one story and this one author, I don't think it's as unusual as some people may think. I've seen and heard many children who have looked and sounded precocious, and I believe that there's wisdom hiding in every person, young or old. It may be an oversimplification to say that children under a certain age are incapable of abstract thought. Instead of trying to rely on inviolable rules about children's learning, let's look at and listen to each child. Maybe, for many children, we don't have to draw such a thick line between the abstract and the concrete.

Young Consumers 204.
The vehicles shown on the TV commercial are zooming through galaxies at speeds that would make light seem to be obstructing traffic. And young space cadets want these vehicles. So they ask, beg, nag, whine, save up allowance, or whatever they have to do to get the coveted items. Somehow, they just have to own this or that. Their lives won't be complete until they own the greatness that, for now, can only be seen on the TV screen. And then, finally, the long-awaited moment arrives (long-awaited from a child's point of view).
The first moments are glorious. The spacecraft doesn't actually leave earth's atmosphere, but imagination is a great vehicle, and the dollars spent on this fantasy seem well worth it. Friends come over, perhaps bringing along their vehicles, perhaps only dreaming and envying. No one has any doubt that this has been a wise purchase, or if they do doubt, the wise ones keep it to themselves. We may be able to fight City Hall, but I don't think we can fight Madison Avenue as effectively. If you've found a way, please write an article about it.
At some point, the child begins to realize that the prized possession is really just another piece of plastic, and the craft returns to the Milky Way, finds that familiar medium-sized yellow star, zooms to the third planet, and lands in your child's closet, where many other pieces of plastic long ago found their resting places.
You want to remind your child of all the effort it took to get that item, and maybe you do bring it up. But no, you just don't understand. You aren't with it. Nobody plays with Space Cruisers any more. Space Cruisers are antiques. The really cool things to have, now, are Intergalactic RV's. Space Cruisers don't even have Super Command Modules! And so, more allowance is saved, or more nagging energy is spent.
I haven't found a way to increase children's awareness of what's going on. I've tried Penny Power magazine, published by Consumer Reports. It's had some good ideas. I've tried to lecture children about consumerism, and I've tried cross-examining them in both gentle and less gentle ways. I've set limits for my own children, sometimes resulting in arguments. But as I argued, I also remembered. I remembered wanting the coonskin cap that would let me be Davy Crockett, only to decide, a few weeks or months later, that I wanted the mask and cape that would make me Zorro. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Dad.
What I do now is trust that young consumers will eventually learn what we old consumers learned - that things ain't always what they seem to be. And meanwhile, I try to be more interested in the space travel than in the rip-off aspect of the new toy. I try to enjoy what the child enjoys. Sooner or later, if a purchase wasn't wise, the child will figure that out. Meanwhile, let's try to join in the fun. Ecology 205.
"Ecology" was not even one of the words we had to memorize when we were memorizing ologies in junior high. We memorized "cytology," "hematology," "psychology," and more, but I don't think we even heard of "ecology." The word existed, but I guess it wasn't considered important enough for us to memorize it.
Then, around 1970, it "became" important. Children learned about the evils of pollution. I joined the crusade as soon as I became aware of it. I taught second graders that the world was being destroyed by people who were short-sighted, and we'd better do something about it soon. I was new to teaching, didn't know much about children, and thought we could rely on the trickle-down effect to save the crumbling environment. We'd messed up the world, and we had to get children to clean it up.
I did the time-honored bean experiment with children: try growing a bean plant with no light, another with no water, etc. Find out what beans need. But I added one variable; I put some exhaust from my car into a jar after planting a bean seed in the jar. Bad idea. The bean plant in that jar did better than any other bean plant. It was tall, green, and doing fine. I later took a course in environmental education, and the teacher patiently explained to me that plants breathe in carbon dioxide, and evidently the little bean had liked what I'd given it.
I followed up the experiment by talking about the effect pollution has on us animals. We breathe in oxygen, not carbon dioxide. We're in trouble! At least some of the children must have been frightened by my message - a message many teachers were giving, and still do. And it's an important message. Saving the earth is not just a pet liberal project to make it so we can take nice walks in the woods; it's a survival issue.
But it's our issue, too - not just children's. Some of us have lived on earth for quite a while, and have grown quite fond of it. And as we get children to care about saving the earth, they'll be more invested in it if they get more of a chance to grow fond of it. So I eased off a little on the threat of environmental Armageddon, and spent some time helping children get to know the gorgeous planet they were supposed to save. I found out that I didn't know it as well as I'd thought. I took some courses, and read a little.
It's a great planet. Others, like Jupiter, Venus, et. al., don't appear to have conditions that would support life as we know it. I think we should do all we can to keep it going. And actually, it probably will keep going; it's only some of the species (Homo sapiens, for example) that are endangered.
As scary as our environmental situation is, I don't think we ought to spend too much time scaring children. They have plenty of time to get scared when they have more resources to turn that fear into action. Children have done some good work to help keep earth safe, but let's make sure we spend some time showing them the beauty.

"I'm Terrible At This" 206.
We don't want children to put themselves down. We want them to feel good about themselves, and what they create, and when they put themselves down, they make us think their self-esteem is not so hot. Parents, teachers, and other adults are often at a loss when they hear children say how terrible they are at things.
Let's simplify this matter by looking at three possibilities. One is that the child's self-esteem is fine, and the self-criticism is really intended to elicit attention and appreciation. If I suspect that that's what's going on, my response is usually to go ahead and appreciate, and then ask the child, in a serious voice, "You really don't like it?" If I'm right, and the child was just looking for a pat on the back, it doesn't usually take long to find out.
The second possibility is that the child is feeling sincerely self-critical, and needs some help. If this is the case, I find it effective to focus not on the child, but on what the child has done. The drawing, story, or other item the child has created, though probably connected to the child's self-esteem, is not the child. In my experience, efforts to convince the child of his/her competence are less effective than appreciation of what the child has done. Chaim Ginott is eloquent on this issue; read Between Parent and Child and/or Between Teacher and Child if you want to hear more about it.
The most difficult scenario is the one that's most typical of older children (sorry - I won't assign a specific age to these children): the child is sincerely self-critical, and is not so easy to turn around. If that's what's happening, arguing is ineffective, and often counterproductive. The child thinks that adults are supposed to help incompetent children feel good about themselves, and the more you try to do so, the more incompetent the child feels.
If this is what seems to be happening, first of all, I remind myself that no matter how impressed I am with what the child has done, any appreciation I give has to be low-key. And I also try to focus on what the child is thinking and feeling: "What do you think is one of the problems with what you've done?" Children, at first, are suspicious. They think my question is a prelude to an attempt to build them up, and they are not ready to be built up; they want their view of themselves, however critical, to be respected, not contradicted. If the goal is to help the child feel competent, sometimes there is a necessary detour - recognizing and respecting the feeling of incompetence.
We're supposed to try to have the serenity to accept what we can't change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. When a child says, "I'm terrible at this," knowing the difference can be quite a challenge.

Sibling Rivalry 207.
In this article, I'll try to capture the essence of some of what goes on in a child's mind when the child has a sibling. This attempt is not intended for children; when one is in the midst of sibling issues, one is often unable to see the issues clearly. Explanations adults give feel as if they have nothing to do with the problem. The problem, from the child's point of view, is that the sibling in question is a jerk. Parents usually aren't able to see this, but for the child, it's true.
First of all, the sibling really has no business being here. Parents have a job to do - loving and caring for their child. This is a big enough job, and from the child's point of view, adding another child into the picture is bound to water down the love and caring. I once read something suggesting that adults should try imagining this announcement coming from a spouse: "I have so enjoyed having you as a spouse that I've decided to bring another spouse to live with us. I hope you will learn to love my new spouse as much as I know I will."
The parents can remain the basic bone of contention, long after the child may seem to have accepted - even come to love - a sibling. There may be fighting about space, possessions, and more, but much of the
fighting is actually about who really owns the parents - who gets the parents' love. Adults may feel that there is no way to quantify and compare their feelings about their children, but children go right on quantifying and comparing.
I know siblings who love each other, and seem to have moved way beyond the rivalry that often begins the sibling relationship. I know some (usually separated by several years) who seem to have started out loving each other and have hardly ever experienced rivalry. And some have the same trouble with each other through decades, and avoid each other's company, or argue their lives away. When you feel that you love a friend "as you would love a sister or brother," you may also actually have a sister or brother, and the sibling relationship may or may not live up to the standard set by your friendship.
As parents, we sometimes like to think our children are destined to love each other. We may tell them, in the midst of rivalries, that they actually do love each other. I imagine some siblings thinking, "If this is what love feels like, I don't want it."
Sibling issues are complex. I don't have a final statement to make on the subject; this is only an article of exploration. I once heard T. Berry Brazelton answering questions after a talk he gave. A parent asked, "Do you know a way to prevent sibling rivalry?" I'll never forget his wise answer. He said, "No."

Whether to Help 208.
I've often heard a certain kind of advice that has given me pause for thought: "Don't give that child attention; that's just what he/she wants." It always seemed to me that if attention is just what the child wants, that's a good reason to give it. I tried not to give too much attention for behavior I wanted to discourage, but if a child cried or looked upset, I tried to help. I couldn't just ignore it.
I've seen teachers who "teach by the book." Of course, there are many books by which to teach, and many were written by experts who disagree with each other, but I like to think I teach by the child, not by the book. No matter how deeply I believe in the efficacy of an approach, I believe more in the efficacy of paying attention to the child, and putting aside my philosophical guidelines when a child is crying out for help.
But now I work with Barbara Rothenberg, a teacher who is teaching me to take a second look at the cries for help that have always tugged at my heartstrings. She is a very nurturing person, who communicates her caring in a way that cannot be missed by any child. She knows the children in her class, and has a good sense of when to help and when not to. Sometimes, I see a child who is crying out for help. I start to move to help, and get a signal from Barbara: "No. Don't help. That child, in that situation, needs to learn independence, and can learn it best by having to solve her/his own problem."
Not helping goes against my grain, as it goes against the grain of most adults I know. We remember points in our own lives when we wanted help - maybe needed it. If people helped, at those points, we have warm places in our hearts for those people. We may or may not have such warm places for those who didn't help when we wanted help but didn't need it.
But here I am, well beyond childhood, wanting someone to find me an agent or publisher. I have many nurturing, caring friends, all of whom are giving me the same message: "If you want to find an agent or publisher, look for one. No one is going to do it for you." I want someone to do it for me, just as the child who is weeping wants someone to come along and solve his/her problem. But I'm being forced, by all these caring, nurturing friends, to learn.
Please don't attach a moral to this story. Barbara Rothenberg does not teach "by the book." If a child in her class cries out for help, she responds to the situation and the child, rather than reacting to the tears. She doesn't have a hard-and-fast rule: don't help a child who is crying. But she's taught me sometimes not to. I guess you're never too experienced to have a mentor.

Open Or Structured? 209.
I'm challenging another dichotomy. The open classroom, according to one of my professors, started in England during World War II. Many teachers went off to war, and they were replaced in classrooms by adults who had no idea how to run a classroom. So they gave lots of responsibility to children - put them in charge of their own learning. It worked. The rest is history.
Here, we tried to learn from the success of the British primary schools, and because we're different people with a different history and different thinking, we had trouble. "Open classroom" came to have many meanings. It could be modelled carefully on the British open classroom. It could be a style of architecture - build a school without so many internal walls, and learning will happen.
Parents and teachers who didn't like what was happening missed what they remembered as "structure." They remembered knowing what to expect in school, and they wanted to make sure children could continue to know what to expect.
And so a dichotomy was born. There were "open schools" and "structured schools." Or within a school, there were "open classrooms" and "structured classrooms." As I taught, I often found myself cast in roles. There were usually two teachers per grade level where I taught, and depending on who the other teacher was, I was either the "open" teacher or the "structured" one. Usually, the "open" one.
I really believe that it's a false dichotomy. Asking whether a teacher is "open" or "structured" is like asking whether a person is a Methodist or a Democrat. One can very easily be both. A well-run open classroom has a structure that can be far more profound and effective than many classrooms that have desks bolted down to the floor. Children are busy learning - much too busy to throw spitballs, or dip pigtails in inkwells. The teacher's presence blends in smoothly.
For some teachers, order and predictability are easier if all the children are doing the same thing at the same time. Some children like it when that happens. In spite of my belief that children learn best when they learn in their own ways, it was usually easier for me, as a teacher, if they were all involved in the same kind of activity. And so I never quite had an open classroom, by my standards.
But I've seen teachers who have run what I've considered excellent open classrooms, and "structured" is totally inappropriate as an antonym for what they were doing.

Covering Our Tracks 210.
Not everything we say is for children's ears. There are various reasons adults don't want children to hear certain thoughts or communications. We may worry that they'll be unnecessarily frightened, excited, angered, or embarrassed. We don't want to spark those feelings, or deal with the behavior that usually accompanies them. Ideally, we find time to say these things when children aren't around. But sometimes we feel that these things must be said right away, and we don't have faith that time without the children will soon happen.
My parents used Yiddish. It was a language they knew, and we didn't. With the exception of one or two phrases we heard frequently, and figured out through context, we had no idea what they were saying. Some parents spell what they want to say, but schools being what they are, children have a tendency to learn how to spell. My wife and I used what we called "dictionary language." Instead of saying, "Should we go out to eat?", we'd say, "Shall we seek sustenance elsewhere?" It didn't take long for us to hear, from our five-year-old daughter, "Can we seek sustenance elsewhere tonight?"
The restaurant example is cute, and it won't scar children for life to hear the discussion that leads to a decision about where to eat. But there are things children shouldn't hear. A parent may be struggling with frustration about a child's learning problems, or any of many issues that children shouldn't hear about. Maybe a parent is trying not to favor one child. Whether or not the parent is successful in this struggle, it does enough damage for the child to even know that it's a struggle.
I've often heard adults speaking about children as if the children weren't there. It was as though the use of the third person pronoun would somehow protect the child, or as if protecting the child was not even an issue. But little pitchers sometimes do have big ears, and some of the thoughts that can only hurt them should not be verbalized at times and in ways that go ahead and hurt. Pain isn't always gain.
It really is best to wait. I know it's sometimes hard. You may be afraid that you'll forget an important thought. And sometimes you are filled with that same kind of impatience you wish your children would stifle. There are also some adults who don't care what effect their words may have on young minds. I wish we could keep those adults away from children until they learn to care. And for those of you who have already learned to care, I wish waiting were always easy.
Until that time, there is a book I recommend: The Joys of Yiddish, by Leo Rosten.

"Talk to Grandpa" 211.
It doesn't seem fair. You make all kinds of adjustments to raise a child, and before you know it, the child becomes a separate person who doesn't necessarily feel like showing everybody how well you've parented. You've seen some of the things your child can do, you've bragged about it, and now that there's finally a possible audience, your child is feeling shy, stubborn, or something else that gets in the way of the opening performance. Were those hours in labor and in laundromats, supermarkets, etc. for this?
No. The purpose of all that work was to help your child grow, learn, adjust to life. It wasn't done so that the child would show other people how good you are at parenting. Still, you'd think the little urchin would at least have the decency to say some of the newly learned words into the telephone. Just to prove that you didn't make up the whole thing. "Come on, Honey, say 'Grandpa' into the telephone. Really, Dad, she can say it. Just a minute." And you try with all your might to bring back that glorious moment when your child said, "Grandpa." Or something that sounded like "Grandpa."
But to some children, the phone may have nothing to do with Grandpa. It's a funny-shaped thing that makes Grandpa-type noises if you hold it to your ear. If that's Grandpa, he's been transformed. His new shape is weird, and your child is not going to say anything to him. If Grandpa is able to change his shape that way, who knows what other powers he may have? And later, when the real Grandpa shows up, your child may still refuse to say anything. Sure, he's back in human form, but he could change back into that funny-looking thing any time.
Besides, even if your child hasn't been exposed to the phone-Grandpa, the last time your child saw Grandpa may have been four weeks ago. Or more. Grandpa may be a distant memory, but he may be acting as if he knows your child well. This may be the same child who said several words last week, or did a somersault, but do you really expect your child to parade these new skills in front of this relative stranger? Don't hold your breath.
I hope I haven't reinforced a stereotype. Some very young children seem to understand what a phone is, and some can remember significant people in their lives with no problem, even as time passes. But it's best not to assume that they see things the way you do.
Children like to be appreciated for their various milestones, but they are pretty quick to figure out who is being appreciated. They don't necessarily mind showing off; in another situation - maybe later - you may wish the child would stop it already. But they aren't necessarily eager to show everyone what a good parent you are. People are going to have to take that on faith for a while.
"Oh, wait a minute, Dad. Did you hear that? Say it again, Dear. Say it again. Really, Dad, he/she said, 'Grandpa.' You heard it, didn't you?"
Egocentric Altruists 212.
I recently came to terms with a certain level of my own egocentrism, and it's made it much easier for me to deal with other people's. As students of child development, we're taught about an "egocentric stage" all people go through. It's supposed to taper off when the child is a toddler, but we all know adults who don't seem to have ever tapered off. I've been annoyed by such adults, and I've been accused of being one of them.
As a person with special needs, I've learned how to accept help from people. Some people offer more help than others, and while I'm touched by their altruism, I'm careful not to let people do as much as they think they want to. I know about burn-out. I know about that moment when you say to yourself, "I've been too nice." And so I let one friend cook me dinner, another drive me to the neurologist, another clean my apartment, and so on. When my dinner-cooking friend offers to drive me somewhere, I'm cautious. Not cynical, just cautious. And when I feel like doing something that happens to be helpful, I don't hold back; I've paid my dues by accepting help.
I trust my friends on one level, but I try to keep my support network balanced. And egocentrism looks different to me now. I don't fault people for being egocentric. I simply try to find ways their interests coincide with mine. For example, one good friend has two young children. I know from experience that it's harder to shop with young children. They often complain, beg, and behave in ways that make it hard to concentrate on shopping. So she drops the children off at my apartment. She gets to shop childlessly and gets to leave her children with someone she trusts. I, meanwhile, get two young friends to hang out with for a while, and get my grocery shopping done without leaving my apartment. We both win.
I see this as a model for many attempts to balance egocentism and altruism. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get children (and adults) to be less egocentric - to think about others. Maybe some of that time would be better spent figuring out how to harness that egocentrism - to arrange situations in which people have to help each other in order to meet their selfish needs. We can believe, against all evidence, that people are unselfish, but that belief can lead to severe disillusionment.
Instead, I've decided that egocentrism, though it may look different in different people and at different times, is not just a stage. Your forty-one-year old brother and your friend's child are both egocentric. So are you, and so am I. It's just a matter of how we deal with that egocentrism

Ontogeny and Philogeny 213.
My brother Richie came home from school one afternoon and told me that ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. I was old enough not to take his word for it, but my own ontogeny hadn't yet recapitulated enough philogeny to know what he was talking about. I had the vague impression that I'd get in big trouble if I said those words when my parents or teachers were around. I knew that there were certain words children were really not supposed to say. But I may have been thinking of some other words.
But now I think I get it. It means our own development from embryo to person is similar to the way single-celled animals evolved into human beings. Many children learn about evolution before they are ready to understand it. They're told that people used to be apes, and they believe it, but they don't really get it. They don't remember being apes, and they've seen pictures of George Washington, who lived a long time ago, and didn't look any more like an ape than my brother Richie (who doesn't look at all like an ape).
But if you look at a picture of a human embryo in its early days, it looks pretty much like the embryo of a platypus, or a chicken. And if you go back a few days, the cells that get together to form the embryo look as if they could easily have grown to be eucalyptus trees, or mushrooms. I'm glad I got to be a human being, although I doubt whether eucalyptus trees have any complaints.
I once witnessed an interesting explanation at the Museum of Science. A mother was guiding her son through an evolution exhibit. Somewhere around the Cro-Magnon fellow, the mother said, "And then God breathed a soul into him..." I was fascinated with this compromise between creationism and Darwinism. At first, I considered being appalled, but I decided not to. I decided that the ontogeny of understanding recapitulates its philogeny, and besides, who did I think I was? I wasn't there when human life started. Darwinism is simply the myth I choose to believe in. If I believe that recorded history is bunk, how can I have greater faith in unrecorded history?
And so as far as I'm concerned, Darwinism takes its place among the great religions. I believe in it, partly because I've seen some of the evidence, partly because I've read and heard about it from some smart people, but mostly because it makes sense to me, just as the parting of the Red Sea or walking on water makes sense to some other people. And besides, it's fun to try to imagine the ways in which I still resemble a platypus, or a eucalyptus tree.

The Hurrying Child 214.
Modern society does things to make children feel that it's not okay to be children. Children are quick to pick up whatever messages society seems to be giving them. Some want to be "cool," and it doesn't take long to learn that it isn't "cool" to be a child - that being an adolescent is much "cooler."
They get this message from many sources. Scriptwriters for TV shows are adults, and even if the shows are intended for children, the lines written for children to say are very often lines written to make children sound older than they are. The timing of the laugh tracks suggests that it's cute when children sound older than they are. I'm sorry, but don't
think it's cute.
I feel like complaining about the hurrying effect of society, but I think it would be spitting in the wind. I don't think the amount of time and energy I'd spend complaining would be worth it. The forces that combine to make children hurry up and become adolescents or adults are too numerous and powerful. I've tried to convince children to slow down and savor their childhood, and for the most part, it hasn't worked. Pop culture is big business.
So instead, I try to go with the flow. I do my best to tune in to the bits of teen culture that trickle down to children. In effect, I try to allow them to be "cool" without rebelling. When a child echoes some of the music or lingo of adolescents, I don't fight it. I give it the same kind of attention I give the stuffed animal another child shares. And since these "cool" children really are children at heart, they appreciate that attention.
If we stop trying to fight the adolescentization (my word) of children, and accept it as part of who our children are, perhaps we can postpone some of the more difficult manifestations of adolescence. We can make it so that children can adopt the pop culture that's all around them without rebelling.
Adolescents often don't like to see their younger siblings moving in on their culture. Adolescent culture is supposed to separate its members from childhood, and if children keep connecting with it, it loses its effect. So fads turn over pretty quickly.
I never quite learned how to deal with adolescence - my own or anyone else's. This whole article is an exercise in speculation. I know there comes a point when we adults have to let go. I remember that much from my own adolescence (most of which I try to forget). But I hope we're not making that point come sooner than it needs to. I have a hunch that we contribute to the adolescentization of children by fighting it.

Cumulative Files 215.
When children take standardized tests, or other pieces of paper deemed significant are produced, those papers are sometimes put into file folders, which are subsequently put into file cabinets. Most of the time, those papers stay there, minding their own business. Most teachers don't keep checking to review children's stanine ratings or percentile ranks; most know that those numbers often don't amount to a hill of beans. Children learn what they learn, and there's seldom much reason, before teaching, to see what tests predict, or after the fact, to see whether tests have predicted correctly.
There have been laws passed to allow parents to see what those file folders contain, and to allow children above a certain age to see, too. I think they're good laws. A teacher usually only spends a school year with a child. A parent is there much longer. And the child is there all her/his life. Whatever the teacher has said about the child - whatever any school personnel, testing services, or outside consultants have said - ought to be for the benefit of the child and the parents. And no matter how skilled and insightful those other people may be, there ought to be respect given to the people most affected by the information in the files.
Sometimes the information on the papers is useful. Some of it tells what techniques and materials have been effective for the child in the past. Some narratives help put the child's behavior in perspective. If a child moves to a new school, the cumulative folder may contain information that will ease the adjustment. And children with various special needs, though often given the support of specialists, can be overlooked in ways that make school more difficult for them if their progress or lack thereof isn't closely monitored. So the contents of the files can be useful.
But the reports about a child's previous problems can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Early in my teaching career, I learned about a study in which teachers were purposely given incorrect results of IQ scores, and children's subsequent success or failure in school was dramatically affected by the misinformation. I'm quite skeptical about that study; I can believe that some teachers' attitudes and approaches are profoundly affected by IQ scores, but to me, that is an indication of the need for more teacher training. The IQ scores can be useful in some situations.
We sometimes get into trouble when we polarize issues. Refusing to look at a child's history can cause some kinds of problems, and treating that history as destiny can cause others. So I think cumulative files should remain in folders and cabinets, not be shredded and thrown into dumpsters. But school personnel should maintain perspective.

An Approach to Conflicts 216.
When two children irritate each other, and start to fight, physically or verbally, the first thing we try to do is stop the fighting. This means physically separating them and getting them to stop talking for a minute. That's the first step in all the conflict resolution strategies I know of. But once teachers or parents have managed to accomplish that first step, there are many different approaches, and each teacher or parent has to figure out what works best for him/her.
I'll tell you what works best for me. If two children are having an argument, I ask one of them (whom we'll call Child A) to explain exactly what the problem is. I tell the other (Child B) to listen - only listen - well enough to be able to paraphrase what the first testimony says: "No matter how wrong you think these words are, say what you think Child A has said."
Child A listens to Child B's summary of her/his testimony, and approves or disapproves: "Yes, that's what I said." During this part of the process, Child B is usually getting quite agitated; his/her point of view has not yet been articulated, and Child A has it all wrong. I often have to repeat step one; if Child B interrupts, I consider that a false start. Child B will get a chance, and does, as soon as she/he has satisfied Child A that the first story has been heard.
Then Child B testifies, and Child A has to try to listen well enough to play Child B's role in the argument. Usually, neither child has an easy time of either listening to another point of view or rephrasing it convincingly. It helps that this kind of exercise usually takes place at recess, when children would rather go back to whatever they were doing; that fact increases the likelihood that they'll get the job done quickly. Disagreements lose some of their intensity in the light of missed moments of recess.
I believe that many arguments boil down to misunderstandings, and even those that don't - those that are based on fundamental disagreements and/or deep-felt hostility - can be resolved more easily if children listen to each other. I learned this technique through marriage counseling, and though the technique did not "save" the marriage, it did give me this idea about helping children listen to each other.
If you think about the major problems in the world today, you realize that they usually don't stem from messy handwriting or poor spelling. And you seldom have troubles with people because they haven't memorized the multiplication table. But I'll bet you've often been bothered by people's inability to hear what you have to say. And at least some international conflict results from poor communication. So this approach to conflict resolution is about more than whose turn it is in four-square.

"I Didn't Even Cry" 217.
I don't cry much, even when crying is precisely what I feel like doing. I don't remember exactly how I learned not to cry when I felt like crying. I remember kids who did cry - especially boys who did cry - being ostracized by peers. I didn't want that. I think the zeitgeist of the 1950's also got my parents to discourage their sons from crying, although the ban still hangs in there in many families, and is not limited to boys as much as it used to be.
I think it was my loss. The few times I've been able to eke out a few tears, and the even fewer times I've really had good cries, I've felt cleansed by the experience. There are many ways women are oppressed by our culture, but one way men are oppressed is the ban on male tears. Instead of crying, we hold it in, or use words that may express our pain, anger, or sadness, but imprecisely, and not as effectively.
As I teach young children, I try to counteract this cultural attitude that discourages crying. Occasionally, in a school, I see a child crying, and I give him/her as much support as I can. I try to protect the child from the teasing I remember so well. I try to get her/him to feel good about the tears. When I hear a child say, "...and I didn't even cry!", with a proud tone of voice, two of my approaches clash. I want to give the child credit for successfully facing adversity, but I also want to be sure the child knows that crying is often a good way to cope. So I try not to interfere with the pride the child feels, but I also try to leave crying as an option.
There are some children who cry quite a lot. I focus mostly on the opposite extreme, but I know this can be a case of too much of a good thing. I think excessive crying can be detrimental to a child's emotional health; it's good to have friends, and too much crying can keep potential friends away.
And if crying accomplishes a child's goals, perhaps it can become a tool. Some people are able to cry at will, and if the tears work for them, they cry, not as an emotional outlet, but as a means to an end. This can accomplish short-term goals, but in the long run, it can also turn people away.
So we have to think carefully about children's tears. We have to consider crying case by case: to what degree should we face social reality and help children learn to control their crying? Are tears their way of getting what they want? Some tears, though they can annoy people and turn them away, are often the best way to cope with feelings. And so falls yet another chance to have a rule-of-thumb.

Heroes 218.
We like to have heroes. When I was in elementary school, George Washington was one of the great people we were supposed to admire. As far as I can remember, one of the most important things he did was confess to a minor misdeed that didn't seem so bad to me. I never chopped down any cherry trees myself, so I never had the chance to prove myself the way George did. I guess you have to be in the right place at the right time to achieve greatness. I once cheated on a math test. I looked at Steve Arbogast's paper, and I'm confessing it now in public. I hope that counts; I'm sure I couldn't chop down a cherry tree now.
As long as we are going to turn people into heroes, we might as well give some thought to it. Today I witnessed a lesson about Martin Luther King. Children heard about the bus boycott, the "I Have a Dream" speech, and the Nobel Peace Prize he won. They heard his voice speaking the words
that inspired so many.
I remember Harry Truman's reaction to King. A reporter asked him what he thought of King. Truman said, "He's a troublemaker." When the reporter reminded Truman that King had just received the Nobel Peace Prize, he responded, "I didn't give it to him." Somehow, some people have come to think of Truman as another hero.
I am now friends with someone who has long been one of my heroes. When I first met him, I was star-struck, and as I spoke with him, it was all I could do to stop myself from thinking, "Here I am, having a friendly conversation with someone who has always been my hero." That kind of thinking can get in the way of real communication.
I imagine Martin Luther King stopping by my apartment for a visit. My first reaction to him would be to tell him what a profound affect he's had on my thinking - how greatly I admire his life of work for freedom, peace, and justice. I imagine him finding that admiration a bit tedious, and maybe asking me what I've done as a result of all this admiration. Or maybe he'd ask about the photographs on my wall, or ask for a drink of water.
Heroes are people. About half of them are female, and should be called "heroines," I guess. As we create heroes and heroines for children, I think it would be helpful to focus on heroic actions and qualities. Children ought to know that these actions and qualities leave lasting impressions.
Children often seek out heroes, and whether their heroes chop down cherry trees, work for freedom, peace, and justice, or pitch no-hitters, it's good to help them focus on the qualities and deeds they admire. That focus makes heroism more accessible. I believe that there's some heroism in most people.

Too Hard? 219.
I work with Paul Oh, a teacher who believes, among other things, in children's ability to solve math problems. One day, he asked children to try to find ways to form certain shapes using Tangrams, an ancient Chinese puzzle. The children worked in pairs, with adult support. Some quickly became frustrated, and the frustration built, so that even children who usually loved math challenges started giving up.
But Paul didn't give up. Sometimes a concept or task is actually too difficult for children, but Paul was not ready to quit on this one. He gave a short speech expressing his disappointment that children were so quick to decide that they couldn't do it. I watched some children's faces, and saw that his speech had inspired not guilt, but determination to give it another try. They seem to respect him, and see him as an ally in the quest for increased skill.
The next day, Paul came in with a different approach. He had decided that children had been approaching the task as they sometimes approached computation - as a search for the "right answer." While teachers often try to emphasize the thought processes involved in computation, there usually is a right answer waiting at the end, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and children tend to see that answer, not the thought process, as the goal. Rather than ask, "What do you think of the way I solved this problem?", they just want to know whether the answer is right.
Paul asked them to experiment with the Tangrams - to move the shapes around and see what they discovered. What followed were about twenty minutes of experimentation. The mood in the class was very different as they played with the shapes. Children were excited as they found ways to solve these geometrical problems. Without the "right answer" as a spectre, they were free to explore. When a child did discover a solution, occasionally another child came over to copy the solution, but the atmosphere was one of collegiality and fun; the copying still involved mathematical thinking, and seemed more like peer tutoring than cheating.
When a teacher tells children that a task is not too hard, children may think, "That's easy for you to say." But Paul's message to these children conveyed a blend of patience, caring, and confidence. He had thought about the task, evaluated and reconsidered his own teaching strategy. Modelling determination, he had refused to throw in the towel. It was inspiring.
Sometimes a concept or task really is too hard for children. Sometimes it's too hard for some, but not for others. But when children are taught with the calm, patient confidence Paul Oh conveys, they have more of a tendency to hang in there, and more of a tendency to succeed.

Clubs 220.
I understand why children want to have clubs. Ricky Eugster and I formed the Texas Rangers when we were seven. I was Jase Pearson, and he was Clay Morgan. There were a few other members from time to time. And everybody else wasn't in the club, so we got to be "us," and everyone else only got to be "them." I didn't know it at the time, but most people didn't really care that they weren't Texas Rangers. They didn't even know about us. But we knew, and it was an important bond. Once, I picked a scab off my arm just after he got a cut, and we became blood brothers.
I still belong to clubs. I belong to a songwriters' group, two music
networks, and probably other clubs. We get together, and we're sometimes
inclusive, sometimes too cozy to think about being inclusive. Sometimes we just want to be us. It's a little embarrassing, especially when we remember how inclusive we usually try to be, but didn't you ever want to hang out with only certain people? And the only way to do that is to find a way to make sure other people don't come.
Teachers often forbid clubs. Whenever I heard children say they wanted
privacy, though I understood their feeling, I told them they could only have
privacy alone. If they allowed anyone else into their world, they had to let
everyone in. School was not a place where you could exclude anyone. So there couldn't be groups that had admissions rules. There couldn't be what children usually call "clubs."
This policy often doesn't seem fair to children, and it isn't easy for
adults, either. If we form a club for people who like to juggle, we don't
want people opposed to juggling to move in on our turf. They can form their own club. They can mobilize however they want, but as long as we can, we're going to go right on juggling. We've got each other, and we're not going to give up easily.
Sometimes there are people who really bug you. You choose not to spend time with those people - not to spend time and energy trying to find ways the two of you can get along together. As adults, we're often, but not always, free to decide to avoid people we'd rather avoid. I think they usually try to avoid us, too. Sometimes we end up becoming friends with people we thought we wouldn't like, and vice versa, but some first impressions are correct.
I feel right about the policy of forbidding clubs in elementary school. I think children should be free to associate with people they choose, but I'd rather postpone the negative effects of the club mentality at least until people have a little more ability to cope with being excluded.

Ruining Lives 221.
I suspect that we're the only species given to wondering whether we're
ruining our children's lives. Most of us provide the basic necessities, and
teach our children strategies for getting those necessities for themselves
when they have to stop relying on us. Those are pretty fundamental tasks for adults, and though we've evolved enough to not necessarily know what's good for us (pandas eat bamboo; they don't add Bamboo Helper or defrost Bamboo Nuggets), we're pretty much like other animals in that way.
But we go way beyond providing basic necessities and teaching survival
skills. We aspire, and hope our children will aspire, to greatness, morality, happiness, and all that. We try to make our planet and our species better. There are many disagreements about how to do that. Some people go abroad to spread some Word or Other, or to try to solve problems. Some stay here and get involved in various earth-saving or humanity-saving careers. Many work with children, hoping to influence young minds by parenting and/or teaching. However we choose to do it, many of us try to work for the survival and/or improvement of our home and species.
Also unlike other animals, we have doubts. We wonder whether we are messing up our children's lives by saying the wrong things, enforcing the wrong policies, emphasizing what should be de-emphasized. Maybe I'm not giving the other animals enough credit (or maybe I'm giving them too much); maybe they wonder, too. But I don't think so. I think they just get food, find shelter, and try to survive. They try to get their species to survive, too, but not by writing articles, developing curriculum, hiring tutors, preaching, or legislating. And as for future generations, I don't think they think far beyond their own children.
So what's my point? I'm sure when I started writing this article, I had
a point to make. I usually do, when I write these articles; they're my
attempts to do good work. I guess my point is that maybe we can lighten up a little. The little mistakes we make as we raise our children aren't going to destroy them. My parents made mistakes, and I've assured them that they've been good parents. I've made mistakes, and my children still give me pretty good grades. I think we ought to continue trying to find better ways to help our children, and we ought to keep working to make our planet more livable. But I don't think we're ruining lives by screwing up now and then.

Liking Children 222.
I used to think I was supposed to like everyone, and I made it my business to see the good in absolutely every person I encountered. Whenever I found myself starting to dislike someone, I thought there was something wrong with my perception, and I just needed to look harder; if I looked hard enough, I would find out why this jerk seemed obnoxious or sadistic, find it in my heart to forgive the turkey, and make a new friend.
A few years ago, I learned how to dislike people. I didn't have to give up my faith that all people are basically good - a faith Anne Frank kept through worse evidence to the contrary than I've ever seen. I just had to decide that some people's behaviors and/or attitudes hid inner goodness enough to serve as obstacles to friendship. And so I allowed myself to dislike a few people. Not counting some historical figures or politicians, whom I never got to know on a personal level, there are about five people I don't like. They probably wouldn't have the good taste to read my articles, so you're probably not one of them.
I still haven't learned to dislike any children. I've disliked some of children's behaviors and attitudes, but their goodness is close to the surface, and the reasons for their annoying characteristics are easier to see. So it's easier to forgive them and get on with the business of liking them. I know that people like to be liked, and the more they're liked, the more they show their endearing sides.
The teachers I consider least effective are teachers who don't seem to like children. For one reason or another, the things children do or say bug these adults, who may have reasons for teaching that get them to put up with the little monsters, but don't generate fondness. Children are quick to pick up on this attitude, and they either reciprocate, hating the teacher, internalize the feeling and start hating themselves, or both. There are other ways for a teacher to be ineffective, but none are as toxic as disliking children.
People really are good - even the ones I don't want to be around. And children's goodness is usually easier to see. I know "goodness"is a culturally and personally relative concept, but there are certain behaviors it usually doesn't include. As long as we let children know we really see and appreciate their goodness (fakeness won't do it), they'll keep showing it to us.

To Get to the Other Side 223.
We spend a lot of time trying to get children to know how to write complete sentences. It's hard, because they don't think or talk in complete sentences. Neither do we. Complete sentences happen during conversations, but not reliably. Know what I mean (not a complete sentence) (neither was that)?
Children learn how to have conversations before they learn how to write, and their first attempts to write reflect their conversational language, as well they should. Gradually, they learn some of the conventions that result in more effective writing. But written English and spoken English are not two entirely different languages; writing is a form of codification, and reading reverses the process.
No matter how many rules people write about punctuation, commas, periods, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, semicolons, and colons are all reflections of the way we speak. Our timing and intonation indicate which punctuation is appropriate. A short pause suggests a comma. A longer pause suggests a period. And so on.
The capital letters and periods that serve as boundaries between sentences have inspired many worksheets. For generations, children have drawn one line under the subject and two lines under the predicate. This sentence - the one you're reading right now - is grammatically correct, but do you remember how to find its subject(s) and predicate(s)? And once you figure it out, will you be any better off? Some children quickly learn how to apply the rules of grammar to their writing. Others memorize rules and try to apply them as they write. Still others never learn it, and get sick of hearing about it.
We're taught that all the great writers had to learn the rules first, and then decided to consciously break them when their artistic sense told them to. That may make teachers feel good, but I don't know how true it is. I'll bet there are some respected authors who never learned how to write complete sentences. Some people have the gift of gab, and when they write, their language is conversational and quite readable. The rules have nothing to do with it.
Writing is a great way to communicate, and I've seen many children learn to take pleasure in it. Occasionally, there's a child who has fun analyzing the structure of the language - diagramming sentences, figuring out when to write "who" and when to write "whom." But I've known many more children who know why the chicken crossed the road, and think it would sound weird to answer, "The chicken crossed the road to get to the other side."

Co-Teaching and Team Teaching 224.
When two or more teachers get together to combine their skills and energy, great things can happen. Children have diverse learning styles and personal styles, and can benefit from some diversity in teaching style. Teachers can focus their energy a little more on their strengths, knowing that other teachers with different strengths can complement their work. Ideally, there's some mutual mentoring, and all teachers involved end up with more skills than they started with. That sets a good example for children.
But it takes organization and humility. If teachers want to work together, they have to know what they plan to do. Spontaneity can be exciting, but when two or more people collaborate, spontaneity can be difficult. During my final few years as a teacher, I started getting organized enough to do some co-teaching, but it wasn't easy for me. It meant I sometimes had to put brainstorms on the back burner. There are teachers whose brains have mild breezes, but not so many storms. That works better when other teachers are involved.
As for humility, I know people who do that well. But as wonderful as I am, I've never quite mastered humility. As I've had insights about children and learning, I've behaved as if they were such unique insights that it would take too much time and energy to share them with other teachers, who, I thought, could not possibly have ever had these insights. And they certainly couldn't have any valuable insights I hadn't already had. This messianic mindset made it awfully hard to work with me.
Now, as a volunteer, I finally get to practice humility, and it's funny how well it works. Since I'm not employed as a teacher, I take what I can get. Teachers who are more as I was don't want me around as much. As hard as I try to blend in to different approaches, I do add another style to the teaching effort, and teachers who can't deal with that assign me to specific tasks that keep me out of the way.
And teachers who are good at teaming include me in their planning, ask for my input, give me suggestions, and make me forget that I'm a volunteer - an outsider. Their humility is inspiring. It's not that they are less skilled than other teachers, or think they are. It's that they are confident enough in their own teaching to allow other approaches to mix with their own.
This new humility I've got is fun to use. My latest project is working to believe that the teachers who don't want me to spend much time in their classrooms can still be good teachers. I think I'm making some progress toward that goal. Working with other teachers - even flexible, creative intelligent, humble teachers such as yours truly, can be a challenge.

A Friend 225.
I have a friend named Emily who, at the time I'm writing this, is eight years old. Her father has one kind of chronic neurological disease, and I have another kind. She plans to learn about pills so that she can mix some pills together and cure us. I could spend time talking with her about the dangers of putting too much faith in pills. Pills have caused a lot of problems. I could spend time trying to make her aware that pills are only one category of approach to healing, and that there are many other categories of approaches that may work better. I could try to give her an idea of how complicated medical science can be.
But not now. For now I'd like to concentrate on the feeling behind her plan. If I read her correctly, she cares a lot about her father and me - enough to want to spend time and energy trying to make us healthy. It's not really her job. She's got her own life to think about. Children need to know that adults' problems are mainly for adults to deal with. Besides, just between you and me, I suspect that she will end up having other priorities, and not doing a lot of research about neurological problems. She's a poet, an actress, a dancer, an artist, a musician, and many other things. There's only so much one person can do in one life. But you never know.
That's not my point, though. It's all right if she doesn't become an immunologist, neurologist, herbalist, or some other kind of healer, if any, who solves our particular problems. My point is that children, who are so often the objects of our caring, also do a lot of caring themselves. And because they are so often unskilled at hiding feelings, or faking them, it can be pretty special to hear about a child's caring. It can remind us that caring is natural - not just something people do because they're supposed to, or because there's something in it for them.
I don't mean to take anything away from the adults who care; their attempts to help are often just as sincere, and often more practical. Some of them do some of the research that may eventually lead to solutions to our problems. Caring alone, though it has a very moving and healing effect on our psyches, may not have much of an impact on our somas. At least I don't think so yet.
But when my eight year old friend told me that she intends to keep experimenting with pills, mixing them together until she finds a cure for the diseases that make life difficult for two people who are important to her, I didn't immediately say the words she soon needs to hear, about the dangers of experimenting with pills. I know her parents, and I'm sure they'll talk with her about that. What I did was tell her how good it felt to know she cared so much about me, and later, go home and write this article in her honor. Celsius 226.
Teachers were told, quite a while ago, that we ought to teach children to use Celsius, because we'd be switching to it soon. I thought it would be a difficult transition, but I didn't know how steadfastly our country would cling to our way of measuring temperature, even as the rest of the world left Fahrenheit behind.
The Celsius system of measuring temperature makes a lot more sense than the Fahrenheit system we still use. What we educators did wrong, in my opinion, was try to teach people how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. That's unnecessary work; if we really convert to Celsius, all the Fahrenheit numbers will quickly become useless. And we don't have to make too many changes to switch to Celsius; weather reports, cookbooks, thermometers, thermostats, oven dials, and maybe a few other things will have to change.
Let's look at the weather, for example. At 0o, water freezes, and it's cold outside. If the temperature gets below zero, it's even colder. We're used to that, anyway. When it gets to 10o, it's still cold, in my opinion, but some people like that temperature. My favorite is 20o. That's comfortable, but not hot. I don't need a jacket, but I don't need an air conditioner, either. My apartment is already the right temperature, so my electric bill is manageable. When it gets to 30o, I start complaining, and when it gets near 40o, I stay inside and turn on the air conditioner.
Your normal body temperature is about 37o. When it heads up towards 38o, it's time to get concerned. Water boils at 100o, but I simply wait until I see bubbles. Most things are baked at 175o, but pizza requires 200o.
If there are any other temperatures that are important to you, subtract 32 from the Fahrenheit number, divide by nine, and multiply by five. There's also a way to convert back, but I'm not going to tell you. If you want to convert back, you're on your own.
I know we're used to thinking in Fahrenheit. I'll probably have just as much difficulty making the transition as you will. But the more we communicate with the rest of the world, the more we go to other countries, and the more people from other countries come here, the more it makes sense to use the Celsius system when we talk about temperature.
Freezing is cold enough for me. When the temperature outside is below freezing, it might as well be below zero.
At first, I thought we'd make the change in schools. I thought children would learn to think in Celsius degrees, as I thought they'd learn the metric system. But that can only work if we think that way, too. Children want to learn ways that will work in the adult world. So I guess it's up to us.

Art Appreciation 227.
I used to think art appreciation was totally pretentious. I thought the honest way to respond to art was to like or dislike it. To me, trying to understand what the artist was trying to "say," or trying to feel what the artist was feeling, was a dishonest game some people played. I like art that resembles things I've actually seen. Some stylistic ideosyncrasies are okay, but I like to have a pretty good idea of what I'm seeing. I like VanGogh, but I like Norman Rockwell more, because he didn't put those funny-looking swirls in his paintings. And I don't know of any Jackson Pollack paintings I like.
One year, I decided to try an art appreciation lesson with children. Most children haven't learned to be pretentious about art yet. I borrowed Goya's "Toledo" from the library, and sat next to it, with the children sitting on the rug facing "Toledo" and me. I asked them how many people were in the picture. The people in "Toledo" are not conspicuous; the weather and scenery are. Children said there were no people in the picture. I told them there were many people in the picture, but they were hard to see because they seemed so small. Children looked closer and saw what I meant.
Then I asked the children where the people were going, and why. Most agreed that they were going to and from the spooky castle that was up on top of the hill, but there were various speculations about why. Some thought they were going to ask the king for help. Some thought they were going to attack the castle. When I asked whether the people might have been going to see a movie, or go shopping, they all seemed to agree that those activities were not possibilities; they'd all done that kind of thing, and it didn't involve any castles.
One boy said he'd been to Toledo, and it didn't look anything like that. I could have avoided the boy's confusion by pronouncing "Toledo" correctly, but at the time, it hadn't even occurred to me that I might be pronouncing it wrong. In fact, I knew next to nothing about the painting, or Goya. I just knew that I liked it. I told the boy that this was Toledo, Spain. I asked him whether he'd been to the one in Spain or the one in Ohio. He'd been to the one in Ohio.
Not wanting to be one of those pretentious art critics who, from my perspective, had lost the ability to see what they were looking at, I hadn't read anything about Goya or Toledo. I wanted the painting to speak for itself, and it did. I left it in the classroom for a week, and children often stopped to look at it. They were honest art critics; they were looking at it because that's what they felt like doing, and they were discussing what they felt like discussing.
That being said, I must say that I'm curious about Goya and Toledo. I'm sending this article, by e-mail, to several friends, and I hope some of them will tell me what they know about the painting, the artist, the town. If not, maybe I'll go to the library. Maybe some of the children who sat on the rug that day will do it, too. And the next time I teach children about it, I may casually mention what I know.
A Crucible 228.
I'm proud of, or at least comfortable with, most of the important decisions I've made so far. Most of the mistakes I've made were forgivable; I've had several factors to balance, and I've tried to do what seemed right after I'd considered all the factors.
But I made a decision in 1974 that I deeply regret. I was a second grade teacher in an open space school in New York. One of the members of our team of four teachers had some ideas about teaching that really bothered me, but one of her ideas, and her related actions, upset me quite a bit. She believed that children who misbehaved should be spanked. It was against the law for a teacher to hit a child for any other reason than self-defense, but she told me that she thought it was a dumb law - one of those laws "made to be broken."
A few times during that year, she proudly told me that she had spanked a child. I never saw her do it, but other teachers assured me that she wasn't kidding. They spoke with embarrassment, but if they felt the moral indignation I felt, I didn't notice it. They seemed to see it as this teacher's "thing," and though they didn't agree with spanking, they didn't express any intention to do anything about it.
After several months of this, two parents made an appointment to speak with the principal and the second grade teachers. They had sent a letter accusing this teacher of spanking children. I spoke with the principal privately and told her what I'd heard about the spanking. The principal, who had already branded me as a trouble-maker, warned me not to say anything about what I'd heard. Telling my "hearsay stories," she said, would be "unprofessional."
I had a family to support, and I wanted to support my family by teaching young children. I was worried that I would lose my job, and maybe ruin my chance to ever get another job, if I did what I thought was right. And so I kept quiet as the parents made their accusations, though a voice inside me was screaming. When one of the parents asked me whether I knew anything about the alleged spanking, I said I didn't. But I didn't add what I had heard.
Perhaps some of you are shocked by my complicity in this abuse of children. Perhaps some of you think I'm making too much of it. And maybe there are even some of you who think children should be spanked, law or no law. But Billy and Michael, if you're reading this, and you remember this issue from second grade, please forgive me for failing you. And those of you who face similar situations, please know that the effects of some decisions can stay with you.

Mind-Reading 229.
I once overheard two children arguing. They had just seen a cat, and one of them had lost a cat a few months earlier. She insisted that the one they'd just seen was her cat. I knew it wasn't, and so did the other child. The argument was becoming quite intense, and I intervened. I said, "You really miss your cat, don't you?"
That stopped the argument instantly. The child got teary-eyed, and said, "How did you know?" She honestly didn't have a clue how I could know she missed her cat. She hadn't told me, and how else could I have found out? Her tone of voice either accused me of sneaking into her thoughts and spying on her, or thanked me for articulating her feeling. Or both. I don't know; I'm not a mind-reader.
I think we all want a certain amount of privacy and a certain amount of intimacy. Sometimes there's a conflict between the two, as I think there was in the case of the lost cat. The child may have been a little annoyed that someone had approached her world, but possibly somewhat pleased, too. She was confused. The image of the cat that had just run by may have been swirling around with the image of her own cat, and the image of this person who seemed to be able to read her mind. If I knew what she was feeling, maybe I also knew where her cat was.
The conflict doesn't end when childhood ends. We all live partly in our own thoughts, and the place where we house those thoughts can be a haven or a prison. When it's a haven, we either want to be alone there, or invite only the people we trust. And when it's a prison, we hope that someone will show up to set us free, or we try to find some way to get out on our own.
It's important to respect the privacy of that world, but it's also important to let children know they don't always have to be alone when their thoughts and feelings are hard to handle. There's no easy formula for figuring out when to do which, but I've found a pretty reliable technique: ask. If children or adults want to be left alone, they often know that. I know they also often don't, but asking conveys respect in a way that can help.
A child or adult can be stuck in a private Hell, and skillful mind-reading, based on listening, thinking, and knowing can enable us to help find a way out. But the wrong approach can make things worse, tightening the bars on the prison, or invading the haven. Sometimes a skilled professional can help; psychology sometimes seems like professional mind-reading.
I'm not saying that you should send your child to a psychotherapist. That should not seem like a drastic thing to do, but often a child or adult just needs someone who listens well enough to hear. And sometimes, for healthy reasons, we just want to be left alone.


The Night Sky 230.
One year, I took a course about the night sky. I'd always been fascinated with the dazzling display up there every clear night, but I hadn't taken any astronomy courses in college, because the course descriptions made them sound like advanced physics courses that had little to do with the view. Instead, I later enrolled in a class at the Broadmoor Audubon Sanctuary, and learned about the stars and planets.
And then I started meeting with children and parents at night to look at the night sky and teach them what I'd learned. Most of them only knew about the Big Dipper, and maybe Orion, so even though I'd only taken one little course, I was a comparative expert. And it was a precious opportunity to see children and parents as equal partners in learning.
I told them that there were different colored stars and planets up there. Rigel (or is it Regulus?) is blue, Betelgeuse and Mars are red. I find those three the easiest to pick out for an introduction to star and planet color. The colors are not easy to see at first. To me, all the stars used to look white. I'll bet many of you see them as white, too. But the colors really are there; it's not just a mind game.
The constellations are human inventions, but they've lasted pretty long. They're still based mostly on Greek and Roman mythology. If we wanted to, we could redo the whole system. We could honor modern heroes and heroines by creating new constellations. Businesses could get involved, using the sky as a giant billboard. I'm sure there are golden arches somewhere up there. I guess I'm glad we stick with the old myths.
I remember the first time I told children and parents that some of what they clearly saw might not be there at all, and none of it was where they saw it. Light takes time to travel. Here on earth, it doesn't take long enough to make a big difference; when we see something, it doesn't really matter that a fraction of a second has passed since the light we see left the thing we see. As far as we're concerned we see things as they occur. It used feel to me as if my eyes sent out something so that I could see, not as if rays or particles were coming to my eyes.
But that's not the way it's explained now. (I almost wrote "That's not the truth." But what is truth?) When light leaves a star, it takes years for it to get to us. So if a star explodes or implodes, it takes years for us to get that information. And most of us are too busy fighting traffic, writing articles, or playing video games to even notice. Besides, the stars are far away, and their disappearance isn't going to have dramatic effects on our lives here.
Some astronomers may have practical things in mind when they study stars. And our space program is far from being a pure quest for knowledge.
But the myriad of lights hanging on our ceiling are fascinating in their own right, and I'm glad I'm done with this article; it's early morning, still dark outside, and I'm going to open my shade and see what the sky looks like. It'll probably look pretty similar to the sky I saw when I was a child, and somehow, that's comforting.
English as a Second Language 231.
As children learn to speak, they experience ups and downs. It's exciting to see the reactions they get from people who already know how to speak. People often make a big deal out of it. It makes the new speakers want to speak more. But there's frustration, too. Sometimes there's something important a child is trying to say, and the listeners, stuck in their rigid linguistic patterns, don't get it. Everyone else understands each other, but no one understands what the novice is saying. They guess, but their guesses are way off, and the frustration builds.
Imagine emerging victoriously from this struggle only to find, a little later, that you're in a strange land where most people don't understand a word you're saying. Maybe your family is with you, and maybe there's a teacher who speaks your language, but most people can't understand you. You may have already learned to read and write (another intense struggle, for many). But books, signs, etc. are printed in the new language.
There's joy in learning the first language, and there's joy in learning the second. In some situations, the child learning a second language is seen as an expert - someone who has mastered what other children haven't begun. If adults and children are sensitive and supportive, the child learning English as a second language feels respected, and is motivated to meet the new challenge. It helps when other children are facing the challenge with them.
But it isn't easy. I've seen some children, trying to be supportive, treat newcomers as they treat their younger siblings. Children sometimes have trouble imagining that someone who "doesn't even know English" could possibly be their intellectual equal. I've seen surprised looks when newcomers who haven't known English have solved math problems with no difficulty - sometimes surpassing children quite fluent in English. And art, music, movement, and more can be full of similar surprises. Children know how hard it was or is to learn English, and when they meet someone who hasn't learned it much yet, they may consciously or unconsciously think inferior intelligence is a factor.
The teachers who teach English as a second language haven't necessarily mastered it themselves. If a child comes to Nebraska knowing only Basque, schools are lucky if they find any teacher who even knows Basque. They can't really insist on hiring someone who knows Basque and can also speak English fluently without an accent. And so children may learn English mainly from someone who has a Basque accent. Foreign accents result from differences among phonemes, and happen whether or not the teacher has a foreign accent, but the teacher's accent is a model.
I once spoke with parents of a child who, I thought, was learning English as a second language. They told me that English was the child's first language. They had taught it to him, knowing they'd be moving to the United States. But English was not their first language. I suggested to them that English as a second language was this child's first language. They smiled, and agreed.
Souvenirs, Stereotypes, and Substance 232.
Young children spend time in school learning what it's like in other parts of the world. I'm glad they do; I think the world will be safer and more pleasant if people know more about each other. And since children often operate best on a concrete level, and deal better with simplicity than complexity, teachers usually use simple, concrete materials to teach children about other places.
But something about that has always bothered me. When I taught children about Japan, for example, I didn't want children to think of Japan simply as a place where people took off their shoes before entering a home, and made cute little animals by folding paper. I wanted them to know the Japan they might some day visit - the Japan from which their Japanese friends could come. Perhaps origami and taking off shoes would be part of their real experience with Japan, but there would be a lot more. It felt fake to stick with the aspects of Japanese life that set Japan apart.
Let's try to imagine an elementary school unit about our own culture. What are some things that set us apart from the rest of the world? Westerns? Situation comedies? Rock and roll? Peanut butter? I'd be very interested in finding out what stereotypes and souvenirs are used to represent us to children around the world. We've got our cultural ideosyncrasies, I'm sure, but I'll bet we'd be somewhat surprised to hear and see how our culture sounds and looks to children who are used to another culture.
And so I spent at least part of my units on Japan, Russia, and India, making sure children knew that there was more to these places than the
obvious souvenirs and stereotypes that were so often part of the units teachers used. I showed children photographs of Tokyo, Moscow, or New Delhi that made it clear that these were cities. I tried to keep the units balanced, so that children would get to know the real places and people. I tried to find penpals for the children. E-mail could have made that easier, but the timing of my teaching career wasn't right; "snail-mail" was a very appropriate term for the process by which I tried to bring children closer to their penpals.
I still don't know to what degree the typical elementary school units about other cultures are appropriate. The world is getting smaller; some of the bits of culture that used to give places and peoples their character are, to some degree, becoming anachronisms, and we sometimes have to stretch a point to make children aware of cultural differences. They can get typical American fast food in most parts of the world. English is an international language; though it's the native language of only a small percentage of earth's population, a large percentage can get along okay in English.
I offer these thoughts to parents and teachers who are struggling to balance emphases on diversity and commonality in presenting other cultures to children. I wish you success.
Mob Control 233.
There are times when adults herd a hundred or more children into one room, usually an auditorium, to do one thing. Usually, there aren't too many times like that, but when it happens, it requires different behavior management techniques. Some schools have found ways to make this work smoothly. The teachers and other adults speak words and establish rituals that prepare the children for the situation And some performers and other leaders have styles that capture the attention of every child, no matter how many children fill the room. In some schools, large gatherings are so common that children get used to acceptable behavior.
But the large group, in my experience, usually presents problems. Most adults are used to having most children give them good attention. True, some adults elicit more attention than others, some children attend better than others, and some reasons for attending are more compelling than others. But children who ordinarily have difficulty listening often have more difficulty when there are lots of other children in the room, and the situation can also test some children who don't ordinarily have difficulty.
Not to mention the adults. Adults who work well with children tend to be more patient than the general population, but these same adults may lose some of that patience when faced with a large group of children. Yelling, threatening, seemingly random punishing, and other behaviors that don't reflect careful thinking about children may prevail when adults are significantly outnumbered.
And sometimes adults who haven't learned much about children find themselves in charge of large groups. An inexperienced or at least unskilled adult may be in charge of supervising a cafeteria or bus full of children. It would help to give these adults a few pointers, or maybe bring them into classrooms, or introduce them to parents. But more commonly, this doesn't happen. These adults are thrown into what seems to them like an impossible situation, and are expected to cope with it.
I have seen and occasionally used effective techniques for controlling large groups of children. The one person who impressed me most was a storyteller named Jay O'Callahan. His voice and physical presence had gentle power. He could whisper to two hundred children, and the only sound in the room was the sound of his whisper. What children heard when they listened to him was fascinating. Adults in the room who ordinarily would have been on the lookout for problems were equally spellbound. If any child had tried to break the spell Jay had cast, peer pressure would have been sufficient to keep the child in line.
All right, so we're not all Jay O'Callahan. But there are lessons we can learn from him: use a voice that requires children to listen, say things children have some reason to hear, and somehow, let children know that we expect (not demand, just expect) that they will listen.

Being a Grown-up 234.
Growing up isn't really awfuller than all the awful things there ever were. We spend the first years of our lives not being grown-ups, and many of us resolve that we either won't grow up, or if we do, we'll do it right. Not the way other people have done it. They've done it all wrong. We know where they've gone wrong, and we're going to avoid the pitfalls they didn't avoid. It can't be that hard.
I grew up. In some ways, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. I'm still growing, but I prefer not to think of it as "growing up." I know adults who like to say they're still children, and there are all kinds of things they may mean by that statement, but in one way or another, all adults have grown up.
As I grew up, I tried to keep the parts of childhood I considered worthwhile. Some of it was easy to keep; I didn't even have to think about it. To some adults, my childlike qualities - innocence, enthusiasm, curiosity - have been charming and disarming. Children liked it, too; it was fun to have a tall child to play with.
Some of it wasn't so worthwhile, charming, or disarming, but it stayed around anyway, annoying other adults, who wished I'd get rid of it.
Impulsiveness, flamboyance, and disorganization can really get on people's nerves. I tried to ignore people's negative reactions to my childishness; I tried to convince myself that they were old fuddy-duddies. I paid more attention to the ways people were charmed by my antics, and even some of the fuddy-duddies came around.
But the message of Peter Pan, I think, is not quite right. Growing up, done thoughtfully, can actually be a pretty creative thing to do. And it can be fun. We grown-ups get to do things children can only dream of. We've got power and freedom children don't have. As much as I enjoy the time I spend with children, I'm glad I don't have to be a child any more. As supportive as adults were, it was not easy to be a child. The fears and frustrations of even my relatively happy childhood make it so that I'm glad to be done with it. If you find yourself frequently longing for your lost youth, perhaps you've forgotten some of the negative parts of it.
There are still hard times for us grown-ups. A friend of mine recently told me how hard it is for him to hear his daughter voicing the same kinds of complaints he used to voice. He had learned to know and like himself as a rebel, and here he was in the role of the Establishment, setting limits, enforcing rules, and all that: "Do you think I like saying this stuff? I'm saying it for your own good." Bye-bye, Neverland.
The oft-quoted "Desiderata" says, "Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth." Of all the pearls of wisdom contained in that treasure, that's the bit of advice that seems hardest to follow.

Handwriting 235.
In 1973, the principal of the school in which I taught came to my classroom to demonstrate for me the "correct" way to teach handwriting. She felt that handwriting was being given too little emphasis in my class. Back then, I was a young, inexperienced teacher who didn't think teachers should be so obsessed with handwriting. Now I'm a seasoned veteran who doesn't think teachers should be so obsessed with handwriting.
The principal stood in "front" of the class (there wasn't actually a front of my class, but this principal's presence created one), demonstrated the correct way to form the letter d, wrote a sentence on the chalkboard, and told the children to copy the sentence in their neatest handwriting. So far, so good. Not my style, but a style I could adopt without much difficulty.
Then the principal walked around, watching children copy her sentence. She came to a child who was not writing as neatly as she expected the children to write. She took the child's paper and tore it up, quite conspicuously. The child fought hard to hold back tears, but the tears came. This was a child who cared very much about doing what was expected, but had trouble with fine motor control. I firmly believe that he had been doing his best.
I have seen teachers who were able to get children to write neatly without oppressing them. I know it can be done. I know and respect many teachers, administrators, and parents who consider handwriting more important than I think it is. In fact, I don't know many who consider it less important than I think it is. I compromised on this issue during my years as a teacher; I don't feel that I have a sacred duty to get children to have messy handwriting.
But let me tell you the story of one person who hardly ever had neat handwriting. Throughout elementary school, his report cards indicated that he was careless about handwriting. His parents and teachers tried various techniques to get him to write neatly. He was able to do it, but he just didn't consider it important. Later, he found himself in a position where he was supposed to teach children to write neatly. He could do it, but he didn't like it. And then he started losing his fine motor control. Luckily, by then computers were compensating for such difficulties. And then he wrote. He kept writing. Neatness was no longer an issue; the computer took care of that. You've probably figured out who I mean. You've just finished reading his two hundred thirty-fifth article.

Jargon 236.
Many lines of work are peppered with words that outsiders don't know. Outsiders may actually be quite familiar with the concepts these words represent, but the insiders are often unwilling to recognize that fact. If you've spent a long time and lots of energy becoming experienced and knowledgeable within a certain field, you don't want some Tom, Dick, or Harry off the street, who hasn't paid those dues, to come in and walk on your turf. And so you have jargon.
Teachers have it. It's called "Educationese." When teachers say a child has difficulty with fine motor control, they usually mean the child has trouble controlling his/her fingers. Those are the only small muscles I know of that we really use much in school; we can get by all right without wiggling our toes or wrinkling our noses. But it sounds so much more professional to refer to "fine motor control" than "finger control." And the "formal operations" stage of development has nothing to do with performing surgery while wearing a tuxedo. It has to do with being able to think abstractly.
I was once at a meeting of The People's Music Network. We were discussing our by-laws. The first paragraph of the by-laws began, "Whereas the membership of the People's Music Network..." Fred Small, a songwriter and performer I admire, is also a former lawyer. He raised his hand and suggested that we change the phrase to "Because we..." He knew how jargon can separate style from substance, and he wanted no part of that separation. He got a round of applause for his suggestion; we realized that we had fallen into the jargon trap.
Sometimes, within a group, there is a good reason to use words and phrases that are unfamiliar to people who are not part of that group. Familiar words may not convey intended meaning with enough precision, and precision may be important to effective communication. I know, as a writer, that I can't always go for the lowest common denominator. I want my words to speak to as many people as possible, but I want to make sure they say what I mean. Sometimes that may shut out a few people who are intimidated or otherwise turned off by phrases like "may not convey intended meaning with enough precision." But I try to make sure I'm using language as a precision tool, not a weapon.
It's important to check ourselves once in a while, and make sure that we're not using polysyllabic verbiage (long words) to impress people, or exclude them. We've got to keep in mind that the purpose of language is supposed to be communication. If we want as many people as possible to understand what we're saying, we've got to avoid using jargon just for the sake of using jargon.

The Carrot on the Stick 237.
Ideally, people learn because that's what they want to do. The work they need to do in order to learn may not even feel like work; the learners may enjoy the process about as much as they enjoy the product. Teachers have strategies to motivate learners, but there are sublime times when those strategies prove unnecessary. The subject matter, the materials, and/or the activities are so interesting, practical, and/or fun that learners are raring to go.
That's the ideal, and it often happens. Occasionally, one or two children don't feel motivated while the rest of the class does, but it's easier to deal with them than to convince a larger reticent group that a lesson is going to be fun; when peer pressure works for a teacher, it can be a formidable ally. Either the mavericks will join the herd, or they can stand on the sidelines and watch the party. Either way, some learning happens, at least through osmosis.
But sometimes, more is needed. I've bribed classes to learn some things I couldn't figure out how to make fun. Sometimes I told them we'd have a party the day after everyone had learned certain multiplication facts. When I directed a play, I said I'd order pizza for the cast the day after everyone knew their lines. These bribes were not examples of the best in educational theory, and I tried not to use bribes too often, but they worked.
Yesterday, I bribed myself. Maybe "blackmailed" is a better word for what I did. Knowing how much I enjoy writing these articles, and how little I enjoy thinking about and tending to practical matters, I told myself and several friends that I would not write another article until I had read twenty pages of The 1996 Guide to Literary Agents. It took me a day of pouting to get to it, but I read the twenty pages, and now I can write again.
It would be better if my motive for reading the book were a little more pure - if I honestly wanted to read it so that I'd know more about the things I'd need to do to get my book published. But I have a mental block about that kind of practical thinking; I have built a better mousetrap, and I want the world to beat a path to my doorstep. If the world isn't ready to do that, it's the world's loss.
We all learn some things that we don't necessarily start out intending or even wanting to learn. The learning process isn't necessarily fun, and so we have to have reasons for doing it anyway. Sooner or later, (sooner, for young children) there has to be some reward for the work we do, or we'll stop doing it, and be wary about even starting next time.

Job Security/Quality Control 238.
It's nice to have job security. It makes it so you can concentrate on being good, and stop worrying so much about looking good. But teachers do lose their jobs. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the quality of the teacher; a position is eliminated, and a competent, valuable teacher has to look for work elsewhere. But sometimes the quality of the teacher is the central issue, and there can be an awful drama, hurting people and damaging careers.
A good system will see to it that teachers have plenty of support in growing into the roles they're expected to play. New teachers can take risks and make mistakes without fear. There's lots of trust all over the place. When the principal comes into the classroom, the teacher feels pretty safe. A good teacher creates an atmosphere in which children feel free to try things out, and a good school provides that same safety for teachers.
But it's a little more complicated when it comes to teachers. The very natural feeling parents may have is that they don't want someone practicing on their children's lives; they want the best teachers their children can get. Someone else's children can be guinea pigs for teachers who are still learning how to teach. I strongly believe that the best teachers are always learning how to teach, and that children can benefit in many ways by having teachers who are just starting to learn. As I've said in a previous article, experience isn't necessarily the best teacher.
Sometimes, though, a teacher is not skilled, and doesn't seem to have potential. Sometimes a teacher is even downright destructive, and children suffer. It's pretty scary to even mention the idea of getting rid of a teacher, but there are times when that seems indicated. The teacher has been given the benefit of the doubt quite a bit, and there doesn't seem to be much doubt left.
I've only had a secure teaching job once. Before I came to Wellesley, and the first few years I taught in Wellesley, I spent most of my waking hours and a good many sleeping hours trying to figure out how I was going to be a good teacher - both as good a teacher as children deserved and good enough to keep my job. Sometimes it felt as if teaching well and keeping my job were two unrelated struggles. I had strong convictions about what was right for children, and these convictions sometimes flew in the face of policy.
I've seen many young teachers struggling that way - sometimes disagreeing with administrators, sometimes with parents, sometimes both. I identify with that struggle. But there are also teachers who, in my opinion and in the opinions of other people, are not good for children, and don't seem as if they're going to change. A system that protects teachers who have lots of potential probably also protects teachers who don't have as much. That's regrettable, but that's the way it is. And I don't know what we should do about it.
Passing Notes 239.
"Roger, would you care to share that with the rest of the class?" Roger has finally gotten up the nerve to tell Lois how he feels. Not by speaking to her (that would take even more nerve), but by passing her a note in class. But the teacher, ever vigilant, sees him passing the note, and Roger is mortified. He would rather have the earth swallow him than share it with the rest of the class.
Nowadays, I pass notes all the time. By e-mail. A bunch of us do. A lot of important things get said in these notes, some of which are private. It doesn't replace conversation, or the kind of mail we get in our mailboxes, but it's nice to be able to have an occasional chat with my friend who has moved to Kenya, or my friend (whom I've never met in person) who lives in Italy. It makes the world a little smaller.
We're adults, though. We can do what we want. Most teachers frown on the passing of notes in class. Children are supposed to be paying attention to what the teacher is saying. I usually discouraged children from passing notes. Notes often contain words that could hurt other children; children can be cruel. And besides, they are supposed to be paying attention; I tried to allow some time for them to chat, but I think my planned lessons were usually worthwhile enough to deserve their attention.
Once, I did intercept a note from Roger to Lois. I put it in my shirt pocket and didn't read it until the kids were out at recess. I read it, and realized that I had invaded Roger's privacy. Roger hadn't written an insult. It was a tender, sweet love note. I remember puppy love. I later handed the note back to Roger, apologized for invading his privacy, assured him that I would not tell anyone what I'd read, and advised him not to pass notes in class - to find another time and place.
Children should be allowed to have their private thoughts. I passed notes with them every day in their journals, and some of those conversations touched on subjects that were not meant for everyone to hear. I enjoyed communicating with children in journals, and most of them enjoyed it, too. Sometimes children wrote stories they didn't want the rest of the class to hear, and sometimes, I allowed that. Because of the way I taught writing, I didn't allow it very often; they were supposed to give each other feedback on each other's writing.
But children do have to learn about privacy. They need to learn about boundaries - when, where, and to whom certain things should be said or written. Roger may have worked hard to get the courage to tell Lois how he felt, but he needs to work even harder, and figure out the right time and place to tell her. Probably not during a math lesson.


Regression 240.
Most of us usually want our children to grow. We realize that if they keep doing it, eventually they won't technically be our children any more - our sons and daughters, yes, but not our children. There's different degrees of sadness about that, but there's often a lot of joy there, too. I love spending time with my daughters, who are women, not girls. I carefully avoid referring to them as "my children."
It can be annoying when you see your children seeming to return to an earlier stage of development. They've done the work of growing, and you've done the work of helping them grow. Especially if it's been hard work, it can be awfully discouraging to perceive the unravelling of that work. I've seen and experienced lots of reactions to perceived regression. One is to blame another child who seems to be causing the change: "I wish my son wouldn't hang around three-year-old Sylvester so much. My son is eight, and is acting as if he's three." I don't know for sure, but I think there may be value in figuring out whether your child thinks Sylvester is getting something your child wants. Or maybe he's simply fascinated with Sylvester; he may be trying to remember what it was like to be that age.
Some parents go along with the regression. They may even join in, speaking baby talk with the regressing child. I guess some do it to try to counteract the problem; they're trying to get the child to know how it feels to see someone you love acting strangely. Maybe some parents don't even realize they're doing it. They may be regressing, too.
Some parents, on the other hand, fight it with all their might. They correct, admonish, maybe even punish. "You're eight years old! Stop acting like a baby! Maybe you shouldn't be allowed to play with Sylvester any more." I'm pretty sure that's not an ultimately effective technique. It may look effective, because the behavior may stop, but I think there's often more involved in regression than just behavior. The child may remember being nurtured in a way that isn't happening any more, or may see younger children getting attention that looks appealing. Especially if those younger children are siblings.
Usually, I write these articles with a certain degree of expertise. I've spent my life with children and with people who work with children. But once in a while, as in this article, I dabble in subjects other people have studied intensely. If you are dealing with what you think is your own child's regression, perhaps it may help to spend some time looking beyond the behavior that's bothering you.

About the School Building 141.
Teachers sometimes get so used to problems that they forget that they're problems, and certainly don't entertain the notion that there could be solutions. This is often the case with the school building. School buildings are mostly designed by non-teachers. Attention is paid to the needs of teachers and children, partly because some attention is required by law, and partly because the community cares about education, educators, and children.
When I taught, sometimes I gathered the children in a circle on the rug,
to have class discussions, during which children were expected to listen to each other. In the winter, the radiator made a steady noise, not loud enough to distract children from concentrating on reading, writing, calculating, thinking, or one-to-one conversations. And we teachers usually had loud enough voices to be heard above the drone of the radiator.
But when everyone in the class was supposed to listen to one child, the sound of the radiator often made that quite a challenge. In some cases, I was able to time it so that the radiator stopped making noise just as we were about to begin our discussion. I submit that such careful timing should not be necessary. I've been in many buildings that have fairly quiet, unobtrusive heating systems. For the most part, though, they weren't school buildings.
And then there are the lights. Once in a while, I read or hear news about the harmful effects of flourescent lighting. Some teachers and children get headaches from fluorescent lights, and I remember a study suggesting that such lights may aggravate hyperactivity. I haven't read or heard any such reports about incandescent lights. People usually use incandescent, not flourescent, lights in their homes. I once pointed out this discrepancy at a staff meeting, and I saw some surprised, concerned looks among teachers, some knowing looks. Some teachers had faced this issue long ago, and knew something I didn't know.
They knew about King Money. King Money is not such a benevolent despot. If a heating system is too loud, or if a lighting system is causing health problems, King Money doesn't care. Quiet heating systems and healthier lighting systems cost more money, and the king won't allow such luxuries (except in the royal palace).
When people first decided to build public schools, they were deciding to spend a portion of their hard-earned money and/or spend lots of energy
to educate their children. I'll bet there were plenty of people who opposed that decision. Some thought they could do the job fine without public schools. Some didn't have children, and didn't want to pay for services they didn't think they were going to use. Objections like those are still around today.
But if we are going to invest money in public schools, we owe it to children and their teachers to spend what needs to be spent to make those schools good places in which to spend time. For example, healthy, quiet heating and lighting systems would be nice.
The "Right" Way 242.
In a few of my columns, I've written about approaches with which I strongly disagree. Some, like spanking or sarcasm, I consider simply wrong. To me, they're not matters of personal style; they're things that should not happen in school, at home, or anywhere else. I've never spanked a child, but I have used sarcasm. I don't condemn myself for it. Nor do I condemn other teachers and parents who make mistakes. But I don't think people who continue to do destructive things to children, refusing to rethink their behavior and change it, should be allowed to spend time with children.
When I first started teaching elementary school, I thought the "right" way to teach was the way Caleb Gattegno did it. He conducted workshops with the teachers in our school, and occasionally did demonstration lessons. He was a genius. He had written books about teaching, translated Piaget's work into English, devised new and exciting techniques for teaching reading and math, and now he was thoroughly impressing me, a new teacher. I thought the "right" way to teach was to be like Gattegno, and I tried.
Sometimes I saw myself or other teachers doing things I was quite sure Gattegno would not have done, and I tried to convince them or myself to change. I worked with many teachers who had never heard of Gattegno, and I tried to be a missionary, spreading The Gospel According to St. Caleb. His approach to reading instruction, called Words in Color, became my answer to anyone who used any other approach. Gattegno's system of math instruction, based heavily on Cuisenaire rods, became my "right" way to teach math.
Gattegno did not want to be thought of as having a philosophy of instruction. He thought that referring to the "Gattegno Philosophy" made it sound as if he were dead. And he said he did not want disciples, although his personality, combined with his expertise, made me and a few other teachers think he had a perspective that set him apart from and above all other educators. I guess he had come along at a time when I needed a hero. I'm sure to some people, I must have sounded as if I was a member of some cult.
Now, though I have strong convictions about much of what I see people doing with children, I have decided that though there are still some wrong ways to teach and parent, there are lots of right ways. I've seen teachers do and say things that I would "never" do or say, and I've noticed that these things have had good effects. They get children to understand things I thought children couldn't understand. They encourage behaviors I've always tried to encourage. Maybe some time I'll try some of these techniques. They might work for me. You never know.
Speed 243.
In our culture, speed is usually seen as a good thing. We have fast food, instamatic cameras, quick-drying glue, and so on. If a child learns something faster than other children, the child is considered to have superior intelligence. One night I was stopped by the police for travelling thirty-five miles per hour in a fifty mile per hour zone. I wasn't obstructing traffic; there were two lanes, and there weren't any other cars around (except for the police car). I guess it's just that it's assumed that people will travel as quickly as they're allowed to, and the officer just wanted to make sure I was sober and okay. I was; I just felt good and wanted to savor the night. Besides, what's the rush?
In most of the work children do in school - especially in math - there are children who firmly believe that the best way to perform is to get work done before other people. The quality of the work is important, too, but to these children, speed is far more important than accuracy, neatness, thoughtfulness, or anything else. Some of these children can work quickly, neatly, accurately, and even thoughtfully at the same time. Most do better work when they slow down, but they don't want to slow down, because slowness is too often seen as a sign of inferiority.
I usually work slowly. I can compute quickly, but I don't compute much; most of the work I do involves words, and I like to take my time with words, making sure I'm saying precisely what I want to say. I watch children write in school, and there's a tendency for children to apply the speed criterion in writing - a child who fills up a page faster than other children is seen by other children as a talented writer. A child who searches for the right word, and thereby takes longer, is assumed by other children (and sometimes by himself/herself) to be less intelligent.
As a teacher, I often tried to counteract this pattern. Children who finished tasks before other children had a tendency to let everyone know they were done; their self-esteem was boosted by their speed, and by their ability to impress other children with their speed. I tried hard to arrange situations wherein these children could still find ways to feel proud of themselves, but not so much because of their speed. And I tried to make sure other children, who worked more slowly, didn't end up with a self-esteem deficit. It can feel terrible to see someone else finish work when you're only half done.
And so I tried to stagger children's tasks so that children who worked quickly were not as conspicuous. As often as possible, I tried to plan lessons and activities in which speed was not such a detectable factor. But it would have helped if we, as a culture, emphasized quality and thought a little more, and speed a little less.

Private Schools 244.
When children are ready to go to school, many parents are faced with a decision: public school or private school? If public school, which town or city has good schools? If private school, which one? It can be a complex decision, and there's a tendency to try to simplify it by leaning on stereotypes. Some towns, for example, have reputations for having public schools that are "like private schools."
Let's take a look at some of the stereotypes. ("stereotype," by the way, originally referred to a kind of type used in printing presses. Interestingly, the French word for this kind of type is "cliche.") According to these stereotypes, private schools are for the children of wealthy snobs who don't want their children mixing with the children of common people. And public schools are chaotic zoos. In this article, I'll focus on private schools, and in my next one, on public schools.
The stereotypes about private schools don't fare so well under close scrutiny. It's true that parents usually have to pay a lot of money to have their children attend private schools, but some parents, who are far from wealthy, consider tuition a high priority, and do without other things for the sake of their children's education. And some private schools provide some scholarships for families who can't afford tuition.
Some private schools have admissions policies that put families through a kind of torture. I don't know of any children who have been rejected by any private schools, but I suspect that's because families tend not to go public with that information. I've sometimes filled out recommendation forms, knowing that children who got accepted wouldn't be around much any more. I'd miss them, so my heart often wasn't in it, but I did the best I could.
There were times when I thought about teaching in private schools. Some private schools are committed to philosophies and approaches that sounded attractive to me. But just as some families couldn't afford to send children to private schools, I didn't think I could afford to teach in a private school. Public schools usually pay teachers more. This may seem confusing: where does that tuition money go if not to pay teachers? But private schools have to rely mostly on tuition; public schools are funded by the whole community, which includes people who have no children, people whose children are too young or old for the schools, and people who send their children to private schools.
My wife and I seriously considered enrolling our children in private schools. We didn't do it, but there were times when we came close. We didn't want to be snobs, but sometimes our children came home with stories about negative things children or teachers had said or done, and we fantasized that our children would be safer from trauma somewhere else. Money and the snobbism factor started to seem less important. And there were private schools that seemed made for us and our children. In my next article, I'll tell you why we and others kept deciding to stay with public schools.
Public Schools 245.
Public schools have a lot in common with democracy. In a democracy, you stand a good chance of ending up with situations you don't like at all, and all you can do is try to bring about change. Does that make you a liberal? The change you want may come very slowly, and it may never come at all. Even when the change you want does come, you have to fight to keep it. Does that make you a conservative?
A friend of mine believes in public schools much more staunchly than I do. He things it's elitist and undemocratic to remove your children from public schools just because you think there's a better way to educate children. If you really believe in a better way, he says, you have a responsibility to work to make that better way known and accessible to everyone.
When he made this argument, his children weren't old enough to go to school yet. Mine were, and they went to a public school. My wife and I were appalled at some of the goings-on in school, and we were busy people who didn't have time to work for change. Neither one of us wanted to run for school committee, and I suspect that neither one of us would have been elected if we had; we were far from the mainstream.
I'll never know to what degree financial constraints and other practical considerations stopped us from having our children go to private schools, nor to what degree my friend's point of view influenced us. We did decide to have our children go to school in Wellesley; we were able to do so because I taught in Wellesley. That decision was similar, but not identical, to deciding to send them to private schools. We lived in a town that did not have a reputation for having outstanding public schools, and we were sending our children to schools in a town that did.
Our children were nevertheless exposed to people who disagreed with us about education. They had some teachers who stressed different things from what we stressed, and we and our children had to deal with some of the discrepancies. Sometimes we learned that our approaches weren't always the most effective ones. Sometimes our children's teachers learned from us. And sometimes there were persistent disagreements.
In retrospect, now, I'm glad we sent our children to the Wellesley Public Schools. I'll never know whether I'd feel that way about the public schools in some of the other towns we lived in, or whether private schools would have inspired my loyalty. But I urge you, as you consider past, present, and/or future decisions about your child's education, not to trust easy answers. And no matter where your child goes to school, there will probably be some ups and some downs.

Computers 246. The last several years I taught, there was a computer in my classroom. I made good use of it myself, but I really didn't have a clue how to use it with a class full of children who all wanted to use it. I know there are all kinds of ways to make the computer an important learning tool. Children could have the world at their fingertips (I almost wrote "literally," but I stopped myself; what they could have was literally at their fingertips, but it wasn't literally the world.) They could, as I now do, have keypals all over the world. They could do research on the computer. They could practice all kinds of skills, write without worrying about their handwriting or their pencils, and during the occasional indoor recess, they could play computer games.
I hope my first paragraph doesn't future shock you as much as it future shocks me. When I think about all the possible uses for computers in education, I worry. Computers can make it so that teachers and children won't need to have as much contact with each other. Neither will children and children. I have always enjoyed relating to actual (not "virtual") human beings, and I hope children always have ample opportunities to do that. Computers could make it so that they don't. I can imagine a classroom in which there is a computer for every child. The teacher sits at a computer that has access to all the other computers, and helps individual children with whatever they're working on. And the teachers and children hardly ever see each other.
My futuristic nightmare is not so unrealistic. But some uses for computers can actually enhance student/teacher contact. Teachers won't have to turn away from the class to write on the chalkboard. Instead, they'll face the class and type on a keyboard, and what they type will appear on a large-screen computer monitor. Some children will be unable to see the monitor, but maybe they'll have headphones that will give them the same information that sighted children are reading. If the teacher is ill, and has to stay home, the substitute and the children can still communicate with the teacher.
I haven't gone off the deep end as much as some people I know. But just last night, I was speaking with one of the people involved in laying out the articles for the magazine I edit, and I surprised myself. She wondered how she could view the articles I sent her; she had an IBM and I had a Mac. I suggested that I could send her hard copy, and she could find someone who had a scanner. I was somewhat pleased with my ingenuity, and somewhat scared: what was I becoming?
The future is on its way, and you may have mixed feelings about it, as I do. Most of the articles I write will probably still be relevant by the time they're printed in The Wellesley Townsman, but by the time you read this one, it could seem quaint and antique. As I write this, though, we still have time. Two factors I can think of give us time: the slowness of change in schools, and the expensiveness of computers. But neither is reliable, so I think we'd better get ready.
Trying to Try 247.
I've already written an article about effort, but I realized, yesterday, that there's a little more to the issue. A teacher asked me about a child with whom I'd been working. She said, "Do you think he's trying?" My answer was, "That's a complicated question. I think he's trying to try, but I'm not sure he's trying."
There's often a communication problem between adults who think a child is trying and those who think he/she isn't. People often have preconceived notions of what effort ought to look like, and when a child's effort does not resemble the preconception, there's a strong tendency to think the child is lazy. It's simpler that way, and it takes some of the responsibility off the teacher: how can the teacher be blamed if the child simply isn't willing to work?
I've often come across as naive when I've expressed my belief that all children try. I've seen incredulous looks in adults' faces as I've argued that their children or students are doing the best they can. To an adult who is trying to teach a child who doesn't seem to be trying to learn, it can be downright insulting to hear that the child is doing her/his best.
I don't mean it to be insulting. When I give a child credit for effort, I don't mean to take any credit away from the adult who is trying to teach the child. Distractibility, confusion, fatigue, and all the other obstacles to learning are real, and I believe that blame does not necessarily belong with either the unsuccessful child or the unsuccessful teacher. They're usually really doing the best they can, and if they find something that could work better, they'll try it.
At a certain point in children's education, we expect them to take over. We expect them to map out their own plans for meeting the challenges we present. We try to start that early, and make the transference of responsibility gradual. Some young children have already taken over their own education, and do wonders no matter what others around them do. These children are fun to teach, and there's a strong tendency among teachers to believe that those children are trying harder than other children. I don't think so. While it certainly isn't sensible or fair to scold a successful child for not trying as hard as other children, who may be struggling, I don't think it's fair to assume that the child is trying harder.
I don't think my faith in children's effort is blind faith; I think it's simply practical. If you are willing to believe that a child is simply lazy, the child is quite apt to adopt that belief; it can be a self-fulfilling perception. On the other hand, if you assume that each child is using all the resources she/he can muster, teaching is not so much of a battle. It's more of a quest - a search for the resources that will make success possible.

The Family 248.
Families don't stay together so much any more. We probably aren't going to go back to a time when they did. My parents live in southern Florida. I have one brother in northern Florida, one on Long Island, a sister in upstate New York, and I live in western Massachusetts. If you go a generation further, our offspring live in Vermont, Washington (the state), New Mexico, and transit. If we ever have a total family reunion, it'll cost a lot in airfare.
We stay in touch, and send each other cards on birthdays and holidays, but for the most part, the pretend family (real people I pretend are related to me) I've created for myself works more the way the old-fashioned family used to work. I spend good time each week with two of my pretend grandchildren. Their parents are a little too close to my age to be my pretend children, but no matter. I have pretend brothers and sisters whom I see more often than I see my real brothers and sister. And I even have a few pretend parents.
I'm not under any illusions about the degree to which these pretend relatives can be there for me in times of crisis, although I wouldn't be surprised. They have real relatives to whom they feel connections and responsibilities, and my real relatives and I feel those connections and responsibilities, too. And I feel much more commitment to my real daughters than to any of the many pretend relatives I have who are their age.
This can be seen as a semantic game I'm playing; my family really is scattered around the country, as many families are. In some ways, I envy people whose families have stayed together. In some ways, people whose families have stayed together envy me. People who know what I was like at age seven know me, in some ways, better than anyone who met me as an adult. But in other ways, people who have only known me as an adult know me better. And likewise, my daughters may feel ambivalent about me. I have to work to remember that they're adults. The people who met them four years ago don't have that problem.
The proverb "blood is thicker than water" never quite works for me. Whenever I hear that proverb, I think, so what? Does the proverb imply that my friendships with people who are not related to me are somehow similar to water? That they're thinner, and more likely to evaporate? I don't like that image. And for what it's worth, blood is mostly water, anyway. If blood evaporated, the red crust that was left wouldn't be so valuable.
But I do understand, to some degree. I know that my pretend relatives may move away, and we may lose touch. There are family members that lose touch, too, but the connection is always there. The prodigal son may or may not return, but he'll never be the prodigal stranger. So maybe, though people would often rather deal with a fluid that isn't so thick, blood is ultimately thicker than water.
Obedience 249.
You probably already know this, but children don't always want to do what we want them to do. They sometimes argue, procrastinate, or disobey. We may find these interactions exhausting, but ultimately they tend to be the ones to lose. We're bigger than they are, and that can give us an advantage. We have control over the budget, the best means of transportation, food, and just about every aspect of their lives. But I believe that they have control over themselves, and they'll only do what we want them to do if they decide to. So while they may lose privileges, they get to keep themselves.
It's been a long time since I've been to a wedding in which one partner promised to obey the other. I think we've decided that the use of the word "obey" in that ceremony is inaccurate and demeaning. Marriage, in the part of our culture I've experienced, is not supposed to be slavery. There's supposed to be communication, compromise, negotiation. Spouses tend not to give each other blind obedience.
And I don't think we should require children to do what we say without thinking, either. Once (only once, I hope), I said to a child, "Never say 'no' to a teacher." The child had refused to do a worksheet, and had triggered an authoritarian response from me. Luckily, the child responded, "My parents told me it's important to be able to say 'no' to adults." I was wrong; the child was right, and I apologized. I had already written a song for children about the importance of being able to say "no," and yet I'd temporarily forgotten my own message.
Of course, refusing to do a worksheet causes problems in school, and after the embarrassing "no" incident, I did successfully negotiate with the child so that the worksheet got done. But I think I learned more from that interaction than the child learned by doing the worksheet. Though insisting on obedience was never a cornerstone of my teaching, until that incident, it was still part of my repertoire; it was still possible for a child to get me to demand obedience.
Now, I hope I've gotten beyond that stage. There's only one kind of situation in which I demand obedience from a child - when safety is at stake. In all other cases, I try to treat children as people who have the same rights I have. When I want a certain behavior from a child, I make no secret of it, but I treat all behavioral issues as interpersonal issues; if children want to get along with me, there's some stuff they have to do. If I want to get along with them, there's stuff I have to do, too. But I don't have to give them blind obedience, and they don't have to give it to me, either.

Clothes 250.
When I told a friend that I was about to write an article about clothes, my friend did a mild double-take. I don't have a reputation for having much to say about clothing. But I think I can wax prolific on the subject of not having much to say about clothing.
I rarely spend much time deciding what to wear. I've learned, over the years, that certain clothes or combinations of clothes will get people to make more comments on my clothes than I want to hear, so I don't get pants that have patterns on them, and there are certain shirts I don't wear with certain pants. I want my discussions with people to be substantive, and people discuss clothes more than I want to; to me, clothes are trivial. So it's easier to just avoid the issue by wearing what I think are viewer-friendly clothes.
It used to be that concern about clothing was more of a gender-linked characteristic, and maybe that's part of the reason I didn't grow up thinking about it much; I didn't belong to the group that was expected to think about it. But I know members of my gender and generation who nevertheless try hard to be well-dressed, and succeed. I even know some who succeed without trying hard. So I have to use the gender alibi sparingly.
I know that many children today, regardless of gender, care a great deal about what they wear. Some children tend to want to wear clothes
that set them apart. Others want to look as much like everyone else as possible. There are fads, like not tucking in your shirt, or not tying your shoelaces. Advertisers thrive on fashions, and children are very susceptible to the ebb and flow of fashions. Even if a style lasts, children outgrow their clothes, so they must be great targets for advertisers and a great market for retailers.
It must have been hard to have a father like me when it was time to pick out clothes. At my best, I liked whatever clothes my daughters wore. They seemed to wish I had some opinions about which clothes they wore. And at my worst, I tried to convince them to be as apathetic about clothes as I was. I've rarely given clothes as presents; when I wanted to give a gift to someone who really liked clothes, it was a gift certificate, or, in the case of my daughters, a shopping trip. I'd stand in stores and do my best to look interested, but I don't think anyone was fooled.
Nowadays, concern about clothing is less gender-linked, and thus more widespread. There's more intergenerational conflict about clothing: "I am not wearing that to school! Everybody would laugh at me! Nobody wears clothes like that!" My daughters are grown up. I still relate to children, but I don't have to deal with anyone's clothes but my own. For those of you who do, I wish you peace. A Quiet Welcome 251.
As I write this article, spring is very tentatively poking its head through a hard winter. I know it's superstitious of me, but I try not to welcome it too much, even though I feel like really letting go. I picture spring as a shy child, curious about a new situation, and yet quite ready to go back to what it's used to if it gets intimidated by some one's reaction. And I want spring to stay.
Shy children sometimes have trouble with boisterous people. They usually do want to be noticed, but they don't necessarily want to be welcomed with banners and a marching band in their honor. I, personally, prefer hoopla, but I'm hardly ever shy. So though it took me some time to catch on, I figured out how to modify my approach when I welcomed shy children.
People have the right to be shy. I remember one child who started the school year shy - spoke so quietly that she was hard to hear. I was new at teaching, and I hadn't thought much about shyness. I kept trying to encourage her to speak up, and to occasionally volunteer to stand in front of the class and be seen and heard.
It seemed to me that the more I tried to get her to open up, the more she closed up. I hadn't yet heard Malvina Reynolds' song, "You Can't Make a Turtle Come Out," but the wisdom expressed by that song would have helped me. Garrison Keillor talks a lot about shy people, and though most of what he says about them is comical, his wisdom could have helped me, too, if I'd been aware if it back then.
But it was a shy child who ultimately showed me the way. She was fed up with my attempts to get her to stop being shy. She came to me privately after school and said, "Mr. Blue, the reason I don't talk loud in class is that I'm shy!" She said it in a voice that did not sound at all shy. She put me in my place. She asked me to stop trying to get her to stop being shy; she told me she had a right to be shy. And then she calmly walked out of the room.
This incident gave me new respect for shy people. I guess I'd unconsciously assumed that they were more like Will Rogers' description of Calvin Coolidge: "The man doesn't say much, but when he does talk, he doesn't say much." Shy people may have plenty to say, and it usually doesn't do any good to try to bully it out of them. The words will surface when the time is right.
Nowadays, I'm more patient about shyness. I want spring to come, but I know that I don't have any power over it. While I'm still not above snipping off a twig full of buds and forcing out some blossoms, I mostly let late freezes and blizzards do their thing, and do my best to patiently wait for spring.

The Teacher's Load 252.
Teachers often feel overloaded with jobs. They feel as if they're forced to be parents to their students, either because parents don't do their share, or because the job of parenting has gotten too big to be done by parents alone. They feel as if they end up doing lots of jobs that ought to be done by other people. And on top of that, the school curriculum seems to keep getting bigger and bigger, with more added all the time, and very little taken out.
I hear those complaints from teachers. I've heard them for years. I think I see their point of view, but I've never shared it much. I became a teacher of young children because that's what I wanted to do. I knew it involved a lot of what's usually considered parenting; children don't suddenly stop being children when they enter a school and turn into pupils. I enjoy most of the jobs involved in parenting, and a lot of what I enjoy about teaching could be considered parenting.
Some of the non-teaching parts of the teacher's job have always bothered me, and I always appreciated it when bus duty, playground duty, lunch duty, and study hall supervision were taken over by volunteers or people paid to do those jobs. As a volunteer, I sometimes give teachers little breaks from those jobs. But not too much; I've paid my dues. I believe those jobs should be done by other people, not by teachers. When teachers complain about those jobs, I agree.
A complaint I don't share is the complaint about the overloaded curriculum. Teachers and others involved in developing curriculum often make good arguments for the inclusion of various priorities in the curriculum, and some teachers feel oppressed by the depth and breadth of the resulting curriculum. These teachers wonder how conflict resolution, sex education, drug awareness programs, and countless other items can all be part of the school day. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and not all of them are spent in school.
I don't see it that way. I think the time children spend in school, like the time they spend at home, is filled with random opportunities for learning. In school, lessons are more often consciously - even meticulously - planned than they are at home, but the random opportunities are still there. As items are added to the curriculum, it doesn't have to mean time taken away from other items. I think teaching about conflict resolution can best be done as part of other teaching. History and literature are full of great opportunities to teach children strategies for resolving conflicts.
Arguing that teaching is a manageable job makes me feel a little like a traitor. But I think at least some of the stress teachers feel can be relieved by a change in perspective; see additions to the curriculum simply as tools for improving instruction, not as extra burdens. You've got to do it anyway; you might as well try to see it in a way that works.

Spelling 253.
Most people aren't very good at spelling, and most people who are good at it never had any trouble with it. There have been all kinds of studies done to find out whether there are any ways to explain why some people can spell and some can't. The last time I checked, which was in about 1980, the only clue they had found was a correlation between musical talent and spelling ability. Children who were skilled and avid readers weren't necessarily good spellers. Children who had received lots of spelling instruction and/or had done lots of spelling workbooks and worksheets were about as skilled as children who hadn't. Children who studied a lot did better on spelling tests, but these children did not end up spelling any better than children who hadn't studied.
This research did not get me to feel like spending much time teaching children to spell words correctly. I had rarely studied spelling in elementary school. I had done the spelling work teachers had given me, but to me, it had been busy work. I'd never gotten anything wrong on the workbook pages and worksheets, and I'd always gotten 100% on spelling tests. Some teachers may have thought I'd studied, but most knew me better than that. My friend David had also gotten everything right, and had never studied. We both had sounded good on the piano, so maybe there was some validity to the research showing that odd correlation.
I've heard people say that children aren't learning to spell any more, but I don't think they ever did learn to spell. If correct spelling didn't come easily, it didn't come at all. I'm quite willing to be proven wrong about this, but so far no one has changed my mind.
It's not so bad, really. I've gotten used to the incorrect spelling I see in children's writing and in the adult world. I've found that the "brocoli" I buy in the supermarket tastes just just as good as broccoli. I notice that teachers who are poor spellers are often still good teachers. And computer programs that correct spelling often leave plenty of errors. For example, if they're are to oar more ways two spell a word, the computer can't help yew decide witch won too ewes; your on you're own.
And yet I kept trying. I gave children spelling lists to study every Monday, and tested them every Friday. It was easier to follow the tradition than to convince everyone that the tradition didn't make much sense. Some children worked hard to do well on the weekly spelling tests, and succeeded. They didn't necessarily become good spellers, but maybe they learned that hard work can have at least some effect. Or maybe they eventually noticed that all their studying was for naught; they still couldn't spell.
I'm glad more and more teachers are deciding to leave children's misspellings alone as children write - to correct spelling errors later. Children are more eager to write if they don't have to worry about spelling. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face the fact that most people have difficulty with spelling, and there may be nothing we can do about it. And maybe that's okay.
Classroom Modifications 254.
Chapter 766 is a good law in Massachusetts. It requires teachers to pay attention to the fact that children learn in different ways, and that some children have great difficulty learning if their special needs are ignored. The first thing teachers are required to do is try some classroom modifications to see whether slight changes in normal arrangements will solve learning problems the teacher has noticed. Examples of this are providing study carels to help distractible children, explaining directions to one child privately, or providing worksheets that are different from the ones other children do.
For many teachers, classroom modifications are happening all the time. They recognize children's diverse learning styles, and they are committed to doing what works, rather than giving every child the same lessons and letting them sink or swim. For some of these teachers, the documentation required by Chapter 766 makes it easier to focus on the appropriateness and effectiveness of modifications. For others, it's just more forms to fill out; these teachers focus well on children with special needs, and more paperwork just gets in the way.
I like to think that I fell in the last category - that I always considered children's various needs, and made appropriate modifications. That filling out the forms, though necessary to make sure some teachers weren't thoughtless and negligent, was really unnecessary in my case. But in fact, the procedure did force me to focus on children at times when I might otherwise have forgotten to. In fact, if there were more hours in a day, it would be useful for every teacher to document all the strategies they try for helping all the children they teach, and keep records of which strategies help which children.
I started each year determined to keep those records. Usually by the end of the first week, I came up with a modification for myself: because Bob, unlike the ideal teacher in his mind, is a human being who has limitations, he will stop driving himself crazy trying to keep track of everything that happens.
The job of educating a class of children in the best way possible is, in fact, impossible. Occasionally, teachers have sublime moments when it feels as if a lesson has really worked for every child. This may not actually be true; there may be a child or two who has missed some of what the teacher thinks everyone has gotten. But even if those sublime moments do affect every child, they can't happen all day every day.
And so, there's a law requiring teachers to try a little harder sometimes. There aren't so many meetings to schedule and forms to fill out about shy children, precocious children, and other children who, though they have special needs, don't have "special needs." Most teachers I've observed do try to keep all children's needs in mind, and succeed to varying degrees. Chapter 766 recognizes that some children do require more attention than others, and though it often feels unnecessary and even oppressive, I'm glad it's there.
Moving 255.
One of the many harsh realities of life in these United States (and other places, I'm sure) is that families often have reasons to move away from places where they've come to feel at home. Often, these reasons make no sense at all to children. Children make friends, get to know local favorite places, adjust to schools, and then are abruptly uprooted and transplanted. The reasons may have to do with changes in their parents' jobs, marital situations, health, or other considerations.
Once in a while, adults decide that their children's security is more important than other considerations, and depends on staying. But more often, children have to make the adjustments that go with moving to a new place, and trying to make it home. Close friends turn into penpals, and in many cases, become only memories.
School records may travel to new schools, but that doesn't really do a lot to make the adjustment easy. Some children are great at welcoming new friends. Some new friends are great at getting themselves to be welcomed. It helps if a child's new home is near potential friends' homes. There are things adults can do to make things easier. They can figure out what's different about the new setting, and help children make new connections.
But adults who have just moved are often preoccupied with their own adjustment, and may not be able to do much about children's difficulties. Adults often think it's easier for children to adjust to changes than it is for adults. There may be some truth to that, but it may also be a matter of perspective; children are faced with inevitability, while adults have had at least some influence on the decision to move. Inevitability can make you feel powerless, but it can also make you come to terms with change more easily.
There's also a difference in the way adults and children experience time. If a child adjusts to a new place in a few months, to an adult, that may seem fast - only a fraction of a year. To a child, a few months is more often a large number of days - even a larger number of hours, minutes, and seconds. It can seem like an eternity. If you have to move again, it can be devastating for a child to hear that.
If a change is inevitable, that doesn't mean children have to deal with it alone. They ought to know, sooner or later, about the inevitability, so that they can learn to accept it. That inevitability often involves some loneliness and rebellion. It helps to acknowledge the sadness and anger children may feel. While they don't have a lot of power over the situation, they need to know that we care about how the changes affect them.

Music Lessons 256.
I've taken music lessons, given them, and my wife and I paid someone to give them to our children. As a student, I hated both piano lessons and voice lessons. I took them because I thought it was the price I had to pay if I wanted to be good at playing the piano and singing. My school music teacher had heard me playing piano once, and had told my parents that I had talent, and that it would be a crime to waste it. My parents had responded by paying her to give me piano lessons.
I'm not sure, but I don't think piano lessons did much to improve my playing. I learned that I shouldn't rest my fingers on the piano when my teacher was watching; I should curve my fingers. I learned that I should look at the sheet music when my teacher was there, and pretend to be reading it. Once in a while, my teacher would stop me and point to a note. I'd look at the note, figure out what it was, and correct myself. When my teacher wasn't around, I played whatever I wanted, except when my mother heard me and said, "Bob, that's not what you're supposed to be practicing."
As for voice lessons, I didn't practice at all, and I didn't understand much of what my teacher was trying to teach me, partly because of her German accent, and partly because even when I could understand her words, I often couldn't make heads nor tails of her meaning.
When my daughters took piano lessons, they seemed to be having a little more fun than I'd had, but they didn't stick with it, and we didn't force them to. I don't think either one of them wishes they had continued lessons. It's typical for adults to wish they'd taken lessons and persevered, but having had lessons and occasionally tried to persevere, I am one adult who wishes I had spent my time doing something else. I'm glad I can sing and play piano, but I don't think lessons had much to do with either.
Then I tried giving piano lessons. I loved it. I let the children tell me how they wanted to spend the time, what they wanted to learn. Sometimes I actually taught them to read music, but more often, we had fun exploring the piano keyboard, picking out tunes, and talking. At first, I felt guilty about the talking, which often had nothing to do with music. But whenever I checked it out with parents, they told me it was okay. I guess my style was famous and infamous enough to attract people who liked it and repel those who didn't.
I don't believe that talent is in great danger of being wasted. If a child wants to develop talent, that will probably happen with or without lessons, and is often surprisingly possible even when the talent isn't immediately apparent. If there's a good child/teacher match, lessons can be helpful. But if a child doesn't want to take lessons, I don't believe that anything is wasted by allowing the child not to.

Sugar, TV, Etc. 257.
Setting limits for children is one of my least enjoyable ways to spend time with them. I don't have much trouble setting limits when it comes to the way they treat me; I won't let them jump on me, destroy my property, use things I don't want used. They respect those limits, and don't argue much. Maybe it's my tone of voice, or maybe it's that they've heard those limits from other adults.
But when the limits are about items that don't affect me directly, I have a little more trouble setting them. If a child wants to eat a lot of sugar or watch a lot of TV, a little battle goes on in my mind: should I be firm about the limit I want to set, or should I be the lovable, roly-poly guy I want to be? I don't want to be one of those boring adults whose mission seems to be to make sure kids don't have fun.
I have bad memories of the statement, "I'm saying this for your own good." I rarely believed that statement, and I promised myself I'd never use it. But the limits we adults set often are for children's own good. Too much sugar or too much time in front of the television is unhealthy, and interferes with children's growth. And so I do set the limits. But I don't like it.
I know a family that has far more children than the national average. People wonder how they do it. Raising any children at all is a big job, and raising a much larger number must be exhausting. I know something about this family that's not as well known: the television isn't on much. If you think about it, that's pretty impressive. The children know that TV is not going to play a big role in their lives. I also know families that don't have sugar in their homes, and don't order things that contain sugar when they go out to eat.
If children think they can change your mind by casting you in the role of villain, it's worth a try. Or if they think they can sweet-talk you into compliance, why not? It's not that children are calculating, manipulative little demons, but it's pretty human, when you want something, to do what will get it for you.
And so, whether we like it or not, we have to set some limits, allowing children to have or do less than they sometimes would like to have or do. I knew, and still know, adults (including myself) who sometimes take this approach too far, and some (including myself) who sometimes don't take it far enough. But like adults, children don't always know what's best for them. And less like adults, children can sometimes be influenced by people who may have an idea of what's best for them.

Parenting in Public 258.
Parenting in public can be embarrassing. The limits set in private sometimes don't seem to apply. Parents have told their children how to behave when other people are watching, but children know that their parents probably aren't going to be as strict in public; maybe they'll get yelled at or something later, but that's in the future, and doesn't seem very real.
I've sometimes tried a little experiment, and it's sometimes worked. When I've heard a parent say, in a restaurant or store, "If you don't stop making noise, someone is going to complain," I've occasionally made the parent honest by asking the child to stop. I played the role of that annoyed stranger. Children have usually reacted by getting quiet. Parents usually know what I'm doing, and appreciate it, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to get children to worry too much about strangers, and even if it is, I'd rather not be one of the strangers they worry about.
Sometimes I invited parents to come to school for a performance of a play. You'd think children would be especially careful about their behavior in that situation; their major authority figures were all right there. Nope.
In that situation, parents thought I was in charge, and I thought parents were. Children didn't take long to figure out who was in charge; they were.
As soon as I became aware of this dynamic, I told parents I'd be the authority figure, and the problem was solved. I think it would have worked the other way, too. But when there's a vaccuum, it doesn't take children long to notice it.
When I write about this sort of issue, I'm afraid I may be portraying children as the enemy. I don't mean to. Lack of communication is the enemy in this kind of situation; children usually care about pleasing their parents, and parents usually care about their children. I suspect that this kind of problem would not exist in a tribal village. Children would know everyone, and to some degree, would see all adults as people for whom to behave well.
But most of us don't live in tribal villages, and so all we can do is try to cope with being in public with our children. We can try to be the same limit-setters we are at home, but that's difficult; the places and people are different. We can try to emulate tribal villages, and take some responsibility for each other's children. That raises other issues; expectations vary, and besides, some caution about strangers is appropriate and necessary. But I think this is one issue tribal villages probably handle better than we do.

Planning the Day 259.
I recently heard from a parent who had spent time and energy planning a day during which she could get some of her errands done and do things the children would enjoy. That's often hard to do, but parents who care about their children do their best. To children, the errands can all seem like the parent's business, even if much of it indirectly or directly benefits the children. There's a lot of sacrificing parents do that children take for granted; parenting naturally involves sacrifice. If you're
planning to have children and not sacrifice, I suggest that you ought to take another look at your plans.
At the end of the day, one of the children complained that she hadn't had any time to play all day. That is not what the mother needed to hear - not by a long shot. A better response to the day would have been for the child to say, "Thank you for arranging for me to do interesting things, and thank you for managing to fit in your errands, most of which were for our
benefit, in a way that still made the day seem basically child-oriented. You parented very well today."
Children don't usually talk or think that way, though. Like adults, children get ideas about how they would like to spend a day. Those ideas may or may not bear any resemblance to the day the adult has planned. And so, from the perspective of the child in this story, the day was unsatisfactory and disappointing.
Try to imagine, now, the parent's response to the complaint. I don't know about you, but I like to be appreciated when I go out of my way to do things for people. I get annoyed when my beneficiaries don't seem grateful. I get even more annoyed when they complain. And that was the initial reaction in this instance.
But then there was a dialogue that can serve as a model for families caught up in similar conflicts. The daughter got more specific, stating her belief that the day had been planned without her involvement, and didn't include any of the things she'd hoped to do. The mother had set up the day with the best of intentions, but hadn't included her daughter in the planning process.
The mother heard the daughter, and responded calmly, with respect. Two people who trusted and respected each other, effectively working out an issue. Both may handle the issue better next time. The daughter, instead of complaining, "I didn't get to play at all today," may consider the mother's point of view. And the mother may include her daughter more in planning the day. I like happy endings, and I'm sure I've oversimplified both
the incident and the prospects for future incidents. But the story, as I heard it, was inspirational.

Closets 260.
It can be hard to be different. Sometimes differences are respected and celebrated, but they can also be burdens to bear; tolerance is far from universal. And so people who are different build closets, and try to hide their differences in their closets. Coming to a new country, they try to hide their heritage by changing their names. Some people hide their
health problems, or details of their lives they think people won't accept. People don't want assumptions made about them, and there's a strong tendency to stereotype people.
It's especially hard for children and adolescents to be different. It can be all right if the differences really are celebrated. It can be sublime. A child who is unusually talented, intelligent, good-looking, or strong can have a great time. But none of the above is a reliable advantage; people can
be cruel, trying to build their own self-esteem and popularity by tearing down others'.
I know a high school student who belongs to a group called "Students Against Homophobia." She's brave; being "out" in high school is not easy, and people are apt to assume that anyone who is willing to stand up for the rights of homosexual students must be homosexual. She could mention to people that at this point in her life, she's somewhat heterosexual, but she chooses not to dwell on that fact. That's not the point; people have the right to be who they are, as long as they're not hurting other people.
When and where I was in high school, people didn't talk about homosexuality except to hurl an occasional snide comment. If anyone felt any attraction to the "wrong" gender, he/she kept very quiet about it. My friends in high school confided in me about all kinds of secrets they had, but not one confided homosexual feelings, though I'm sure the feelings were there. That particular closet was tightly closed.
Nowadays, there's a little more openness, but we still have a long way to go. I have hope. I remember a time and place when the word "nigger" was used as an insult for people of all races. I remember hearing "jew" used as a verb to mean "cheat," and finding, to my dismay, that the dictionary I used included that meaning for the word. And now, "gay" is making the rounds as an insult.
Once, I asked a young child what "gay" meant to him. At first, he said, with an emarrassed smile, "You know what it means." When I pressed a little more, he told me, "A gay boy is a boy who likes girls." I think that answer was based on more than a misconception. I remember being attracted to girls in my early years, and I had to pretend I wasn't; girls had "cooties."
It turns out that nobody has "cooties" - not people of different races, ethnicities, religions, genders, or what a friend of mine likes to call "affectional preferences." With all the possibly valid reasons for people to avoid each others' company, we really don't need any invalid reasons.
When Parents Are Teachers 261.
I've often heard teachers say that teachers make the worst parents. The statement, as I've heard it, has usually referred to one aspect of parenting - relating to a child's teachers. Parents often have strong opinions about what should and should not happen in school, and when a parent is also a teacher in a school, the way he/she expresses such opinions can be downright obnoxious. And the teacher, who sometimes likes to say, "That's the way teachers do things nowadays," can only say, "That's the way we do things in this school," or "That's the way I do things." It's harder to be the voice of "the way things are" when you're talking to someone else who's also such a voice.
There is a way to build bridges and establish trust between teacher/parents and teachers. If teachers respect the knowledge and experience teacher/parents carry around, and vice versa, the relationship can become one of collegiality. I've often tried to build that kind of relationship with teacher/parents, and I've often succeeded. Good teaching and good parenting aren't really so different, and children can flourish when adults who care about them communicate with each other. Each has some insight, and together, they can move mountains.
But it doesn't always happen that way, and that's why it's sometimes said that teachers make the worst parents. A teacher/parent hears about what happens in school, and forms opinions. That's natural. And if children complain about what a teacher has done, or seem to be reflecting negative influences a teacher has had, it's natural to want to do something about it. If the parent is a teacher, she/he has ready-made proof that there are alternatives to the way things are. And so it's easier to get the teacher to be defensive. I speak from experience as a teacher.
As a parent, I tried hard not to come to conferences as a teacher. I tried to put my own style and philosophy aside long enough to hear what teachers had to say about my children. But sometimes I couldn't. I'd listen to the teacher for a while, but then start reacting: what right does this person have to be a major influence on my child? This person thinks so differently from the way I think! And then I'd stop listening.
My convictions about the way to help children grow are real, and some of them are as fundamental as some people's religious convictions. I don't deny that I developed some of these convictions as I taught and took education courses. So at least in some ways, I was one of those teachers who were the worst parents. But I hope over the years I got so I could listen well to teachers, even if I didn't agree with everything they did. If I could manage to see the strengths teachers had, life was easier for the teachers, my children, and myself. And maybe I could have some influence now and then.

Facilitated Communication 262.
The phrase "facilitated communication," as I've heard it used, refers to a very specific technique for helping some people who have trouble letting other people know what they're thinking and feeling. A friend of mine has been deeply involved in using this technique, and another friend of mine is an adult with autism who has been able to communicate because of it. There is controversy about whether the technique really works, but there's no doubt in my mind that it works for some people.
But that's not what this article is about. Communication can be difficult for all kinds of people; autism is one of many obstacles to expressing thoughts and feelings, being heard and understood, and hearing and understanding what others express. And I recently witnessed a gathering of adults to discuss an issue that can be quite explosive. The mood in the room, at first, did not make it seem as if communication was going to be possible, let alone facile. The person moderating the discussion had obviously thoroughly thought through his approach to the issue.
He is the principal of an elementary school in which I volunteer, and he needed to make a decision about whether or not to display a group of photographs in the school, and if so, how and where to display them. To me, the photographs were innocuous. They depicted families living their lives. These families were not doing anything children shouldn't see, but they didn't look like the families some of the children and their parents were used to. Parents were divided about whether children ought to see these pictures in a public school.
At first, it began to look as if the meeting was going to turn into a verbal battle, as talk shows sometimes do when people discuss controversial issues. But the way it was handled, that didn't happen. People expressed strong opinions and emotions. Sometimes tears flowed, and I saw anger on some faces. But more to the point, I think communication was happening.
At least part of the reason some people were communicating was that the principal kept to some ground rules: don't applaud or hiss when someone makes a point; everyone who wants to speak will get a chance; and the ultimate decision was not going to be made during that meeting or immediately afterwards. I'm sure that battles were going on in some people's minds, but this masterful facilitator managed to structure a situation in which at least some people who disagreed with each other heard each other. I, for one, was impressed.
Some people left the meeting quite discouraged. I spoke with some of them, and they were so upset about some of the things people had said that they wondered whether there had been any communication at all. I understand their frustration, but I don't share it; I left the meeting with the impression that maybe some minds had been changed, or at least opened, and that even some people who would disagree with the final decision would feel as if their voices had been heard.
Echoes 263..
Most teachers I've observed repeat things they really don't need to repeat. Most teachers I've observed repeat things they really don't need to repeat. Once in a while, I've challenged myself to stop doing it, but it's awfully hard to stop. I can think of three possible reasons for this phenomenon, and I leave it to the teachers who read this to try breaking the habit.
First let's consider some reasons to try to break the habit. Some children legitimately need to have things repeated; the communication didn't work the first time. There was an auditory processing problem, and repetition is the solution. More often, though, repetition, rather than solving the problem, perpetuates or even aggravates it. It can perpetuate the problem by letting the child know it's not necessary to listen the first time. This line of thinking has to be used carefully; children who rely on repetition may or may not need to rely on it.
If children need time to process what they hear, repetition can work against that processing. The echo of a direction interferes with the auditory processing that's already going on. The child, instead of hearing, "As soon as you have finished, take out a book and read," may hear, "As soon as you as soon have finished you take out have a book finished and read, take out a book and read." The child may be understandably baffled by that direction, but the teacher knows what he/she has said, and so do many children. And it can be hard for a child to seem to be the only one who doesn't get it.
Sometimes teachers don't even realize that they're repeating themselves. Maybe their own processing styles involve repetition. Maybe they unconsciously think they're increasing the possibility that children will hear what they're saying; if something is said twice, they think, there's twice the chance that it will be heard. Teachers sometimes seem to think they're rephrasing directions for clarity when, in fact, they're repeating them verbatim.
Repetition can be done angrily; the teacher has already given instructions or information, and is annoyed that a child or children haven't gotten the message. Some children are better at hearing the anger than at hearing the content of the repeated message, and all they end up learning is that they've somehow gotten the teacher angry. The teacher may actually be angry at herself/himself for not communicating effectively, but children don't necessarily know that.
As teachers teach, they may or may not have already thought about little issues like this, which may not be so little for some children. Speaking to a group of children involves some juggling of details; what helps one child may baffle another. It's not easy. At the end of a teaching day, it's a good idea for a teacher to take a little break. Take a little break. Family Secrets 264.
Families have the right to have some secrets. All kinds of things that happen in families are private. They may have projects and plans they don't want people to know about. They may have problems they're trying to solve, and they want to involve only people they think will help. People want privacy for all kinds of good reasons, and as long as they aren't doing anything terribly wrong, they ought to be allowed to have that privacy.
Children don't always know how to maintain privacy, and even if they do, they don't necessarily know when to maintain it. There are some family secrets that shouldn't be kept secret. Sometimes families try to maintain privacy because certain family members abuse other family members, and don't want to get in trouble for it. Abused children ought to be able to speak to adults who will help them, but they may not know whether and when they're being abused, and even if they do know, they may think they deserve to be abused, they may feel a kind of family loyalty and love that stops them from getting the abuser in trouble, or they may not be confident that talking about it will stop the abuse; they may think that could make it worse.
It's said that everything's relative - that what is abuse to one person may be simple strictness to another: "spare the rod and spoil the child." I submit that the rod needs to be spared. Physical abuse has been around for a long time, but we should know better now; there's been a lot of learning about what happens to children who grow up abused, and I think it's time to use words, not rods, to raise children.
But back to the issue of privacy. What if it becomes quite apparent that a child is being abused? What is the responsibility of people who become aware of the abuse? I sometimes compare this sort of situation to that of the nation that becomes aware that the government of another nation is oppressing its people. It brings up some similar questions: do we have the right to tell other people what and what not to do? If so, what power do we have, and how should we use it? Are we in a moral position to judge others?
I've answered those questions for myself: in some instances, we do have not only the right, but the responsibility to tell other people what and what not to do. We have a responsibility to do what we can to oppose and prevent genocide and other forms of oppression throughout the world. And though families should be free to choose their life styles, religions, homes, etc., abuse is an issue for all of us. Inaction on this issue is complicity.

Violence 265.
Violence is part of life. If we're lucky and, to some degree, careful, it isn't a big part of our lives. We try to live in places where violence is less prevalent. Some people move from nations where violence is too common to nations that seem safer. Within a nation, people seek out sections that seem safe. It's not the only priority; affordability of homes, convenience, schools, community character, and other factors contribute to the complications when people decide where to live. But safety is a pretty important factor, and people often decide to spend more than they want to and/or commute further than they want to make sure their families are safe from violence. And some can't, but wish they could.
Once we have given our children the safest homes we can, they turn on the television, go to the movies, play a video or computer game, or open a comic book, and there's the violence we worked so hard to avoid. For the time being, at least, it won't physically hurt them; they're still safe. But it can fascinate them. Some of it depicts the real violence we may have struggled to avoid or escape, and some is violent fantasy.
One possible response to this phenomenon is to carefully monitor all media our children see. We can ban certain television shows, movies, games, or comic books. Much of what's left may be boring to our children, but it doesn't have to be; life and art can be quite exciting without being violent. But we have to recognize that part of the appeal of media violence is how exciting it can be.
I remember seeing the movie "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1966. It was the first time I'd seen violence that looked real; the camera stayed focussed on people after they'd been shot. Up till then, cameras had made violence seem fun. At first I thought this new approach, though disgusting, would have good effects, making people aware that real violence is not fun.
But that didn't happen. "Bonnie and Clyde" was a trend-setter; people now expect to see the blood and guts that shocked people when they first saw "Bonnie and Clyde." And that includes children.
As I tried to hold back the rising tide of media violence, both as a parent and as a teacher, it became clear to me that it wasn't going to be easy. There came a point when I started to see that my attempts to ban violence were making it harder to relate with some children. If I was just going to be another adult who was going to react with indignation when they told me about their favorite destructive monsters, I wasn't going to be as able to know some children.
So now, a child who gets a new action hero doll gets positive attention from me. I try to work my pacifist reaction into the conversation in a way that doesn't get the child to look elsewhere for appreciation. And as I help a child write a story about this action hero, I try to gently guide the child away from violence. I still feel the indignance I've always felt, but if I let on too soon or too firmly, I don't stand a chance of having an effect. Anger 266.
It's certainly no coincidence that I'm writing about anger right after I wrote about violence. Violence is a very common and unfortunate companion to anger, and I think it's a major reason anger has such a bad name. Like sadness, it's too often seen as something to get rid of quickly, or hide, rather than as a legitimate emotion from which to learn.
But anger has motivated many people to do many great things. When people are angry about something, and think clearly about their anger, they find ways to express their anger, and when appropriate, act on it. Often, they get good things to happen, and their lives and others' lives are better off.
As I tried to think of examples from history, of course violent examples came to mind first. Colonists got angry about taxation without representation, and dumped some tea into Boston Harbor - a relatively peaceful act - but their anger was more frequently expressed in acts of violence. Furthermore, as they dumped the tea, they were disguised as people who had other reasons for being angry. Not a very good example.
But as I taught children about Mohandas Gandhi or Rosa Parks, I stressed the fact that these two people were often angry. They were angry about injustice, hatred, and violence. While I didn't know either one of them, and couldn't tell children specifically how Gandhi and Parks had learned to express anger peacefully, I told them about the good effects of the words and actions that expressed the anger. India ceased to be an English colony, and buses in Montgomery were desegregated.
Anger really is okay. It took me years to learn that, and I almost wrote "Anger is good," which isn't quite what I mean. Emotions are morally neutral, but when they are handled well, they can inspire words and actions that have good effects. Most of us, I think, have experienced people's anger in ways that make us want to stay away from it, and to make sure we don't express anger.
For the most part, we're still not doing a great job handling our own anger, and so, of course, we're not teaching children effective ways to handle theirs. Children see how their models (both the real-life ones and the media models) get angry ("Don't get mad; get even"). And that's what they learn. They learn that "good" people don't express anger, and they grow up with the same problems we grew up with.
This pattern makes me angry. What I do with that anger is write about it and teach. I hope that has the effect I want it to have. I'm sure violent acts wouldn't.

Self-Motivated Learners 267.
When I was in high school, I had a friend named Michael Cohen who wanted to learn Latin. I have no idea why he wanted to learn it. There were about twenty of us who had been taking Latin for three years, but not Michael; he wasn't in the "honor group," so he hadn't been placed in the Latin class in junior high. But unlike most of the people in my Latin class (including me), he really wanted to learn Latin.
So Michael called me up every night, and I taught him Latin for about a half hour. This went on for about a year, until he was finally allowed to take Latin. I don't remember whether he had to take first year Latin. I hope not. He should have gotten some credit for all the work he'd done to learn the language on his own, or at least without the help of any paid teachers. To this day, I wonder where his motivation had come from.
Now, I'm teaching Russian to a second-grader named Frederick. I volunteer in Frederick's class, and sometimes his teacher asks me to help him write or proofread a story. He's learning disabled, and the regular work he does in school is hard enough; if you thought of learning as work, you'd probably think Frederick had enough work to do without learning Russian. I worry that Russian may get in his way as he's learning to read and write English.
But Frederick doesn't seem to be worried about that. So every time he gets a chance, he asks me how to say something in Russian. Sometimes he asks me how to say things I don't know how to say, and I later ask my friend who is fluent in Russian. The next day, I tell Frederick. His memory is not great, but this is important to him, and when he forgets Russian words, he asks me to remind him.
I've considered the possibility that Frederick just likes spending time with me, and sees this as a way to be able to do it. So I suggest other ways we could spend time together - playing games, talking (in English), or studying things that are not quite so challenging. But he wants to learn Russian.
So much of the learning we do is required - so much teaching is so carefully planned - that what happened with Michael Cohen and Frederick may seem a little strange to you. I don't think it's strange, though. I think it's a little closer to education than a lot of what happens in school. I don't mean this as a criticism of school; we can't really have one teacher per child. But it's good to keep in mind that people really do have things they want to learn.

Some Gaps 268.
I realize that there's only a certain amount that can be taught and learned in school, but I think there have been important gaps in our education due to the simple fact that the people who plan curriculum and implement it are usually educators. Not everyone who goes to school plans to be an educator, just as not everyone who goes to the movies plans to go to Hollywood and be a movie star. But a disproportionate number of movies are about Hollywood and movie stars, and I think a disproportionate amount of school curriculum teaches people how to function in school.
People ought to choose their careers based on having become somewhat familiar with all the options, but I suspect that many choose to become teachers because they've been taught by teachers, and don't know much about any other options. To a certain degree, there's not a lot that can be done about that, but it may help to take a little look at the gaps and think about what could be done.
When I first started to drive, I started my car by inserting a key into a little slot and turning it. That started the motor. Years later, I bought a new car, and had to also press the clutch down with my left foot to start it. There were some people who had learned more about motors, but for the most part, the more they knew about motors, the less I knew them. I often got better grades than some people who knew a lot about motors, but when I had car trouble, I'd be at their mercy; the good grades didn't make me any smarter about carburetors, alternators, etc.
Now, I don't drive any more, but I use a computer, and just as I used to hope my car didn't develop problems, I dearly hope my computer doesn't. I know a few tricks to solve some computer problems, but if they don't work, I'm at the mercy of people who know all about computers, or at least seem to.
And there's a whole world of finances that has always been strange to me. There have been ways to learn about cars, computers, finances, and more - even courses in schools (I know about schools), but where were they when I needed them? I was busy learning how to diagram sentences while the auto mechanics were learning how to change fan belts. They've never come to me to have their sentences diagrammed, but I've occasionally had to come to them to have my fan belt changed.
Practical skills have traditionally been family matters, not school matters. But families vary. In some families, practical learning doesn't happen much. We have schools so that we can learn things our families don't teach us. So how about teaching about life insurance, auto repair, and other practical matters?

Confidence and Originality 269.
As a young child, I brought home a poem I'd written for my mother for Valentine's Day. She was so moved by it. I didn't tell her that whoever had written my spelling book had also written that poem. I told her I'd made it up. I wanted her to know just how special she was, and how special I was. The fact that I hadn't made up the poem seemed to be a minor, insignificant detail, and I didn't want to trouble her with it.
People do that all the time. That is, they send people cards that contain heart-felt messages they didn't make up. There are entire aisles in pharmacies, supermarkets, and elsewhere that are full of very personal messages written by strangers. Part of the reason may be that people don't have time to write their own messages, but I suspect that a bigger part of the reason is lack of confidence.
As I help young children write stories now, occasionally I encounter children who want to write stories they've seen in movies, or read in books. Sometimes they want to write about characters they've seen on television shows, or in video games. I don't lecture them about copyright law, and if I don't manage to elicit totally original characters and plots from them, I don't take any legal action. They eventually need to know about plagiarism, and they need to become more confident in their own creativity, but there's time.
Adults who write usually know about plagiarism, and if they don't have confidence in their own writing, they tend not to write much. In school, that's not an option. And some children don't believe in themselves enough to look inside themselves to find the stories that are there. Maybe some spend so much time absorbing the stories created for books, TV, and movies that even when they do look inside themselves, they find other people's characters and stories.
And so teachers read stories that are strikingly similar to stories children got elsewhere. Most teachers don't spend much time watching Saturday morning cartoons, playing video games, seeing children's movies, or reading Sweet Valley Twins or Babysitters' Club books, but it's usually easy to detect ready-made characters and stories anyway. If a teacher knows a child, it very quickly becomes obvious when a story does not come from the child's own thought and experience.
Then it's time to guide the child toward originality. Accusing a child of copying someone else's story is not a very effective technique; children need to learn about the treasury of stories that are in them, and until they are confident that those stories really exist, they lean on whatever resources they can think of.

My Khmer Hour 270.
Each week, I spend an hour in a small room with seven children whose first language was Khmer, and their teacher, whose first language was also Khmer. She teaches them to read and write Khmer. At first, I didn't think I'd have much of a role to play in this class. I know two Khmer words: "jumbarepsua" ("hello") and "jumbareprea" ("good-bye"). These words are useful for a very small portion of the hour I spend there.
But I do have an important role there. I am an adult who cannot understand their language, and though I can read some facial expressions, hear intonations, read body language, and use other cues to figure out some of what is going on, I mostly have no idea what is being said. I sit there, watching the teacher, listening to all that is said, trying to make some sense out of it. When children glance in my direction, they see an adult who is trying to understand what is going on and only succeeding a little.
I stay cheerful, and try to look the way we want the children to look when they don't understand everything that's being said. Two of them, at least, have begun to think of school as a place to be bored, and they've started inventing their own ways to make it interesting. I see one of them in his regular class, and occasionally help him with math. I know how distractible he is when English is a factor, and he focuses a little better without English, but I think his distractibility would be an issue in any language.
So I am a model. It isn't easy to pay attention when I don't understand much of what is being said. So I model effort and concentration. Just between you and me, there are times, during that hour, when I feel like giving up and doing something else, somewhere else. But I stay there. I know that those seven children know that they understand Khmer and I don't, and I want to make sure they see me trying. I'm a very slow learner in Khmer, and they know I'm pretty smart in English. I hope that my modelling is helping them gain some perspective on their own difficulty in the regular classroom.
Before the children leave the room, each one puts his/her hands together, bows her/his head, smiles, and says, "Jumbareprea." Later, when I see one of them outside of this Khmer haven, we have a special connection. They know that I understand how difficult school is for them, because they've seen it be difficult for me. I've spoken with their teachers, letting them know a little about what I've seen. I think I may learn a little Khmer from this experience, but more importantly, I'm learning about how challenging school can be for some children.

Family Planning 271.
I went to sleep one night determined that when I woke up, I'd write an article about family planning. I didn't sleep well that night. I woke up at 1:00 deciding that the concept of family planning required several articles. I woke up again about 2:30 remembering a talk I'd had with a friend who thinks it's selfish for someone to decide to become a single parent. I decided that there is some selfishness involved, and realized that I hope the decision to create me was somewhat selfish. I hope and believe that my existence has given plenty of pleasure to my parents. Around 4:00, I decided to start out by focussing on the degree to which the term "family planning" is an oxymoron.
When teachers write lesson plans, they know that the lessons they plan may not take shape the way they intended them to. There can be problems with the materials, the media, or the people involved. There may be a fire drill at a crucial, "teachable" moment, and a well-planned lesson may lose some of its effectiveness. But tomorrow's another day, there's some flexibility in most curricula, and if worst comes to worst, there will be another class next year, or another career that is more suitable.
The decision to have a child ought to be a fairly conscious decision; it's more irrevocable than any lesson plan. But it can't be made with total awareness of what parenting that child involves. Prospective parents spend so much time deciding on a name for a child, only to get a letter from college, eighteen years later: "I've decided not to be Susan any more. My new name is Mehitabel. There are too many Susans here." And Mehitabel, whose parents expected her to be a doctor, becomes a freelance writer. So much for family planning.
A child may turn out to have problems that weren't expected. Maybe the child doesn't look much like the parent or parents. The possibilities are endless. Parents are not going to end up with the sons and/or daughters they had in mind. Family planning is, to some degree, impossible.
I don't mean to turn this into a word game. I know what I'm talking about is not exactly what people usually have in mind when they talk about family planning. They're usually thinking about birth control, planned conception, and the issues these concepts bring up. But even when we focus on the usual meaning of "family planning," I think it retains its status as an oxymoron.
So before I go any further with this issue, think about your friends. How many of them were conceived accidentally, intentionally, ambivalently? You probably don't know. You may not know which adverb applies to your own conception. Families happen, for better or worse, and the best parents do the best they can. Whether or not children are conceived and born according to their parents' plans is not as earth-shaking an issue as it's sometimes treated. More on this later. Irene and Renee 272.
Many children, after a full day at school, come home to one parent. For some, there's another parent who lives there, too, but maybe that parent won't be home until much later. For others, the other parent lives somewhere else, but is still involved. And for still others, there is no other parent. Of course, for many, no parent is home. Maybe an au pair or other responsible adult is there. Or maybe the child is home alone. Probably the least common situation of all in our culture is one in which the child comes home to be greeted by two parents.
In all of these situations, the children have homes and parents. Not all children do. People who are used to one of the situations described above may envy or pity people in other situations. They may also condemn. But envy, pity, and condemnation are not very useful. It helps to look at situations and learn. So I'll describe one of the situations, and hope that you can look at it simply for what it is.
Seven-year-old Renee comes home from school. Her mother, Irene, who has spent the morning at her job and the afternoon at home doing housework, is waiting for her. Renee hugs Irene somewhat quickly, and then proceeds to tell her about something that happened at school. Irene doesn't have to feign interest; she loves Renee, and wants to know how her day has gone. There's no doubt in Renee's mind that she is loved. She has heard about children who don't get much love (including some who have more parents than Renee has - quantity isn't the same as quality), and she feels pretty lucky.
Sometimes Renee and Irene argue. Irene sets some limits Renee sometimes tests. Irene isn't perfect, either; she has her moods. If some critic walked in at the wrong time, the critic could conclude that the family is disfunctional. I don't know of any families that don't have their disfunctional moments. Do you?
But Renee and Irene are more functional as a family than the national average. When Irene's or Renee's friends visit, they have good times together. Sometimes they go places together. Sometimes they stay home and play games, or just talk. Irene and Renee are very lucky to have these friends, and even luckier to have each other.
I suppose I should tell you about Renee's "father." He knew that there were some unmarried women who wanted children, and he donated some of his own sperm to a sperm bank so that they could. He's a nice guy who just doesn't want children - maybe never will. He runs a consulting service, spends some time jogging, occasionally dates, and though he occasionally wonders whether there is some child somewhere who has some of his genes, he's much more involved with things he does know about.
I think people waste a lot of time envying, pitying, and condemning other people who have figured out how to live their lives. I think the time would often be better spent figuring out how to live their own lives, and living. That's what Irene and Renee are doing.
Diagnoses 273.
It is useful to figure out why children sometimes have difficulty learning, and since most learning problems are somewhat similar to problems that have shown up before in other children, people who think about these things are apt to use labels. Labels are simply words; they don't tell the whole story, but used wisely, they can help us to focus.
Doctors have been diagnosing for a long time, so they have lots of labels. Occasionally, a doctor attends a meeting to discuss a child's learning difficulties, and teachers, administrators, and parents listen intently to what the doctor says, perhaps thinking, this is not a regular person like us; this is a doctor!
Many doctors have studied long and hard to enter one of the medical
professions, and many have also learned a great deal through their experiences. Their input is often helpful in schools. But they are regular people like us, and parents, teachers, and administrators have intelligence and wisdom, too. When an educator or doctor diagnoses a child's problem, that diagnosis is a tool that can be used for thinking and communicating. Other people's experiences with children who face similar obstacles have sometimes uncovered approaches that work. It can help to know that a child is deaf in one ear, has difficulty processing visual stimuli, or faces any of a multitude of challenges, because those challenges may have been faced successfully before, and it helps to know that, and to know how it was done.
Once a diagnosis is made, we've got to be careful how we use it. We tend to think of a disease or difficulty as one thing, and in some ways, it is. But a human being is many things, and however scientifically we describe symptoms, whatever diagnoses we make have to be seen only as tools, not as answers. Such an approach helps to maintain the view of a person as a person. A friend of mine, who is an expert on some of the special needs children have, is careful to say "a child with autism" rather than "an autistic child," because she wants to stress the humanity of the child, avoiding the dehumanizing tendency for people to see the diagnosis instead of the child.
I'm someone who has been diagnosed with a medical problem - MS. It makes it so that it's hard for me to do some things I used to do easily. Multiple sclerosis, probably more than other diseases, affects different people in different ways. Some have lots of trouble with it, and some have very little. And people manage it in many different ways. It's not ordinarily recognized as a learning disability, partly because it rarely strikes children, who are the most likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities. And I'm glad I'm seen mostly as "a person with multiple sclerosis," and not as "an MS person."
Tying Your Camel 274.
There's an Arabic proverb which says, "Have faith in Allah, but tie your camel." Children (and adults) want us to trust them, and are occasionally offended when our words or behaviors suggest that we don't. As I see it, trust is a concept that is more complicated than it's sometimes seen to be. You've got to have faith that a person means well, is capable, will remember, and is lucky.
I have lots of faith in lots of people, but there are some things I insist on doing myself. I once let a trusted friend mail some things for me, including a checking account deposit. A few weeks later, several checks bounced. My trusted friend had mailed the deposit, but had gotten distracted, and had taken a little extra time to do it. Now, a little sadder and a little wiser, I mail everything myself. I still trust my friends, but I only trust them to be as reliable as I am, and since I'm forgetful, I trust them to be forgetful, too.
And when a child asks, "Don't you trust me?", there isn't necessarily an easy answer. I, personally, usually trust children's intentions. I think they want to be responsible, honest, competent - trustworthy. But I think there's a lot more to it than that.
Let's follow a child named Terry as she/he takes some money to a nearby convenience store to get a dozen eggs. My parents trusted me, thinks Terry, and I'm going to show them that that's wise. The first thing Terry sees in the store is some candy. Terry's parents have told him/her it's okay to get some candy with the change. But there are also some stickers that look really attractive. No, thinks Terry. I've come here to get eggs.
The eggs are in the refrigerated section, in the back. It turns out that some of the containers only contain six eggs, and they're only a little more than half the price of a dozen! There are only three people in the family, and Terry knows that each of them only eats two eggs. And there's something about cholesterol. It's in eggs, and since it causes some kind of health problem, people aren't supposed to have too many eggs.
Terry buys the eggs, some candy, some stickers, and even has some change to bring back. My parents are going to be so proud, she/he thinks. I've gotten the eggs, gotten some things for myself, and I didn't spend all the money.
Let's leave Terry for now. Perhaps he/she is quite careful on the way home, and all six eggs arrive safely, as does Terry. Perhaps her/his parents are patient, and explain the mistake. Perhaps not. Maybe it's not even treated as a mistake. It's even possible that Terry knew, somewhere inside, that he/she was supposed to get twelve eggs, not six, and that candy and stickers were not supposed to be quite so affordable.
I would still trust Terry. But I'd be more careful next time, explaining the mission in more detail. Or maybe I'd get my own eggs. Trust is complicated.
Letting Go 275.
In 1965, a representative from Beloit College (in Wisconsin) came to Walt Whitman High School (in Huntington, Long Island) to convince us that Beloit was the place for us. He talked about the great academic environment at Beloit. I wasn't impressed. He talked about the terms we'd be able to spend off-campus doing all kinds of interesting work. I wasn't impressed by that, either. What won me over was the fact that Beloit was more than a thousand miles away.
It's not that my parents were abusive or obnoxious. They're pretty good parents. But I had the vague notion that whoever I was was not going to be who I'd been so far, and if I stayed near home, who I'd been so far would be haunting me wherever I went. I saw college as more than just a place to learn a trade; it was a place where I could "find myself."
I didn't spend much time thinking about how much my parents would
miss me, or how much I'd miss them. They were hurt by my obsession with "escaping" from Long Island. Did it mean they had failed as parents? No. It meant they'd succeeded in getting me to a point where I was at least interested in becoming my own person. Some people can do that near where they grew up, and some can't. I couldn't.
So I went to Beloit College, and even lived and taught in Beloit for a year after I graduated. I got married there, and my older daughter was born there. I had established my turf, and when my parents came to visit, there was no doubt that they were the visitors. I'm sure that they kept hoping I'd return to Long Island, and though I did move east, I never moved back "home."
And then my daughters grew up. One went to school in Burlington, Vermont, and one in Olympia, Washington. My own "escape" had been recent enough that I didn't try to talk them out of it. I understood the need to get a fresh start. It's not a universal human need; some people are quite content to stay with their families. But I had to respect their decisions to get away. And for all I know, those decisions may have had more to do with Burlington and Olympia than with me or their mother.
Maybe you have a son or daughter who is going to go to college, or has some other reason to find a new place. And maybe it will be far away. If so, I hope there isn't too much pain involved. It may be that it's something that just has to happen. And it may be that you aren't being rejected - that you've raised someone who is ready to move on to the rest of life. Sometimes you just have to let go.
Colleagues 276.
If you're a teacher, there's probably another teacher next door or down the hall, doing what you're doing, but not the way you're doing it. Ideally, you get some time to trade successful ideas with this teacher, and warn each other about possible problems. Ideally, you respect each other and see each other as comrades in the struggle to educate children in the best possible way.
There are many teachers who do develop this kind of give-and-take relationship. But it doesn't always start that way, or even end up that way. For one reason or another, there are teachers who avoid each other, harbor ill feelings about each other, and don't seem to stand a chance of becoming each other's colleagues.
As a fairly opinionated teacher, I spent a lot of time disapproving of things other teachers did. I also disapproved of some things I did, but I knew why I did them, forgave myself, and tried to stop doing them. I rarely gave other teachers credit for that same commitment to growth, but in retrospect, and as a volunteer now, I think commitment to growth is a lot more common than I'd thought.
Teachers do, in fact, have a lot to learn from each other. Even teachers who seem to be on the opposite ends of some spectra. Without competition for approval, job security, and "rightness," it is possible for teachers to clearly see each other's strengths, and learn from each other. Cooperative learning is not just for children.
It's too bad that I had to retire before I could clearly see other teachers as colleagues. I know there are plenty of paid teachers who already learn from each other whenever they get opportunities. I remember my own reaction to hearing administrators suggest that I learn from other teachers. I was usually pretty defensive (Why should I learn from them? They should be learning from me!)
Nowadays, when I find myself disapproving of a teacher, I let it happen for a while, but not too long. Maybe there are teachers who are doing things I consider ineffective or destructive. But lately I've discovered that those same teachers are often doing things that could serve as positive models for other teachers.
I don't think my own reluctance to treat other teachers as colleagues was very unusual. Even the best of schools, managed by the best of administrators, contain traces of competitiveness and hostility among teachers. I know there are teachers who rarely talk to each other (though they may often talk about each other). I don't know how to deal with those walls. But I'm convinced that there's a lot to be gained by getting rid of them.

A Practical Decision 277.
Throughout most of my life, I've had a reputation, real or imagined, accurate or inaccurate, for being impractical. And I have made some decisions that would have been made better if I'd taken more details into account. Recently, I've noticed that people have begun to ask me for practical advice, and I've been surprised to be able to give them some, and to be thanked after the advice has proven to be useful.
But the advice I intend to give at the end of this article may represent some regression to my former mindset. So be it. I've been looking back a bit, looking at where I am now, and thinking that one of what some of my wise friends called "mistakes" may not have been a mistake. Perhaps, for my friends, it would have been a mistake, but I don't regret it; I'm glad I made one of the "unwise" decisions I made.
I'm referring to the decision my wife and I made to become parents. And since I'm the one writing this article, I'm actually only referring to my part of the decision. Back then, most of the college-educated portion of my generation was deciding not to have children, or at least not until much later. My daughters' friends' parents usually were either older than we were or were not college-educated. Now, my friends who are my age mostly either have children much younger than my daughters or don't have any children.
The "wisdom" was all around us back in 1969, and to some degree, we heard it: don't have children until you have a house; you can't save up for a house as easily when you have children. Don't have children until you have a secure career; there won't be time to focus on career issues when you have children. Work on your marriage first. Wait until you have more of a sense of who you are - what's important to you. All of that advice was really wise, and it may well be that we and our children would be better off if we'd followed it.
But as I said, I'm glad I became a parent when I did. I'm twenty-one years older than one of my daughters and twenty-two years older than the other. So far, they haven't decided to have children, but if they do, I stand a chance of putting in plenty of grandparenting time. I'm excited about that possibility; I think grandparenting is largely a lost art, and I hope to help revive it. I'm also glad my daughters are not far removed from my generation; they may not remember the fifties and sixties, but at least they remember some of the seventies. And most important of all, I became a parent when I wanted to.
So I'm going to give a bit of advice that is probably different from what you're used to hearing: notwithstanding your situation with regard to employment, real estate, finances, and other practical details, give some weight to your desire to be a parent. If children grow up knowing they were wanted and knowing they're loved, it may not matter so much whether all the details called "practical" fall neatly into place. Useful Distractions 278.
Sometimes, when you're travelling a long distance in a car, or have some other reason to need some silence and peace, there are children with you who do not feel at all peaceful, and do not feel that silence would be an effective way to express what they're feeling. It's important for children to know that you respect their feelings, and so children who are crying loudly, or otherwise altering the peaceful atmosphere you need, must be heard. Besides, you'll hear them whether or not you listen.
Once, travelling from Natick to Amherst (about eighty miles) with a cranky four-year-old child in the car, I struggled with this issue for a while. At first I thought, the feelings this child is expressing are real, and though I'm skilled at distracting children, I've done that too often in my life, and however disturbing it may be to cope with this trauma, the child's feelings must be heard.
That line of thinking lasted up to Westborough. I was a passenger, not a driver. I was the only adult in the car who did not have the awesome responsibility of getting us from one place to another safely, and it didn't take me too long to see what my job was: I was the one who ought to deal with the growing temper tantrum. Summoning up skills I hadn't used in about twenty years, I looked up at the sky for a distraction (I was in the front seat, and the child was in the back).
"Where are the stars?" I asked. "I'm looking up at the sky, and I can't see the stars!" I said these words with just a little bit of panic in my voice. Just between you and me, I actually did have a pretty good idea of why I couldn't see the stars, but I had to do something.
"The clouds are covering them," answered the child, who knew what it was like to worry about things not being the way you expect them to be. I'm sure that on some level, she knew that I knew where the stars were, but this was an issue she hadn't expected, and she was quite ready to play along.
I told her that I was going to ask the clouds very nicely to move aside a little so I could see the stars. I tried it, and waited for a few seconds. There was silence in the car (aha!). I told her it hadn't worked. I still couldn't see the stars. She explained to me that even though the clouds were alive, they weren't real, and they couldn't talk (You may think the clouds are real, but not alive. Small, unimportant detail). I insisted on trying again, but being less nice about it. This time I got tough with the clouds.
We spent the time from Westborough to Sturbridge playing with this subject. All the while, a little voice inside me was telling me that I was doing the child a disservice - getting the child to stop thinking about some real stuff that was bothering her, by distracting her with a silly game. I'm sure there have been times I've done that when it would have been better to have listened to children's real concerns.
But it worked. In fact, by the time we got to Palmer, she was asleep. "You Acted So Grown-Up Today" 279.
It's not unusual for a child to hear this compliment from an adult: "You acted so grown-up today." I think there's something wrong with that compliment. We may occasionally compliment adults by telling them they look young, but we don't usually say to them, with pride in our voices, "You acted so much like a child today."
Since growth is usually a goal we have for our children, we try to reinforce it in the way we bestow our praises. And children learn to take pride in their growth. They'd probably feel pretty good about it whether we praised it or not; it's fun to be able to do and to know what you couldn't do and didn't know before. Still, praise can sometimes help.
But there's another way to think about this. Children are, in fact, not grown-ups. From their point of view, they won't be grown-ups for a long time. What they are is children. So in a way, the proud words and looks say to them, "I'm so proud of you that you make me forget about your intrinsic inferiority. You make me think you're something you actually aren't, and because I think that, I'm proud of you."
I may be nit-picking. If we're proud of the growth we see in our children, it may not matter so much which words we use to let them know about our pride. They may quickly, unconsciously translate any inaccurate statements we make, and simply feel appreciated: "I'm not a grown-up, and I know that. What this adult really means is that I did or said something good."
Since children mostly want to grow up, we can begin to think of maturity as the carrot at the end of the stick: "Do what I want you to do, and I'll think of you as more of a grown-up." Maybe the child shares, waits, or stays quiet at appropriate times. And there are actually plenty of adults who do those things, too. But we and children also know adults who don't.
And besides, what's wrong with being a child? If there's something intrinsically better about being a grown-up, then there must also be something worse about being a child. And I don't think there is. Maturity will come in good time, and childhood is good, too. Patience, generosity, etc. are not quite so dependent on age.
But really, I don't think it's such a big deal. I hope this article didn't make you think you're doing anything wrong. In fact, I'm proud of you for reading the whole article; most young and middle-aged adults probably wouldn't have finished it; I think reading the whole thing was very old of you.

Bilingual Education 280.
I'm confused about the issue of bilingual education. At first, I thought I'd avoid writing about it until I was able to think clearly about it, but I'm beginning to think that confusion about it is evidence of clear thinking. If I'm ever able to stand confidently on one side of the issue, I'll write another article. Until then, I'll share my confusion with you.
In high school, I read The Ugly American. One of the messages I got from the book was that when you go to another country, it's a good idea to know the language and culture of that country. That it's chauvanistic to expect the people in that country to speak English and behave exactly the way people back home behaved. I resolved to try to learn other languages, so that I could communicate with a larger portion of the human race. And eventually, I did learn bits of other languages.
When children came to my class from other countries, I tried to learn and teach my class some key words and phrases. In Japanese, "Ah-so-bee-MAH-sho?" means "Will you play with me?" Children in my class sometimes learned to say that, and it made recess a little friendlier once in a while. If a Japanese child had ever responded in Japanese by suggesting a game, or explaining why she/he didn't feel like playing, the non-Japanese children wouldn't have completely understood, although head-shaking, vocal tone, and facial expressions can convey part of the message.
But what about the message I got from The Ugly American? Are we an exception - an unusual country that will truly lift a lamp beside a golden door, welcoming people from around the world, and encouraging people to bring their languages and cultures with them? Or to what degree are we one of those provincial places whose game rules you've got to know in order to get along?
I like the idea of the Statue of Liberty. I'd like to think the United States is a place where people from around the world can find a home. Eventually, I'd like the whole world to be that way. It's a little embarrassing, but when I went to Disney World, I went on the "It's a Small World" ride four times. And I'd like to go on it again.
But the United States is not yet a place where it doesn't matter what language you speak, or what your traditions are. Knowledge of English - especially the ability to speak without a "foreign" accent - is still a distinct economic and social advantage. We can aspire to become more of a welcoming country. But meanwhile, to what degree are those Khmer, Portugese, or Russian bilingual classes making children's adjustment easier, and to what degree are they postponing a necessary task that's more easily accomplished early?
Though my questions about bilingual education may sound (to those of you who have already taken sides) as if I agree with you, I honestly don't know where I stand on this issue. The Threshold 281.
There's a place between impossible and too easy where learning happens best. When people find themselves in that place, learning is exciting and enjoyable. Every new bit of skill or knowledge makes the learner want more. People who are lucky enough to spend a lot of time in that place know about the feeling of success, and are often willing to deal with extra challenge when it happens. They know about the light at the end of the tunnel.
Teachers try to plan lessons that bring children to that place. But several factors can make it difficult. First of all, there's diversity and class size. A tutor teaching one child can pay attention to every bit of feedback that the child gives. Facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, and language give the teacher plenty of clues about what to do. But one teacher can't be as aware of all the feedback coming from a class full of children.
Another factor is children's previous success and failure. If a child knows from experience that difficult work can be done, and that the results are worth the effort, more becomes possible. But if failure has been the name of the game so far, any perceived challenge can feel like an ill omen. So good teachers try to provide lots of experiences wherein success is likely.
Lack of challenge is sometimes a little less of a problem. When children do work they call "too easy," they can occasionally benefit from it. They may be calling it "too easy" a little prematurely. But a steady diet of lessons that teach what children already know can get children to tune out just as surely as the lessons that go over their heads; children want to be respected for what they know, and they want to move on to what they don't know.
This is much easier said than done. Teaching would be easier if feedback were consistent and reliable. The best of tests are designed and used to provide that feedback and plan strategies. If a little light bulb flashed or a bell rang every time a child learned, teachers might have some better chances to provide learning experiences (but it could also make the classroom a little too bright or noisy).
But I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen. Teachers are going to have to keep estimating where the learning threshold is for each child, planning lessons accordingly, and learning to guess more and more accurately. With luck, that won't be too challenging. I'm sure it's not too easy.

Showtime 282.
I've seen many good student teachers being observed by their supervisors. And they seldom show their supervisors how good they are. Instead, they try to imagine what their supervisors want to see, and as long as the supervisors are there, they put on the show. When the ordeal is over, and the spotlight is turned off, they turn back into the good teachers they really are.
Some are embarrassed about the way they set limits for children. They actually do it pretty well, but they don't want their supervisors to see that limit-setting. Student teachers worry that they may be too strict, or not strict enough. So they set more or fewer limits than usual, and children are quick to notice that something is different, and change their own behavior accordingly. The ones who respond well to limit-setting - maybe need it - notice its absence. Or the ones who appreciate the freedom they usually have don't respond well to rules that aren't normally there.
Some student teachers, like some teachers, rarely speak to the whole class at once. In my opinion, that's good teaching; many children have trouble spending a lot of time listening to an adult who is in front of the room. But the usual situation, one in which the student teacher gives some quick instructions and then helps individual children follow them, or watches what goes on, intervening only when appropriate, doesn't look, to the student teacher, like what he/she thinks the supervisor wants to see. And so there's a long lecture, filled with attention cues for children who aren't focussing.
A good supervisor can see through the various facades, and see the skill. But I've also seen good supervisors who prevent the whole thing from happening. They let student teachers know what they'd like to see, so there's no second-guessing. Instead of sitting in the back of the room and writing notes, they behave the way they expect student teachers to behave. They move among the children, helping some, conspicuously appreciating what's going on. They smile a lot, which makes both student teachers and children feel more comfortable.
When the observation is over, the kind of supervisor I like has lots of positive things to tell the student teacher, many of which the student teacher may not have noticed, or at least didn't know the supervisor noticed. There are a few suggestions, but they're given in a context of overall approval. Student teaching, especially while being evaluated by a supervisor, can be a terribly intimidating and unsettling experience. I wonder whether supervisors ever get supervised. I hope so.

Those Who Can't Do 283.
Once, I participated in a workshop that focussed on "mid-life transitions." I was in my late thirties, but since, like everyone else, I didn't know how long I'd live, I figured I might as well face whatever mid-life issues I needed to face - try to get them over with. The presenter was eloquent. One of his central points was that if you can teach, you can do just about anything.
At first, it didn't sound right. There were other careers I'd considered, and I'd decided against some of them because they'd seemed too difficult. Eyebrows around the room were raised. What was this guy doing? Trying to trick us into retiring early? But I think we were hearing something that was meant to therapeutically contradict the usual message teachers get: "Those who can't 'do,' teach."
Now that I'm retired, I realize just how wrong that message is. By my standards, teaching an entire class of children is no longer something I can do. Once in a while, a teacher in whose class I'm volunteering has to take a phone call in the office, or has some other reason to need to leave the room (teachers are human, too), and asks me to "watch" the class. By this time, the necessary large group lesson has happened already, or some alternative is already in place. But still, this can't happen too often. I don't have the necessary energy. Leaving the class with me is better than leaving it unattended, but it doesn't take long for me to start hoping the teacher hurries back.
Teaching is work. Real work. The kind of work labor songs should be sung about. And it's not just mental work, although that counts, too. Teaching can involve a lot of moving around. It's not like being a guru; it can't always be done as effectively in lotus position. I know. The year before I retired, I tried to teach without doing the physical work involved.
I asked the custodian to display some of the work children did. I put my student teacher in charge of scenery and choreography for the class play. An artistically talented teaching assistant took care of my bulletin boards. Other teachers took my recess duty. Parent volunteers helped out, too. The amount of support I got was heartwarming. But the bottom line was, the job was work, and required a lot of energy.
Take a good look at even physically healthy teachers after a day of work. I think you'll notice that most of them look tired. Even the ones who have had successful, invigorating days. While I'm still not sure that people who can teach can do just about anything, I'm quite sure that those who can teach can "do".

Quality Time 284.
The term "quality time" started getting popular in the 1970s. I think it was used as an attempt to make people feel better about not spending much time with their children. Somehow, the "quality" of the time parents spent with their children was going to compensate for the lack of quantity. It didn't take long for the phrase to be used more as a parody of itself. The bottom line is, the less time parents spend with their children, the less time they spend with their children. If parents used to spend more time with their children, the quality of that time was not necessarily affected by the quantity.
I once overheard a daughter complaining to her mother that her mother wasn't around enough. I identified with both the mother and the daughter. When I was a child, my mother was usually home, but my father wasn't. And when my daughters were children, I was often attending classes or meetings in the evenings. Once, I even attended a lecture on the importance of spending time with my children, instead of spending time with my children.
I intervened in the mother/daughter conversation. I said to the daughter, "It sounds as if you love your mother, and wish you could spend more time with her." She nodded, and her mother assured her daughter that she felt the same way. My reason for intervening was the memory of how easily that kind of conversation can elicit accusations and stir up feelings of guilt. The hard, painful reality is that people who love each other often have to be away from each other when they'd rather be together. There are other possibilities, but that's one worth considering.
When I got divorced, had my own apartment, and had to spend lots of time away from my children, I started to understand the "Disneyland Dad" stereotype. If I could only have a little time with them, I wanted that time to be memorable, valuable. I wanted it to be "quality time." It never occurred to me that we could just spend regular time together, and that that time could be memorable and valuable.
People have been spending quality time together since long before the 1970s, and they've also been struggling with the difficulty of not being able to be together as much as they'd like to. And it's not an issue that's going to go away. Adults have their careers, hobbies, chores, and other adults. Children have school, lessons, team sports, and friends. I hope that they somehow also find some time to be together. And when they do, I hope they don't feel pressure to make sure that it's "quality time."

Stealing 285.
In our society, when adults steal, they're supposed to be punished. When children steal, they're supposed to be taught not to. That's the way our society works. Some people believe, as I do, that adults should also be taught not to steal, but I don't know how to do that; I specialize in children. And some people don't distinguish punishment from instruction as often as I do. They're quicker to think punishment teaches a lesson.
I think most children steal at some points in their lives, and very few completely outgrow it. They do develop morals. But they also develop a sense of which stealing they're more likely to get away with. If a child finds something he/she wants, she/he is tempted to try to apply the finders/keepers rule. And to some degree, most adults do that, too. If the average adult finds a quarter, you probably don't see that quarter in any lost and found the next day.
Many people don't like the idea of moral relativism. They firmly believe that stealing is wrong, and they rigidly define "stealing." To them,
anyone claiming to own something that rightfully belongs to someone else must be severely punished, no matter how old the "criminal" is. I remember how I reacted to children's stealing when I first started learning about it. As gentle and understanding as I was in most situations, I turned into Kojak when I discovered that a child had stolen. I'd occasionally had something stolen from me. It had made me feel violated, and I certainly wasn't going to allow the younger generation to become thieves.
Children do need to learn not to steal, and it can be effective to establish consequences for stealing. I use the word "consequences," rather than "punishments," but maybe it's only a euphemism; the word "punishment" conjures up visions of prisons and executions in my mind, and I'd rather not use it. But you know what I mean.
That shouldn't be the only form of instruction, though. We've got to make sure children see some examples of our own responses to the temptation to steal. When they see us take that quarter that someone left in a pay phone, they've got to learn a little about why we don't search for the rightful owner of that quarter. And when they see us find something more valuable, they've got to see both our temptation to keep it (if we're tempted) and our decision to resist the temptation.
There's more to think about. Why do children steal? What, if anything does "possession" mean to children? Do children understand the relationship between stealing and punishment, or do they think they're being punished for being the people they are?
This is a difficult, complicated issue, and there's a tendency to try to make it less complicated - to think stealing is wrong, and should be punished, and that's that. That used to be my approach. I still think stealing is wrong, but I've grown less likely to condemn children who steal. I'm a teacher. Punishment is only one instructional technique, and I think other techniques are sometimes more effective.
When Friends Argue 286.
I've come to know that when children who are good friends argue, they usually remain good friends. But they often don't know that. One child may angrily and earnestly say, "I'm never playing with you again." Another may think the world has come to an end; without that particular friendship, nothing will ever be right again. Another may say the former and think the latter.
But the fact is, friends argue. Even the best of friends. There are two important messages I try to give children when I happen to be nearby and available during arguments. One is that the argument may not herald the end of the friendship, and the other is that the end of the friendship isn't the end of the world. Children who are in the midst of arguments may not be ready to hear either message, and I don't push too hard if they're not ready. But I do try.
Roughly half of the adults reading this who have been married have also been divorced, and roughly all adults have had arguments with good friends. Depending on your own experiences, you may take children's arguments too seriously or not seriously enough. So may I. It's sad when good friendships don't seem to be working, and we don't want sad things to happen.
Besides, maybe adults have vested interests in children's friendships. The parents may be friends, too, and it's very convenient when the children can play together while the adults talk together. It's also easier to trade child care if the children get along well. If the parents don't know each other so well, still, it's easier to get some things done if your child has a good friend over, or is at the good friend's home. And last, but not least, it's hard to see children having trouble without trying to do something about it. We care about them.
But arguments are real, and are sometimes difficult for children to handle alone. I know adults who stay out of it. They believe children have to learn about the hard parts of friendship the hard way, and they think helping a friendship through a rough time isn't really helping at all. I know other adults who do all they can and more to make sure children's friendships survive.
I don't agree with either extreme. We adults know some things about friendship that we can help children learn, and there are other things children have to learn on their own. And which is which varies from child to child and friendship to friendship. So when you see two children who are good friends arguing with each other, I wish you lots of wisdom and good luck.

When Boys Express Feelings 287.
I used to be a boy, and boy, it took a long time to come to terms with some of the stuff boys had to grow up with. A good friend of mine (who also used to be a boy) read my article called "When Friends Argue" and asked me why he doesn't remember experiencing all the trauma he sees his daughters experiencing - traumas about who likes whom, who doesn't like whom any more, and all that.
I told him that we boys weren't supposed to think or talk about those difficulties we had with our friends. We were supposed to somehow be above all that. If someone didn't like us, or did at first and then changed, we were supposed to ignore whatever pain we felt about it, and go on about the business of life.
I do remember the pain, though. It didn't ruin my life, as it didn't ruin the lives of the children who were allowed to show it (back then, mostly girls). But the boy who was my best friend in second and third grade stopped being my best friend in fourth grade. Another boy moved into the house next door to him and became his new best friend. And I had to search for another best friend, or not have one.
Years later, I wrote a song about the trauma, but in order to make it sound more believable, I changed the characters to girls. In my experience, girls were the ones who could express their feelings. And since I had strong feelings, and wanted to be able to express them and be heard, most of my good friends (after third grade) were girls. Only recently have I developed strong friendships with men.
At first, my friendships with people of my gender were saturated with jokes. But gradually, I learned that some of the serious stuff I'd previously discussed only with women were okay to talk about with men. Some of my male friends had faced difficulties similar to what I had faced, and had been affected in similar ways.
I hope things have changed, and I know they have for some boys. But I also know things have stayed the same for too many. For every father who encourages his son to express his feelings, there's at least one who tells his son not to. There's a certain point in the average boy's life when he learns that he's supposed to stifle his tender feelings, his vulnerability, his sensitivity. But it's not healthy to stifle all that. It causes psychological problems, and probably some physical problems, too. So let's cut it out, guys. Okay?

Parenting Adults 288.
In my social circle, it's not cool to make a big thing about age. So some of my friends are in their eighties, and some are in their twenties. True, most of my best friends are about my age (forty-seven, at the time of this writing), but I try to think that's because of the post-war baby boom. When I feel parental about my younger friends or filial about my older friends, I try not to let those feelings have negative effects on the friendship. In fact, they often have positive effects.
But there are four people with whom there's an extra challenge: my two daughters and my parents. All five of us are adults, but there's a dynamic at work when I relate to my daughters or parents that isn't there with anyone else. If my parents comment on the way I live my life, it means more than when their contemporaries make the same comments. And my opinions on my daughters' lives (and their mother's opinions) mean more to them than other baby-boomers' opinions.
Ideally, parents have spent some significant years getting their sons and daughters ready for life, and sons and daughters have spent some of those same years relying on their parents. In most parental/filial relationships, there's been some time when those roles have caused conflicts: people have disagreed about who's ready for what, who's relying on whom, and whose life is whose. If that even starts to happen with any of my friends who are in their twenties or eighties, it's relatively easy to resolve the matters. We either come to understandings, "agree to disagree," or ease off on the friendship.
But it's a little more complicated when there's actual parenting involved. Sometimes, when I say something to one of my daughters, I've temporarily forgotten (at least consciously) that I'm the father, and my daughter's response or reaction quickly reminds me. And when words come to me from my parents, I try to think of my parents as friends who just happen to be older than I am, and evaluate their words as I would any other friends' words. But it doesn't usually work. If my parents think I'm doing something the right or wrong way, there's a powerful tendency to take their words as gospel. I hope my daughters don't have the same tendency with my opinions, but they may.
I've only recently started parenting adults (my daughters are 25 and 26). I want to do it well, but I'm not sure what doing it well means. I've written a lot about parenting and teaching children. I think I've done both pretty well. Maybe in about twenty years I'll write more authoritatively about the ins, outs, ups, and downs of parenting adults.

Groups 289.
The first time I heard a teacher refer to the parents of children in her class as "my parents," it was confusing. But I haven't yet been able to come up with another quick phrase a teacher can use to describe that group of adults. Like all groups, it's composed of individuals, and most generalizations won't apply to all the individuals.
Nevertheless, a teacher's "parents" can become a group with a character of its own. In part, that character may exist only in the teacher's mind. Maybe there are a few parents who say a lot, and the teacher hears them as representatives of the whole group. They may be supportive, critical, or apathetic. In the teacher's mind, those few parents are almost everyone, and no matter how many exceptions there are to the pattern set by this inner core, they're only exceptions.
But maybe it's not just a matter of perception. One year, I had a class in which children seemed to have formed two very distinct social groups. The few children who didn't belong to either group suffered, as did children who tried to make friends outside their own group. I tried to use my own repertoire of strategies to correct the problem, but I had little success. So in January, I asked parents to come to school after hours to discuss the problem. We had a great discussion, and it felt as if we were united in our attempt to solve the problem. But after the meeting, parents kept discussing the problem in the hall outside the classroom. In two distinct groups. The same ones.
There are good reasons for these groups. Parenting can be a very lonely activity, and it's good when parents can get together and bounce ideas off each other. They usually don't start these groups to complain about the teacher, the administration, or other parents. But when an individual does have a complaint, it's nice to have other people to complain with. It feels less like your own personal problem if you have comrades voicing similar concerns. And even if you weren't concerned before, you can get caught up in the concern the group seems to feel. And you can always think of a few personal examples that apply. As a volunteer, I'm friends with teachers, parents, administrators, and children. Occasionally, one of the above complains to me about another of the above, hoping that I'll lend a sympathetic ear. What I sometimes hear is one person I admire complaining about another person I admire. I listen, but I try not to get caught up in the complaint; I'm sometimes more aware of the other side than the plaintiff is. And it helps to hear the other side. I hope those of you who are in one of these categories can clearly hear people who are in another one. It may not change your mind. But it may make communication a little easier.

Great Expectations 290.
If you've ever been to an elementary school band or orchestra concert, you may have heard a rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," from his ninth symphony. There aren't a lot of notes in it, and beginning instrumentalists
often don't know very many notes. And yet it was written by Beethoven, and Beethoven was a great composer, and so that's great.
Teachers sit in chairs while children sit on the floor, and they listen to the efforts of the young musicians. The music teacher involved knows that the piece sounds somewhat different when performed by a symphony orchestra; it's not done in unison, and the tempo is faster. Perhaps the music teacher is imagining that sound as the children make their attempts. Children and adults who know how the music is supposed to sound may be struggling to maintain a positive attitude and look. After all, they think, you've got to start somewhere. And the kids are trying so hard.
That isn't my experience at all when I go to the band and orchestra concert at the school where I volunteer. The band and orchestra play a variety of musical pieces - jazz, movie themes, classical, and whatever else the music teachers pick out. Toes tap. Hands clap. The concert really sounds and feels like a concert. The children may be beginners, but that's not how they sound.
If you didn't know, you'd think children had had to audition to get into this school. Or you'd think the teachers were internationally acclaimed
conductors who had been brought in at great expense to do an artist-in-residence year. You'd think the sounds in that elementary school gym couldn't possibly be coming from regular people like you and me, regular children like ours.
I don't mean to take any credit away from these talented teachers and children, nor from the other ones - the ones who perform Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." But I think the difference has more to do with attitude than talent.
Somewhere, many music teachers learn that children are limited by their age - that it's unfair to expect children to sound better than their developmental stage will let them sound. It's the same message other teachers get about art, math, reading, writing, movement.
But there's something empowering about believing in yourself, and/or having someone else believe in you. When I've taught well, I've seen it happen in children I've taught. With me, it usually happened during writing, music, or science. Or children performed a play that was above and beyond what you'd usually expect of children. When it hasn't happened, I wonder, now, how much attitude has had to do with it.
I still believe in disabilities, and take them seriously. If you can't walk, you probably won't dance as impressively as someone who can. And some people do have more of an "ear for music" than others. But belief in the ability to learn is powerful - much more powerful than belief in clumsiness, "tone-deafness," or any other limitation. The Homework Club 291.
I volunteered to substitute for a friend at something called "The Homework Club." It had been set up by parents who wanted to give children a chance to do their homework in an atmosphere conducive to actually doing it, with adults around whose only reason for being there was to give them appropriate support. It would be nice if every child had some time at home when that could happen, but many children don't, for various reasons.
The way my friend had described The Homework Club, I did not expect to enjoy being there. My friend had done many favors for me, and I thought I was finally going to get a chance to do a real favor for her - something I wasn't doing for my own enjoyment. I'd done child care for her and her husband, but their children are so delightful that I couldn't, in good conscience, count that as a real favor. But The Homework Club sounded as if it was going to be real work. My friend was going to the dentist, and I approached my volunteer role wondering whether I was going to wish, for the first time in my life, that I had gone to the dentist instead.
It wasn't the best time I've ever had. There I was, with children who, for one reason or another, needed help. I enjoy helping children whose needs are academic, perhaps stemming from perceptual problems, confusion, slowness, and/or lack of confidence. I can be patient and supportive with such children. And such children were there. But so were children who didn't want to be there, or at least didn't want to do homework there. And so I count it as a favor.
Most children in the communities I've lived in have gone home after school, or have gone to lessons, team sports, friends' homes, after-school programs. They've usually liked school, to some degree, but when the bell has rung at the end of the day, they've gotten the same thrill I used to get, as a child and as a teacher. Free at last! Even in the best schools with the best teachers, there's something magical about not having to be in school. I've rarely encountered children who didn't want school to end. When I have, it's usually been because of negative things that were waiting away from school, not because school was so wonderful.
So I really didn't expect to enjoy The Homework Club. I spent time with some children who were simply having trouble with their homework, but also with some whose main problem seemed to be that they had homework, and didn't want to do it. Outside the classroom, unpaid, and not having to be there, I was somehow more able to connect with these children than I've ever been. My friend told me, later, that the children who usually presented the greatest challenges hadn't been there. That probably helped. But I think I'll be part of The Homework Club next week, too.

Magic 292.
I once overheard two children discussing magic. One of them said something which I've occasionally quoted ever since: "Real magic is make-believe; only make-believe magic is real." As someone who doesn't believe in some of the dramatic miracles others believe in (e.g., the parting of the Red Sea just in time for the Israelites to pass through), I am nevertheless thoroughly impressed with little Red Sea partings that seem to happen from day to day.
For example, a child who seems unable to learn something suddenly gets a flash of insight, and then moves on to further learning. That kind of miracle is one of the main reasons I taught for twenty-five years and keep teaching now, as a volunteer. It's not quite being a magician, though teachers often get credit for the magic, and usually deserve some of it. It often feels more like being an active witness. But since the miracles we witness seem to happen more when we're around, we get paid for them, and we're called "teachers."
Once, I was working with a child who had "writer's block." His friends had already finished the writing they had to do, and it was frustrating for him. He couldn't have snack and play with his friends until he got his writing assignment done. He was getting upset, and the fun he was
missing was looming larger in his mind than the story he was supposed to be writing.
I told him I had a trick that sometimes worked with some children who couldn't think of what to write. He was quite eager to try the trick, so I quickly explained how it worked. He was supposed to put his hand on top of my hand while I concentrated really hard, and if the trick worked, he would know what to write. I warned him that sometimes it didn't work. But he was desperate, and anyway, this didn't seem like a desperate measure.
So he tried it. He put his hand on my hand, and I closed my eyes tightly. It worked. Immediately, he thought of something to write about, and in a few minutes, he had finished his story, wolfed down his snack, and joined his friends at the Lego table. I don't think he seriously thought I'd done magic. I hope not. I hope he was quite aware of his own role in this miracle.
To me, this phenomenon wasn't on a par with the parting of the Red Sea. It was more like Dumbo's learning how to fly. Dumbo didn't really need the feather. All he had to do was believe in his own power. As far as I'm concerned, real magic is make-believe; only make-believe magic is real. But when we really need magic, we take whatever magic we can get. We can't afford to be picky.

Variations on a Theme 293.
Children have a variety of ways to tell us that they don't think they're able to do what we think they're able to do. Some come right out and tell us. That makes our job easier. But some pout, and obsess on issues that may have nothing to do with the real problem. Some get angry, and their angry words and/or actions serve to distract us. Some get silly, and try to entertain their way out of challenges (that was my way). And these variations on a theme can be effective, pushing teachers' buttons so that children get consoled, admonished, or punished instead of taught. After all, most of us don't want to ignore behaviors that could very well be symptoms of problems worthy of our attention for non-academic reasons.
So our sensitivity and children's vulnerability occasionally interact in a way that works against learning - some children behave in ways that disguise their difficulties, and we react in ways that don't do anything about the disguises, and can aggravate children's actual problems. Angry children get angrier, silly children get sillier, sullen children get more sullen, and children learn that their behaviors effectively cancel or postpone challenges that don't actually have to be so challenging.
As a teacher, I was quite aware of the entertainers. Having been there myself, I knew when to let them entertain, when to redirect their shenanigans, and when and how to stop it. We entertainers need audiences, and all I had to do was make sure I responded to the content, not the style, of what these children said and did, and that they didn't get the wrong kind of attention from other children, either. This still required some fancy footwork, but at least I knew what was going on, and stood a chance of responding effectively.
Anger and sullenness were harder for me to figure out, because I hadn't used either much as defenses. The few times I'd gotten angry, or pouted, there actually were things wrong; the behaviors that accompanied these feelings weren't in my disguise wardrobe, or at least those disguises didn't work well for me. So if I'm your teacher, and you want to avoid a lesson, don't try clowning around. Pout or rage.
Knowing about this dynamic helps, but it doesn't solve the problem. Children can still push my buttons. As a volunteer, I usually try to stay away from temper tantrums and tears in class. I point them out to other adults. If I know a child well enough to know that these behaviors are atypical, I may give them more attention. But when they're typical, I try to stay out of it; I'm a clown specialist.

Taking Your Children to Work 294.
As a teacher, I spent my working day among children, and as a parent, when I got home, there were children there, too - sometimes even some of the same children. I was active in my daughters' Brownie troops. And my younger daughter spent fourth grade in the school where I taught, and made friends with some children who'd had me for second or third grade, or were having me for fourth grade. At home and at work, there were always children nearby.
But many people have jobs that don't seem to have much to do with children. Adults may work with people who would rather not be around children. They, themselves, may rely on the daily chance to be away from children for several hours. Their jobs may be ones that can't be done when children are around, or ones that, for one reason or another, children shouldn't see. Some children get bored or otherwise negatively affected by seeing what some adults do for a living.
But if it can work, it's nice, occasionally, for children to see how their parents spend their days. Whatever their parents do for a living affects children's lives. Parents come home at the end of each work day, and the way these adults behave then is often strongly influenced by what has happened at work. There's often conversation at home that refers to things that have happened at work. And work is where most parents get the money that determines what the family can afford.
Some parents, like me, don't have to do much explaining. I took my older daughter to work with me once, when she was four years old, and she saw that I spent my day with children. That may have stirred up some feelings of jealousy; if I was going to spend the day with children, why did I need to leave home? But I think she understood pretty well. And I think that day was good for my daughter and for my class. It gave them some insight into the life of one adult who was important to them.
But even with a very child-oriented job, it wasn't easy to mix my parenting with my workday roles. My mindset and behavior at work was different from what it was at home, and it was somewhat disorienting for everyone involved for Daddy to be called "Mr. Blue" and vice versa. I was very happy, at the end of the day, to take my daughter home and just be Daddy. And it was a relief, the next day, to go to work and just be Mr. Blue. I think it had been educational for all the children, but I was glad to get things back to normal. I imagine that there are similar and different challenges for those of you who have less child-oriented jobs. Some of you may occasionally come to school to explain your work to your child's class, but would rather not take your child to work and try to explain to your child what you're doing, or explain your child to the people at work. But one way or another, it often does some good to establish this little bridge between two parts of your life.
Graduation Speech 295.
A friend of mine was asked to speak at a graduation. She was supposed to say some things to people who were about to start looking for teaching jobs. She asked me to try my hand at speechwriting, and here's what I came up with:
"When I was asked to talk to you, I tried to pick out some words of wisdom to set you on a path that would get you a job and then enable you to do the job well and keep it. I don't think there are words like that. There are so many variables that combine to build each teacher's style that even if I could pick out great words of wisdom, they'd have to be tentative.
Besides, maybe you don't want someone else's wisdom right now. Maybe you want to try out your own wisdom first. Advice can help some people avoid some mistakes, but some of what I think are mistakes have to be made, either because you have to be the one to see their inappropriateness, or because for you, they're not mistakes.
It's also possible that you're much more aware of what you think you're doing wrong than of anything you're doing well. There may be times when you hope nobody can see or hear what you're doing. It's unfortunate but true that the people who could most use help are often the ones who are least apt to ask for it, or accept it when it's offered. When you're starting out, you want to show people your strengths, and maybe asking for help, in your mind, is an admission of weakness. Maybe you think you're supposed to start out as an expert.
After all, you've probably dealt with applications or interviews that ask you what you've already done to prove that you're the one who should be hired. So no matter how earnestly I tell you that teachers have got to be learners, you may be hearing a different message from the people who can hire you. They may not actually be sending that message; they may know you're just starting your teaching career, and they may be looking for people who seem ready to learn. But that isn't necessarily what you hear.
Still, notwithstanding the scary questions that ask you what you've already done, it could be that schools are looking for you - the one who is excited about teaching - excited enough to look for jobs even when finding one seems like an impossible dream. As teachers, we specialize in impossible dreams anyway. And no matter how thrilled you'll be when you land your first teaching job, please leave room for the possibility that the school or school system that hires you, the teachers who will be your colleagues, and the children you'll teach are pretty lucky to have you.
If you need some help, I hope you can ask for it. If not now, soon. You have some great ideas that we experienced teachers have never thought of, even after years of teaching, and if we hear about those ideas, we may want to use them. We hope you don't mind. And in return, we hope you ask us for help sometimes. It's not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of commitment to growth. And we're teachers. That means a lot of us are really into helping people learn, anyway. Please give us a chance."
Words 296. There's a form of linguistic shorthand that adults sometimes use when they speak to children. Instead of saying, "I need to have you stop making noise," some say, "You need to stop making noise." Or when a child is doing something an adult doesn't like, the adult may say, "You don't want to do that," instead of "I don't want you to do that." That kind of statement may be quite wrong.
I guess I'm a stickler on verbal precision. I think children can take things very literally. If you tell a child what he/she needs or wants, you may be giving a very confusing message - one that denies the existence of thoughts or feelings the child is experiencing. And since adults seem to know so much, and are so often right on target when they say things to children (e.g., "Be careful; that's hot."), children are apt to disregard their own experience and believe that they want and need what adults say they want and need.
One verbal game I've sometimes played with both children and adults is to take them as literally as I think children sometimes take adults. That can be very annoying. Granted, sometimes children enjoy that game. And it can help them learn to be more precise. They enjoy puns and riddles, because they like to play with the ambiguity of words. But language tricks can also drive them up a wall. If they've worked to put together words that communicate, they don't want to have to go back to the beginning and do it again. They know that I know what they mean, and they don't want me to pretend I don't.
Adults have had more time to play with language, and sometimes some of them enjoy playing more sophisticated versions of the verbal games children play. But like children, they can also be annoyed by word games that creep into conversation. I know a lot about that tendency. As a recovering compulsive verbal trickster, I try to direct my tricks toward people who enjoy them, and limit them to moments when they're likely to be appreciated. It used to be that when a child or adult was not amused by something I intended to be amusing, I thought all I had to do was try harder. Nowadays, I'm more apt to just drop it.
Verbal precision is a good goal. It's good for us adults to take care to say what we mean. Both to children and to each other. And it's good to teach children to do that, too. We can do that both by being careful about our own words ("I don't want you to do that," instead of "You don't want to do that.") and by treating children's speech the way we're learning to treat their writing - allowing them to succeed in their attempts to communicate, even if they're not always as precise as we want them to eventually be.

Solitude and/or Company 297.
Sometimes a child wants to be alone. We all do sometimes, don't we? Please don't take it personally; it may have nothing to do with anything you've said or done. Company is important to most people, to different degrees, but there are times when enough company is enough. I live alone now, and though there are times when that gets lonely, so far there are more times when solitude is exactly what I want.
So when a child is alone, it's best not to assume that there's something wrong with that. A little probing may do some good, but some children who like lots of solitude are tired of all the probing they get from adults. They'd really rather be left alone, and if you watch from a distance, you may notice that a child you were worried about is actually enjoying solitude. Maybe you remember your own isolation (I remember mine), and you think you identify with some poor little kid who's alone. But maybe you have it wrong.
I know we human beings are supposed to be social animals, but I think that's one of many biological imperatives that should be taken with grains of salt. For sometimes better and sometimes worse, we've transcended our biological destinies in many ways, and I think one way is that some of us social animals need some space now and then. In fact, some of us really do want lots of it.
Let's say seven year old Sigmund is sitting next to a tree, playing an imaginative game. Along comes a teacher, who asks why Sigmund doesn't join one of the groups, or play with Douglas, who is also alone. After a brief discussion, the teacher finds out why: Sigmund is having fun alone, and doesn't want to join any group, or Douglas. It's no reflection on Douglas or the groups; maybe Sigmund will join them some other time.
Of course, there are children who are alone and don't want to be. Maybe they're feeling left out, or shy. There are all kinds of things that could be going wrong. A child's isolation may be a symptom of these things, and maybe shouldn't be ignored. When teachers probe, that may be why they do it. And sometimes that probing reveals important information that ends up being useful in helping children start to make important connections.
But sooner or later, there has to come a point when a teacher decides that maybe things are already the way they should be - that Sigmund really is okay, and will, in fact, be even more okay if the teacher would bug off and let him do his thing. Besides, isn't it about time to pay attention to poor Douglas?

An Apology to Stewart 298.
When I was five or six years old, there was a boy named Stewart whose life didn't seem to be having a good start. I don't remember much about him; in fact, I only remember one incident. But if that incident was typical for him, he couldn't have been having much fun. I hope it wasn't typical.
There were about six of us playing near Stewart's house. Stewart came outside, and whoever was our leader (probably one of the oldest among us) said we should throw rocks at Stewart, and we started throwing them. We kept throwing them until Stewart's mother came out, and then we all ran away. I don't know whether I actually threw any rocks, or whether, if so, I aimed at Stewart. I don't know whether any of us did, or whether any of us actually hit Stewart. Maybe Stewart's family subsequently moved to a community that didn't have rough kids like us. But that's not my point.
I feel like mentioning Andy or Arnold. But I only remember their names, the fact that they lived nearby, and a few other unrelated details; they may have had nothing to do with the incident. I'm sure that if I mentioned the incident at all when I got home, I told what the other kids had done, and said little about my own role. I don't remember much about that neighborhood where we lived for two years, but I do remember that incident.
I wonder how many of the children were feeling what I was feeling: intense guilt. I was feeling like a really bad boy. I was doing something I did not think anyone should ever do, and I didn't feel as if there was any way to stop doing it. If I had suggested that we stop, maybe others would have rallied around me in support, but maybe they would have started aiming at me, too.
Now I'm forty-seven, and I still remember. As a teacher, I often run into kids like Stewart, Bobby (myself), and whoever was the leader. I can't blame any of them for being who they are, because I was who I was, and I forgive myself. When I see kids starting to gang up on anyone, my first approach is to stop it from happening, but as soon as possible, I try to address an individual in the group. I'm tempted to focus on the child who seems to be the leader, but I try to avoid using that child as a scapegoat. When a group becomes a gang, each member is responsible.
I'm sorry, Stewart. I have no idea what has happened to you since that awful event. I hope that you didn't remain a victim - that the new place you moved to had kids who became your friends. And I hope you didn't become a rock-thrower. I know that sometimes happens to victims. But I take responsibility for the role I had, and I'm really sorry.

Organizing a Game 299.
I once saw a crowd of children around two tables that had been pushed together. Two of the children had ping pong paddles, and they were playing ping pong. The rest of the children were watching. I think most of them were hoping to get a chance to play. But it was all happening during a twenty-minute indoor recess, so there was no way everyone was going to get a chance.
The paddles and the ping pong balls belonged to one boy, and he was one of the two players. The procedure he or they had set up was that two children would play until one of them won, and then someone else would play the winner. This worked until the owner of the game lost. Then he took the paddles and balls, and put them away. The other children were angry, and called him a sore loser.
As all this was going on, I was devising a fairer way to organize the game. It wasn't fair, I thought, to keep having challengers play the winner. That would mean the winner or winners would have more chances than everyone else. I had a system whereby as many people as possible would get to play. I really wanted to interrupt the game and explain my system.
But something stopped me. I remembered having tried to impose my sense of fair play on groups of children. Sometimes, it had worked, sometimes not. I also remembered the games we used to get together when I was a child. We usually treated the best players as authority figures. Once in a while, the baseball or bat was owned by someone who wasn't such a good player, and we had to give the owner some authority, or risk losing the equipment we needed in order to play. I did not intervene in the ping pong game. I really wanted to, but I didn't. I checked with the children's teacher, and she had already thought about the issue, and decided to let the children work it out themselves. And so the game was played in a way I considered unfair, and ended when the equipment-owner ended it.
I don't like what happened, but I like the fact that the children were in control of what happened. We adults control children's lives in many ways. We try to get children to do things that are fair, healthy, educational, safe, and so on. We do that partly because we care about children, and partly because we like to be the ones with the power - we like things to be done our way. But somehow, despite the angry, disappointed looks I saw on children's faces, I think their teacher and I were right not to get involved. This time, the children had to work it out on their own. Maybe they'd agree to let the owner have his way, and play every game. Maybe they'd work out something fair. Another child might bring equipment next time. Whatever solution they'd come up with would be theirs, not ours, and something about that felt right.