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 handwrit