Essays 1-20

People can have many reasons for wanting to teach in public schools. Some of them neatly match the most common reasons for which communities have schools – they want to help children learn how to read, write, compute, and do other things that most people agree are useful in later life. Educators may disagree about…

I got some immediate and helpful feedback about my previous article, “Doing It Their Way.” A friend suggested that I write an article examining strategies for keeping integrity and living and teaching in a way that doesn’t seriously conflict with your strongly held convictions. That’s a tall order, but since I think I’ve already written…

Almost immediately after I wrote “Grievances,” I got feedback from several parents and teachers on my e-mailing list. Some thought that Ellen, the teacher, had done the right thing – listened to children’s thoughts and feelings. Others thought that she should not have allowed that discussion to take place the way it did – that…

As I begin this article on divorce, I’m nervous. It’s an important subject. I know things about divorce from my own experience, from my adult friends’ experiences, and from my work with children. I got familiar with the effects on children of unhappy marriages and divorces well before I got familiar with their effects on…

Advice is a touchy subject. In this paragraph, I’m going to give you advice that I think is phrased ineffectively, and in the next paragraph, I’ll try phrasing it better. Here goes: don’t tell people what you think they should do. When you tell people what you think they should do, you’re casting yourself in…

I recently had a conversation with a friend who had a stroke a few years ago. She is paralyzed on one side of her body, and like me, has to do things more slowly than she used to. That can be quite frustrating. It takes her longer to do simple tasks most people take for…