594. Norks and Noogly

In 1974, I applied for teaching positions in the Boston area. I was hoping to teach in Boston, and help right the wrongs Kozol wrote about. That year, for reasons I support, Boston was looking for teachers who would help make the Boston Public Schools more racially balanced. My racial characteristics were pretty much like…

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…

Many creatures great and small, but not all of them, start out needing their parents. I’m not sure, but I think the complicated creatures need their parents longer than the simple ones. Human beings need them for years. The actual degree and duration of this dependency among humans varies greatly. Bill Cosby, in his book…

Once, a representative of the phone company was asking me some routine questions. One of them was what kind of work I did. Another was whether my wife worked. At the time, we had two children, both under four years old. I knew what the representative meant, but I could not bring myself to give…

Imagine going into a store to buy something you really want. You buy it, bring it home, and when you open the box, you discover that they forgot to enclose the owner’s manual. You return to the store, as a good consumer should, but instead of being handed the owner’s manual by an embarrassed clerk,…