609. Measuring

Usually when I roll into one of the classrooms in which I volunteer, it becomes immediately apparent what needs to be done. A child is wearing a pained expression, another child is playing around when there’s work to be done, or some other problem is staring me in the face, waiting for me to try…

I was going to write an article about the joy children feel when they get to be in a play. I was all set to write it. Then the anxious faces of several children appeared in my mind, and these children seemed to be asking me to write, first, about the joy of not having…

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…

I can’t think of anything better than friendship. For some people, a friend is one special person, and if there are too many more than one, the friendship starts to seem thinner. For others, the more, the merrier. There are people who feel that they can speak about just about anything with one or two…

I feel funny writing an article about organization and predictability. I never felt as if they were my strong points as a teacher. There were times, as a teacher, when I tried to convince myself that they weren’t so important. And there were days, weeks, even years when I rose above my natural tendency to…

When I was a child, one of the memorable trips we took was to Nova Scotia. On the way there, my parents took me to a restaurant called The Gloucester House in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They wanted to have seafood, and they wanted their children to experience it, too. They thought of this experience as something…