609. Measuring

I just read a friend’s response to one of my articles. He liked it. He thought it was insightful and well said. He’s going to show it to some people he knows. There are many ways growing up has changed me, but my reaction to appreciation hasn’t changed so much. I may not blush as…

On some days, your child walks into the classroom and sees an unfamiliar adult face. The teacher isn’t there, and some other adult is there instead. For some children, once in a while, this is a treat. Either a day without the teacher is not such a bad idea, or this particular substitute is fun…

What about the mistakes we’ve made? How can we make sure our children don’t make them? We don’t want our children to have to deal with the awful consequences we’ve had to deal with. True, we’ve learned from our mistakes, but what is the ultimate use of all that learning if we can’t pass it…

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…

People waste an awful lot of energy thinking of ways to avoid taking responsibility for things that don’t work out right. That energy could be used to seek out the real sources of problems – both the external ones and the little flaws we humans have. And the problems would end up getting solved sooner….

When I first started teaching elementary school, two children in my class were quite sure that they wanted to be paleontologists when they grew up. They’re grown up now, and I doubt whether either one of them is a paleontologist. Maybe, but probably not. People tend to change their minds a lot. When I was…