609. Measuring

Once in a while, I get really impressed by a family. I know, on some level, that every family has its ups and downs, but sometimes all I can see are the ups. I recently went to a child’s birthday party at the home of a family that impressed me. Having been to many children’s…

I keep hearing talk on the news about some people’s interest in lengthening the school day and school year. It’s being treated as a way to improve education. I guess the implication is that what happens in school is valuable, and if more of it happened per day and per year, things would be even…

When I was eight years old, I wrote a poem: Oh my goodness, oh my gosh. My little doggie forgot to wash. Oh my goodness, oh my grace. My little doggie has a dirty face. I had a good sense of rhyme and meter, and the poem did also say something. Looking at it now,…

“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,…

Many of us adults allow ourselves to have days when we’re not at our best. Some of us find people or circumstances to blame, and to varying degrees, and in various ways, sometimes those people and circumstances actually do deserve some of the blame. As hard as we try to be in control of what…

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…