Essays 1-20

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….

There are things you’d like to do all the time, but you don’t do them in public. And things you never want to do, but you do them in public. There may even be behaviors you rule out entirely in both public and private, but you harbor secret fantasies. And the reason? It’s against the…

Do you remember the moment in Animal Farm when Napoleon (the Lenin pig) ordered the dogs to drive Snowball (the Trotsky pig) out of Animal Farm? Napoleon had taken charge of the education of the pups, and they had grown up loyal to Napoleon. I read the book in high school, and though I had…

In every elementary school in which I’ve taught, all children in each grade have been promoted together in June. There may have been some mystery about which teacher they’d get, but they could easily figure out which grade they’d be in just by adding one to the grade they’d just finished. Children knew that they…

Some children, for various reasons, like to be done with their work. It could be that there is some carrot at the end of the stick – that whatever the child is going to do after the work is done is so attractive that finishing is a high priority. Unless the teacher or parent has…

The phrase “facilitated communication,” as I’ve heard it used, refers to a very specific technique for helping some people who have trouble letting other people know what they’re thinking and feeling. A friend of mine has been deeply involved in using this technique, and another friend of mine is an adult with autism who has…