Essays 1-20

I’m tutoring a nine year old boy named Alex. He doesn’t have all the skills and knowledge other children his age have, and his parents hope that he’ll catch up with them a little by working with me. I spoke with his mother and two of his teachers to find out what to focus on…

I’ve written lots of prose for this column, but one of my poems, “The Trying Game,” says part of what I want to say in this article. So I’ll start with the poem: We try. No matter what, we try. From when we’re born till when we die. We try to be, or try to…

The issue of parent requests not to have certain teachers is a difficult one, and I’ve faced it both as a parent and as a teacher. This article will tell you how it feels to one teacher, and my next article will tell you how it feels to one parent. We’re both the same person,…

When children are actually children, many of us adults start out getting to know as much as we can about them. We get used to knowing what they consider fun, what bothers them, what will make them laugh, and so on. And many of us love them for who they are. We see them grow,…

As our society moves forward, backward, or sideways, school curriculum often responds. In the early and mid-1970’s, as gender equity issues seemed to make their way to the surface, people expressed their concerns about the sex role stereotyping that was prevalent in school textbooks. In basal readers, the female characters usually stayed at home and…

You’d think after all the effort we’d put into helping our children grow, and after all the work we’d seen them put into that upward struggle, that we’d be thoroughly happy when they’d finally made it through all that. We ought to be sitting back proudly and rejoicing in having done good work. And there…