Here are some quotations that I’ve collected over the years about the amazing genius of children. “The real magic wand is the child’s own mind.” – Jose Ortega Y Gasset (Spanish philosopher) “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.” – Mencius (Chinese sage) “No Columbus, no Marco Polo has ever seen stranger and...Read More
Here’s a little multiple choice quiz: When we come to the end of life, what is it that we are most likely to regret? Is it: a) ”I wish that I had spent more time answering my email” b). ”I wish I had spent more time texting.” c) ”I wish I had spent more time...Read More
There’s a compelling article online at The Atlantic, on David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core State Standards, the “national curriculum” that most of the states in the country will be following in 2014-15. Coleman has impeccable credentials: Yale, Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford, a man of letters whose conversation, as the piece states, ”leaps gracefully from Plato to Henry...Read More
The October, 2012 issue of Educational Leadership, the flagship journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), in an issue dedicated to “Students Who Challenge Us,” features my article “First, Discover Their Strengths,” which highlights many of the ideas discussed in my forthcoming book Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs...Read More
I am sickened by a news report from Reuters on the rapid rise in the use of standardized testing at the kindergarten level. The push for academic accountability in the higher grades has been essentially pushed downwards through the grade levels and now sits like a 10-ton block of steel on what used to be literally a “children’s garden”...Read More
An article in the latest APA Monitor (the monthly news magazine of the American Psychological Association), reveals that budget cutbacks nationwide and a growing focus on academic learning, has resulted in fewer school psychologists being available to help children and adolescents with social, emotional, and behavioral problems. The National Association for School Psychologists (NASP) recommends one school psychologist for...Read More
I think there should be a whole new movement in education called “children’s peak experiences in learning.” There ought to be books about it, M.Ed. and Ph.D. degree programs about it, tons of research about it. Why? Because when we observe learning at its best, only then do we have true benchmarks to evaluate the...Read More
Maybe you’ve reached a point where you consider your child/student (choose one or more): unmotivated, lazy, spoiled, hyper, inept, bratty, inattentive, unmanageable, messy, distractible, beyond redemption. Before you give up on your child, consider what the following parents and teachers felt about their own children and students: “This fat, little fellow goes around in a...Read More
Why is it that we expect children to sit quietly in their seats while they’re being taught in school? We even use the word “seatwork” to describe this behavior. I want to know who made this decision. I can imagine some grizzled old scholar somewhere in Europe during the late eighteenth century thinking: “You know, I really like...Read More
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