I’m learning where all of my tulips are.

It’s our first spring in our new home. There weren’t too many daffodils, sorry to say, but the tulips are plentiful. Interestingly, many are hiding in places that I wouldn’t have considered to be garden beds. There’s a few yellow ones in a cluster of weeds along the fence line. There’s a single purplish one in the very corner of the yard in the shade of a giant spruce tree. And there are a few lurking under a sprawling forsythia; most of these didn’t have enough resources to flower.

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At The Little Middle School, students usually have a period of discretionary time each day in which they can work on any assignment for any subject or pursue their own projects.

Part of the benefit of this format is that we can directly teach students how to pace and structure their work time. Don’t you wish someone had shown you how to do that when you were twelve?

Interestingly, to make Discretionary Time successful, the adults have to recalibrate their own understanding of what it looks like to be working.

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It’s a nice feeling of accomplishment when I finish writing and formatting my blog post each day.

Some days, I’ve even written two posts. Wheeee! But it’s funny—writing more posts doesn’t really mean that I’m crossing more stuff off of my to-do list. The days and the blog posts will keep on coming, like the chocolates on Lucy and Ethel’s conveyor belt. Getting a few days ahead is always nice, but there’s still more to write. So maybe I’ve taken care of today and tomorrow, but I will need to keep it going.

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Lots of school assignments are just for show.

Even assignments with a legitimate objective will often be padded out with superfluous tasks to make them seem more interesting, substantial, or fun. But often, it just makes them take longer.

That’s how a first-grader finds herself doing an addition worksheet that requires, for instance, coloring each box based on the sum in order to create a picture of a flower.

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The way most people learn classical piano, they are building in mistakes that will make them sound like amateurs forever.

They start at the beginning of a piece, which is only logical, and keep playing until they reach the end. There are stumbles along the way, but that’s only natural. It will get better with time, right?

Not necessarily. A piece can get more familiar, but it isn’t guaranteed to get better. If your fingers play the same wrong thing a hundred times, that’s what they will “think” is correct. Fixing this problem requires an intervention.

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