A classroom isn't a factory, churning out the product of educated humans. We can't just go through the motions of something and assume that someone can learn. The process is highly collaborative and highly dependent on getting into the right emotional state. In order to learn, there needs to be trust.

It's easy to understand why children might have a hard time trusting adults. We, as a society (and sometimes teachers and parents in particular) are constantly telling children things that aren't true in an effort to manipulate them. It's "for their own good" sometimes, and sometimes it's "for our own convenience."

Is it any wonder that, after awhile, they become wary?

Read More

As a freshman voice student, I was in trouble: I was supposed to sing opera, which I was terrible at.

My first teacher was an older man with a brisk, condescending demeanor. Our lessons together were bearable, but something was missing. By January or so, I didn’t feel that I had made a lot of improvement, and I’m sure he felt the same way.

One day, I asked him, “Do you believe that anyone can learn to sing?”

Read More

The human obsession with measurement is everywhere, and starts from our earliest moments. Our height and weight and Apgar scores are recorded when we are born. We are measured repeatedly throughout our childhoods, tracked for every developmental milestone and compared to others according to percentiles in every attribute.

A parent can become fearful about a child’s future if the child appears to be “behind” in some way. However, the truth is that we are all very different, and these measurements only go so far in helping us to identify potential problems caused by those differences.

Read More

I took my work to a particular suburban Starbucks one afternoon before a tutoring session. There were a few tutors there working with students.

I watched a tutor write an entire essay in longhand for her student to type up (presumably to submit for a grade). I scoffed.

And then, about an hour later, I was working with my own student, helping him to limp through a math worksheet from a major textbook publisher — and found that the only way he was going to succeed was if I did more or less the same thing as the tutor I had seen at Starbucks.

Read More

When you’re writing an essay, you have to organize your thoughts, create an outline, and incorporate your research, while crafting sentences and paragraphs — and these skills depend on solid handwriting or typing skills, confident spelling and punctuation, and strong mental stamina.

This is a lot to manage. So whenever possible, we want to isolate skills. To do this, we use Tiny Tasks. We want to tell the student exactly what’s expected, ask them to carry out the task, and praise them for a job well done. Then we do the next thing, and offer praise. 

Read More

One of my students, age fourteen, is an accomplished amateur ornithologist.

The other day, we were looking at a picture of a bird. I said it looked like a house finch, and he said something like, "No, this bird’s [technical term] is more [technical term], and its wings have [technical term] along the [technical term]. They look nothing alike.”

Read More