Many of my students are unaware they are being watched in class by critters other than teachers. As a child gets up to sharpen her pencil, a salamander scurries back under a rock, a fish darts to the surface looking for food, a cockroach slides under some lettuce. As they become aware, and they do over the months, they start to watch. They bang ...

A lot of people have asked me how they can get a trolley like mine to play with. And I usually say, ''Why don't you just make one?Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood A child finds joy making things. An adult finds release buying them instead. One of the pleasures of compulsively tossing out words has been hearing from others. Quilbilly is a ...

As I sink deeper into the morass of words that pretends to advance science in the name of economic security (which is like asking a flower to open in order to fulfill an order for FTD), I find comfort in reading  Walt Kelly's Pogo, a document at least as sophisticated as anything ''managed'' by Achieve, an organization of governors and business ...

It's planting time--as has been for the past few weeks. I poke a small hole in the earth, drop in a seed, push dirt over the hole, then go on to the next. It is an act of faith that each seed will erupt into a growing organism, thrusting it roots deep into the dark, its leaves arching towards the sun. It is through acts of science that we ...

As much faith as I have in natural laws, I have much less faith in my ability to lasso them as needed in a classroom. I've had some spectacularly loud, messy failures. Kids like this. As much as the Arne's and the Eli's and the Bill's want to control curriculum, they cannot control a child-driven experiment. To be fair, neither can I. Kids like ...

Leslie and I walked along the edge of the Atlantic this afternoon, arguing just what that meant. She believes the edge is ephemeral, abstract, and I drew a line at the highest point of the last wave. It was a pointless discussion, and done in play, but it gets back to the words thing. So many words approximate what we think we know. If we knew ...

The individual concepts of children, and the individual concepts of most persons who live and die in this world, are exceedingly vague, crude, and obscure. That is, they are vague, crude, and obscure in comparison with any approximation to adequacy. Francis W. Parker, ''Observation,'' Talks on Pedagogics, 1894 Leslie and I startled a black ...

While some schools have fancy Madagascar hissing cockroaches, we made do with an American cockroach, the huge one found in norther Jersey. A child volunteered that she her dad had caught one at work, and wondered if she might bring it in. I loved the idea, most of the class groaned, and the next day she waltzed in with a margarine tub poked with ...

Procedural rules are both useful and arbitrary--we like to have routines, and we like to know the routines already established. (I bet the 20 odd people backed up at Newark Liberty Airport while I fumbled with the check-in procedure would agree.) A child in my classroom might not know that if you want to go to the bathroom, you just sign the ...

Chris is the guy on the left....I've had an interesting past few days in Tampa the past few days, celebrating the work of our principal Chris Jennings and our school at the NASSP Convention. We're a MetLife Foundation Breakthrough School this year and we're beaming, much more on that later. I got to spend a lot of time with a colleague, an art ...