I was just twenty-two when I became a teacher. Yet, from my first moment in a classroom, I was struck by my students’ youth, or more precisely by the myriad possibilities they embodied. I was only a few years older than they and my putative adulthood was pretty tenuous. The tie, the tweed jacket, and […]
Although I’m approaching the seventh anniversary of my “graduation,” a few people still ask if I miss being the headmaster of a school. My answer is the same as it has been since the day I left. I miss the kids and I miss the battles on their behalf—the battles with hyper-competitive parents who imagined […]
How in an age of helicopter parenting can we as parents give our kids the necessary opportunity to be independent? Even in the same family, one kid can by much more naturally independent than his/her sibling. Birth order? Nature? Whatever the older one has absorbed from having had to break in first-time over-protective parents? The […]
The teacher, a slight humorless woman wearing a Guatemalan shawl, held her stringy hair back. With the other hand, she held up a piece of black craft paper covered with orange scraps. “This,” she said, “is the kind of developmentally appropriate project your children have participated in for the past two weeks.” It was our […]
I recently asked Jon Maksik, who spent an entire career working with teens, to write a piece for Momfilter about why, as he once had told me, he preferred the company of adolescents to grownups. (Full disclosure, I was once a 17-year-old beneficiary of Jon’s supreme insight and good counsel. That we are close friends […]
When I was fifteen my parents took me to see Damn Yankees, a hit Broadway musical in which a paunchy fifty-year old real estate salesman named Joe Boyd is tempted into a bargain with the devil and becomes Joe Hardy, a fleet, hard-hitting centerfielder. Joe leads his feckless Washington Senators against the hated Yankees until…well, […]
Forty years ago, perhaps exactly forty years ago, I stood in the doorway of my dorm room at a small school in Florida and absorbed what can best be described as a tirade. Though the transgression itself was a minor one, I had presumed to argue the merits of the rule I had violated. The […]
It is a law of nature that fathers can be dangerously stupid around their sons. You have seen the shrieking sideline daddies: “Your left foot, your left foot!” as six year-old soccer players mill around the ball. You have seen the red-faced baseball daddy yelling from the stands, “WATCH THE BALL, DAMN IT. WE PRACTICED […]
A cynical colleague once cautioned me about using the word “failure” when discussing children. “Challenge,” he said would be more soothing. Becky wasn’t failing to meet expectations and getting a D in the class, She was facing challenges and if she would only live up to her potential, etc. It was only a semantic feint […]
As children, we are taught not to lie, not to steal. We are also taught that achievement and success are our goals and, in more affluent segments of society, our birthright. Too often, those goals contradict our childhood lessons, perhaps never more so than in school. Success usually means, “getting into college.” Sometimes it can even […]
