Teacher Tom

Yesterday, I wrote about a dialog with a boy who gave me insight into myself as a teacher.

I've sent hundreds of kids off into the world from the Woodland Park Cooperative School.

Years ago, a friend involved in the business of "up cycling" wound up with a collection of junk with which even he couldn't figure out what to do, so he passed it all along to the preschool, where, I assured him, the experts would make something of his no…

"I really can't stand children."

I first started running regular preschooler circle times as a 14-year-old baseball coach.

"To garden," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "is to engage in a form of coevolution -- not just with plants and pollinators but also with roots and fungi, microbes and microfauna, sun and soil."

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough . . ."

"Don't worry Leon, you can always make some more blood."

Man is nothing else, but what he makes of himself.

"We should banish the idea," writes Alfred North Whitehead, "of a mythical, far-off end of education."

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US.

I was once engaged in a massive battle for the ages, pitting my powers against those of a five-year-old boy.

Not long ago, one of our toilets stopped flushing: the chain that connects the tank lever to the flapper had broken.

Much, if not most, of what you experience today will be forgotten by tomorrow.

There are three broad categories of things about which we adults know more than the young children in our care: safety, schedules, and courtesy.

We converted an old, worn out sensory table into a worm bin that lived adjacent to our playground garden.

I looked up to see a familiar face.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly misunderstood as the "pleasure chemical."

F.

Cry contagion, or contagious crying, amongst human infants is a well documented phenomenon, one that anyone who has worked with groups of young people has learned about first hand.

For a time, the children gathered together around the workbench where they made things with junk using glue guns.

The old world is dying.

When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home.

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers.