There’s a sign outside the neighborhood elementary school that clarifies the school’s policy on taking off jackets at recess.  (It’s been balmy the last few days.)  Children in grades K-2 are to keep their jackets on, children in grades 3-5 may take them off.

I’ve watched many battles over jacket-wearing, and I don’t quite understand it.  When kids get cold, they usually (in the absence of actual thermostatic dysfunction, which the reading I’ve done suggests is extremely rare) act quickly.  And they’re not usually quiet about it.  Getting their needs met is not something children tend to take lightly.

So it’s a little strange that we decide to try to regulate their temperatures for them.  To me it seems like a recipe for not learning how to regulate various things for yourself in much the same way as scheduling meals and eating regardless of hunger can teach kids to eat when they don’t need to and shouldn’t.  We tell them they’ll be cold, if they don’t wear a jacket, though we have no idea how they’ll actually feel because their hormonal makeup is entirely different from ours. (As each of ours is from everyone else’s.)  They don’t get the chance to find out whether they’re hot or cold, how many layers they need, whether they need a jacket or not.

If it’s too warm to be wearing a coat, left to their own devises, kids know.  And similarly, if they’re too cold, they can put coats on.  We say these things, like “wear a coat or you’ll be cold,” with good intentions, but they don’t always hold up under inspection.  When kids resist, it’s worth a look to find out what the source of their resistance may be…

A.J.’s teachers tell me he’s bright, but struggles with slow processing speed.  Things take him a very long time to do.  I noticed early in my work with him that he didn’t actually seem to be processing anything slowly.  He was just doing things slowly.  He could produce a response to a question fairly quickly, but he would think about his answer for quite awhile before offering it.  I pointed out a few times that if he worked more efficiently (in his case, that would mean choosing to write down the first answer he came up with, which was always plenty sufficient for the task at hand) he would have more time to spend on the books and music he likes. It didn’t change the pace of his work, and I finally got to thinking.  What if there’s something in this pace of his, a pace we’re trying to teach out of him, that’s serving a purpose, or making room for something?  What is there to discover if we step back and watch what they’re doing before we start trying to mess with it?

A popular way to teach vocabulary is to issue a list of words and then instruct kids to look them up, write them in a sentence, record the part of speech, and complete a variety of other related tasks.  Often we give them blanket tasks to perform for all the words even when the tasks can’t be applied to some of the words.  (Adjectives with very specific meanings like “indentured” that don’t really have antonyms, for example.  I heard a child suggest “someone who has to work for their own servant?”)

Kids mostly glaze over at this kind of assignment.  Particularly if it’s a regular part of their school or homework, they just slog through it.  Kids who can’t make sense of the definitions, and this is a lot of them, come away with at best a vague understanding of a few of the words, at worst thorough but inaccurate understandings.  Dictionary definitions are not written for people who have been reading for only a few years.  They’re written with great formality, and by formula, so as to be consistent.  Unfortunately the form renders them nearly unreadable to young readers.  (Not to mention that it exposes a great hypocrisy.  Kids are told not to use a word in its own definition, but the dictionary, it’s OK for the dictionary to do that (and don’t try to tell them that what we meant was they couldn’t use the exact form of the word in its definition; they know that’s not different).) The dictionary ends up feeling like just another club kids aren’t invited to be a part of.

But I digress.  I went looking for an online dictionary that might be written such that it conveyed for at least some words a degree of meaning that could be ascertained by a typical 10 year-old reader.  Here’s the best I found, Scholastic Word Wizard.  Pronunciations, definitions, synonyms, antonyms (where possible), and often a sample sentence.  The pages are mostly unencumbered by advertisements, which can’t be said for most online dictionaries I’ve found.  If you’ve found a better one, please let me know and I’ll pass it on.

My cousin invited me to play an online word game with her yesterday.  I don’t like spending any extra time at the computer, but I’ve got a weak spot for word games, so I agreed to try it.  After playing once on my lunch break, and being something less than satisfied with my score, I found myself waiting for the day to be over so I could try again.  I knew I wasn’t going to come anywhere close to scoring as high as the others who were playing, but I really wanted to do better than I had done.  It made me curious - the outcome of the game has absolutely no impact on my life whatsoever, but there I was looking forward to playing it again, just to see how I could do at this thing that I find interesting.  I didn’t just want to play, though, I wanted to See How I Did.  I wanted the results, and I wanted to keep comparing them with my other results.

I’ve seen this happen with kids, too, this kind of intense relationship with results - whether it’s short lived or longer standing.  But I’ve also seen lots of resistance to results.  I think that adults think that kids don’t want to know how they’re doing, or don’t think it’s important to know, but in fact they really do want to know how they’re doing. It’s just that they want to know how they’re doing on the things that they’re convinced are important.  That of course raises the question of whether or not they should have to be convinced of what’s important, and I won’t get into that now, because I only have a few minutes and that one’s a real button-pusher, but I thought it might be a good inquiry to raise.  See where you notice your children being really interested in results, and where you see them being less interested…

Try this one: Origami: the Art and fun of Japanese Paper Folding.  The drawings make sense, there’s lots of white space on the pages so as not to overwhelm, and it’s spiral bound so you don’t have to try to do your origami one-handed while the other hand keeps your book open.  It’s a little tricky to find an image of the book online; here’s one I found if you want to get a bit of a feel for it.

Yet another suggestion that things are not always as they seem. This reminds me of how many folks I’ve heard say that they can only focus on what someone’s saying if they don’t make eye contact, though we tend to assume it’s the opposite. Take a look at this summary of a study (published earlier this year in Applied Cognitive Psychology) about the effect of doodling on recall.

I’m going to get a reputation for the unwise practice of recommending books before I’ve finished reading them, but I can’t help myself.  I have read several pages from the beginning, several from the middle, and a few from the end of Your Child’s Strengths: Discover Them, Develop Them, Use Them, and there is so much in it that can be so useful in so many ways for so many people I cannot wait to start talking about it.  You can read a few pages on Google books…

I’ll post more soon when I come up with the words…