Thursday, September 22, 2005

Don't be quick to tear down fences until you're sure why they were built

The title is today's apohorism by Mr. A, who is fond of such home-spun wisdom. Several students today talked about how at tutoring they made connections with students labelled as poor learners by their regular teachers, and while Mr. A is pleased at our enthusiasm, he also counsels letting a situation play out and see if we won't see the reasons for the teacher's judgement in good time.

American Public School was fun, as always. We watched a quite interesting and well-made video (An episode of The Merrow Report, on how public schools have evolved since their inception in the 1840s and the myriad efforts to improve them or pursue some agenda through them), then broke up into groups for a rather silly and meaningless project involving newspaper and tape that was meant to teach us about working together. The silly project aside, we did work together, and I'm sure we need all the reminders we can get about the importance of surrounding yourself with capable people, and we also got some experience in presentation as well.

One of my group members asked my age, and I told her. I'm sure she has a completely different view of me now. That's how it is.

At work, I played They Might Be Giants' album No! At the song "Bed Bed Bed," when the clock, alarm, and sawing wood sound effects all start up, CM said, "That sounds like the Beatles." Man, kids really do have great powers of perception, don't they?

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