Harmony School, 1989, Page 138

Description:	AlWORDS OF WISDOMORMY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATIONORPOINTS TO PONDERTo learn something is fantastic becauseevery time you learn something you becomesomething new. Leo BuscagilaJohn Holt quotes Saint-Exupery as saying,Perhaps love is the process of my leadingyou gently back to yourself.Talking with students and discoveringtheir current level of sophistication andinterests are the basic diagnostic tools ofgood teaching. Herb KohlA young teacher in Vermont wrote me notlong ago that one of the problems in hermath textbook said that it took 11/2 cansof paint to paint the window trim in ahouse, and asked how many half cans thatwas. When one of her students gave theanswer one, she asked him how he got it.He said, Theres one full can, and theresone half can. Nothing wrong with that;indeed, its what we would have seen in thereal-life situation. But too many teachers,and of course all machine-scored tests,would simply have marked this answerwrong. John HoltIn a number of first-grade classes I haveseen tacked up on the wall a notice saying,When two vowels go out walking, the firstone does the talking.’ Very nice. A littlefurther inspection shows that in thatsentence there are two pairs of vowels, bothof which violate the rule. Now what arechildren expected to make of this?John HoltA mother said to me not long ago, I thinkyou are making a mistake in trying to makeschoolwork so interesting for the children.After all, they are going to have to spendmost of their lives doing things they dontlike, and they might as well get used to itnow.Jolin Holt ^8
Source:	http://cdm17129.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/hs-harmony/id/141
Collection:	Harmony School

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