Sniff Sniff.

Currently reading, 'How Children Fail' by John Holt. Feeling so excited to finish this book and move on to 'How Children Learn'. But my health condition wont let me do so. Sniff Sniff.

Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or not, they dont work to please us, but to please themselves. 

They went on daydreaming, no matter how often they got caught and embarrassed doing it, because the class, despite our efforts to make it interesting and safe, was a boring, confusing and dangerous place, from which they would escape if they could - and daydreaming was the only way to escape.

A teacher in class is like a man in the woods at night with a powerful flashlight in his hand. Wherever he turns his light, the creatures on whom it shines are aware of it, and do not behave as they do in the dark.

Student teachers in training spend long periods of time in one classroom, but they think they are in there to learn How To Teach, to pick up the tricks of child management from watching a Master At Work. Their concern is with manipulating and controlling children rather than understanding them. 

People teaching their children at home consistently do a good job because they have the time - and the desire - to know their children, their interests, the signs by which they show and express their feelings.

Maybe I thought the students were in my class because they were eager to learn what I was trying to teach, but they knew better. They were in school because they had to be, and in my class either because they had to be or because otherwise they would have had to be in another class, which might be even worse.

 

School feels like this to children; it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you dont do them or dont do them right.

When I read this, I know I was right when I hate homeworks so much;

But most homework, when it is not pure busywork to fill up the children's time, is designed to convince the teacher, not the children, that they know something. And so it rarely goes good and usually does harm.

The best quote is,

Walking a tightrope, you worry about falling off; 

once fallen off, you dont have to worry.

Well, it is a good book. I've got half more to go. Wish me luck ;)