The New York Times has an article today about Haven Academy, a new charter school in the Bronx. It’s specifically designed for kids from broken homes (in foster care or under the supervision of a social worker). There are lots of attempts to create charter schools for inner city (read: poor) kids, but what impresses me about this school (at least according to the article) is how deeply the staff seems to understand the real needs of their student population.

“Higher standards” is currently the buzzword in education–especially around education in underprivileged communities–which basically means more drilling, more homework, more grades, and more rules, and this has always struck me as a subtle way of blaming the victim. (You can’t meet our standards, so we’ll up the ante by keeping a closer eye on you and pushing you harder so that you won’t be lazy.) Here is a school, though, that realizes that not everyone comes to school equally able to attend to school. If your dad beat up you and your mom last night, practicing multiplication tables is probably not your first concern. If you’ve lived in six different homes in the last 18 months, you probably haven’t had any consistent role models for how to behave. The school approaches discipline by considering each child’s situation and background, and designing a plan that makes sense in that context. What a sane way to do things! This school is not a Montessori school, but what could be more Montessorian than putting each students lives and needs ahead of any canned curriculum schedule?

Of course, having two teachers in each classroom is not cheap. Sending a van out to pick up all the children who have been moved to foster homes far from the school is not cheap. Keeping extra social workers on staff is not cheap. You might argue that this is a great opportunity for the few hundred kids who get to go there, but it’s too expensive to educate all children from broken homes this way. But aren’t these the kids who are most in need of our resources and most deserving of that extra investment?

I hope Haven is successful and becomes a model of respectful education for children who desperately need respect.

This editorial was published last week in the New York Times suggesting that the school reform we really need is to allow elementary aged children to spend more time practicing (and enjoying) reading and writing and math and less time being graded and tested and judged. My only complaint about this editorial is that it misses the fact that classrooms like this already exist. Their called Montessori schools. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

[Thanks, Elise!]

I saw this sign on the side of the road near my house. It is not a cartoon. Really.

Rounding up Kids

I have this image of lassoing little kids (and their families) and corralling them before they can come to their senses and bolt. Except that getting kids signed up for school is more like herding sheep.

Yesterday, I stopped off at the Learning Palace, one of those educational toys/teacher supply stores. The experience made me want to cry. I went to try to find some sort of “manipulatives” (ugh, I hate that word), to help one of my students understand borrowing, since the Montessori variants on those materials are out of my range.

The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that the entire front third of the store was filled with cheap plastic toys. Buried on a shelf in the very back of the store were some beautiful hardwood puzzles, and I didn’t see wooden blocks anywhere (admittedly, I wasn’t looking for them, so I may have missed them). Meanwhile, the entire left half of the store was filled with shelves of workbooks.

The second thing I noticed was how incredibly busy and brightly colored everything was. I have no problem with putting brightly colored things in a child’s environment. It can help draw their attention to important things, and besides, bright things are just plain appealing. (I’m a grownup, and I still love red things and sparkly things.) But if everything is brightly colored, and covered with a bazillion different designs, how is that going to help a child figure out which things are important?

All that busyness also creates a complete lack of serenity. It seems to suggest that we can’t leave kids in peace (or bored or un-entertained) for even a few seconds. Is it any wonder that older children have trouble concentrating? Or that they won’t put their iPods down for two seconds because they’d be bored?

Admittedly, a store like that is not actually an environment for children. But that’s what we sell to parents and teachers to create environments for children. How about a little calm instead?

I did find the materials I was looking for, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy them. They were made out of cheap plastic, and besides, the entire store made me feel dirty. I couldn’t give them my money.

Just read it for yourself: Test Scores, College, and What Really Matters.

Claus von Zastrow, who is apparently something of a voice for the educational status quo (he writes for a blog called Public School Insight: What IS working in our public schools”) published a post yesterday on the importance of motivation and the danger of pandering to students’ desire to be entertained all the time. He writes:

Author Dan Pink makes a strong case for “motivation 3.0″ in schools. That is, he believes carrots and sticks alone won’t make people behave the way we want them to. Instead, we need to rouse people’s inner drive to do meaningful work. I couldn’t agree more.

But I do worry about what happens when we confuse true motivation with a kind of wish fulfillment: students doing what they want to do when they want to do it. Without a doubt, students should do hands-on work. They should use technology that makes learning vivid and exciting. They should see the relevance of their studies to their own lives and aspirations.

What happens, though, if we condition our students to believe that every moment in school or life should be sublime, or at least entertaining? The truth is that just about any work worth its salt includes peaks and valleys. You’ll have to slog through tough stuff–and boring stuff–to get a real payoff. You have to gain knowledge, and that takes time. Robert Pondiscio recently noted that the day-to-day work of scientists is often tedious. If we’re telling students that a STEM career is all fireworks, they’ll be in for a disappointment the first time they don a lab coat.

I, too, could not agree more (and having worked in “STEM,” I can vouch for the fact that a lot of the time it’s not fun and games). However, von Zastrow seems to me to be missing the point. His view takes for granted that what we ask students to do is right, reasonable, and useful to them, and that it is reasonable to expect them to be motivated to do the things we tell them to do. Those fancy videos and games don’t come from a need to pander to students’ inherent lack of motivation; they come from a need to cover up the fact that students have no reason to be motivated to do the things we ask them to do.

Von Zastrow agrees with Dan Pink when he says, “We need to rouse people’s inner drive to do meaningful work.” But the key word here is ‘meaningful.’ When I spend hours and hours slogging my way through difficult academic papers, or through piles and piles of data, I can’t wait to be done, but I’m doing it because I expect the hard work to pay off in the form of answers to questions that I care about. (And, when I realized that I wasn’t that interested in answers to those questions, I had the freedom to leave academia and pursue answers to questions I do care about.) When my students slog through pages and pages of tedious algebra problems, they don’t have access to any such larger vision. They know that they are supposed to do this; that it will somehow pay off in the form of better grades, which will somehow pay off in the form of a better college; which might pay off in the form of a better job. If they’re lucky.

That’s not inner motivation. That’s outer motivation. Yes, you can argue that students ought to have an inner motivation to get good jobs so they can have lots of stuff and live happy lives. That may be good self-interest, but it’s not passion. It isn’t fueled by a burning need to answer a lifelong question, or to solve a social ill, or to accomplish a dream. Passion like that is inner motivation.

I don’t think von Zastrow is really that interested in whether students are motivated. I think he is interested in students are obedient and disciplined, regardless of the tedium of the task. And that’s not freeing, it’s soul-destroying.

Over the last month or so, I’ve enumerated some of the assumptions that I think underlie most mainstream discussions of education. In the process, a lot of my beliefs have probably become pretty clear, but I thought it would be a good idea to make explicit at least one of the assumptions that underlies almost all of my thinking about education. I made my first major decision about my education when I was eight years old and chose to go back to Montessori from a traditional school. (More precisely, my parents gave me an option, I told them what I wanted, and they heeded my opinion). Granted, that wasn’t a particularly well-reasoned decision. I’m pretty sure I thought about it for as long as it took my brain to tell my vocal tract to produce the word “YES!” But since then, I’ve never really stopped thinking about my own education and about what makes a good education and a good school.

My thinking about education has changed a lot over the years, and has changed as I’ve moved through different stages of development. When I was eight, I thought Montessori was the most wonderful thing ever invented, and everything else was awful. When I was a teenager, I thought adults should pretty much never tell kids what to do, and when I was in college (at a school with intense academics and fairly traditional course requirements), I started thinking that maybe requiring a certain amount of depth and breadth wasn’t that bad and that grades weren’t the end of the world, at least if you chose to take on the structure. For a while, I was really into unschooling. At another point, I was really into Waldorf. In the last year or so, I’ve come back around to thinking that Montessori is pretty much the best thing ever invented.

In the last year, I’ve also started wondering whether all those changes mean that I just get excited about the latest educational trend to come my way (well, progressive educational trend — I’ve been pretty consistent about what I don’t like). But gradually, I’ve realized that I actually do have a pretty consistent metric for judging schools, and my opinions of schools and of pedagogies goes up and down as I understand better how they fall on that metric. So how do I judge schools? I judge them by how well they respect children, not as adults, but as human beings.

That takes some explaining. Unfortunately, ‘respect’ is a word that gets misused in a few totally contradictory ways. When talking about kids, respect is usually just a euphemism for ‘obedient.’ Kids are ‘disrespectful’ when they don’t do what they’re told. On the other hand, when it comes to people’s strongly held beliefs, it is ‘disrespectful’ to question or disagree with them, even when their beliefs are completely irrational or downright destructive. I don’t mean either of those things. What I mean by ‘respect’ is seeing people for who they are: as individuals with hopes, fears, desires, opinions and beliefs, whose right to determine their own lives should be infringed on only when necessary.

That “not as adults, but as humans beings” part also needs some explaining. Kids are not adults. They don’t have as much life experience. They don’t have as much perspective. They need more protection, more guidance, and more limits than adults, and that’s fine. I worry a lot about kids whose families refuse to set reasonable standards for behavior. Or whose families refuse to push them to try new things, take on challenges, and follow through on commitments. Those things are hard to do, and nearly all of us need some prodding to get there, and I don’t think we do kids any good by refusing to push them. But that doesn’t make kids blank canvases without wills or dreams of their own, and just because some of those dreams may be childish doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be cherished and nourished.

Adults do have power over children. That’s just a fact of life. Up to a certain age, kids are dependent on their families for food, shelter, clothing and pretty much everything else (and, for better or worse, that age is higher in Western cultures than strictly necessary for mental and physical development). A combination of legal and social forces put kids at the mercy of their schools when they aren’t under the control of their parents, and we expect kids to be “supervised” more or less all the time. However, just because someone has power doesn’t mean they should use it any way they please. We all recognize tyranny as unethical, but people rarely question whether adults have the right to use their power over children in more or less any way they please, at least as long as it’s “for the child’s own good.”

So what does that have to do with schools? I’ve realized I judge schools as “good” if they have built into their very structure an understanding of when to use their power over children. If adults are constantly asking, “What activity of the child’s will I be stopping if I interrupt now,” that’s a good school. If adults are constantly asking, “Do I need to make the child do this, or can I let them discover it on their own,” that’s a good school. If adults are constantly asking. “Am I replacing the child’s desires with my own, and do I really need to” that’s a good school. If adults are constantly asking, “Would I want to be a child in this place,” that’s a good school.The more a school makes that level of care possible and probable, the better.

(By the way, I didn’t realize until I came back around to it as an adult how many of these ideas come from Montessori and were internalized early on in my Montessori education. The idea that children have a right not to be interrupted when their hard at work literally comes straight from Dr. Montessori’s own writing (unfortunately, I can’t find the reference), and the other ideas are all there implicitly or explicitly. It’s not that surprising that my standards for a good school come straight from Montessori. I was surrounded by her ideas practically before I could talk.)

Three business executives (including the former CEO of Harley Davidson) published an editorial in the Milwaukee (WI) Journal-Sentinel calling for more focus on character education in schools, and also arguing that kinder schools are more academically successful schools. In their own words:

To people who run companies, honesty and punctuality are as important as computer literacy. Traits such as these are about respect for ourselves and others; they make up our character. Without character, quality work is almost impossible to produce no matter the number of employee incentives…

…Milwaukee is in the midst of a heated debate about salvaging our distressed public schools. Nowhere have we heard discussions about character education. We’re here to help. Teaching kids to be good is low hanging fruit with a lifetime payoff making for a productive society.

As is common with articles like this, I felt some distress myself after reading it. Given how much I blather on about the importance of raising compassionate, kind kids, you’d think I’d be wildly joyous whenever an article like this comes along. But I’m not. The trouble is that these sorts of articles almost inevitably fall prey to the fallacy that learning is a product of teaching.That assumption suggests that, in order to make good kids, all we need to do is add some new units to the curriculum and it’ll magically happen. While there’s nothing wrong with adding an overt focus on good character (it’s probably a good thing), assuming the learning is a product of teaching eliminates the need to consider all the non-overt lessons we teach kids.

In fact, we do teach character in schools. It just doesn’t seem to work. I don’t think I’ve  ever been in an elementary classroom that doesn’t at least have the Golden Rule up on the wall, and most classrooms (sometimes even in colleges) have a long list of rules posted somewhere. Punctuality is certainly a highly valued trait. Students usually get in trouble for showing up late to class (or not showing up at all). Honesty may not be as consistently enforced, but students caught cheating on tests surely get into trouble. So why don’t kids learn good character? Here are some of the reasons, I think, and they go far beyond not “teaching” character enough.

My own sense of honesty compels me to point out that I’m being unfair to the authors of this editorial. They are all members of an organization called the Character Education Partnership, about which I know next to nothing. One of their Eleven Principles for Effective Character Education is “Creating a caring school community,” including fostering respect, fairness and cooperation among staff, between staff and students, and between students. That suggests that they recognize that implicit lessons and demonstrated behavior are more powerful than overt lessons, and have identified most of the factors I’m going to list. Still, CEP appears to be very much a project of “the establishment” and I have trouble believing that they are seriously questioning the foundations of their own establishment (though I’d love to see evidence to the contrary). And if that’s the case, they’re missing at least #2 below, which I happen to think is the most crucial factor because it underlies pretty much everything else. At any rate, back to my list.

1. Society is not a nice place. Our culture glorifies poor character. Open you nearest newspaper, or news website, or tv news channel. Chances are most of the prominent space is given over to liars, cheaters, thieves, murderers, rapists, terrorists, and finger-pointers. Poor behavior gets attention. It’s not usually positive attention, but it’s attention, and a lot more attention than good behavior usually gets.

   Donald Trump is not a particularly nice person, but he gets (uh…got?) his own TV show. Bill O’Reilly is famous for screaming at people on his own show. Survivor-type reality shows expend a great deal of energy showing the back-stabbing and the viciousness of the contestants, and I can’t think of a scripted TV show that demonstrates kind, compassionate speech and careful listening (though if you can think of an example, please share). Meanwhile, in the current big movie among adolescent girls–New Moon–every single relationship qualifies as abusive. (There was actually a better article about this, but I can’t find it. If I do, I’ll post it.) And that’s just TV and a movie…

2. Schools are not nice places. If you read my recent post on the School is Prison argument, you’ll know that I think this claim might be overkill, but I still agree that the school system is coercive. No matter how kind and caring your school is, forcing kids to be there who don’t want to be is not nice. As long as you are required to go to school, sit down, shut up, and do what you’re told and are punished for objecting, you are not being treated with respect. Let me say that again. As long as you are required to go to school, sit down, shut up, and do what you’re told and are punished for objecting, you are not being treated with respect.
   
   What difference does that make? I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t know what sort of research has been done on this, but here are two ways I think this creates problems. First, people tend to do as is done to them, rather than is told to them. If you are constantly given the message that it’s okay to force someone to do something, at least if it’s for their own good, you’re not very likely to question your own desire to force someone into something, even if you’ve been told you shouldn’t.
   Second, as Peter Gray pointed out in his School is Prison article, people want to be free. They want to feel in control of their own destiny, and will often go to whatever extremes necessary to be free. As long as children feel unfree, nothing is more important than fighting their “captors.” Lots of kids decide to get there through cooperation and waiting out the years of school (or maybe are so crushed they stop caring), but others use whatever weapons they have: rudeness, disobedience, violence, and anger.
3. Teachers don’t have to be nice. Of course, the vast majority of teachers are kind the vast majority of the time and genuinely care about their students (most are not Professor Snape), but everyone knows they don’t have to be. Whenever one of my students has trouble with something in their math class, I ask them if they talked to their teacher. About half the time, the student says, “I asked my teacher, but he just yelled at me.” I do think this is a place where CEP has figured out that there’s a problem, and wants to help figure out how to encourage teachers not to treat students this way.
4. Students need a moral compass, not moral rules. Once again, this is a place where CEP seems to have identified part of the real problem. Although it varies from class to class and teacher to teacher, in general teachers (or principals)  are the ultimate arbiters of good behavior in most schools. Whether you’ve been good or bad is ultimately determined not by whether you feel good about your behavior, nor by whether you’ve harmed yourself or someone else, but by whether or not your teacher says you are. And the consequence for poor behavior is not necessarily a logical consequence (cleaning up your mess, apologizing to the person you hurt, a discussion about why that wasn’t a good thing to do), so much as a punishment. In the same way that tests and grades take the focus away from learning and put it on meeting someone else’s expectations, this kind of approach takes the emphasis away from developing an internal sense of ethics for the sake of being a good person and puts it on doing the things you’re supposed to do to avoid getting in trouble.

Somewhere (unfortunately, I can’t find the reference), the Dalai Lama talks about three levels of morality. The first level is following rules because you’ll be punished if you don’t. The second level is following rules because you know it’s the right thing to do. The third level is responding to every situation you encounter with kindness and compassion, and choosing the most appropriate course of action for that situation. I’d like to see everyone get to that third level, and I really, truly believe that humans are capable of this level of ethical standard when they are allowed to develop their own sense of rightness and wrongness. But as long as schools dictate “goodness” largely without student input, students won’t have any chance to develop their own ethics.

PZ Myers, a biologist and atheist who writes an extremely insightful and intelligent (if sometimes excessively vitriolic) blog about atheism, just posted something about parents giving their kids home tattoos of religious symbols. The parents in question happen to be Christians and happen to be giving their kids tattoos of crosses, but he (rightfully, I think) insists that the identity of the religion is irrelevant, and he’d be unhappy if these were atheist parents tattooing “A”s on their kids. He points out the real problem extremely eloquently, so I’ll let him speak for himself:

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper. They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

I’d add that it’s not just religious whackjobs who think this way. It’s our legal and social systems, which largely treat children as the property of their parents (and of their schools when they’re not at home). Fortunately, here in the US, we live in a country with decent child abuse laws which keep most kids out of the worst kinds of abuse, but parents are still allowed to choose their childrens’ schools, religion, activities, schedules, and even friends. Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons for this. Part of a parent’s job is to provide a healthy, safe environment for their children, and that means exerting influence over things like schedules and friends, but it’s a fine line between providing a healthy environment and living vicariously through your child.

has caused me–Oh, she of the stony heart and refusal to cry in anything but the direst of situations!– TO CRY. That is how frustrating I find it. Head over to RockJuice for the whole shebang:

If the fury this inspires in me were measurable by the Richter scale, it would constitute the most annihilating earthquake known to man.

Laurie Halse Anderson, a writer I admire immensely and have talked about here, just posted a note her site about how two of her books are currently under consideration to be banned by school districts in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and California. 

If the fury this inspires in me were measurable by the Richter scale, it would constitute the most annihilating earthquake known to man. 

Objectively, I know that fighting for Free Speech and the Freedom of Information Act is a constant battle.  It’s waged on a large scale, against government regimes that want to keep people in the dark about what’s really going on in the country and in the world, and it’s waged on a small scale, by individual teachers and librarians, against strident parents who want to impose their ideas of what’s appropriate for children to read on every kid in school.  And it is waged EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.  I know that. My mom is a librarian, and I read enough authors’ blogs to know that no matter the book, someone somewhere is trying to get it banned.  And, objectively, I realize that this is the dark underbelly of Free Speech.  People are allowed to think that some books should be banned, and to voice that opinion, no matter what I think about it. 

But the fundamentals of our goddamn constitution prohibit the actual banning of said books.  Because taking information away from other people limits their right to free speech and free information. 

I’ve got that, objectively.  And I feel confident that in the majority of cases, the constitution wins.  Objectively, I also understand where some of these people’s arguments are coming from– populating the shelves of a school library is difficult, and the age appropriateness of books, in terms of language and content, is a legitimate concern.  But it is one that librarians go to school and get degrees in Library and Information Science in order to deal with in a way that does not violate the rights of the people their libraries serve. 

That’s objectively.  But on a knee-jerk, gut level, all I know is that banning books is tantamount to burning them. 

It is the most base and insidious form of cruelty you can level against a person– to take away their right to learn and understand things.  To me, it constitutes a fundamental blow against humanity, and I find this so abhorrent, I admit I AM CRYING RIGHT NOW, AS I TYPE THIS.  I kid you not. 

Banning books violates and degrades the person who is limited by the strictures you put on them.  And the worst thing is they may never know they are being so totally violated.   How could you even think of doing that to someone?  How could you ever do that to a KID? 

I do not hesitate to point out that slave owners throughout history have employed ignorance as a way to maintain slavery.  Slaves were not taught to read for a reason: it wasn’t just that the owners didn’t think of them as anything more complex than human-shaped cattle; it was also the most effective way to keep them from getting information.  Information that might make them think they were human beings capable of real thought and real decisions, instead of simply walking, talking property. 

It really, really bothers me when people treat kids as though they aren’t people.  They are.  They are not accessories you acquire and then dress to match your outfit.  They aren’t dolls you speak for and manipulate with impunity.  THEY. ARE. PEOPLE.  And as such, their rights can be violated just as easily as yours can, except that they’re relying on you to fight for those rights, since they can’t vote.  Yeah, it sucks when your kid learns about ideas you’d rather they didn’t have.  It sucks when a kid reads books like Anderson’s Speak or Twisted and comes to realize that sexual assault and rape exist, or that people can be so unhappy they try to kill themselves.  That’s hard knowledge.  It’s fucking scary.  BUT IT WOULD SUCK WAY WORSE AND BE WAY SCARIER IF THEY NEVER KNEW AND THEN HAD TO DEAL WITH SOMETHING LIKE THAT.  Awful and traumatizing things happen, and they happen to kids and teenagers with the same frequency that they happen to adults.   You’d rather your kid remained protected and safe from the fact that bad things even happen?  Fine.  Control what they read.  Try to control what they do, or what the world throws at them, so that they never know.  But don’t try to force every kid to suffer such a paralyzing lack of knowledge. 

On her blog, Anderson posted a draft of the letter she wrote to the superintendent of the school in Kentucky where Twisted is being challenged, and here is a quote that I found really important, because it empathizes with the teenage reader in a way that some parents clearly don’t:

I suspect the roots of the parental concern about TWISTED are the scenes in which teenagers make stupid, dangerous, and occasionally horrifying decisions. Why on earth would someone like me put things like that in a book?

Because readers who can experience those decisions – by reading about them – and appreciate the consequences of those actions – by seeing those consequences affect the lives of a book’s characters – are less likely to do the stupid, dangerous and occasionally horrifying things themselves.

Jesus knew this. He did not simply reiterate the Ten Commandments, or tell us to love one another and walk back into the desert. He told stories that made His listeners think. They make us think two thousand years later.

Storytelling is the traditional vehicle mankind uses to pass wisdom from one generation to the next. TWISTED contains a lot of bad decisions, hard consequences, and wisdom.

She included the addresses of the schools in question and has asked readers to send polite letters to the powers that be, urging them to dismiss the ban.  You better believe I am going to send some, too.  If you’d like more information or want to send a letter yourself, check out Anderson’s full post:

Autumn, with the smell of book banning in the air

As most of you know, here at Container Diaries I try and look back at all the wonderful times spent growing up in Windsor Terrace. You know, reminisce.

At times I will write about certain things that happened to me, the situations I found myself in and I will also comment on others who I grew up with or just happened to observe on a daily basis.

People, places and things are common themes on the blog. (I recall hearing that lesson in Miss Lynn’s 3rd grade class)

Container Diaries is a public diary – hence the title of the blog.

It brings a smile to my face when I see someone leave a comment stating that they enjoy the blog. Or someone connects with a friend they haven’t heard from in over 25 years. The on-going conversations are truly remarkable (Imagine I told you 30 years ago that in 2008 we’d be communicating with each other over the internet, me in Michigan, you in New Jersey?)

You’d be like, “yeah whatever!”

Encounters like that are priceless.

If you read the comments section, you can see that we have readers/contributers who grew up in different decades; the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s 80’s and even the 90’s.

That’s a long time-span and a lot of people.

Some readers may understand what I’m writing about, others may not – that’s cool. Some readers I know like a book, some I have never heard of.

Like I have stated many times here on the blog, I truly appreciate everyone stopping by and reading and a special thanks to the folks who have left their comments.

The blog is gaining new readers each day, we have yet to scratch the surface. When I set out to re-connect others, I thought maybe 50 to a 100 people who be the norm…not a chance! Readership has reached an incredible number! (The blog even attracts folks who never stepped foot in Brooklyn)

**********

Rising this morning at 7:30, I thought about brewing my coffee, the New York Times newspaper and what would be on television? One thing is certain, EVERYONE remembers the children’s show Wonderama!

I believe it started back in the 1950’s?

Over the years it had different hosts but the guy I recall was Bob McAllister.

I loved watching the “Snake cans” segment. The kid who opened the can with the paper flowers usually won a bike! And the other cans had snakes jump out (not real ones of course).

The song they sang, ‘Kids are People Too’ wacka-doo, wacka-doo, wacka-doo! was a favorite of mine.

And of course the Goodie Bags they gave away; I was always jealous.

Each Sunday I always wanted to be on the show. But of course, I didn’t have a chance in hell. I wanted to be the one who won the Ross Apollo Bike. Tell me that bike wasn’t the coolest thing ever!

Oh well, like I always say, you can’t have everything.

But I sure wish they had Wonderama back on the airwaves on Sunday mornings.

-SF

Hoops135@hotmail.com

(sidenote: I actually love Patti Smith)

Sorry I haven’t written, not sick this time, just dismayed. This week’s been tough; boys are stupid.

But here’s a great 70’s video. I always feel badly for Bob McAllister; the old host of Wonderama and Kids Are People Too. He killed his own career. This isn’t over on Wikipedia, but I remember that he spent his own money to take out a full page ad in the Sunday Times, in the early 80’s, warning parents to be aware of what their kids were watching – this was well before Vchips or TV ratings, etc. Well, that was that for McAllister, his career petered out and he died in semi-obscurity. For caring. Bastard business. I want a mini Lender’s Bagel necklace!