
by Terry Heick
You try to fake it, but it limps right out of your mouth, barely alive: “How was school?”
You might use a slight variation like, “What’d you learn in school today?” but in a single sentence, all that is wrong with ‘school.’
First, the detachment–you literally have no idea what they’re learning or why. (You leave that up to school because that’s what school’s for, right?) Which means you know very little about what your children are coming to understand about the world, only able to speak about it in vague terms of content areas (e.g., math, history).
Then, there’s the implication–they don’t talk about the way that they’ve been moved or impressed upon or changed but in the rarest cases; you have to drag it out of them.
And there’s also the matter of form–you ask them as if a developing learner will be able to