Has your school found an effective way to teach any subject? Then, let the world know about it. Publish it here.

Publishing students creative work in this forum brings, among others, the following benefits:

Royalty for submissions that are included in planned book printing of the best works.

Regular and timely answers to real questions that students and teachers want answers to.

Opportunity for Educators to provide expert answers to questions and issues affecting students, teachers, parents, and administrators.

SPECIAL FEATURE "Living With Children" by Family Psychologist, John Rosemond

Positively No!

In Hamilton's Blessing, author John Steele Gordon explains the philosophy of deficit spending and why America's national debt has been spinning wildly out of control for 17 years. With regard to the latter, he says it's "for no better reason, when it comes right down to it, than to spare a few hundred people in Washington the political inconvenience of having to say no to one influence group or another."

Whether he knows it or not, Gordon is saying that Congress is like some parents who are unwilling to suffer the unpopularity -however temporary -of saying No to their children.

When pressed to justify their lack of fiscal restraint, parents tell me they don't want their children, either now or as adults, to dislike them or blame them later for unhappy childhoods. This is what I term the Everlasting Hate Theory, as in "My child hates me today; therefore, he may hate the twenty years from now:"

This is simply not true. Recently, I've asked several audiences, "How many of you absolutely loathed your parents for a significant period when you were children?" Out of 500 people, nearly half raised their hands, "Please keep your hand up," I've then requested, "if you lack affection for your parents today." All but a few hands go down.

Even considering that a few people probably feel uncomfortable with publicly admitting that they hold lingering animosity toward their parents, the point is made: The fact that a child holds an unflattering opinion of his or her parents today is no indication of how the child will feel about them when grown. In his first letter to the early Christian commu­nity at Corinth, Paul wrote that when he became a man, he put "childish ways" behind him.' Paul wasn't talking about toys and games. He had in mind childish ways of thinking and behaving.

Proverbs 22:15 tells us that "folly is bound up in the heart of a child." There is only one person more foolish, I would suggest, than a child who "hates" her parents because they will not acquiesce to a whim, and that is a parent who takes the child seriously.

replacing. The only way to balance the resulting "deficit" is to

require that children perform chores around their homes on a daily basis. Not to do so implies that something can be had for nothing-the erroneous belief that lies at the heart of a poor work ethic.

Good citizenship is a matter of willingness to promote the common welfare, which in turn requires unconditional service. As John E Kennedy implored, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your coun­try." Good citizenship, as our foremothers and forefathers knew, begins in the home. So, having children perform regular chores around the home not only is good economi­ca11y but also advances the children's sense of family citizen­ship.

Parents who fail to require daily chores of their children encourage their children to have everything they want.

'their children, as a consequence, become demand­ing and self-indulgent. They want, complain, and regard any request for service as a major inconvenience, if not an indignity In short, they are poor citizens of their families. But in the same way that the national debt is a problem of government and not the governed, this matter of poor family citizenship is a problem of parents, not of r children. The problem is parents who indulge their children instead of helping them to learn temperance in the acquisi­tion of things. Children who fail to learn this valuable lesson as children are likely to enter chronological adulthood still clinging to "childish things." Do you want to help your children shed childish ways of thinking and behaving? Do you want to help them mature into fiscally responsible adults? Then "balance the budget" in your home. Say No at least four times as often as you say Yes to your children's request for material things, keep their material possessions to a minimum, and encourage them to be helpers in the family. The more you do for your children along these lines today; the more your children will do for God and country tomorrow.

•Family psychologist john Rosemond is director of The Center for Affirmative Parenting. Gastonia, North Carolina. For infor­mation on his parenting newsletter, call (800) 525-2778.

Student Reporters Wanted

Students who would like to be a reporter at their school for School-News-USA should send an e-mail by clicking here.

 WHAT ARE THE ISSUES THAT FACE SCHOOLS TODAY? ARE ANY OF THESE RELEVANT?

Students' Rights  -- have they led to breakdown in school discipline?

Teacher tenure -- has this led to mediocrity in schools?

Collective bargaining -- has it led to more politics and less education?

Education Courses -- are they the passport to teach regardless of competence?

Teacher salaries -- are they the key to getting better and more skilled teachers?

Standards -- are they just another fad?


What are the important issues worth discussing? You tell us.

SIMPLY WRITING

We humans have a knack for doing things the hard way. We seem to have some genetic compulsion to look for complicated ways to solve our  problems. Time and again we have found out that the best solutions are the ones which, because of their simplicity, we have overlooked, while sweating through one frustrating effort after another, only to discover that the plain path to success was there before us all the time.
Take for example the problem of how to improve schools. Millions are spent year after year in the effort to better students performance in schools but from one year to another the judgment seem to be that we haven't made much progress in that effort.
But couldn't it be that the solution to the problem of schools inability to effectively educate all children well, may just be as simple as teaching students to master the art of writing well?
There is no purposeful endeavor that will not benefit from clear thinking and what's more effective than writing to help expose muddled thinking!
"Writing could get into corners that other teaching tools couldn't reach" wrote Connoly & Vilardi in their book Writing to Learn Mathematics and Science. And we will certainly concur with the view that there are a lot of corners in schools that need to be reached.
Schools in this country have been subjected to tons of abuse about their general lack of effectiveness in educating children. We do not agree with much of the rhetoric but we believe that schools could improve their credibility as places of learning by giving greater attention to helping students to learn how to write well.
 In his book Writing Matters Across the Curriculum, Ernest Spencer described a study of the state of writing in Scotland (1983). He concluded that "many pupils have no sense of being taught how to write and are vague about the purpose of written work". There is little evidence to conclude that such is not the existing condition in our schools at the turn of the 21st century.
It is our belief that teaching students how to write effectively in all grades and by all teachers, if given high priority, will result in unprecedented gains in students performance nation-wide. We challenge all teachers in the elementary and secondary schools to begin a writing crusade in their school. We promise that we will use this medium to  document the unprecedented gains that will be made as a consequence.
We invite all to join us in this effort to better schools through writing. It's that simple.