Relationships with Children

In Intellectual Emergencies: Some Reflections on Mothering and Teaching, Lilian Katz makes these two observations about teachers' relationships with children:

"Relationships cannot be developed in a vacuum; we have to relate to each other about something — something that matters to the participants in the relationship. The content of our relationship with children should not be mainly about rules, regulations, and conduct, but about their increasing knowledge and developing understandings of those things within and around them worth knowing more about and understanding more deeply, more fully, and more accurately."

"Cultivate the habit of speaking to children as people — people with minds — usually lively ones. Appeal to their good sense. It is not necessary to be sweet, silly, or sentime ntal at one extreme, or somber, grim, or harsh at the other end. Let us be genuine, direct, honest, serious, and warm with them, and about them — and sometimes humorous too."