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To become a healthy kid you need to learn to question and go against the predominant culture in U.S. society today.

To stay at a healthy weight you need to avoid most of the food offerings surrounding you, and seek out alternative healthy choices.

To become a motivated learner you need to be supported in pursuing your ideas and interests–and find a school or other learning environment that isn’t simply focused on teaching to standardized tests. (I am thinking of this after reading the recent Newsweek article “The New First Grade.”)

I picture Pinocchio heading out to school and being approached by the Fox and the Cat, and he doesn’t know to question what they’re telling him.

There’s a lot of talk about the influence of culture on learning and education, but I haven’t read or heard so much about the importance of counter culture to support positive youth development.

One of the most helpful things I’ve read about writing is by Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power. He observed from his own struggles with writing that the problem he had was having too many ideas at once. “Blocked writers suffer from too many ideas more often than too few.” I picture the image of trying to type too fast on a typewriter and the keys getting jammed together.

I am feeling some of that as I try to approach writing down the ideas bouncing around from my first few weeks of grad school. (Mixing metaphors, but these ideas do seem more like bouncing balls in an model of an excited gas, rather than typewriter keys.)

One of the main things to learn about writing is how to eventually focus on one idea at a time, in each paper and in each paragraph.

A page with some ideas about writing from Peter Elbow