Robot Wisdom linked to an excellent piece by Philip Pullman on how reading is taught, and on how it should be.
Then there were the two girls of 13 who wrote each other's biographies. Again, no pressure: they were best friends, and they wrote about how they went on holiday together, and how they chased boys, and how they argued and broke up; and then how the little brother of one of them died, and that drew them together again and now they couldn't imagine ever having hated each other as they once did so bitterly.
And those experiences of writing very vividly showed the children, firstly, that you could use language to say true things, important things; secondly, that what you wrote could affect other people, could move them, could make them think - "it affected me"; and thirdly, that you could work at your writing and learn to say things more clearly and strongly.
But none of that would have happened if I hadn't been able to give them the time to do it, and the freedom from the pressure of... Tests.
Pullman also wrote a NYT column on why he doesn't believe in ghosts:
So that's why I welcome Halloween, and it's why, although I revere the great realists and read their work with devoted admiration, I know I'm not one of them. My imagination comes to life only in the presence of the uncanny; the despot I serve is the part of my mind that feels a thrill as fierce and sudden as lust when it encounters a deserted graveyard, or comes on the idea of personal daemons, or hears those old familiar words: "Once upon a midnight dreary..."