Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean...The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life -- of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. But we could barely manage them in class.