My grandmother and her sister were elementary-school teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District for over 30 years. They were experts at entertaining children with learning activities. They also had nonnegotiable ideas about what a child should know and be able to do, whether she liked learning it or not.

I was the first, adored grandchild.

Over the years, the sisters had acquired such a collection of teaching materials, only a one-car garage lined front to back with old wooden bureaus had enough drawers to contain all the stuff. There were child-size costumes from every country their classes had ever studied, with fabulous accessories like real wooden shoes, a comb to hold a sequined mantilla in place, and, for the German costume, pearl opera glasses. The drawers were also stuffed with fabric for sewing projects, chalk, paint, paper, magnifying glasses, sheet music, bird-call whistles, clay, and books, books, books.

Everything the old ladies taught me had something to do with stories. Even the folk songs my aunt played on the piano, in what I now know was a lesson in hearing and singing the right note, had stories attached to each. Raw wool came out of those drawers so I could learn a primitive form of spinning, just as many girls in Grimm’s fairy tales knew how to spin, weave and sew to get themselves out of their magical fixes. We crocheted. They even had a small loom on which you could make enough fabric for a really good pocket for some piece of clothing my mother no longer cared about.

Besides feeding my hungry imagination, the stories provided help with the worries I had, especially how to make friends and allies, and how to vanquish fear and foes.

In his excellent book The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettleheim notes that the giants who populate folk tales and fairy stories reflect the child’s sense of being small and living among large and powerful grown-ups. I was afraid of my giants, but also delighted in outwitting them with my clever or charming ways. And the old ladies used the stories to comment, indirectly, on strategies for getting along with my incredibly tedious siblings and with the neighborhood kids my age, all of whom happened to be boys who seemed rough. My grandmother and aunt had been adjudicating little-kid fights for decades, and while I couldn’t always take the high road of their advice, they did equip me with good instruction on how to be a leader among peers and siblings.

So together, we were always learning to solve all manner of problems, both my own and the ones they posed. Even lessons I didn’t like — identifying flowers, flower scents, birds and bird calls — were still connected to stories, so I was fully willing to cooperate.

What I didn’t want to do was learn to read. I did what they asked, but I always chafed and whined.

I think my aunt felt reading could wait, but Maybelle — I called my grandmother by her first name — insisted I learn to read before going to school. Her methods have since been mercifully abandoned.

Besides flash cards, with the common little words such as “a” and “is”, she had word boards. These were 18 by 6 inches, with big rings that held three stacks of flip-cards with one or more printed letters waiting to become prefixes, roots and suffixes. She’d flip through those prefixes until I had the words nailed into my head. I think the suffixes were mostly verb endings and the letter “s.” I remember being “rewarded” with a more difficult board whose prefixes and suffixes contained more than one letter. I was annoyed.

Worst of all were the primers I had to read aloud. They had an insulting quality — Look, look, see Spot run — that didn’t sound at all like the gorgeous prose coming from the books they read to me. Perhaps the ladies insisted that this learning to read would one day give me access to the gorgeous prose, but I didn’t get it. Learning to read was the only task that didn’t seem connected to the stories that helped me tolerate, for example, describing rose scents.

So our time together was a deal. Mostly they taught me things I was sure would come in handy on the treacherous but magical journey of my life. If they felt I needed some skills and information that didn’t seem so useful to me, well, that’s the nature of living in the land of giants that you trust.

The time that students and teachers spend together at school needs to be more of a similar sort of deal. All kids have worries of their own, however petty or great. They try to solve problems every hour of their day, unless life grinds the creativity out of them.

For example, they can always use more information and illustrations about how people get along with each other. But schools tend to ask kids to leave their passions and worries at the door to focus on solving academic problems instead.

Lots of kids never do see that the school’s versions of problem-solving will become really useful in their everyday life. Sadly, some kids get isolated in their own heads working on tough issues no school adult even knows about. No wonder school can seem useless to them.

We could make sure that every child and teen was getting help working on at least one problem of their own choosing. That would go a long way to linking the riches of educational resources with everyday problem-solving.

Few kids these days are as lucky as I was, getting two old-lady Merlins who made learning fun and tedium tolerable. But all kids would learn more if they were certain that their schools were really trying to equip them to succeed in their own lives.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.