There was a weekly visit from Project Self Esteem in which we'd get a puppet show and a 20 minute meditation period.
OMG!! I remember this!!
I thought that was-- seriously-- the
weirdest thing ever. That was also in my (second) first-grade classroom where we seemed to spend (what seemed to me, anyway) an inordinate amount of time watching
The Letter People.I think that Moomin is definitely on to something re: the era in which the teacher was originally trained. Many of my teachers were
my mom's college classmates. (And yeah-- talk about a major BUMMER. "Oh, no, honey-- I know John. He would NEVER..."
Curses! Foiled again! 
Heheheh... well, and besides the fact that adults are not always the same person with other adults that they are with children, KWIM?)
I can point to a handful of teachers that were NOT my mom's (rough) contemporaries, and yes-- they definitely had a different pedagogical outlook. My second grade teacher was one of them.
My mom and her contemporaries were initially trained in the early 1960's, but most of them spent a lot of time in
continuing education as well, so they were definitely exposed to new ideas as they emerged. The other factor is that we lived near a laboratory school teaching college-- probably THE teacher's college in the region, in fact. So not only were they initially trained with cutting edge thinking, they also had a lot of peer pressure to keep up with it. I know that my mom was VERY excited by the emergence in the 1970's and 1980's of research that improved the understanding of learning disabilities impacting literacy and numeracy.
I think that some people are just more flexible and open than others, too.
