Every Story Begins with a Word.

Children.


That is the word I want to begin this story, for children are the subjects of this blog, and in turn, this blog is to serve them. Serving the needs of children is what I do daily in my professional life; lately, I feel as if the children I see from Monday to Friday are not the only ones I can serve. I can do more. I can do this - speak directly to you, the parent, the teacher, the aunt or uncle, the adult who loves the child or children in your life and feels a bit lost in the sea of expectations and uncertainty involved in educating a human being.

I want to help, I want to create a resource and a forum for discussion, because I think we are all a little bit adrift. There's so much out there - information and ideas about how to best provide an education, what that education looks like, etc. - and a part of me asks if I am doing anything by adding my voice to the din. But then, a greater part of me feels that there needs to be more voices saying, Teaching a child to read at 'grade level' is not as important as teaching a child to read between the lines of their experience and make sense of it for themselves. Teaching a child how to divide fractions is not as important as teaching a child to prevent divisions within their community. So much of the current educational climate ignores anything that can't be measured with a paper test - surely, a cultural foundation made of paper skills will give out as quickly as a physical building would, were a ream of paper laid as its base.

And so I want to be clear about two of my deeply held beliefs, the premises that guide everything I will be posting here:

1. Children - future adults - have merit both in terms of what they can do now, as well as what they are capable of achieving later on.
2. Learning does not occur in a vacuum - regardless of age, everyone has the ability to learn, and learning is at its best when all aspects of our selves are engaged: cognitive, physical, emotional, social, spiritual... we are whole beings and we learn as whole beings.

As I post, I will most likely end up talking about something in 1., or 2., or both. I can't say either of those things enough. Because what education comes down to is value: how we display and transmit, in real terms, what is intrinsically valuable to us.
What is it we want to build with on the ground floor, steady and stable, yet with enough give to withstand the occasionally shifting movements of the earth below?

Every building needs a door; and so this blog is the door of my virtual classroom. This is the threshold between philosophy and practice - a space where thoughts and ideas, and the real-life stories to illustrate them, can go freely to and fro. Every building needs a door. Every story begins with a word.



Welcome.