Children, Meet Earth.

I'm not a visual person. I don't really look at the living room and say, "You know what would be great? Some curtains in a color that compliments the couch, with a chair over here and..."

But today, I looked at our playground (not very far from the legendary recycled-rubber bits), and I saw it where it does not currently exist: a raised bed of... peppers, maybe. Or something, anything, green and growing.

I think that in the wider world, I would be easily dismissed as an unrealistic, idealistic, hippy-liberal or any number of epitaphs to describe someone who thinks that we can actually all get along, even if we never quite understand each other fully. But the reality is, while I am socially liberal, I am personally quite conservative: I think as a whole, people can't do for themselves and need help, but individually, we should all be capable of taking care of ourselves and our surroundings (home, family, community...).
In other words, you need to protect and take care of your own.

So as a teacher, I need to teach these kids to care about their own. And what is theirs? This space at school, for one. That's where we begin. We take care of our space. We take care of our bodies, too - that's why we go outside every day, why we have a 'fitness' program, why we have healthy snacks at snack time. It then makes sense that we can do both at once by gardening.

Therefore... raise the beds!

Recent Letter to Families

Dear Families,
It all began with snack gone awry. Several times, when we had yogurt or applesauce or something vaguely liquidy for snack, Mrs. B and I noticed that several cups ended up in the cup bin with a cloudy mixture in them: a sign that snack was being used to play and not to eat!

A lot of times, there's a knee-jerk reaction to something like this--children do something they're not "supposed" to do, and so we adults immediately forbid the inappropriate action. The problem with this reaction is, it might suppress the behavior, but it doesn't erase the desire to do whatever it is the children are doing, and often it leads to us being upset at them for finding ways to continue doing it.

In this case, clearly, the kids wanted to mix stuff.

Normally, we're not big proponents of using food for anything but eating at school--I know one of my own personal values is to waste as little as possible. But here, I don't consider it a waste to provide the children with an opportunity for scientific exploration. (Yes, I said it: mixing random food together is scientific exploration!)
Science is all about asking questions and conducting experiments to find answers. For three and four year olds, those questions are things like, "What happens if we mix bread with water?" and then of course we use our hands to mix the bread and the water together, to feel the changes in the texture. Then we ask again. "What happens if we add jelly to the bread and water?" And we mix and we feel the changes (and as several children noted, "My hands are all sticky!")



So far the children came up with a list of things they'd like to mix, and we've completed two concoctions. The recipes were as follows...

Concoction #1
bread
water
grape jelly
blue food coloring
mini marshmallows
green paint
purple paint

Concoction #2
soy sauce
duck sauce
hot mustard
bananas
mini marshmallows

We'll do another concoction this week, and we can start to point out patterns: marshmallows don't mix like the other stuff does, for example. Perhaps just as importantly, together we've turned what could have been an ongoing tension in the classroom--the children playing with their food and teachers getting frustrated--into an ongoing scientific inquiry that challenges the children to stretch their minds and allows them to really do some hands-on work!

Not a bad fate for all those ketchup packets, eh?

The Rock of Interest

One of the two playgrounds at my school is covered in a recycled-rubber surface, or in other words, many many pieces of shredded tires.

Underneath the tires, I assume there has to be dirt, and rocks. But if ever I've seen a version of the needle in the haystack with my own eyes, it's a rock in the playground. Try finding rocks in something that looks like this:


But here's the thing: one kid in my afternoon group decided he was going to look for rocks. He took a bucket and got to work, and before long, he'd found a rock. And then another one. And another, and on until when it was time to go home, he had too many rocks to carry in his hands. I had to give him a Ziploc to put them in. I poured his new rock collection into the bag, thinking that was the end of it.

Silly thought, that.

The next day, half the class was scouring the playground for rocks. And they all found enough rocks to fill their hands and beyond. And even today, a week or two later, I put four rocks in a child's mailbox that she'd asked me to hold on to for her while she played elsewhere on the playground. Chances are, they'll find rocks until the end of the year.

Why does this matter?

Simply because if I had asked the children, or told the children, to look for rocks, they probably wouldn't have done it. Or, maybe a little bit, but not the handfuls of rocks they've uncovered, and not for the length of time they've spent searching. Looking for stones half the size of a golf ball amid thousands and thousands of little black rubber pieces half the size of a golf ball... well, it takes patience, and persistence, and a desire to find what you're looking for. It's not something you do unless you're interested in doing it.

And isn't that how we operate in life? Don't we perform better, feel better, interact with others better, remember better, when we're interested in whatever's going on? Interest fuels learning, and when we take away the balance of things that children learn "because they should/need to" and things they learn because they want to, we destroy entire worlds of possibility.

Overlooking the Obvious

Families have to trust teachers - adults outside the demarcations of 'family'- to aid in the rearing of their children. So a good rapport between teachers and families is important. Trust and good rapport, as I see it, has honesty as its base.

So it annoys me that I am not honest, and that I feel I cannot be honest, about a very basic piece of my life with families.

Why should it matter that my significant other is a woman? It shouldn't. And maybe it wouldn't, if I happened to mention it in conversation.

But I work hard enough as it is to convince families (not all, but many) that my approach to education is thorough and informed, that I understand their children's needs, and that even though I have a facial piercing and I wear jeans & t-shirts to work, I am a professional. I carry around this niggling feeling that if I were to share this piece about my life (a piece that I feel is ultimately inconsequential), there are enough people out there who would second-guess my work as to make my already substantial efforts unsustainable. It's not a feeling I enjoy, and as I said maybe it's unfounded, but there it is.

However, as with so many things, people don't see what they're not looking for. A week or two ago I guess I let slip a first-person plural pronoun sort of story--"we" don't watch much tv or whatever it was--and the mom I was talking with exclaimed, "Oh! I didn't realize you were married!"
Though I've known this woman for almost two years, we've only ever encountered one another within the hallways of the school. How many moms, dads, grandparents, etc. have had countless conversations with me about families and never noticed that I am particularly oblique about my own? When my colleague became a grandmother, signs went up announcing it. Others talk about their children freely; it's never a question that they have husbands (or less frequently, ex-husbands) who are a part of those children's lives. In my case, maybe there are a few parents who have put two and two together, but one way or the other, I've fallen into this 'don't ask, don't tell' policy with families.

Trust? Check. Good rapport? Check. Total honesty? Hm, we're all working on it.