Make Peace.

"I know how to protest war, but I don't know how to make peace."

These were words heard by the leader of a church in Manhattan when visiting a Quaker meeting. They became the subject of a prayer ribbon project that caught my eye one day, and I'm so glad I stopped to read how the project came about. I thought about these words again a few weeks ago as a committee that I've been serving on put the finishing touches on our curriculum.

The curriculum we've designed is an attempt to help children make peace. Or, as I've seen somewhere or other (on a bumper sticker, probably), to "wage" peace. Because peace is exactly like war, in the sense that it doesn't come from nowhere. Peace, like war, arises from a series of small decisions and a variety of influences. Peace has a history.

(photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/33981855@N04/3164684831/)

We talked a lot about peace, justice, and mutual respect; we talked about how such abstract values can be made concrete for children. Turns out there's a lot we can do. We can provide examples, by setting up games and role-playing, we can present problems for the children to solve together.

More than that, we can also be examples. We can work to be at peace with ourselves and with others. To illustrate what this doesn't look like, I think about a child in my class: her mother understands child development, and in particular knows what kind of child her daughter is, and instead of being at peace with that, has been steadily working to make her feel bad about herself. (Example: the girl had an accident, as recently-turned-4-year-olds sometimes do, and mom berated her in front of her teachers and other parents, then came back the next week and berated us teachers as well for good measure.) Most recently, she gave me a series of forms to fill out, attempting to get her daughter diagnosed with a disorder she doesn't have.

This girl, will she be able to make peace? Will she struggle with her thoughts, second-guessing her own experience and in turn second-guessing others throughout her days, because her mother cannot respect who she is and be just?

Peace has a history, and that history is written with every choice we make.

Spring Fever Makes Me Inarticulate.

Today I don't want to talk about the injustices of education, foisted on children by adults. Because today, my annoyance lies elsewhere.

Namely, with the children.

Lately, my classroom has been suffering from a severe case of spring fever. It happens every year to some degree; the kids get restless, punchy, and seem to lose the ability to listen to anyone over four feet tall. The result is no mental downtime for the adults in the room, as we are constantly arbitrating, repeating ourselves, and trying to introduce new/cool stuff to keep boredom from compounding the problem. The constant need for me to be "on," combined with whatever level of punchiness the children exhibit, is a nasty recipe that causes me to be far less patient with them and produces the need to nap the instant I arrive home. Being exhausted and annoyed with the kids makes it more difficult to come up with awesome plans and continue doing the documentation that I share with colleagues and families, all of which generally makes me cranky.

So hopefully, this too shall pass, as I have seen the good stuff come from these kids over many months, and this will turn out to be a short period of disequilibrium in the longer stretch of a happily functioning classroom. Children, like adults, have times when they are more wacky and moody than others... it sucks, from the adult point of view, to ride it out. But if I've done my job right, they'll get through it and we'll all move on!

occupational therapy, snake oil, normality.

Lately my head has been filled with disorders and disabilities. I mean, I've been thinking about the semantics of disorders and disabilities. I've been sitting on this entry for a while, because it's a sensitive issue for many, many people (especially parents), and I don't want anyone to feel dismissed.

Just now I tried searching for the New York Times article I read recently about the rise of occupational therapy - it didn't pop up - but instead I got a hit for an article about vision therapy ("Concocting a Cure for Kids with Issues," March 14 2010). It's a therapy that's not really respected by the medical field, or by other special education therapies (physical, occupational, speech, applied behavior analysis, etc.); the central tenet, as explained in the article, is that many of the learning problems diagnosed as A.D.H.D. and the like are, in fact, misdiagnoses that treat the symptoms and not the root of an underlying vision problem. To quote:

"...vision therapists often see children’s learning and attention problems as part of the high-pressure society that kids are forced to grow up in. While problems like A.D.H.D., dyslexia and other developmental or learning disorders are now seen by mainstream medicine as related to differences in brain structure, wiring and chemistry, the behavioral-optometry model conceives of achievement-related problems as resulting from the environment: notably, the stress of growing up in an unnatural and overly visually demanding world."

It goes on to say, "In this schema, vision therapy just undoes what culture has created. There’s nothing actually wrong with the child who’s struggling to learn or pay attention — his or her dysfunction has been caused by the outside world. This reasoning is filled with the promise that, with the right kind of care, any child can rise to any sort of opportunity."

What amazes me about the opposition to vision therapy and behavioral optometry is not that it exists - certainly every idea should be turned around, examined, and questioned - but that it all seems to be based on the argument, "Well, it's not scientific enough. You're not doing anything except making children and parents feel good about themselves." Example cited by critics: "...the low-power glasses that behavioral optometrists prescribe to reduce stress are so weak that they can’t actually have any effect on a child’s vision — except to make the child believe that they are helping his vision (or to please a parent who believes they are helping the child’s vision)."



The American Academy of Pediatrics says, “Ineffective, controversial methods of treatment such as vision therapy may give parents and teachers a false sense of security that a child’s learning difficulties are being addressed, may waste family and/or school resources and may delay proper instruction or remediation.”

As if feeling good about yourself is somehow a bad thing, a hinderance on "proper learning." What does that say about our idea of 'proper learning'? That it should be drudgery? That we should struggle and hate every moment of school in order to learn? (Obviously, if you have been reading so far you know my feelings on interest, engagement, and learning - and you know I disagree with drudgery for drudgery's sake.)
It would also help if children - people in general but children especially - were not seen as some sort of predicable scientific subjects. Science is a wonderful thing, and it is fascinating to know that no matter whether you heat it in a kettle or a pot, with a gas flame or an electric coil, water is water and will boil at 212 F. Or 100 C. Whichever. But people are not a hard science. People vary. Our emotions matter, and they are not measurable in degrees, Fahrenheit or Celsius. And, when I say our emotions matter, I mean that they absolutely affect the outcome of a situation. They cannot be disregarded or ignored, or treated like a variable in a science experiment.

What bothers me about the "scientific" argument is that it loses sight of the ultimate goal. The whole idea isn't to get kids to respond predictably to stimuli, like water to heat. The idea is to get kids to acquire and use literacy and mathematical skills. So what if they need 'magic glasses' to help them do it? It is hardly a "false sense of security" if the child actually makes strides in their academic life (or, as the article suggests, several areas of life, including sports and music). It is, rather, achieving the ultimate goal of the child being comfortable with academic skills.

This post ended up straying a bit from where I started - I want to get to the story about the "snake oil" of the title - but I think this is where I need to end for now. Certainly, it's a large and complicated enough topic to warrant revisiting. So here's to a bit of time to digest, with snake oil to come.

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.