The Third Way Blog

A Little Bit of History

About 10 years ago, my partner and I were on our way to Pittsburgh to talk to an intellectual property lawyer about our programs and how to copyright them. I was driving as usual, and he sat beside me. This is how we roamed the state working and talking. We often had some our best brain storming sessions in the car. At that time we were working with farm and migrant families all over Western Pennsylvania, training parents and home visitors in our teaching methods, developing curriculum, and running a summer school for migrant children. I was in and out of schools and homes in this whole region talking to parents, teachers, our own staff, and helping our small country schools deal with the first influx of non English speaking children. About half the families I worked with were also English speaking, young local couples, living in trailers and old farm houses in back of barns, or next to corn fields while they worked on dairy farms. 

 "We need to think of a name ," one of us said, I forget who. After a long silence, my partner said, "How about The Third Way?", going on to explain his thinking, "The first way is classroom, group instruction; the second way is technology based; our way is the third way, individualized, personal, one on one and small group teaching and learning. " And so the name stuck, and in fact has turned out to be very apt. The more I work with families, schools, children, the more I see that the heart of The Third Way is in the new approaches to teaching and thus to learning, and the more I become convinced that children need to experience this kind of learning, especially in today's educational climate.  

I was remembering this conversation yesterday morning as I went on line and, much to my surprise, managed to submit the papers to renew the trademark for The Third Way education program. (There is another Third Way out there, which is a political think tank.) 

Now I have to go back and go through the same process for the term "Baby Logic", a phrase I came up with myself, one morning when we were having one of brain storming sessions at home. Another large part of our work even then involved redefining pre school learning, and school readiness, and thinking about how to use parent talk to help very young children learn to think.

I've come a long way since then; ideas which were just seeds are now worked out step by step, and here I am renewing the trademark for both terms. But counting back, I realize I am talking about conversations that took place 12 or 15 years ago. It seems like a different life time.

 

Glad to Be In the Country, For Now

Last night I made the first berry pie of the season. As I dodged falling packages and dug berries out of my freezer, I was thinking about why I am glad I live in the country. This train of thought started because I realized that I have a freezer full of raspberries, something that would never happen in the city. Then I began to review my whole day, a typical day of work, chores, scavenging. 

I had to get up early and went down to our small local hospital to get a blood test (enough vitamin D in my life?). Before I left I brought in an armload of wood listening to the neighbor's rooster. Then down to the hospital where there was no line; I was in and out without even enough time to read the Vanity Fair I found in the waiting room. After a short stop for coffee (now finally since we have a destination hotel in the area, you can get a really good cup of coffee in town), I went home to work until early afternoon when I headed back out for one of my favorite fall activities, scavenging for supplies around the county. (Over the years I have developed a grape connection, an apple connection, a milk connection, a chicken connection, several egg connections, a hay connection, and of course, always, a raspberry connection.)  This time my first stop was at the discount grocery store, one of the best places to run into people you haven't seen in years. Sure enough there was the woman who used to run the store patronized by the Mexican apple pickers. Every fall, this small local store would have chorizo, 100 packs of tortillas, coconut and sweet potato candy at the cash register, round balls of Mexican cheese. It was great.  Eventually my friend, the owner, married the crew boss who brought in the workers, sold the store, and disappeared, until yesterday.

Next I headed out to a friend's house where I had an appointment to pick up four bales of hay from his neighbor. We loaded it into my car and I drove carefully down the road to get eggs. (The hay was packed to the top of the car, no rear view). Stop at my friend's farm where her mother raises chickens, and after a brief chat, go out to the barn to find only one dozen in the frig. The chickens are molting. Oh well.  Back home, I pit stopped to drop off the hay, change clothing, and call another friend to discuss the crack in the plaster ceiling in my bedroom. We go way back and he is the master dry waller in the county. Years ago we worked together for two years to stop Pennsylvania from building hospital waste incinerators. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically, but also have many areas of agreement. We had a very informative discussion about who to vote for for local district attorney, judge, sheriff (or sherff as they say around here) and county commissioner. We traded information, who knew what about each candidate. My friend will stop by today to check out my ceiling before it all falls onto my bed. (These walls in this old house are not wall board, but old fashioned plaster.) Into town for a yoga class, on the floor of the local arts center. And then home to dig a chicken, locally grown of course, and berries out of my freezer and make pies and chicken stew. 

So why am I glad I live in the country? Lots of berries and local meat. No lines for things like driver's license or hospital visits. I can hang my laundry outside. Friendships with people who seem so different from you, but aren't really. When things happen to my house, I realize once again that I am not alone, in spite of living alone.  Now, five days later I am on my way back to New York, where, as my other friend says, everyone wears black.  Me too, I guess.    

Buying Lettuce Again

The cold is here, 10 days late.  My partner and I used to argue every fall about the first real frost date (an important turning point in the country year).  He said it was the beginning of October, and I said no, in our little nook in the woods, it was always around the 15th.  I knew because I keep track of when the lettuce freezes.  Before leaving for New York on October 12th, I brought all the plants in off the porch, arranged to rebuild the driveway so the oil truck could get close enough to run a hose to the basement, harrassed my friends about promised loads of wood, changed the screen door for the glass storm door, and assumed the rest of the plants would be zapped by the time I got back in town.  I returned to blooming impatiens, nusturtiums, calendulas, and a garden full of greens.  Until last night, October 27th.

Today, the flowers are gone.  The furnace came on this morning just as I got up.  And I locked myself out going out to get an extra load of wood, which I then had to leave on the picnic table, until my friend came with a key to let me back into my house.  Oh yes, and for the first time since April, we will have to buy lettuce.  Although the arugula and Japanese greens and kale and all just fine.  Except for leaf raking, which seems endless, I never mind this season so much when it actually comes.  It is the end of summer that I mourn more and having to remember the fire again and remember to buy lettuce. 

Fix the Building

Walking NYC streets with a two year old is in its own way fascinating.  Last week we spent 28 minutes (I timed it) in front of a building on upper Broadway while she played with a fire nozzle that stuck out of the building.  There were two nozzles, next to each other, each with a simple chain looped over the front.  28 minutes!  I leaned on the building and just watched, and she tried to turn the yellow nozzles, ran her hand over the different surfaces, pulled on the chain, carefully looped each chain over the nozzles, stepped back to crow and admire her handiwork, told me she was fixing the building, and then went through the process all over again, and again, and again.  What was she learning or thinking?  I am not sure, but it seems to me that growing up on the streets of NYC and in its hallways and elevators is basically an education in space, angles, and surfaces. 

I was also a NYC child, and I still occasionally have the reoccuring dream of my childhood. I am very small and surrounded by flat surfaces, high walls, wet streets, puddles with reflected blue and red and yellow and orange lights. Rain is falling.  Obviously a child's experience of city streets. I also have an affinity for high light spaces.  I remember apartment hunting for a family member here in my small town years ago.  I walked into an empty second floor apartment with the light shining in through the windows and the sky visible and I thought "Now this feels like home."  The New York was still in me.

So one thing I've been doing is watching the next generation explore the sidewalks, curbs, cracks, chains, grates, stairs, halls, walls, ramps, protrubances, and spaces of her surroundings. Not surprisingly, she is an expert on  "rough" and"smooth." 

Just A Few Minutes a Day

"You just need a few minutes a day." I often say this about using Third Way methods with young children. But that's not exactly it either. After all, I know that for many families, even just a few minutes a day of something new is impossible to imagine. But this approach is not about finding 20 minutes, or even 10, to do yet one more thing with your child. It is more about how to use the many daily little interactions and routines in new and very specific ways. 

I will say one thing though, to work with children this way, it is necessary to find small amounts of time with your child when you are not rushed, not doing one thing, and simultaneously thinking about what needs to happen next. At least a few minutes a day, when the pace changes and the focus is on exactly what you are both doing in that moment. That ability to slow down and focus is after all one of the key skills that young children need to practice. Slow down, examine what is in front of you, and talk about it. This way of thinking can be for just 5 minutes, or even 3. That's OK; the power is in coming back to the space again and again. This can happen looking at a picture book, playing with simple toys or household objects, taking off coats and boots, riding in the elevator, walking to the corner, putting away toys, sorting laundry (one of my personal favorites), standing in line, and, of course, playing games, when and if you have time.  

The power is in the pace, the talk, and the repetition.  Look for small moments for simple games, empty times, and conversations.

 

 

Country Hands/City Feet

 

I grew up in Manhattan, a city child who couldn't wait to get out into the country in the summer. I cultivated "country legs," which were scratched, scabbed, bruised, dirty, and a little brown. I've been thinking about country legs as I move back and forth between New York City and my home out here in Western PA. These days I can tell where I am by looking at my hands. Clean and relatively smooth?  I am in New York.  Not quite clean finger nails, hands a little gritty and perhaps stained?  I am in Pennsylvania, where I still have to pull weeds, cut up beets and tomatos, plant the iris that someone sent me from Montana, and, as of this morning, bring in some wood. 

So, two very different lives, lived in two very different environments this fall and winter.  When I am here, I want to make sure I keep doing all the small things that make this place my home.  I insist on taking the time to get my fall tomato scene together.  I will feel like I have lost my country chops if I have to buy canned tomatoes this winter.  I will not let the porch look ragged and unoccupied. And I will take the time to think and work on long term projects, (and keep this blog going), not rush from thing to thing.  There are some very interesting things to think about this winter, exactly because I do go out into the world, leaving behind the tomatos and flower beds, and wood piles. 

For example, what is the best way to help Spanish speaking adults get enough English to pass a proficiency test as quickly as possible?  I am thinking about that this after a day and a half working with GED teachers of Spanish speaking adults. It seems to me that the rapid acquisition of  vocabulary, and the ability to scan (orally and visually) and recognize enough words to make sense of material are critical.  So how do I help teachers plan lessons that practice this skill?

Also, what are the skills that three and four year olds need to get kindergarten ready?  The more I work with this age and younger children, the more I am convinced that the key lies in helping them  (1) physically and mentally slow down and focus on the world around them, and (2) see the connections and patterns. Listening, looking, scanning and pattern recognition again

What would a box (wooden) of Third Way math materials look like?  How could I produce materials that would help young children both understand basic math and make the transition from objects to paper. (Not writing numbers, but looking at marks, and pictures.) Seems like I am back to focus, scanning, and pattern recognition.  

Well time to go get my first armload of wood for the season. Now the question is simpler.  Where did I put the axe last spring?  

Early Morning Thoughts on Games

My father's daughter again. It is 5 AM and I am up writing. But the sound coming from my room is not the click click click of the typewriter (the sound of my childhood), but the quieter tap tap tap of computer keys and the purr of the computer itself. The other sounds are bird sounds, the crowing of a neighbor's rooster, and a couple of early morning birds arguing with each other.  It is still dark out, and I am determined to finish the final report on the math in the orchards project before going back to New York in the middle of next week.  So I got up at 5 and am now hard at work.

  I am on the one hand looking at relevant research and on the other comparing it to my own experiences in the orchards.  Right now I am reading and summarizing research on how children learn math. One of the most interesting articles describes a study that examined the use of games to teach four year olds "number sense."  (By number sense educators mean not just the ability to count, an essentially meaningless task by itself, but an understanding of magnitude and order, the ability to recognize and number small collections of objects or marks, and the ability to count real objects accurately. ) In this study, the researchers taught 4 year olds a simple board game that used a number line.  They played with each child for just a little over an hour in short sessions over a two week period. The children played one on one with an adult, and were helped by the adults to count out loud as they played.  At the end of the study the children could not only count better, but they had a better sense of the order and size of numbers.  9 weeks later when they were tested again, they still showed these gains in skills and understanding!

It seems clear to me that the children made a breakthrough in their understanding of numbers.  They had not simply memorized new information, but had somehow made fundamental connections.  Looking at the pictures I have of our children playing games this summer, I am not surprised at this.  If there is one quality that shines out of the pictures, it is the total engagement and concentration of the children.  This research was with 4 year olds, but I suspect it applies to older children also.  I've been looking at other studies, talking about the difficulty of engaging older children, especially those of the middle school age.  In fact one of the big changes we have seen in our math game project, is that we have more and more older children who wander over to our blankets and insist on playing games.  I have had to expand the whole curriculum to meet the needs of middle and even high school students. 

Like Father, Like Daughter

Right before my father died he was briefly (very briefly) in a convalescent home since he had fallen and broken a hip.  Soon his bed there was strewn with New York Times, his favorite history books, a battered issue of "Foreign Report."  He could barely read them at that time since he was highly medicated, but he wanted them around the way a child wants a favorite stuffed animal, and he did dip in and out. One of the nurses commented  on this in front of him and I said something like "Oh yes, reading is his favorite thing to do."  "No," he corrected me, "my favorite thing to do is thinking."  I know what he means.  I won't say that it is my absolute favorite thing to do, but this morning, now back in New York for three days,I realized how thinking grounds and calms me. 

As usual when I am starting in a new direction I feel puzzled and anxious, even after all these years.  Then I sit and start to think and make notes; once again I need to remember that the process of mulling takes a little time, and some empty space. This is especially true when I am making a transition from one project to another or juggling several projects at the same time, starting out in a new direction, or working with a deadline to meet. This is the time not for action, but for inaction. At this moment in time all of these conditions are true. And to add to this, my surroundings have changed completely, and I do mean completely. I have gone from wandering from orchard to orchard to play games on blankets, from floating down the Clark Fork on an inner tube, to riding the subway to Brooklyn. I have also gone from 14 hours a day on just one all encompassing project, to having to combine writing the report on this project with reconnecting with the families and schools I was working with here in New York before I left, not to mention catching up with personal affairs.

 And so, this morning, instead of trying out a new yoga class that I found around here, I got up, got coffee, read the paper briefly, and began to think.  Now a couple of hours later the whole thing looks not only manageable, but exciting.  (Here's a picture that does not have a lot to do with this post, but it is all I have around. I took it last week.)

 

Reading Fanatics

 

Recently I have been telling parents (here in the migrant camps and also in the wilds of Brooklyn) that whether or not a child reads well depends on life style choices by parents, not method or even quality of instruction, and I am increasingly sure this is true. In the last two weeks  I watched my 8 year old neice make that mysterious jump from almost reader to reading fanatic. This happened in English, her second language.  She arrived reading those  little "chapter books" that are labeled by Levels and grades. The ones I have around here are slightly below what she was reading, (Level 2 for grades 1- 3) and they average about 30 - 50 words a page.  After a week with time on her hands, my neice was reading Pipi Longstocking and other novels obsessively. This is not a TV watching or computer using child, so the transition was easier than usual I suspect.  By the end of her visit, we had to tell her to put down the book at the dinner table, to stop reading and go to sleep, to speak to us once in a while.  She left carrying  four books onto the plane. 

So I was thinking about this the other day when I arrived at the Middle School library where we meet and plan before going out into the orchards to play math games in the late afternoon.  I found a young girl who had made a bed for herself out of chairs and was deep in a book.  An unusual sight these days.  She was the first and only child here who told me she liked to read, especially "thick books." and we went out to the book table to share book recommendations.  She sent me off with one she liked, and I, after much searching, sent her off with "Little Women," and an animal story, I think.  I do not really expect her to like either, but that was all that was there.  

The other night when I couldn't sleep I finally got to her recommendation, and also a copy of Lousia May Alcott's "Old Fashioned Girl" which I had picked up in the school. The contemporary book  which is described on the back cover as a "tough, tender, and darkly funny story of a teenage outcast" and has won many awards. It is about a 14 year old girl who was raped at a party when she got drunk.  In a panic she calls the police, and so spends the next year ostracized in school, and essentially mute from the trauma of the experience. She tells no one, and no wonder, since all the adults in the book are portrayed as clueless self centered idiots. The Alcott book is about a poor country girl who goes to visit her rich city cousins, and over the years teaches them all the old fashioned virtues and how to be happy in life through being good. It is full of little moral asides by the author and characters go back and forth between living up to her moral standards, and falling apart. It was in its time a best seller.

As I lay in bed, going back and forth between the two books, I was struck not only by the difference in message, but also by something else that I had not noticed at first. The look of the page and the difference in the use of language. The modern book is 198 pages long, written completely in the present tense, and averages a little over 200 words per page. There are big white spaces on every page; dialog is written double spaced in short half finished sentences, almost as if people were texting rather than talking.  The Alcot book is 305 pages long, averaging about 375 words per page, long dense paragraphs and complex dialog.  So two totally different kinds of thinking and sets of reading skills are required to read these two books. 

I began to think about how to help children make the transition from this kind of abbreviated, simplified reading to more complex material. I suspect this is a matter of conversation and exposure, and perhaps some scanning skills - a collaboration between school and home.  I do know that any parent can fill his (or her) home with all different kinds of reading matter (new books, old books, magazines, picture books) and insist on empty time in the child's life and that this will lead to reading for pleasure.  I have seen parents who do not speak English and barely read themselves do this.  After 6 months, they find themselves having to go in and yell at a child who is secretly reading under the blanket instead of going to sleep, and hogging the bathroom to finish a chapter. It is sure fire.  What she reads is another story. 

 

Pre School Math on a Blanket

These days, I am spending every evening sitting outdoors on blankets with children where we gather to play math games. The youngest are between the ages of 3 and 5. (The 2 year olds come around, but we often have to take them back to their campsites when they start grabbing and throwing.) The goal with these little ones is simply to have them settle down and practice learning in a semi structured situation. I say "semi structured" because how structured can you be outdoors on a red blanket?. The first “lessons” are all about sorting, patterns, systematically looking at and using materials, and especially working as part of a small group with an adult.  As usual the adult does much talking and avoids questions. We speak in two languages. 

 

It’s been exciting to see children suddenly make small leaps in attention and understanding,  even in this short period of time. The other day I worked with three 3 and 4 year olds who had been giving a tutor a hard time, throwing chips around and being normal pre schoolers. We started by giving everyone “Circle Sheets”, pieces of paper with rows of drawn circles the size of poker chips. Then I took a big bag of chips and instead of pouring them out, I had each child take a turn picking a chip out of the bag, one at a time, as we discussed color. All children I have ever worked with, just love to place the chips on the circles, and these were no exception. Slowly their sheets filled with chips. I took each child's fingers and we touched each chip saying the color. (This is an exercise not so much in color recognition, as a preliminary to the counting skill called “one to one correspondence”.  In other words learning to coordinate what you say and what you see and what you touch.) Suddenly I heard a muttering on my right, and I looked at Francisco ,the wildest of the 3 year olds. He had covered his page, and was slowly and intently touching each chip, and muttering the color (sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in English).  He worked his way systematically through all 25 chips, completely engrossed. As far as I was concerned the lesson was a success and over.

Last night I went to another orchard where a tutor was working with a two year old and a four year old. They had been sorting and building towers. I sat down with the older child, and began to show her how to arrange the plastic dowels side by side instead of in a tower. At first I handed her each one, saying the color. Then just for fun, I began to alternate, orange, purple, orange, purple. She never said a word, but just got it immediately. She began to systematically choose her colors, orange, purple, orange, purple, trying to fill the whole board.  In the end, we touched each one naming the colors. Again the lesson was over. 

 
The three and four year olds do not do much with numbers, but the five year olds, especially those who have been in “school” all know how to count.  This does not mean, however that they really understand about numbers as quantity, so we do lots of looking at small arrangements of chips, toys, and fingers and talking about them.  I don’t know why, but children love to count touching their noses, so this is always part of the game.  (This, like the fascination with the Circle Sheets, seems to be a universal joy. I have successfully counted touching noses with children from three continents now.)  Here are a few pictures from the last week.  Next time, I will talk about working with teens, the other group that really challenges the tutors.  More counting, a little boy and his grandmother working with blocks.