The Third Way Blog

End of April

   
 Leaving town again tomorrow, and this is a hard time to go since the outdoors has become so inviting.  Every year I give myself a birthday present of guilt free flower bed weeding in the last week in April.  Yesterday, sitting in the dirt, carefully trying to pull single blades of grass, roots and all, without disturbing the delicate California Poppy plants, I wondered what it says about my personality that I love to do this so much.  Sit on the ground, look at every single little weed and then essentially sculpt the flower beds, plant by plant.  I was also thinking about birthdays.  My mother had died before reaching 66.  My father at age 66 was the proud parent of two very young children.  I am somewhere in between.  Very much alive, and yet certainly not in the parent stage of my life.  Although I have shared my home with a 13 year old off and on this month, and will probably do so again.  I have been regretting leaving because I will not get to see the slow emergence of the water lilies, all the different 100 year old daffodils, the apple tree in full bloom, and the many little green sprouts that are just beginning to take on their adult form, although not size.  So I decided to take a few pictures before I go and my garden becomes a May garden.

 
 
 
  
 

Next time I take this picture we will be full into the buttercups.  Moved from blues to yellows as the dominant color.   
  

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time for the next stage.  I have often thought that spring goes by so much more quickly than winter because the landscape changes from day to day, while during the winter it does not.   

 

 

Changing the Face of Education??

Here are some thoughts after watching the movie “Waiting for Superman,” the documentary that is supposed to “change the face of education.”

1. It was interesting to see the endless parade of middle aged men in suits and ties (mostly white, a few black) who were the experts, leaders, and commentators, when the majority of people who deal with children on a day to day basis at home and in the classroom are women (teachers and mothers). Only two women spoke at length and both were polarizing and controversial figures. 

2. Any school that is willing to hold the kind of spectacle that was shown in the final scenes of the lotteries is NOT thinking about what is best for the children - all the children, not just the ones who "win," but also the vast majority who are “not accepted.” Why in the world does this have to be done publicly with the children present? One mother left, murmuring to herself "I wish this had been done without B... present, so by the time I got home I could gather my thoughts and be ready to talk to her!" It is interesting that the lotteries for entrance into the exclusive private schools in New York (for middle class and upper middle class families) are done either by mail or without the children present. These public lotteries seem almost designed to give the vast majority of children the message that they are "not lucky" and "not accepted"; they lost the lottery and so had lost their chance for success. What kind of message is this to give children? That your chance of success in life is determined entirely by luck, by forces outside your own hands?

3. Why so much scripted chanting and rote learning in these charter schools? This is something I want to write about more. It is an important point in light of brain research that shows that learning that is done by rote, without real attention, forms pathways in the brain that are only temporary. (You might pass the test, but the understanding will quickly fade.) For permanent changes in brain wiring, you need full attention, and ideally, the participation of all the senses. I’ve seen for years that chanting vocabulary in language classes, for example, is very inefficient. But I see groups of children mindlessly chanting after the teacher in clip after clip of the KIP schools, and the other schools profiled in this movie. 

4. Finally, the whole system of charter schools, lotteries, longer school days, even boarding schools, gives the message to parents (especially poor and working class parents) that they are powerless. Their job is to work their assess off and hand their children over to someone else to educate. What happens to any one child depends, as a school principal said, on "geography and luck." How about putting the tools for giving children a powerful, individualized education into the hands of parents? This is possible and would be a true change in the "face education." That's what I am about anyway. 

  

Life in the Fast Lane

 
Easter Sunday, and I am still being stalked by "my" robin, who has actually begun to follow me from room to room. Sometimes, I take my computer into a chair in the living room, where it is warm and cozy when I've made a fire. This last week has been damp and cool, so I moved in there to work.  Suddenly, thump, there was the robin, sitting on the banister out the window, and thudding against the window at the end of the living room. Then the window right next to my chair. The last straw was when I strolled into the bathroom the day before yesterday, sat down, and there he was banging the bathroom window. He is circling the house. I keep thinking of his female mate, sitting on some branch looking at him, and thinking to herself "this pathetic nut is the father of my children!" 

The high point of the week also took place in the bathroom. I fixed the toilet myself! This was definitely a triumph of ingenuity over gender. Suddenly, one morning, the handle did nothing. I looked inside and saw what was wrong (the chain was broken). I did not assume I couldn't deal with the problem. A first step. Instead of calling for help, I went to the hardware store and looked for the part I needed. I had a chat with the guy at the register about if it would work for a very old toilet. (Everything in this house is very old.) The part, he told me, could be used in two ways, depending on the age of the toilet. I took it home, opened up the back and began to tinker. It took several tries, and even cutting the new part, then adjusting the chain. Suddenly I had a working toilet and I did it myself! I was very proud. I wanted to call someone and brag, but no one to call. So here I am actually posting about this small triumph. I have the feeling that this experience should tell me something about learning, experimentation, the pleasures of figuring things out, not matter your age.  

Mostly I've been working, and then wandering outside to enjoy the increasingly porous feeling between inside and out. Pull a few weeds and think about the list of forgotten lessons learned every year from the first days in the garden. The one I seem to have to learn over and over and over again is to watch where I put my feet. Small tender plants, once stepped on, will not recover. 

 

 

Really Ready to Learn

 

For many years my house was a pit stop for the Mexican workers who came into this region to pick apples every fall . Some time in mid August I would hear a door slam, the sound of Spanish being spoken on the road, and look up to see groups of young men, or men, women and children coming down the pathway to say, “Hello! We’re back! When can the English lessons start?” People would then be in and out all fall, sitting on my porch, bringing papers to be translated, using the phone to call Mexico, or just stopping in with a box of apples. Often the children had to sit around for hours as their parents worked on some paper or other or waited their turn to use the phone (This was pre cell phone days).

I began to notice something interesting about these young children. They were never intrusive, restless, or bored, and they didn’t fight with each other. Unlike their Anglo contemporaries, they didn’t bug their parents or anyone else. They just played, or sat and day dreamed. If someone was there to play with, good, they would disappear around the side of the house. If not, they found some small toy and invented a game. It wasn’t that they were intimidated; they were just able to amuse themselves for long periods of time. They were obviously used to following adults around, listening to the murmur of adult conversation, and making their own fun. (Visiting the camps, I also noticed that the children were passed around a lot, made much of, cuddled and played with, not only by their own families, but by all the young men who were, after all, far from their own brothers and sisters.)

We popped the school age children into our local country school where no Spanish was spoken and there were no other Hispanic children. In spite of this, they did very well, especially the youngest ones. They bravely climbed onto a bus full of English speaking strangers in the morning, made friends in school, and brought home glowing reports from their teachers. These were well behaved, friendly, surprisingly resilient, and unusually confident young children. In spite of the itinerant life style, the poverty, the language and cultural issues, they were “school ready.”

I’ve been thinking about those days this week as I prepare a talk/training for migrant parents that I will be giving at the National Migrant Conference in a couple of weeks. I ran across an article called "The Social Competence of Latino Kindergartners and Growth in Mathematical Understanding" (Galindo and Fuller, Developmental Psychology, 2010 vol 46, No 3). This article reiterated what I had observed. Latino (especially Mexican) kindergartners come to school with a set of "social" skills that equals those of middle class "white" children. The article speculates that Mexican culture and family life is behind this surprising finding. The article also says, however, that their math skills are not what they should be. (Interesting in view of the fact, that I have also noticed over the years that adults educated in Mexico tend to have much better math skills than minimally educated adults in this country. I think the parents simply do not realize that they can help their children mathematically, and that not speaking English does not matter.)

I suspect that parents create a little bubble of loving security for their children especially in the early years. It is almost as if the families carry the village with them as they move around the country, and village life is healthy one for young children. Working now with parents in New York City (as well as Hispanic families), I’ve been thinking about how parents could combine the intellectual and verbal stimulation that we want to give our children with a little dose of village life. This is one time when it is possible, I believe, to have to best of both worlds in any one family.

 

Mini Posts

 For more than twenty years I got up every morning, started the fires, and
prepared a breakfast for my partner's mother, then in her late seventies and eighties. (As I write this I think "Oh no, she must have been older than that! She seemed so old.") I would take a big bowl and put in a variety of supplements, including lecithin, a mixture of ground nuts, wheat germ and a special yeast, called "Dragon's Milk", a variety of vitamins, a banana, and the cereal. She added artificial sweetener, hot water and evaporated milk herself. I have recently added lecithin to my morning routine, so suddenly I find myself mixing a bowl of cereal with Dragon's Milk, lecithin, banana, (vitamins on the side).  The first time I put in the lecithin, I got quite a pang. Was she old or wasn't she old? Am I old or aren't I old? As I write this I  realize that the pang is not about aging, but about change. After all I still feel the same, probably even a little better.    

 

   
Spring is a funny time here in the country. The animals are a little nuts. A couple of years ago it was that sleepy little bear that came on the porch and peered through the door. Now it is this poor demented robin. Every morning it sits on the lilac bush right outside my window and dive bombs the window over and over and over again. I don’t know if it is trying to get in, if it sees its reflection in the window, or what.  I wonder when it has time to build a nest, take care of its babies, do all the things robins are supposed to do in the spring.  I have asked my young friend who draws Manga all the time, to make a picture with big eyes to put in the window, but she hasn't gotten around to it.  So the birds are trying to get in and it looks to me like my house plants are trying to get out.  They get longer and leggier and press themselves longingly against the window.  I like plants; they are so quiet.  At least they only press against the window instead of banging and banging and banging. 

Morning Post Again

Here I am writing early in the morning again, to the sounds of spring.  Peepers from my pond, rain dripping from the trees, the rooster crowing, the sump pump cycling on and off, and the wood stove creaking in the living room.  Also my computer humming and my head humming with memories of more than 30 years of April mornings.  

I'm sitting looking at the wall above my desk, which is mostly empty except for  an outline of the parent handbook, a list of projects I am working on (6 in all), and my small collection of pictures and notes.  Somehow the dripping sound of wet eves and the rooster (for me one of the most evocative sounds in the world) are making me feel nostalgic about the many years of living here, over 30 now.

At the very top of the wall is a torn and yellowing scrap of paper, with  a phrase written in brown ink. The words are "the exercise approach to Learning Things."  The handwriting, which I would know anywhere, is that of my partner.

 I've been thinking about him and about how much of what I do and say now came originally from him.  Most of his ideas were developed during the late eighties and nineties, in long silent nights of feeding the fire, thinking, and writing notes in little notebooks just like the one this scrap was torn from. The fields of neuroscience and education have just begun to catch up with his ideas.   So here is an interesting list - ideas, insights, and exercises developed in this little house that have now become the core of Third Way teaching and that are slowly coming into the mainstream. (Very slowly indeed)

• The exercise approach to Learning Things.  The art of practicing.
• Try talking to children without asking them questions. It changes everything.  
• Scanning and Pattern recognition are fundamental thinking skills and the key to powerful reading .  They can be practiced and learned. 
• Pointing and Naming - an exercise to develop attention and focus in young children.

In the next few weeks, I am going to explore these four points in more detail. 

So things haven't changed that much.  The rooster photo from my last post was taken over 20 years ago.  This photo was taken the day before yesterday. 

 

Morning At Home

 
 
I woke up at five again to the sound of a rooster crowing. I have been trained over the last 30 years to respond to the sounds of this house even in my sleep. The furnace comes on in the night and I pop out of a deep sleep, and lie awake waiting for it to stop; regardless of the hour I feel like I should get up and make a fire. And then there is the sump pump – a small, but critical piece of equipment that keeps the water from flooding the basement, especially in the spring. When it comes on, I wake out of a deep sleep until it goes off; sometimes it gets stuck and then I have to put on clogs, go down through the cellar way to the basement and jiggle the little arm. So I have been home for a week, and my unconscious knows it – I am back on duty again, living in my own home. I can be in a deep sleep and will come completely awake at these small sounds, when a week ago I was sleeping through New York City traffic, and two weeks ago I was dozing and reading on a plane flying from Germany to New York. 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday a friend here asked me if I was still blogging. It’s been a while. Time got by me, as I made these transitions from one life to another. All energy and thought seems to have been used just to keep track of daily life and live in other people’s worlds. My partner used to say to me “You just need to take the time to sit and think.” A good message. For me the doing part is easy, the thinking space needs to be cultivated. Now that I am back to roosters, building fires (even in April!), trips to the basement, filling my own frig, checking pumps and furnaces, I have time to think, especially when I am jolted awake by roosters at 5AM.