This is My Life: December 17

Alexander: Is Jesus still alive?

Me: No, Jesus has been dead for a long time.

Alexander: Five years?

Me: Much, much longer than five years - about 2,000 years.

Alexander: 2,000 years?! How old was he when he died?

Me: Well, we're not really sure, but history tells us he was about 34 years old.

Alexander: How did he die?

Me (with hesitation): Well, do you see that cross up there? (I point to a cross suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral.) He died on the cross.

Alexander: What? Did he fall off the cross?

This is My Life on November 17

"When did you go to South Africa, Aisha?"
"Last winter. It was so so fun, but it took a long time to get there."

"South Africa is pretty far away. How long did you ride in the plane?

"A long time - like one hour!"

"Teddy, I noticed you had a really hard time concentrating in calendar today. Why was it hard to listen?"
"I don't know! I just can't help myself!"

Alexander Moment of the Day

Alexander, one of our "active" boys, has been reminded to sit down several times.

Me: Alexander. Sit down. On your bottom.

Melanie (my co-teacher): Alexander. Down. Bottom.

(Alex walks around the room and smiles at Melanie through the legs of the easel.)

Melanie: Alexander, you need to sit down now. We have asked you three times, and you are stopping our friends from moving on in their writing. That is unacceptable.

Alex: Why is your face red?

Melanie: My face is red because I'm upset, Alexander. I'm upset that we can't move on in the lesson.

Alex: Your face is always red.

Preparing for a New Adventure

It's been over a month since my last post. Where did the time go?

For starters: I now live in Washington DC and am preparing to teach kindergarten. After the craziness of moving to a new city subsided, I jumped into orientation and classroom preparation. Our first day of school is Tuesday, and I can't wait for the kids to arrive. I've written their names on so many folders, name tags, snack orders, and welcome boards that I can recite our class list in alphabetical order. Here goes: Agnes, Aisha, Alex, Asha, Charlie, David, Griffin, Jaden, Kimora, Liza, Luca, Lucas, Luke, Mackenzie, Max, Mia, Nina, Olivia, Phillip, Ryan, Sigrid, Teddy.

One of the things I've studied (at length) over the last week is our kindergarten curriculum. My directing teacher, Mrs. L, is in her 8th year teaching, and she is a veritable curriculum rockstar. She is amazingly organized, to the point of listing books and chants for each lesson on our weekly planning sheets. She also has insight into the huge variation of skills our kids will have mastered when they arrive in our classroom. She explained to me at one dinner that we can expect reading levels ranging from "little to no knowledge of letters" to "5th grade comprehension." We'll have kids who don't know teen numbers and those who understand the concept of a factorial.

"How do we work with that?" I asked, wondering (understandably, I think) how to help each of our 22 students fulfill his goals.

She gave me the answer I've come to expect in education: "It depends on the child."

Is there anything in this business that can be boiled down to pure formula? My experience, and the experience of my infinitely more qualified colleagues, suggests that the answer to this question is, "No." It seems that the only rule for working in a school is that there aren't any hard-and-fast rules.

This leads me to another, larger, question that swirls around my head almost everyday: if we can't simplify the workings of a single classroom, what makes us think that there is a silver bullet to reform the entire system?

This reminds me of a conference I had with the parents of one of my students last week. The conference was a chance for the parents to tell us about the "hopes and dreams" they have for their daughter in kindergarten. It's a fact-finding mission for teachers that helps us understand how the child learns, her strengths and weaknesses, as well as areas where her parents would like to see her improve. This particular student has an older brother who is quite advanced and introverted, and one of his favorite things to do is correct his baby sister. Their dialogue goes something like this:

Baby Sister: "Well, I think it's a little like this..." (Baby Sis demonstrates, explains)

Older Brother: "Not exactly."

According to the student's parents, this near-constant refrain of "not exactly" from her older brother sensitized the younger sister to making mistakes. Because she is a big-picture thinker, she uses broad strokes to understand the situation. Her brother, however, always seeks out nuance and points out moments when she could be more precise.

It strikes me that such a dynamic is not unique to this pair of siblings; we can find examples of it everywhere we look. Because I spend quite a bit of my downtime reading education blogs, they are my most salient form of reference. Every issue in the world of education reform, from "value-added" to charters to the achievement gap, essentially breaks down to one party painting the broad strokes while another reporter approaches just in time to write "not exactly" in his next post.

So where do we go from here? I can only hope that my 5-year-olds have some insight in this matter to share with me.

Education Utopia: No Place?

Utopia lies at the horizon.

When I draw nearer by two steps,

it retreats two steps.

If I proceed ten steps forward, it

swiftly slips ten steps ahead.

No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.

What, then, is the purpose of utopia?

It's good for walking.

— Eduardo Hughes Galeano

The other night, I went to a lecture on utopian art at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The speaker was Stephen Duncombe, Professor of Art History at the Gallatin School at NYU. Duncombe's talk centered on a growing minority of artists who have abandoned the "truth telling" function of art in favor of seemingly far-fetched utopian propositions. These ideas push against atrophied imagination, forcing the viewer to consider unprecedented societal change. One of the most interesting utopian campaigns Duncombe discussed was Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings' "Wish You Were Here: Postcards from Our Awesome Future." Lambert and Packard describe outrageous (and hilarious) ways to improve San Francisco. Here are some of their suggestions:

- Turn Candlestick Park into Candlestick Organic Farms

-Install a zipline between Coit Tower and Oakland

-Turn the Muni into a roller coaster

The point of the work is to challenge perceptions of what a city can be. Dumcombe says of "Wish You Were Here," "Unless you have imaginative leaps, you're always going to create the status quo."

Duncombe's talk got me thinking about applications of utopian ideas to education. What could we do if we could think bigger about schools?

People like Geoffrey Canada are already doing this in places like Harlem Children's Zone. HCZ provides wraparound social services for families who live in the Zone. Canada said in a recent press release, "If your mission is about all of the students in a community, then dealing with family crises, gangs, drugs, violence, and health all become part of your strategy to support development of the whole child, not just how they perform on standardized tests." I believe wholeheartedly in supporting the whole child and seeking other measures of success than standardized tests. But perhaps we can reach even higher.

So what would I do if there were no limits? How would I change the system, Coit-Tower-zipline-style? What would you do?

(As a side note, I just finished the season finale of The Bachelorette. So so entertaining.)

Phone Calls: Keeping Kids Off the Streets?

Last week, I was reading Ross Trudeau's analysis of Lee Canter's assertive discipline. Canter is bringing some of his strategies to the MATCH Teacher Training Program, including this crazy walkie-talkie system that gives teachers immediate feedback on their presence in the classroom. (I'm not going to describe it in-depth, so read Ross's post if you want to know more.) Canter believes that urgency must characterize a teacher's every move. His justification?

"Hey, that classroom is chaos. You know the only thing between those kids and the street? YOU. You gotta dig deep and find that stronger voice or it's the STREET."

I happen to think that factors other than vocal urgency keep kids off the streets. (I'm sure Canter and Ross would agree with me). The gist of Canter's message, however, hits a powerful chord. Here's the chord it hit with me. I thought, "I should really call my students from MATCH."

It wasn't guilt that caused me to pick up the phone. Canter's statement was a powerful reminder of what I already knew: kids from low-income, tough environments need all the support they can get. My 7th graders need reminders that I care about them: I care about the video game that Gardy just beat and what Joselia's camp counselor said to her. When you're 13, those things mean the world to you, and you're bursting for someone to ask you about them. I want to be that person for my kids.

I remind all of them (and their parents) that they can call me anytime. I'm not just an academic resource, and I haven't disappeared because the school year is over. Instead, I am one of the many supports that will keep my kids off the street. That's a role I'm proud to play.

Debbie Miller: Best Practices for Teaching Reading

I often hear from friends who teach older students, "I just don't know how to teach really basic stuff. I mean, how do you teach someone to read? Or to add?" My answer to their questions is probably less than satisfactory, because the truth is that I don't know either.

But surely, I thought, there is a way it can be done. And not just a way, but the best way, a best practice. I've been searching for that best practice since I found out that I'll be teaching kindergarten next year. One of my basic goals is to instill a love of literature in all of my students.

In her book Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades, Debbie Miller describes how she teaches advanced comprehension strategies to her first-grade students. Her kids do absolutely amazing things - they predict, they ask meaningful questions, they use mental imagery, they activate background knowledge. Most shockingly, they INFER. THEY INFER!

So how does she do it? With lots of books, lots of time, and lots of explicit lessons. She gives an entire month to some strategies, and she lets children explain what they think about books. I particularly like that Miller integrates physicality into every aspect of the classroom and that she believes creative play contributes to comprehension. Here's one of my favorite bits:

"Work activity time is the perfect time for children to synthesize and apply their learning to new contexts, either independently or with their peers; it's the time when children can put into practice what they've learned during either parts of the day. But before we can expect the Tobwani Dams, Little Bear Worlds, and classes on JFK, children need time to explore, investigate, and yes, play."

The fact that I received this book from Beauvoir is a good sign for the coming year.

Classroom Management: Clear Positives

Last night, I finished Ruth Sidney Charney's book Teaching Children to Care: Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth K-8. In the book, Charney describes how to create a positive learning environment for elementary school students. The key to her technique is student involvement: students help formulate the rules, and when the rules are broken (as they certainly will be), Charney describes how teachers can be consistent and sane.

Charney's belief that it is possible to teach children to become good people is heartening. At a time when schools and teachers are charged with so much responsibility, character education often falls off the map. Yet it is the lessons about ethics and values that stick with children throughout their lives. The classroom where they learned to treat one another kindly will have a major impact on the way they behave, both inside and outside the school walls.

One of the chapters I found most interesting is about "clear positives." Charney defines "clear positives" as the "strong reasons for what we teach and how we teach it." She writes, "Most people who become teachers have an initial vision of what they will add to the world through their teaching. This vision is often lost in the pressures, confusions, and constant demands that exist for every teacher in every type of school." Charney believes that teaching with clear positives at the forefront of your mind allows you to act with joy and conviction. Her clear positives are:

1. Schools need to teach alternatives to violence and to stress nonviolence as an essential characteristic of the community.
2. Children need to learn to think for themselves.
3. We need to stretch, not track, potentials. (Charney means that children must try everything, not just the activities where they show natural aptitude.)

Charney's discussion motivated me to develop my own clear positives for the coming school year. Here they are:

1. Children will be excited to come to school even when they find material challenging.
2. Children will be able to work collaboratively and listen to their classmates and teacher.
3. Children will see value in all academic disciplines.

This is just a start - I fully expect to refine and even change my critical positives over the course of the next year. For now, we'll see how they hold up.

The First Post

"So we want you to know that the name of the book doesn't mean that this is us being six all the time, but that it is about as far as we've got at present, and we half think of stopping there."

-A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six

If it's less than clear from this quotation why I named this blog is "Now We Are Six," let me explain. I like Milne's suggestion that growing up is a process that can't be summed up by numerical age. It's a "one step forward, two steps back" affair. It is true that a student might "now be six," but some of his behaviors and tendencies are those of a five-year-old or even a two-year-old. One of the purposes of education, I might argue, is to match our behaviors and our intellect with our numerical age.

Of course, this is no easy feat. I slip up all of the time, despite the fact that I'm supposed to be a fully-functioning, bill-paying, 401-K contributing young woman. There are still moments when I feel my middle school anxieties creeping to the surface. Teaching, however, pushes me to slip up less often, at least in those 9 hours of the day when I'm modeling "adult" behavior for children.

Milne also reminds us is that "acting our age" all of the time is boring. Young children know this better than anyone, which is why they're so much fun to teach. Just last week, I hung out with a four-year-old who is starting kindergarten in September. She's witty, inquisitive, and sweet, but she has a lot to learn during her first year in school. I know that she'll learn to use her self-control to stop tantrums and get along with other students. The joy (and the challenge) of teaching her will be to preserve her spontaneity and curiosity while teaching her to value her peers.

Over the course of the next year, I'll be documenting my students' first year in school. These twelve months mark a critical transition from age five to age six. It is a year when children begin the long trek into the "educational unknown," a journey that will end when they finish high school...or college....or graduate school. Setting them up for success takes patience, energy, and commitment.

Most of all, though, it takes time. Ten months is about the right amount...

This blog is the story of those ten months.

The End

by A.A. Milne

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three,

I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five,

I was just alive.

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.

So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.