“Imagination is more important than knowledge”
~Einstein
Sometimes life it just too much. Things come flying at you faster than you can handle and the goal becomes to just get through each and every day and to do the best that you can. In the midst of great busyness you check things of the list and move on. But at some point you stop and realize that you are not living as much as creating a record of living. I may be “doing”all of the mechanical movements to get through a day, but the mundane checks on the list mean very little in my life.
I believe that we get what we give, you know, karma and all of that great stuff. And as I read through my blog posts I realize how much power and energy I myself have given to the Common Core State Standards. So I decided to devote one entire class with my graduate students of teachers and devote it to the joys of teaching. I asked each teacher in my group to think about and come to class with a unit, an idea, collaboration, a lesson that they loved.
And I wish you could have felt the energy, the laughter, and yes even the tears that came out of this discussion. One teacher talked about how she had her students make toothpaste. Students would bring in ingredients that they then combined with baking soda and water. One teacher chimed in talking about how her daughter was in that class and how they brought in chocolate extract and how disgusting chocolate toothpaste was. She laughed at the great messiness and engagement and sheer joy in this experiment.
Others talked about great units they had planned with colleagues and how those units moved children. Another spoke of her grand puppet making and how those puppets were then used to create and show meaning within a social studies unit. I wish I could have bottled that energy…but there is no way to measure that energy so it is deemed useless. But at the same time it was the excitement behind the thinking that went into the planning and execution of these lessons, units and projects. And if these teachers were this excited just talking about them they you know the execution of them was the same…and that energy then becomes the energy of the classroom!
I talked about one of my all time favorite units when I was a third grade teacher in Barrington, NH. Our team created the most incredible unit on the history of Barrington. It included storytelling as we brought in the Calef’s and their descendents and neighbors who told great tales of the grist mills and the endless springs walking to school in feet of mud. And what incredible storytellers these elders were! Students would hear these stories and then research and read stories of their own to tell at a celebratory tea where parents and townspeople were invited to hear their stories. They were also asked to interview someone in the community and we compiled these interviews into books to be shared with the town. Every day was filled with Barrington history as I read through the town history book and uncovered more great tales to tell. The month long unit ended with the great town tour. This was more of a scavenger hunt really where we handed out riddle books with clues and questions. This book was their guide and they had to think to figure out where they were going. Small groups would pile into parents cars and off they would go to the Isinglass Riverbanks to the old schoolhouses, where they would be invited in and given a brief history. I can’t even tell you how much the townspeople welcomed our kids into their homes; some even made snacks and drinks in preparation for their day of visitors.
I have heard that parts of that unit actually still exist in Barrington Elementary, but that the big parts, like the town tour are no longer allowed because of liability. How sad that litigation gets in the way of good learning? Once again it is the checks that matter…no more unsafe driving conditions for kids. (Ironic if you have ever ridden on a school bus with no seatbelts really!) Never mind how beneficial that town tour was and how it connected the taxpayers to the students and was a starting point in bringing the town together, creating connections and community between the young and the old. What matters are the details (the devil lives there doesn’t he?) and all of the other minutiae that clog up each and every day.
And so after each teacher had a chance to talk about their joyful teaching we gathered into small groups and I asked these teachers to go through the Common Core State Standards and begin to plug in the standards that were actually covered in those units. In no time at all they were listing standard after standard. There is very little that is new in these standards but we are coming at it from the wrong direction. Why? Because there is money to be made by large corporations (Pearson) and why consult the experts in the field when you can have people who have nothing to do with education create what you need?
And so I ask, why don’t we spend more time in these joyful spaces talking about what we DO DO instead of always what we don’t do? Why can’t we bring back poetry, and puppetry and create spaces where people want to be? Why can’t we create thematic units where students look forward to 3rd grade and the town tour almost as a right of passage? What is missing in the efforts to implement these standards is the whole. We are so concerned with each little increment and how to “cover” that small piece that we are not doing anything that is connected to anything else…the whole is gone…and without the whole there are just a bunch of pieces floating about randomly in space never to be connected.
And so I am going to attempt to remain in a place of joy through National Poetry Month. My goal is to read and write poetry each and every day of April. I will start today and each day I am with students, children and teachers I will have a poem in my pocket to share. Not so that I can check something off the list, but just for the sheer enJOYment of it.
I will leave you with one of my all time favorites:
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Conversation Education 