—Todd
September 16

Autumnal Equinox

WHEN THE WIND off the bay contains that whiff of brisk season-change, you get the feeling that summer could fold up in a blink. It always catches me off-guard. There is a certain kind of day when you have the sense that you’ve reached the seasonal outer buoy and that the next tack had better be down the reach, under a small jib, toward home and snug harbor. Are we there yet?
    I am in no hurry to be mounting the studded snow tires. But these late September days it can be hard to tell which season we are tipping toward. The maple leaves are not yet turning, and the acorns are still plumping on the branch. The farmers have long since harvested their hay and tucked it in the barns. Time for one more pass with my brush hog, or let it go? The field won't grow much longer, now that it’s cold. And is the woodpile big enough for a whole winter's heat? The tipping point is palpable.
    Autumn, poet John Keats says, is for gleaning—not just of the lingering ripeness of what’s actually there, so much as what we feel about what was there. It was during this week in September, 1819, that Keats wrote “To Autumn,” a poem that seems gleaned from his own ripeness for inspiration, growth, and beauty. His autumn of “mists and mellow fruitfulness” was as much an interior season as it was the mellowing of the English countryside. Perhaps poets are society’s gleaners, gathering morsels left in the furrow after the haste of harvest. You need to walk slowly and look carefully to see fruit in unexpected places.
    I can still detect a few lingering feelings of the season ending, so I want to be a gleaner of summer, not autumn. I’m not done fully appreciating its thoughts and rhythms. There are too many choppy currents that throng the gaps we allow for slack time. It’s a societal compulsion to be going, doing, making—as if outward industry is all that counts as movement and action. Because it is the season to pause, summer confronts us with the interstices of life. Time elongates, allowing us to see corridors of thought that were blurred if we passed by at a trot. If we meander, we savor the more subtle textures of our progress from season to season: the perfume of spruce, the grasshoppers in the tomato plants, the crows caucusing on the knoll. An outer buoy also marks a farther channel to ply.
    Keats would like my Sunday hammock. “Mowing can wait,” he would say. “We will make muffins with late blueberries. Plenty of time ahead for apple picking.” Here in the gently tipping hammock, this late summer/early autumn morning, Mr. Keats and I can listen to “gathering swallows twitter in the skies”—gleaning at the equinox.

—Todd
September 23

The Castine Harbor Tunnel?

NO SOONER HAD THE TRENCHES in Green Street been filled and paving commenced than a considerable public works project began in the Adams School sandbox. Monday recess: the primary grades sand hogs were at it again. With just two shovels, a broom, and sundry boards—and a supervisor-to-laborer ratio of 4:1—what seemed like several hundred cubic feet of sand, pebbles, gravel, and roots had been removed. The hogs could taste victory: the deepest sandbox excavation in the history of Adams School.
    Perhaps history was in the making in the archeological sense as well? A concerted effort at recess just might yield a breakthrough discovery: Preciposaurus bones? Viking coins? A few sous from the Baron’s legendary hoard? Perhaps an old school primer? (It’s hard to resist the urge to plant evidence! There’s such a fine line between perpetrating fraud and inspiring exploration.) Digging is an act of the imagination.
         One worker explained the impending need for shoring. “When this is finished,” said the foreman, “we’ll be able to walk right under the board.” He was referring to the entrance corridor dipping below the eastern wall of the sandbox. The engineer’s schematics call for it to reach the depth of our average third grader. If they’re a couple of inches shy, no worries. “Close enough for who it’s for,” as the contractors say.
    Spectators are a big part of any civil engineering of this magnitude. But exactly why is a hole such an observer magnet? Who can resist standing on the edge of the pit and inspecting, as the street surface is torn open and the guts of town sewer and water systems exposed. Perhaps in Castine it’s because there are few reliable maps of this subterranean world, and there is always the potential for finding something really old. As Greg Bowden excavated beside the school last summer, there were any number of grown men watching his nimble work with the excavator hoping for a peek at something unexpected down at the pre-Cambrian layer.
    By Wednesday, the school kids had hit the water table and started up the sump pumps. Today Bowden’s big truck is due back to remove more till. Just now a very small person turned into the playground with one of McQuinn’s excavators—who knew they could reach the pedals? I’m told that blasting bedrock commences Monday—better secure your good china. The kids have pulled the requisite permits. They think big. As near as we can tell, the lead digger is now working somewhere below the Variety, and making a turn to the east. I’ve seen the plans. The kids are tunneling to Brooksville…something about the Davis Narrows bypass. Oh well, a hole is to dig.

—Todd
September 30

Inhabiting History

    A family friend who writes about the Civil War era,[i] made a comment to me once that I’ve often contemplated in regard to education. “I commute to the 19th century for work,” Jack said. He inhabits history, writing from the perspective of someone whose critical eye sees Lincoln’s voting public as contemporaries.
         For a couple of hours on October 17th, our 6-8th graders will inhabit the 1854 court room in which Anthony Burns, an escaped slave in Boston, was tried under the Fugitive Slave Act. After seeing a play reenacting the trial, performed in the federal courthouse in Bangor in front of a real judge, students will themselves play the role of jury and decide the fate of Burns. The play is the work of Discovering Justice, which performs it weekly at the Federal Courthouse in Boston.
         The issues of 1854 are complex. The trial stirred the abolitionist movement in Boston. The judge, Edward Loring, was conflicted between upholding settled law and yielding to conscience and public sentiment. He faced removal from the bench. There were riots in the streets. States rights issues, and the seeds of civil war, loomed. Our students will inhabit the history of their forebears and try to imagine the moral, legal, and political confines of the times. Perhaps they will discover a “distant mirror” to some of the issues of their own era?
         If schools can simulate concepts, whether in biology, art, or social studies, students have a much better chance of learning in a way that is personal, meaningful, and long lasting. The facts of history may be static, but their interpretation and application to the present is always dynamic.
         What of the future? How can we help kids inhabit the future—their future—from the vantage point of a contemporary classroom? Here in the present the facts are dynamic, but our vantage point static. How can we prepare for a future that is being shaped and invented at an unprecedented rate? We may reliably predict some of the skills that will be required, but in many cases the jobs that will put them to use have yet to be imagined. If you went to high school in the 80s, how would you have defined the job of “Web master?”
A recent commentary by Howard Gardner[ii] gives us parents and teachers some traction for inhabiting the future. Gardner, whose books on multiple intelligences have galvanized teaching for a generation, scans the educational landscape of nations obsessed with “quantitative international comparisons” and finds that we’re following a herd heading down the wrong path. We need different goals. “In the future,” Gardner writes, “we need to cultivate five kinds of minds if we want to be successful as a nation and, more important, as a world.”
        Here they are: “A disciplined mind, that can think well and appropriately in the major disciplines; a synthesizing mind, that can sift through a large amount of information, decide what is important, and put together in ways that make sense for oneself and for others; a creative mind, that can raise new questions, come up with novel solutions, think outside the box; a respectful mind, that honors the differences among individuals and groups, and tries to understand them and work productively with them; and an ethical mind, that thinks, beyond selfish interests, about the kind of worker one aspires to be, and the kind of citizen that one should be.”
         The jury is out as to whether our educational system is leading or following this herd. But we are qualified to make some astute judgments if we can just imagine the kind of history we want to make—the kind of future we’d like our children to inhabit. I’d like to live in a future peopled with minds like Gardner’s—minds that would know how to respond to the trial of Anthony Burns, as well as any future collisions of rights, resources, and responsibilities.

—Todd
October 7

[i] John Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, Surviving the Confederacy, and others.
[ii] “Beyond the Herd Mentality,” Education Week, September 14, 1005.

Slow Tool Time

    I have a timber framing mallet which I bought years ago at the Chicken Barn. It is dented and pocked; the handle dark with pitch and dirt. It is an old object with personality and character, but it is no longer useful as a tool—except for the stories it tells of former ways. What used to be a common tool is now a common “find” in antique stores, and uncommon in toolboxes of contemporary builders who favor the pneumatic nail gun, dimensional lumber, and fast-framing techniques.
    Nonetheless, I like to think about the craftsmen who gripped my mallet and pounded pegs home in timber frame joints. I can imagine the local structures they raised—perhaps our school, or your house? Are your floor joists or roof rafters notched or mortised—clues to the building values of a bygone era? If so, it’s also evidence of recycling at work. Yesterday’s oak barn beams turned into today’s farmhouse. A timber frame structure can be easily dismantled and moved, as Castine loyalists demonstrated when they transported their houses to Nova Scotia!
    Our tools say something about our values, not just our technology. We are accustomed to the virtue of efficiency, speed, and economy, which seem to be the rationale behind most every tool we use today. Witness my favorite tool: the laptop I’m writing with. I learned to type on my father’s Royal manual typewriter. My favorite writing tool, however, is my fountain pen, though I only use it to sign my name. Like my pen, a really good tool might just slow you down, create a pause and a different appreciation of work. We have grown unaccustomed to what it feels like to take a long time to make things.
    Today is timber frame Friday for the eighth graders, the next phase in the construction of our nature center as well as a chance to think about our tools. The fir and hackmatack beams milled during the summer have been trucked to school where our eighth graders will spend the day with Ted Lameyer learning the techniques of craftsmen who built Castine’s old barns and houses By having our kids use mallets and chisels to make joints that will hold their building together, we are making an inquiry into technology…and time. It is a Slow Tools movement. By building a nature center out of a timber frame, we are not only making a place for our collections from the natural world, a space for mindfulness and wonder, but also a time to think about technology and craftsmanship. We’re making a collection of old tool—hand and thought—experiences.

—Todd
October 14

Who Teaches Hope?

    On 9/11, I was an associate editor of Hope magazine. How do you work at a magazine called Hope on the new “day of infamy?” My teenage daughter said, “Daddy, what’s wrong with the world?” Her teacher’s brother had perished in the collapse of the trade center towers. My brother-in-law watched events from his office in lower Manhattan. In our offices, we sought tangible actions to stanch our feelings of emotional incapacity and powerlessness. Perhaps you remember how dark the world felt.
    I’ve been thinking about how kids respond to tragedy, prompted by the number of natural disasters—two hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes—we’ve witnessed since school started, in addition to the continuous background of images of terror attacks and warfare. How do we talk with kids about hope in their lives, when confronted with such disaster and hardship? How do you answer a question like, “What’s wrong with the world?”
    Actually, the kids may already have an answer. Even before the start of school this year, I had a call from an Adams School student who was planning her hurricane Katrina-relief activism! She wasn’t fazed by the enormity of the disaster, and I was impressed with the enormity of her energy. So on the very first day of school, we started collecting money, as we did last year in the aftermath of the tsunami. And we’re working to make our outreach to hurricane victims personal and tangible, adopting schools in Hancock County, Mississippi. Tangible actions—stanching a sense of powerlessness. But what of the emotions? Are today’s young kids in danger of feeling overwhelmed, even at a distance from New Orleans or Pakistan or Iraq, when the images of suffering make them feel so close?
Perhaps kids feel reassurance in the cues they take from adults. The worst natural calamities tend to precipitate the best human responses—in fact, a global outpouring of humanity and solidarity. Horrified and anguished by events, we stake out new resolve to bring order and security to those in need; to realign our priorities, push back the darkness.
    The immediacy of our experience of disasters via practically real-time media coverage also reinforces the notion that there are no remote or disconnected lives. The world commiserates in unity because it has shared in the experience. Nowadays, we are all “there” in a very real, immediate, powerful sense—“there” with help.
    I take inspiration from another image: when Apollo 8, on its way to the moon with three American astronauts, relayed to an attentive planet the first image of the whole earth from outside earth orbit, it compelled us to think differently about the fact of our common destiny and our common responsibility as inhabitants of a fragile world. We were finally confronted with a glimpse of ourselves as inhabitants of a single world: the water planet. The concept of world citizens, formerly an abstraction, became a tantalizing actuality, a challenge to indifference, a hope.
    Kids are naturally hopeful. Perhaps we can follow their lead? Perhaps the question should be, “what’s our opportunity to make things right with the world…our world?”

—Todd
October 21

The Trunk at Dyce’s Head

“This is all true, even if it never happened.”

—Big Chief (Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)

    “Whether we shall turn out to be the heroes of our own tale, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. So I will simply begin with a retelling of the events of the nineteenth of October and allow the reader to make the final determination. Hopefully, the details and their outcome will be sufficiently enlightening.
    “The discovery of the mysterious, near-empty steamer trunk occurred as follows. It into our possession when we were least expecting: during a simple outing to the lighthouse in order to take our class photograph. The sun was shining; the full moon just setting over the Camden Hills; the oak leaves rustling on the branch. No one had seen it before—not the residents of Battle Avenue, in front of whose house the trunk had appeared, nor any of the thirteen members of our party. Thus, its provenance was, from the start, shrouded. It was at least to be, we supposed, the beginning to a trail of perplexing facts.
    “The trunk itself yielded the following tidbits. Its exterior bore a label, scarred by many a journey and rough handling, on which was penciled a single wave-worn name: Montgomery Stallman. Inside the trunk, once it had been pried open, were two keys, to what we could not fathom. The most recent shipping label was dated October 31, 1956, at which time it had a weight of 207 lbs and declared value of $550. What contents would account for such a heavy cargo? Shipping destination: New Concord, Ohio. Mr. Stallman, evidently, once resided at 28 Dodd Street, East Orange, New Jersey. It was a neighborhood, we eventually determined, which, at least to contemporary observers, seemed like a transitional suburban block. Wood-frame residences once in good repair, hard by vacant lots and commercial properties, and within the sound of an interstate highway, which must have bisected the tree-lined streets of a sleepy post-war neighborhood at some point in the sixties. The former (or current?) Stallman house was now divided into apartments, and sided with asphalt shingles; the cars parked in front lackluster, economy models; the yard derelict and overgrown, like every other yard on the street. It had a shabby aura.

“How then did this old trunk wash up on our shore, sitting like some forlorn vessel, high and dry, beside the lighthouse in Castine, Maine? What was that faint, lingering aroma pervading its worn compartments— Cinnamon? Vanilla? Rum? And the contents of those inner drawers—a woman’s white glove, an Italian coin, a postcard written in French, and a dried corsage—what was their story and significance? The trunk, the house, the tantalizing objects linked to a single, man’s name—were they spectral witnesses to something more than decay, age, and dissolution?”

—Hugo James Rutherford

Editor’s Note: We would be grateful for any information that might help us identify the author of the above fragment, or the history of this curious trunk. It can be viewed in the 8th grade homeroom.

—Todd
October 28

Taking a Walk with Clark Fitz-Gerald

<>    Liddy Fitz-Gerald visited school last week with a box of Clark’s miniature sculptures, but I wasn’t prepared for the exquisiteness of what I saw. Liddy made up a word for them: jibbies. Thirty-two of them are now arranged on the table in my office making up their own little gallery of inspiration, nature’s forms and functions instantly turned into art when Clark simply stuck them to a small pedestal—the better to appreciate. It is a tattoo of sculptural insights.
    Here is the stone with pebble-worn tunnels, the fossil clamshell, the sea purse, the scroll of a leaf; its veins curled inward like a hand. Another leaf suggests the prow of a Viking long boat. A chip of wood, a piece of bark, a geester in mid seed-dispersal, a dried starfish, petrified worm castings—they could all interrupt a walk with Clark as they were collected and then reimagined as monuments or soaring carvings. Even spirals of brass, snipped from some routine sheet that Clark was turning into an exotic form, were exalted when they became minute Mobius strips. As Dustin said, when he saw them, “You can make art out of anything.” True, if you have the right eyes. (Of course there are also plenty of human forms walking around Castine, flesh and blood jibbies, to the right eyes, that have turned up in Clark’s curvaceous carvings of Elm trees salvaged by the town crew!) A walk with Clark isn’t about getting anywhere in particular—it’s about seeing things. Really seeing things. Botany or paleontology or geology might be the formal name for such science, but it’s really a matter of art, or poetry, or music—seeing, or feeling, or hearing a different pulse in things.
    So I opened the Clark Fitz-Gerald Table Top Gallery. When Tom saw it, he appreciated the “childlike wonder” evident in Clark’s choice of natural objects. Students visited and drew inspiration. I cut some pedestals and handed them out. Deb Belyea’s art classes went to work, gleaning the common and neighborhood for significant objects. Within hours we had produced our own jibbies. Soon they’ll be on display in the library. Perhaps seeing things differently is getting somewhere?
    I bet Clark would have enjoyed a stroll with physician/essayist Lewis Thomas, who could intertwine unheard melodies and things from the natural world in his musings. “If we had better hearing,” wrote Thomas, “and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic timpani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”
    He’s been gone a year now. Or, as I like to think, he’s making art somewhere else, and it’s nice to imagine the new jibbies he must be finding, arranged in the morning light filtering into a new studio, and the grand sculptures that will be coaxed from some new leaf, or mollusk, or stone. School kids can carry on the local work. A simple stroll on the common or down Court Street has yielded a new generation of jibbies: Chestnut husks elevated to medieval armor, an elm leaf as imperial emblem, a scrap of bark as winter ocean wave. Childlike wonder lives, as we all take a walk with Clark, like Clark. Do you hear timpani too?

-Todd
November 4
See the gallery of photos: Clark Fitz-Gerald Tabletop Gallery.

Artifacts and Emblems

<>    The kindergartners and first graders couldn’t quite name the object I delivered to their room on Monday, a gift from my mother to the class. It had keys like a laptop, but no screen. It had a plug, and you had to put paper into it before you could see the letters. It hummed. But I did not hear the word “typewriter”—it is a remote artifact for our five and six year olds. And this was an IBM Selectric typewriter, the Cadillac Eldorado of typewriters in its day!
    To those of us who have not grown up with laptops and word processors, a manual writing machine is, like, about more than just typing words. The big black Royal typewriter that I have on my desk at home (to keep me honest) is still my emblem of writing. Its staccato printing, diminutive bell, hefty carriage, bulky metal shoulders, ratcheting paper roller, and keys in rows more like a church organ than my current iBook, give it gravitas. It has several octaves, compared with the sterile clatter of these molded plastic keys. And it was designed for immobility. It is a word engine, a factory of printing. It hammers letters directly onto paper winding down below its shiny hood where the levers, rods, connecting pulleys and metal type lurk. It has a hood like a ‘55 Buick and the innards of slant six.
    In my mind, the sounds of those keys striking paper are the cadence of thoughts turning into writing. Every ten or fifteen words the little bell sends its carriage zippering back to drag a new line of words across the page. My Royal has sharps and flats, bass and treble; a staccato space bar; the timpani of the capital letter shift; the triangle of the pinky finger making a question mark. It had sixteenth notes of familiar patterns and convenient phrasing: ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘without,’ words which alternated hands allowing greater speed or swinging rhythm to accompany a jaunty thought. Boom, clatter-clatter-clatter, ta-ta-ta-ta-Boom. Ting. This is writing, and when I learned to type in seventh grade my stories written on the Royal typewriter finally had more authority because they looked like real writing. They looked, sounded, felt like typing.
    A few weeks back, when we cleaned out the attic of the school, we uncovered a very early Macintosh laptop, as well as an old school desk. They’re both in the lobby now. The desk lid raises almost like an oversized wooden laptop, come to think of it. And it has a hole for an ink well. The names of former Adams School students are carved in it. The desk, though much older than the laptop inside it, or the Selectric that has joined the K-1 classroom, seems oddly more familiar, almost comforting, an artifact. It seems to embody the true starting point: when we held a pencil in our writing hand, and traced the letters for our name. Our first emblem: T-O-D-D. The word our parents gave us to be called.

—Todd
November 10

The Winter Count

To the Lakota Sioux, a year was called “a winter”— measured from first snowfall to first snowfall. Marking the passing of time and collecting the important events of a year for memory, they would record a “winter count.” Each year, or events within a year, would be remembered with a pictograph on an animal hide showing the crucial moments in tribal life. In the Carnegie Winter Count, for instance, “the year the stars fell” was the name and picture for the Leonid meteor showers of the year 1833. The Winter of Compassion was 1944, the year of the founding of The National Congress of American Indians. Over a hundred original winter counts survive, and can even be seen online. (See: The Winter Count.) Various schools around the country are making their own winter counts in imitation of the native American tradition.

What would an Adams School Winter Count look like? I asked the 4-5^th grade class, who are studying native Americans, to think of their own winter count after we looked at the Lakota example. You’ll have to imagine their responses as if accompanied by a drawing or image that complements their highlights. This will be the year of…the Red Sox, of course… “my baby sister”…the arrival of Amber, my new cat…making igloos…skiing for the first time…the tsunami…hurricane Katrina. Or, as one student pointed out, “disasters…and help.”

The winter count distills the meaning of events, threading singular moments into a tapestry that becomes the history of the tribe. Thanksgiving and New Year’s seem to be the common contemporary moments that come close to this ritual. Here we are, then, on the verge of the holiday which focuses us on gratitude as we look back, and anticipating the holiday that will focus us on looking forward with optimism and new purpose. One holiday asks, “How have we been fortunate?” and the other, “How will I make good fortune?” If there is sincerity and humility attached, they are questions that also draw us out of ourselves to think of others: How have I; how will I, help others share in the benefits that abound?

Any “winter” is more than the sum of its parts, more than just an enumeration of the things that happened. Our tribe is certainly defined by more than Red Sox victory, little sisters joining the family, or nature’s turmoil. But it’s still good to count, particularly to affirm that we have a voice in determining the next winter count. Will this be another “Winter that strengthened our Voices?” “Winter of Shelter,” to cite a few of the Carnegie count winters. I like the activism in one of the short texts we’ve started using this fall as one of our morning pledges, because it distills Adams School activism. It was written by Edward Everett Hale. “Look up, not down; Look forward, not back; Look out, not in—and lend a hand.” And I like the chance we’re about to enjoy to pause and reflect on this, grateful people sharing a tent or table, looking up, forward, outward, and lending a hand. Happy Thanksgiving.

—Todd
November 18-December 2

Bird by Bird

Anne Lamott, a peerless inspirer of good writing, tells the story of her brother, age 10, agonizing over his science report on birds. “He’d had three months to write [it]. It was due the next day,” she writes. “He was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”*

We’ve all been there, either as the report writer, the parent, or the teacher trying to coach and coax the project to completion. I remember my daughter struggling with just such a report, an English assignment requiring her to go beyond a synopsis of the plot of April Morning, to delve deeper than a mere summary of the list of characters and their actions. She had to step outside of her reading and writing comfort zone.

A seventh grader, Hilary was in a fairly typical, bumpy transit from her competent, concrete summaries of the text to the sub-textual observations her teacher was training the class to do. The time had come in her growth as a reader and writer to explore the abstract sense of things, the figures in language. It was a painful struggle. It seemed to her like an unfair trick—words could be about something other than what they say. Go figure!

“I can’t interpret what happens.,” she moaned. “It just happens. There’s no interpretation. It’s about what it’s about. That’s all there is to it!”

The parallel scene in my own schooling was also seventh grade, working long and hard one night to make the usual time-honored book report poster by pasting a collage of magazine photos on oak tag. Summarize the plot, illustrate the trials and tribulations of the characters in The Outsiders, add a few photos clipped from the newspaper—voila! Done.

When Mr. Katz returned my dutiful work, his comment suggested that I needed to interpret the story, think about “the why” of the story; think about the writer’s motivation in telling the story. Apparently, the story meant something other than what it said. The writer had been saying one thing and meaning another. It was about more than it was about. Go figure.

But what a thrill I felt in the subsequent moment of revelation when the “inner meanings” became clear to me and I left behind the illustrated book report (with fancy cover and huge titles) forever. A writer actually has control over this stuff? A writer isn’t just recording the way it happened? The story is something imagined! I realized. I took a giant leap towards critical examination of the craft of assembling words in a particular order for a particular reason.

We’re accustomed, of course, to a world that is carelessly worded. “It’s about…” is a constant refrain, as if meaning were something obvious, declarative, visible, agreed upon. And what Hilary was encountering, as we all do at some point, is the opening of the mind’s eye to the more that’s there. I don’t think even she thought it was just “about” a book report in 7th grade. The transition takes time, timing, and patience, like anything learned.

What would Mr. Katz’s progress reports have said about me, I wonder? “In Language Arts, Todd is taking it ‘bird by bird.’” They’re probably still filed away somewhere in my mother’s archive, and still classified. Parent-teacher conferences? “Now, about his handwriting….” Some things haven’t changed.

—Todd
December 2

*Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird.

Simple Gifts

As I arrived at the Castine post office Monday with our five boxes of Christmas stockings for kids in Mississippi, I thought about their contents: pencils, candy canes, baseball cards, letters, and even an original story written into a handmade book. The contents varied from stocking to stocking, but each one had personally selected items reaching out to a kid—to Samuel, or Brooke, or Josh, or Samantha. Names summon faces, personality, texture. Each stocking had the name of a student at the Murphy school painted on the hem. I thought about our day on Friday with our whole school sewing, ironing, and making small ornaments or cards to put in those stockings. Parents and teachers gave their time and instruction; students gave energy, ingenuity, and care to making the stockings and filling them.

I also thought back to the year I was in sixth grade. The teachers at my school organized a collection of used toys and clothing for low-income families in Boston. For weeks before the holiday vacation, we wrapped, labeled, and boxed items for “9 year-old boy,” or “five year-old girl.” When everything was ready, my mother and I accompanied the woman from the neighborhood charity to deliver our gifts to families. I vividly recall walking down a dark hallway in a derelict building, and knocking on an apartment door. “Who?” shouted a gruff female voice. “Low Cost,” announced the woman. “We’ve got presents for you.” The door opened slowly, cautiously, fearfully. Inside were several kids my own age, as startled at my appearance in their door as I was by theirs. We made eye contact—nothing more. But it gave me a glimpse of devastating material want, and a sense of the power of a simple gift to help someone feel they aren’t forgotten.

As a classroom teacher in the Boston area, I always insisted that Secret Santa be accompanied by outreach. We gathered toys and clothing, and on the last day before vacation drove a van-load of wrapped presents into a neighborhood organization in the city. My 8^th graders got to meet their beneficiaries, kids delighted to receive toys and coats and mittens. Once again, the gift to us was a sense of having an effect. Perhaps one year in the future, our students will think back to a year at Adams School when they had the benefit of making stockings for a stranger, and were given the feeling that large obstacles—want, fear, desperation, indifference—yield to little gestures. We all become beneficiaries.

As consumers of cultural messages, I fear we are becoming too accustomed to thinking only in terms of the grand gesture and generosity writ large. Television would insist on “Extreme Makeovers,” or an “Angel Network” required to marshal resources that change desperate circumstances. Make no mistake: my admiration goes out to Oprah, and others, who use their media power and personal wealth to bring attention and aid to people or areas in extreme need—oftentimes situations where no one else will venture. But there is a veiled commercial ambition here too, harvesting attention for advertisers. At street level at Adams School, we should not slight the power of the humble gesture along our quiet network. A Christmas stocking sent to a peer in Mississippi is also a grand gesture.

Al got our boxes weighed and prepared for shipment in a jiffy. “Seven to ten days,” he said, referring to the time they’ll take in transit. We’ve already heard from the teachers in Mississippi. “The books and clothes are priceless as were all the other things,” writes Jeanne. “But not nearly as priceless as your friendship. I’m so blessed to have found all of you.” Holiday fabric: $35.00. Parcel postage: $90.00. A day at school spent gluing and painting and sewing: time well spent. Lasting benefits to all the givers: priceless.

—Todd
December 9

The Snowball Commissioner

The first significant snowfall of the year blanketed the Adams School playground with the raw materials for sledding (“Mr. Nelson got new sleds!”), building forts, sculpting snow, and tracking the mysterious Preciposaurus. It also meant the opening day of snowball season! So the Commissioner of Snowballs called a press conference.

“Good Morning. I’ll read a brief statement and then answer questions,” said the Commish, booming into his microphone.

“Adams School has a snowball rule. It reads as follows: ‘No one is allowed to throw snowballs at Adams School or during Adams School.’ Thank you. Now for questions.”

The first reporter had his hands in the air before the Commish had even begun reading his statement. “Clarification, sir: Does this mean that you also can’t throw snowballs on the town Common?”

“—or how about on the playground after school?” chimed in The American’s education correspondent.

“Let me amplify my statement. Snowballs are not allowed during Adams School time, nor at any time on Adams School property,” said the Commish. “That should take care of just about any foreseeable situation.”

Nonetheless, a sports reporter had her hand in the air. “Does that mean no snowballs during basketball practice, or games at MMA? And is the Common owned by Adams School?”

The Commish considered this for a second, then replied tersely, “Any Adams School-sponsored activity is considered school time; no, the school does not own the Common.”

“Can I throw snowballs with my MMA Big Brother,” asked the APO stringer.

“The ‘time’ and ‘location’ clauses apply to that one,” said the Commish.

“Commissioner, how about when the older kids go downtown for lunch and are on Main Street far from the playground,” probed the legal affairs correspondent for the Bagaduce Bar Picayune. “Can they toss a little snow?”

“Let me tell you a true story, my friend,” intoned the Commish, leaning forward on his podium, dangling his glasses pendulously above the official league seal. “Last year we had a little incident with snowballs flying en route to the Variety. I had instant messages from the neighbors, faster than you can say “Slush Puppy,” as soon as the first ball was airborne, informing me that a few of our ‘franchise players’ were wreaking havoc. Furthermore, you could be on the flying bridge of the State of Maine, throwing snowballs at seagulls in the rigging, and someone would speed dial me to say so. Felony Snow Endangerment. You’re toast.”

The questions persisted. No stone would be left unturned. “Let’s say you and a friend agree that it’s okay to throw snow at one another?” probed the court reporter for Entertainment Tonight.

“Automatic third felony strike,” said the Commish. “Burnt toast.”

“What if we’re wearing snowpants and jackets?” asked the style editor for Adams Wear Daily.

“Irrelevant,” said the Commish. “You’re French toast.”

“Could you be more specific about the consequences for throwing snowballs?” asked the crime reporter for The Patriot.

The Commish rattled off the sanctions: “Seven game suspension; fine; media shame; mandatory ineligibility for Winter Four Square Hall of Fame.”

There was a last, lone hand still raised. “Can I throw snowballs at my

house?” said the cub reporter.

“Sure, kid,” said the Commish, “But it depends on your definition of ‘at.’ That’s a non-league venue. Ask your parents. Have a ball. We all done here?”

“One more, sir: What do you think of the dodge ball salary cap?”

But no one waited for the answer. The press corps bolted out the door, eager to file their stories before the next news cycle.

—Todd

December 16

BTUs, Student Age, and Academic Subjects: Notes towards a new theory of elementary school heating.

The school building is cold—again. That is, the rest of the building is cold. My office and Barb Thomas’s office are saunas. But Bill McWeeny’s room is glacial (yesterday it was a sauna); so is the art room. We expect the lobby to be cold, given the constant traipsing in and out during the day, and the doors that leak. So I scout the other classrooms and test the little white control dials on the radiators: open. “Control,” however, is a misnomer! The pipes are hot, but the rooms are cold. The thermostats on the walls are vestiges of the old system and do nothing.

The “new” system is rapidly becoming an old system and the subject of much analysis. Circulator pumps working? Check. Burner going? Check. Supply valves open to the radiators? Check. Then why’s it so cold? Eighth graders start showing up in my office wearing parkas and looking for BTUs—no room here, alas. Poor Elaine Bertrand is teaching her three math groups in the lobby wearing gloves. I call Gary’s Fuel.

Rusty arrives promptly with his bucket of wrenches to check on today’s frigid conditions, and heads straight to Bill’s room and the control knob by the backdoor. Our conversation turns to drafts and unheated spaces and insulation for the basement. Perhaps an external wood-fired furnace would help? There are alternatives to oil-fired burners, but at what cost. Pay-back ratios and the geo-political fuel nexus filter into the discussion of how to keep Adams School kids comfortable as they crunch numbers and expand their syntax repertoire. I shut a few hallway doors to try and control drafts in the building—about the only thing that can be attempted quickly and cheaply…until a comment from Deb Belyea opens a unique line of inquiry.

“I try and get the big kids or larger groups down here first thing in the morning,” she said, leaning against the radiator in the art room. “They produce a lot more heat.”

I should have known. The solution is not unlike the Paul Manning Ice Cream/calorie Coefficient: “the colder the ice cream, the more calories are burned off while consuming it.” Therefore, the colder the ice cream the more you can eat because the process of consuming it counters the effect of the high caloric intake. Simple. Patrons of the Castine Variety have known this for years. Therefore, Nelson’s Elementary School Heating Coefficient Hypothesis goes like this: The colder the building, the harder you need to study to burn the calories necessary to heat the building.

Now the question is, which subjects produce the most BTUs, factoring for age and body mass. Since no two learners are alike, I’m guessing that the answer will be “your favorite subject.” Thus, multiple intelligences and learning styles are automatically factored in. Here’s the good news: Adams School has plenty of heat--if the situation is correctly analyzed.

My research suggests that our art room full of ten or so enthusiastic second and third graders weaving yarn tapestries, for example, produces sufficient BTUs to heat 120% of that space. Fifth graders doing multiplication facts produce even more heat. Six, seventh and eighth graders, factoring for greater mass and more complex brain activity, produce so much heat that were it electricity we could sell it back to the CMP grid. And we’re just a little elementary school. Who knew that the education system in this country was sitting atop a latent energy reserve greater than the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge!

The technical equation is as follows: W=(S/m)(C/T), where W is warmth, S is number of students over mass, C is curriculum and T is duration of activity. Here’s a simpler way to describe the phenomenon: Desire to learn is heat. Clearly, we will leave no child behind in a chilly classroom….and keep the ice cream good and cold.

—Todd

December 22

Waiting for Ice

Where does all that water go? The fire department delivers another 1,000 gallons to our small ice rink behind the school, but it still doesn’t look full—except for the eight inches in the “deep end.” We have a “coast line,” where iceland gives way to plastic linerland, at about 2/3 of the way to the shallow end. But how many more loads will it take for the whole thing to be Iceland. Factor for volume in cubic inches of water/ice; air and water temperature; rate at which said water freezes…and leaks. It makes for quite an interesting science experiment.

The hole in the corner of the deep end, six inches up the side, was certainly one explanation for our apparent loss. Denny found that on Monday and plugged it (we think) so that we weren’t losing quite so much water as we were adding. So now that we have our “fingers” in the dike, it should be filling up fast. But the “shallow” end still doesn’t have ice covering all of the plastic liner. What’s going on under the ice and plastic?

As a younger student and I gazed at the freezing progress on Tuesday morning, he suggested we put more water in the shallow end, not just the deep end. Hmmm. How would Piaget explain this one? Now it’s not just an interesting science experiment, it’s an experiment in childhood cognition: conservation of ice rink mass. Now factor for age, powers of observation, experience with various size cups of water.

“Well, the shallow end won’t fill up until the deep end is full,” I say. “Actually, the water is going to find the lowest point no matter where you pour it in.” Shallow and deep are tough concepts when talking about an apparently level surface.

“Oh.” Pause. “Then put more water in the shallow end,” he says. I will—via the deep, downhill end.

At morning meeting, after the slide show of the fire department unloading the water the day before, it’s time for the progress report.

“Here’s where we stand,” I explain. “1,000 gallons of water went in yesterday (thank you Castine Fire Department), but some of it leaked out. And we can’t see what might be happening under the existing ice. If there’s a hole there, we won’t know. And it was warm and sunny yesterday. So we probably melted some of our ice for the sake of adding more water. What we really need is deep cold.”

Why is deep, old-time cold so hard to come by? A hundred years ago, there was a thriving ice trade on this peninsula. From big rivers to small ponds, ice was harvested once it reached a thickness of twelve inches. Then it was packed in sawdust in icehouses for up to a year, before being shipped by sail to all parts of the world. From New York to New Orleans and Havana to Calcutta, Maine ice cooled the drinks of children and rajahs. Ice harvesting tools still litter the lake bottoms—sunken treasure for summer divers. And then almost overnight refrigeration made the industry obsolete. Now ice is recreation or hazard, but not an industry. Charlie Deans remembers childhood winters when he could count on pond skating from November to March.

After morning meeting Tom Gutow and I walk out back and check on the rink and the high water mark I made on the plastic liner. The ice is about a quarter of an inch lower than the mark—a phenomenon of ice freezing, or water loss? And how much water does that quarter inch represent. Do the math: twenty by forty-foot rink…cubic inches converted to gallons. Wednesday night, Tom brought Engine 6 over and made another delivery. Maybe tomorrow it’ll be ready. The temperature is 20 degrees, as I write. We’re not looking to export ice to the tropics—just harvest a little patch of sliding fun for recess, that’s all we ask.

—Todd
January 6

The Zamboni Factor

Snoopy knew the answer: Why is it a chore to shovel snow off the driveway, but clearing snow off the skating rink (or four-square court, or removing snow for fort building) is a pleasure?

On Monday, for instance, four kindergartners were eagerly clearing a mere dusting of snow off of our basketball court. They were doing quite nicely with only a couple of sticks that had been converted into “plows.” When I offered them shovels, they got a special gleam in their eyes: tool time. It was a promotion. Three shovels were fetched in short order and the team went to work. Real tools make it real work. This is “The Zamboni Factor.”

Kids actually compete for the chance to clear snow off of any prime play surface. And who hasn’t shared Snoopy’s fascination with the big machine that resurfaces the hockey rink? No game can take place until the zamboni has prepared the way, which means the zamboni driver is the man. In some ways it’s a more inviting role than playing goalie or center forward. On our elementary level, everyone wants to take the beveled shovel and walk back and forth across any piece of ice, methodically clearing the surface for the waiting players. The shovel driver is the man.

Part of the principal at work is the fact that snow removal is a chore, while “zamboni/shovel” driving is a job. It’s official work, a service, practically requiring a uniform, training, and full-fledged union membership. It is a role on which others depend, and, of course, involves specialized equipment. Being the man, versus working for the man. I see a correspondence therein to many of life’s little tasks. It extends beyond snow removal and ice resurfacing.

The professional literature on the zamboni factor contains several sub-categories that may sound familiar to Adams Schoolers. Research shows, for instance, why running the vacuum cleaner and helping with the dishes in the school kitchen are such attractive jobs (note: not chores). Even students who hide under their beds at the slightest parental suggestion to vacuum their bedrooms are the first to volunteer when classroom mess requires a canister vacuum cleaner operator. Students who suddenly claim mountains of homework more pressing than doing the dishes at home jump for the yellow gloves when Brenda needs assistants after lunch service in the school kitchen. There may be more to it than wearing the official yellow rubber gloves.

The zamboni factor is more than some sleight of hand that gives profound meaning to ordinary tasks. The power isn’t just in the tool. I think it signifies the meaning we seek in tasks, the link between good work and good works: taking pride in the work we do, and being offered work that feels valued. Sometimes, for young workers like our students, it simply means tweaking the perception of work by a few degrees to create a job. One could learn about physics and the laws of gravity by studying equations on paper. But how much better to set up an incline plane in Mr. McWeeny’s classroom and start the NASCAR of marble runs. (Better yet: an Adams-to-Eaton’s Boatyard marble chute!) The golden section might remain a rather abstract geometric concept, until it allows you to draw an intellectual connection between the Parthenon, the Witherle Library, and the boards that you get to nail on the Adams School nature center. Tool belts everyone! Now we’re drivin’ the “zamboni.” Concepts turn into public works.

Once the ice rink out back is frozen good and solid, we’ll see more zamboni drivers at work. It never fails. It’s good work, if you can get it. Good jobs attract good workers, and we’ve got ‘em. And no one plays while the person driving the “zamboni” is getting an important job done. Huzzah for the zamboni drivers! Adams School is hiring. Form a line behind Snoopy.

—Todd
January 13

Tipping Points

It snuck up on me: suddenly the halfway point of the school year is upon us. Next Wednesday is the 87-and-a-halfth day in the calendar, and, at 11:15am, we will have arrived at the mid-way point in the school year. Take it easy, I tell myself. Mid-way doesn’t necessarily mean half over. Like the proverbial glass that is half full or half empty, it depends on whether you’re filling it up or pouring it out!

We’re still filling up, and this apparent defiance of the laws of physics is more than a trick of the mind. Even though the second half of a school year can feel like the downhill slope, hurtling towards June, time passes in unique ways. The external benchmarks of calendars and schedules only describe one kind of time passage. The second half is more like two thirds of the year in terms of the learning we can pour in. Better to focus on the upcoming tipping points, to use a popular phrase, which are internal, less predictable, and indicators of more profound growth. “The goal is soul,” as Bono says, and the good thing about going downhill isn’t just the speed—it’s the momentum.

Here’s a tipping point. A child enters, say, fifth grade long before they truly become a fifth grader. Fully inhabiting any new grade takes a while. There are new routines to master, a new teacher and classmates to know, new curriculums and traditions to practice. But those are just the quantifiable parts. A tipping point comes when we move beyond mere format to fully inhabit the grade with a new sense of self, of accomplishment, of our individual capacities, and possibilities. It’s tipping from being in fifth grade to being a fifth grader.

Perhaps we’re accustomed to thinking of tipping points as large-scale phenomena, the moments when a grand new cultural idea, trend, or behavior suddenly subsumes the status quo. But a tipping point is about subtleties. There are, in fact, many tipping points in a school year. It can be the ‘Aha!’ moment when the concept of multiplication becomes clear, or when words take flight and a poem’s “deep inner meaning” finally makes sense. Suddenly you can play C sharp on your trumpet, and a whole tune falls into place, or the short vowel sound you hear finally corresponds to the letter you’re seeing in the middle of words. You walk to school alone, or score your first basketball points, launching an NBA career from our little coastal league. Just raising your hand in morning meeting for the first time is a big moment. These might be tipping points within tipping points. Even The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s book that launched the concept, must have had a tipping point!

Beware: Tipping points arrive spontaneously and without warning. It’s good to be on the look out though. We may be halfway “there,” with a couple more halves to go before June, but we make more progress in the time allotted if we celebrate those new trumpet notes (play ‘em loud!) and vowels and consonant blends (“One good word is worth a thousand pictures”) and reports of nature and birthdays in morning meeting. We can’t always see them coming, or recognize that “we’re there” until much later. But we’re destined to be “more than the sum of our parts” if we take delight in the surprising “tips” ahead, and savor the momentum they bring.

—Todd
January 20

Help Wanted: Inquire Within

Last week, we had a guest chef for pizza day. He opened a new restaurant out back and needed to hire some employees. There was an overwhelming response! By lunchtime, delivery personnel were taking Nellie’s Deli products around the building to teacher customers, and after lunch a scullery crew had the clean-up done in record time.

The job application even had some merit as a survey. Since the answers to a few of the questions are not bound by confidentiality, we can share them here. School pizza, for instance, is more popular than Ernie’s or Zeke’s, though the dog and pinball machine at Zeke’s were notable attractions, and the cooling down time between the Variety and home was significant to many customers. Popular references included several pets, and characters from fiction (the Pink Panther, Mrs. Frisby). Pepperoni wins hands down for favorite kind of pizza; scrambled, for eggs any style; crusts: yes; hairnets: not so popular. Availability to start work? “Noon,” “Right away,” “Today!” We’ve got willing workers here.

Still needed: cashiers, waiters, servers, a sous chef, line cooks, and a maitre d’ for all shifts. Interviews are pending. Background checks are under way. Can a daily amuse-bouche be far behind?

Nellie’s Deli

Application for Employment

Please fill out this application in your own handwriting and send to:

Nellie’s
c/o Adams School
PO Box 29 , Castine, ME 04421

What is your full name, and any local aliases?
What is your favorite kind of pizza?
Do you eat your crusts?
Have you ever worked in a deli before? (This includes making cookies at home, mud pies in the sandbox, and lemonade stands.)
Do you prefer Ernie’s, or Zeke’s pizza?
Essay question: In 2-3 pages, explain your answer to question 5.
What would be a good theme song for Nellie’s Deli? Can you sing it?
If you had to cook “Eggs any style,” what style would they be?
List the names of two references other than teachers, classmates or relatives.
Have you ever been given a time out, sent to your room without dinner, or had your allowance withheld?
Tell us a good, clean joke.

Which is heavier: a pound of cheese or a pound of lettuce?
If a customer paid their bill of $15.37 with a twenty-dollar bill, how much change would you give them? Figure out a 16% tip. (Do not use a calculator.)
Do you have a hair net?
When would you be available to start work?

—Todd

Proprietor and chief bottle-washer

Nellie’s Deli

January 27

Flash Nebula is in the house!

Judging by the mountain of colorful fabric scraps on the art room table, I knew something wonderful was underway in second grade art.

“What are you guys making?” I inquired.

“Finger puppets,” was the gleeful reply, as five hands shot in the air with the works in progress stuck on forefingers and thumbs.

On one hand was “my mom,” on another were superheroes in the making. A good superhero needs two things: a cool name, and an arch nemesis. Dustin had the name: “This is Flash Nebula.” He wasn’t sure about the arch nemesis. (Footnote: Have you ever heard of a nemesis that wasn’t arch? Aren’t all moms superheroes?)

An hour later, the first graders were in the art room and modeling clay dragons were taking shape. Casey’s was called Rory. “This is the dragon of death,” said Hannah, as she displayed her winged creature with scales reminiscent of her beloved triceratops. Plasticine meets Pleistocene.

In the last week, I’ve had a number of conversations among faculty members talking about the raw materials of play and learning. Mrs. P’s class was making bamboo on Friday, using newspaper rolls held together with masking tape and painting them a vivid bamboo green. By Wednesday a rain forest was growing in her room—a background tableau on which to pin information about monkeys and snakes and other rain forest flora and fauna. Data meets dada, or “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as Marianne Moore defined poetry. If we simply turned the kids loose with a pile of scrap wood, they’d make incredible things, Ms. P and I mused.

Across the hall, flights to Mars and Pluto are taking shape, as Mrs. Lameyer’s class travels the solar system in search of knowledge, having built rockets to get there from here. Byron proudly displayed his rocket ship, complete with flaming tissue paper coming out of the business end of the Saturn booster. On Wednesday, the class made comets out of Styrofoam and silver sparkles. I trust they can also explain the orbits and composition of the real thing.

Last week we talked about how long it will take NASA’s New Horizons rocket to reach Pluto, 3 billion miles away. “Make a note to check up on it when you’re in high school,” I suggested. “That’s when the pictures will start coming back to earth and you’ll see them.” Sometimes learning feels like looking through the wrong end of the telescope! The payoff can require billions of miles of travel, or years of waiting. Perhaps Flash Nebula will be the first earthling on Pluto?

<>            Meanwhile, in Mr. McWeeny’s VAMP lab (Velocity, acceleration, momentum project) 6^th and 7^th graders were preparing to customize their wooden racing cars (Tess and Meredith’s polka dotted racer is called “Green Glops”) and demonstrate the laws of physics. Cool paint jobs are important, as are aerodynamics, weight, friction, etc. This is Newton meets NASCAR meets “Pimp my Ride.” Perhaps we have a future Dale Earnhardt in class…or the woman who will make hydrogen fuel cell cars economical for mass production.

            Someone has to imagine the new possibilities, and it happens when we ply the boundaries of data and fantasy. Data tends to be fairly static, easily available, and abundant in the age of the Internet. But it’s also fairly inert. The imagination is dynamic, constantly evolving, adaptive, interpretive, and giving juice to the facts.

I’ve always liked Howard Nemerov’s enigmatic poetic take on such learning. It’s easy to skate along on its surface whimsy without fully inspecting what it affirms about the possibilities we should invite at school, lest we become too absorbed with the data in our lives.

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,

Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,

Things like the square root of Everest

Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,

Or whether the law of the excluded middle

Applies west of the Rockies.*

Most of the ingenuity, pleasure, and richness of a school day arrive from the moments when Flash Nebula appears and vanquishes his arch nemesis, Data Magneto. Both are in the building—and they kind of need one another, in the way all superheroes need a nemesis. Be on the lookout. Stand back, citizens!

—Todd
February 3

*”To David, On his Education,” Howard Nemerov

Send in the Araboolies!

In some ways, the name says it all. Without having seen one, can you conjure an image of what an Araboolie must look like?* Well, good! Does it go something like this…When an Araboolie wakes up each morning, they never know what color their skin or hair will be. They are definitely from “away”—an undisclosed exotic island.

You’ll meet the Araboolies and their menagerie on April 11 at 7:00pm in Delano Auditorium when Adams School will perform an original adaptation of Sam Swope’s book, The Araboolies of Liberty Street. The creative team that brought you last year’s Beating Captain Najork is back: Derek Nelson has written four songs, his brother, Todd, the script. Deletra Schamle directs, and parents will get to help create sets and costumes. This year, Myles Block of MMA has volunteered to help with sets and lighting.

“The Araboolies weren’t the neatest people in the world, truth to tell, but they sure knew how to have fun,” writes Swope. “They put their furniture all over the yard and lived outside—they played outside, ate outside and watched TV outside. The Araboolies even slept outside, all cuddled up like puppies in the largest bed you ever saw. They snored like crazy.” They’re different, and that’s the fun of being an Araboolie. Why settle for being the same color two days in a row. Free-spirited Araboolie life is about change, spontaneity, and vibrancy.

The Araboolies have a wok, plant palm trees, and have exotic pets like a wild barumpuss and a popalok. They play Boolanoola ball, which you’d almost think was four-square, except for the obligatory ululation, dancing, and recitation of state and foreign capitols. They have palm trees in the kitchen and talk and sing with their hands. Their musical theme sounds like calypso-reggae, with an emphasis on percussion.

However, not everybody likes “different.” When someone says, “You look like an Araboolie,” is it an insult, or a compliment? When the Araboolies arrive in town, they’re not entirely popular with a certain Mr. and Mrs. Pinch. Young Joy, on the other hand, likes her new next-door neighbors—but there’s a potential cost. Some kids aren’t so sure about their outrageous styles and games. We also discover that there might just be a little Araboolie, and Pinch, in us all. The sub-plots suggest that some of the adults in town have prior Araboolie experiences.

We hope the play will let us explore acceptance of diversity, respect, and tolerance. It’ll also be a great excuse for a conga line dance, wild hair colors and zany costumes, and some cool sets. The Araboolies just might have some good ideas for our own Mardi Gras parade. So, send in the Araboolies! (Don’t bother—we’re here.)

—Todd
February 10

Olympic Mettle Contenders

One of my favorite Olympic success stories is about a big loser.

During the Albertville Winter Olympics in 1992, I was inspired by a Moroccan cross-country skier. Morocco has never been known as a big Nordic skiing powerhouse. Nonetheless, the country had an Olympic contender. He was faced with a Norwegian competitor who was nicknamed The Terminator. Norway, on the other hand, is very much a Nordic skiing powerhouse.

At the start of the race, the Moroccan simply stepped aside and allowed the fiercer medal contenders to pass him by. He then skied his best. Although he finished the course hours after The Terminator, he won “his race.” Perhaps he didn’t belong in competition at the Olympic level, or deserve the label “Olympic athlete,” but I have to admire his tenacity and gumption.

The front pages of Olympic reporting this week were full of figure skater Michelle Kwan’s agonizing story. The five-time world champion pulled out of gold medal contention at the Turin Olympics over the weekend, due to injury—a move that made room for younger contenders on the U.S. team. Perhaps we can say that Michelle won by not competing, by realizing that to go on would be about personal stoicism rather than team aspiration. It must have been an a torturous couple of days leading to her decision, and she showed great grace with the outcome.

Did you also notice the back page story about Anne Abernathy, the 50-something woman competing in the luge in her sixth winter Olympics? Known as “Grandma Luge,” she hails from the Virgin Islands—again, not a real sledding Mecca. (see www.grandmaluge.com) But she shows tenacity and spirit in her pursuit of her dream.

The Moroccan skier and grandma luger from the tropics are good object-lessons for kids—as important a role model as The Terminator or Bode Miller and other medal contenders or winners—because they exemplify an accurate sense of their abilities, self-denial, and perseverance in the face of adversity. These are the great qualities of Olympians regardless of their medals. This is the Olympic mettle that anyone can win.

You can win an Olympic medal by crossing the finish line first, by being judged best, or by being overly hyped, media attention being an embedded part of the contest in most sports these days. (Cf. The recent “that’s just Bode being Bode” media jag). But two things stand out that might relate to a positive message for kids. You need to compete at the right level, both in order to win and in order for the challenge to be fair. And you need to ski, or luge, or skate “your own race.” In this regard, you win just by competing. It’s how you develop intellectual “muscle” and medal caliber performances.

To push the point a little further, a quality education gradually raises a child’s expectation for what they can accomplish, providing them the feedback that develops self-judgment. This should involve both familiar and unfamiliar experiences, which will lead to resiliency: each child’s durable sense that he or she is a powerful learner and capable of coping with the unknown. Teachers want to inspire lofty personal goals without creating unfair competition with a personally inappropriate lofty ideal. We have to be sure that kids are learning how to “play their own game,” and that the expectations they create for themselves are ones they truly value and can achieve—i.e. the right muscles for their “sport!”

As to the media hype: maybe some day our culture will mature and realize that there is such a thing as bad publicity, especially to an audience of future Olympians.

—Todd
February 17

“If you have to ask, I can’t tell you.”

As I watched an eighth grader give a power point presentation on Louis Armstrong the other day—the older kids are studying Jazz (New Orleans, in particular) with Bill Schubeck—I was reminded of his famous quote. Responding to a request to “define jazz,” Satchmo said: “If you have to ask, I can’t tell you.”

Some things can’t be taught. You can have great chops on your instrument— music theory, technical skill, even experience—and still not play Jazz. It’s “about” more than playing the right notes in the right order. There’s something between the notes; something not recorded in the sheet music, like the gestalt of a poem. Something the instrument maker, bandleader, music teacher, and even the player himself didn’t plan. Jazz just happens when the conditions are right, when the tune is more than the sum of its parts.

Jazz might be a good emblem for creativity in lots of areas. It defies definition, is difficult or impossible to actually teach, but yields such rich rewards. You know it when you see it, hear it, feel it, touch it—or when it touches you. Creativity swings. And maybe we can’t define it, but there is a way to encourage it and make room for it. In fact, that may be all we can do.

You can’t rehearse an improvisation, but you can practice in order to improvise—that’s getting your chops. True improvisation just happens when inspiration, timing, and technique magically converge and you get jazz…or poetry, or art, or science, or home runs. This made me think about the daily teaching choices we make regarding practice versus improvisation.

As students we’ve all paid our dues learning the “scales” that allow us to make our own music, whether it’s the rudiments of the piano, the periodic tables, verb conjugations, or figure drawing exercises. As parents or educators we are in the business of teaching how to practice various intellectual disciplines, creativity and independence of the student being our goal. But it’s essential to define the continuum that keeps us true to our goal; otherwise we end up with just scales.

For instance, are our students independent enough to answer these questions about their own learning continuum: Are we just trying to read the words, or really understand, the book? Is the point of the assignment to write two pages, or to write an essay, or story? Are we merely running on schedule, or creating time for ingenuity and delight? What is the nature of the test for which we are teaching? What is the meaning of a “good” grade? The answers are important. They define an interior, core value related to creativity and learning.

Last week, an article in Education Week (February 23, 2006) on this subject caught my eye. “It may sound paradoxical that creativity is a habit, a routine response,” writes Robert Sternberg. “But creative people are creative largely not by any particular inborn trait, but because of an attitude toward their work and even toward life: They habitually respond to problems in fresh and novel ways, rather than allowing themselves to respond in conventional and sometimes automatic ways.”

I’ve come to think that we should think of creativity less as a free-spirited, undisciplined part of our lives (a bad habit), and more as a kind of vital skill: the ability to solve problems. In fact, it may be the most important kind of problem solving we practice because it’s what we use to cope with uncertainty, unfamiliar tasks, and new situations. Creativity is flexibility, improvisation, adaptivity, resilience…jazz.

Sternberg also points out that we ought to make a place for it. “The main things that promote the habit are (a) opportunities to engage in it, (b) encouragement when people avail themselves of these opportunities, and (c) rewards when people respond to such encouragement and think and behave creatively,” he writes. “You need all three. Take away the opportunities, encouragement, or rewards, and you will take away the creativity. In this respect, creativity is no different from any other habit, good or bad.”

Perhaps we can’t define creativity, but knowing the conditions that encourage it helps. Like astrophysicists, perhaps we can detect it by observing the behavior of the particles orbiting the atomic nucleus! Questions are good detectors. Are we taking pleasure in the journey? Have we preserved time for contemplation? Do we emphasize joy and humor? Are we allowing ourselves the chance to stop and play, time to improvise? Most importantly, are we using appropriate measures of our success? Popularity, cost, location, size, standardized test scores aren’t always the most accurate predictors of value. As another band leader said, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Creativity may be hard to define—“If you have to ask, I can’t tell”—but it’s easy to feel its effects. Only time will tell if we’re developing it here. It’s a wait and see proposition, but the particles are definitely in excited orbits. Fulfilling lives—that’s the long-term harmony we’re looking for.

—Todd

March 3

The VAMP Car Hall of Fame

It’s no accident that NASCAR chose this week to announce Charlotte, North Carolina as the future home of its Hall of Fame, hard pressed as it is to seize any of the media spotlight from the rival VAMP car association and its enormous Gravity Car fan base. G-Race fans in Castine, Maine, already well established as the home of the VC association’s Hall of Fame, hardly batted an eye. Their attentions are elsewhere: gravity car racing fans are looking forward to the 67^th running of the PenBay 500 on Friday.

Pit row for the race, held at Adams School, is a virtual Who’s Who of G car teams: the Squirt car, Green Glops, Cheese-It, Burnini Eagle, Duck Mobile, and Radical Doom III and their crews. Owner-drivers Storme Macomber and Ben Olivari spoke about their “School of Rock” car, sponsored by the Rolling Stones.

“It took us a long time to get everything tuned just right,” says Macomber, as he applied a torque wrench to the vibration over-ride sensor on his sleek ride.

“We found that when we turned the radio up to 11, we got the best velocity, acceleration and momentum,” added Olivari, though he declined to say which classic rock station yielded the best performance. “Can’t give away our edge,” he said.

The M-O car, a black and red wedge with the famous Stones tongue logo on the hood, is also known for its drag-reducing paint, a special ion transducing epoxy-based turbine-dried chemical compound on which the team is seeking a patent. “Our lips are sealed,” said the racing partners, when asked for particulars, but they vowed an 8 second victory—with a $3 million price tag.

Proprietary paint jobs are not the only news this year at CASTVAMP, as the race is known to the G car faithful. Race car fine-tuning is a lonely, secretive art, and crew chiefs are reluctant to even inadvertently relay their innovative technology or practices. However, an experienced observer will notice many an interesting gadget in this year’s cars.

There are the mid-car quarter weight consoles; various drag-reducing waxes and compounds; graphite and oil injection suspension systems; slant front or curved back airfoils on the custom body shapes; and even front end tube stabilizers, to say nothing of technologies hidden under the hood. One car is rumored to have a cellulose nucleus alignment capacitor, the latest in fiber-based body structure strength theory. To reduce friction, the Squirt car has only two wheels touching at a time.

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