All Aboard!
Tuesday morning, as we dropped the
lines, hoisted our mainsail, and eased off our summer mooring to begin
the
Adams School 2006-2007 cruise, I admired the instant flow and
effortless rhythm
of our crew at work. The students and teachers grasping the big orange
and
white parachute on the common seemed like people that knew what to
expect of
each other; that were glad to be standing right where they were and
making a
big silken jellyfish, or category 5 hurricane, or billowing spinnaker.
There
was joy at setting forth. The bell rang, bagpipes skirled, children
clapped and
laughed and cheered. Teachers strummed; everyone sang. Cameras clicked. Imagine a ship of such capacity and tonnage
leaving such a small harbor without the aid of tugboats!
In no time we were moving out into the
channel full steam ahead. There was a new climbing structure to
explore, new
classmates to chase, new projects to learn about, new shoes to fill. At
At exactly
So now it’s onward to the tropics of
math, the
—Todd
September 8, 2006
The
Kindergarten
Mindset
Each
fall,
You
get the idea. Based on the
list, you can view 360 degrees of the experiences creating the mindset
of
people of a certain age.
Since
I work in an elementary
school, my incoming “freshman” class is age five. So I wondered what
the
kindergarten mindset list would be for John, Christopher and Bess—our
class of
2015. Perhaps the list would reveal the rate of change in our cultural
mindsets: what are the innovations or changes that have taken place in
a quick
five years to which we are already acclimated?
From
the sublime to the
idiosyncratic, here are a few things that come to mind.
For members of the
These
are, of course, external factors of a mindset—more the adult
1. Charlie drives the bus. I like
going home.
2. We have the greatest, greatest
time at school.
3. I can do an upside down thing
on the playground.
4. I go down backwards with my
head pointing forward down the slide.
5. We like our teacher.
6. We get to be learned.
7. I’m making a woolly mammoth out
of Legos. It evolved into hairless elephants
from the
Dinophyllus (?) that weighed 14 times as much as a giraffe
8. The first movie I saw in a
theater was Cars. I like the [Curse of
the]Were-
rabbit.
9. I’m 5 and so are they so we’re
triplets.
10. My mommy’s name is “Mommy,”
and my dad’s name is “Daddy.”
11. Our parents make the best,
best ice cream cones and sundaes.
12. I call his dad Dr. Bob. My dad
is Mac.
The trio
built a 25-story Jenga tower while I conducted my research. I’m
thinking that
item #2 and #5 are crucial to item # 6, if I understand #6 correctly.
Further
interviews may be required to complete my findings and connect the dots
between
Jenga, Were-rabbits, Cars, and
triplets. Clearly, this is a complex matrix.
Wednesday
was sawmill day. Grades
4-8 visited the shingle mill at H.O.M.E. Co-op in Orland that will make
the
shingles destined for the sides and roof of our nature center. Randy,
the mill
operator, showed us the stockpile of cedar tree lengths which are sawn
into
logs which are cut into shingle blanks which are cut and squared and
ready for
roofing. We also saw the Mercedes diesel engine that powered the mill,
and the
double-bladed sawmill where boards and beams are made. It’s familiar
territory
to
So
how many times does a piece of cedar get handled
between tree and shingle? Bill McWeeny’s class is working on the
answer.
Monday was
Jim Moulton day, and it’s not a stretch to see our bumper crop of
Monarch
butterfly chrysalises as a forest product. The deer netting protecting
our
milkweed patch from crows is yielding daily lessons in metamorphosis.
Jim
capitalized on this during his visit, showing us Internet sites for
understanding butterflies and other impressive insects. Did you know
that
praying mantises, for instance, are carnivores? “They’re kind of like
mini
T-rexes,” Jim explained. “And if you order a pod of their eggs and
raise them
in a glass tank, you’ll have
Of
course. Bananas produce fruit
flies, which mantids love to snack on.
The females of the species snack on other things too, but this
was a
G-rated lesson. “One of the best ways to keep a house healthy is to
control
flies,” Jim told his K-3 audience, who are now conversant in
carnivores,
herbivores, and omnivores. We’re also ready to order a few egg pods of
mantises
for next spring. Perhaps they’ll suppress the red ants on the
playground? “But
will they bother the monarchs?” Nah! They’ll get done long before
monarch
season.
In fourth
and fifth grade, Jim inaugurated the use of the Garage Band software on our iBooks to record poetry
recitations, adding a music sound track beneath the words. For example,
“Stopping by woods on a snowy evening,” which Jim recited spontaneously
to
demonstrate reading versus recitation for broadcast-quality recording.
Poetry
too can be a forest product! “Now try using your best radio voice,” he
told Jen
Burton as she stepped up to demonstrate. “Well, I have been
doing readers theater,” she said. Jim didn’t know that
Adams Schoolers are already radio personalities! Soon the whole class
was
speaking poems into their laptops and refining their word attack and
oral
interpretation of literature.
In
art class after lunch, the 6th
graders ventured out to the town common to sketch. Jasper and Meredith
returned
with wonderful drawings of the Witherle library—an intriguing
counterpoint to
the computer-assisted sketches they had done that morning. Here were
two
different, perfectly accurate renderings of buildings, neither of which
could
be used for cross-purposes. Jasper’s drawing of the library could not
be used
to construct a building; his computer sketch in three dimensions could
not be
used to capture the feeling of the
library, as did his pencil-on-paper drawing.
Friday was
bark mulch day. A hundred cubic yards of “Kidsafe
Cedar Playground Chips” was deposited on the blacktop by
tractor-trailer. This
“playground surfacing material meets the ASTM F-1292-96 standard, and
is
processed using virgin Eastern Cedar logs,” read the technical
description. “It
has a cedar aroma and natural insect-repelling features.” So perhaps
the red
ants will give up and move away before our T-Rex mantids scourge
arrives? And I
wonder how many times a bark mulch chip is handled between tree and
—Todd
September 22
Working for Scale:
Towards a More Concrete Verbal Measure
of Seismic Energy
If
you lived in
The
morning after the earthquake,
Gordon volunteered to make the first report in morning meeting. “There
was an
earthquake that measured 4.3 on the Richter scale,” he told us. It’s a
common
term, but exactly what is the Richter scale? A little research on
Google gave a
sense of scale to the scale. Our recent local earthquake weighed in
somewhere
between a small nuclear weapon (say, the equivalent of 1,000 tons of
TNT) and
the average energy of a small tornado. But what did our earthquake feel like in terms we can appreciate? A
big truck, subway, explosion, were a few descriptions.
My
hasty research suggested that
anything under 5.4 is “often felt, but rarely causes damage.” At 6.0,
we might
see slight damage to well-designed buildings. Rocks may roll off hills
on
Mr.
Richter “calibrated his scale of magnitudes
using measured maximum
amplitudes of shear waves on seismometers particularly sensitive to
shear waves
with periods of about one second,” I discovered. “The
records had to be obtained from a
Wood-Anderson seismograph.” I’m not feeling it yet. What is
being
measured, and how? Time for the graphic
description
equalizer: Grade 2-3.
We needed
layman’s terms, and it’s a good exercise in defining concepts like
“greater
than,” or “less than.” So I asked the amateur seismographers after
lunch if
they could “give a better picture of what this Richter guy was
describing with
his scale.” And that is how a new local scale was arrived at in short
order,
which awaits field testing.
3.0
Your windshield
cracks
4.0
Feels
like 45 cans of oil lit by a bomb.
4.5
It’s
like 100 bricks hitting your head
5.0
More like 16 boxes
of dictionaries on your head
5.5
16 cement cinder blocks,
or cracking a barn.
6.0
falling 50’ from a
window on your head.
6.2
tumbled on by an
elephant
7.0
a skyscraper toppling over on you,
7.5
3,000
pieces of titanium (John: “it’s heavy”).
8.0
comet hits earth and dinosaurs go extinct, or 3 cement
trucks with
1k gallons of cement each run you over.
The
Weston Observatory, which
registered the recent trembling Downeast, has been informed of the new
scale,
as has
—Todd
October 5
On
Wednesday morning,
the Cote Crane and Rigging Company sent equipment all the way from
Before
the building
housed the historical society, it was apartments. Before it was
apartments, it
was
According
to Dr. George A.
Wheeler’s history book, the cupola was specifically requested by the
school
district on
Denny Colson, senior, stood by us on the common as we
watched the crane stretch up to the roof, so I asked him if he’d ever
been up
in the cupola. Sure! He remembered climbing up there to spy into the
principal’s office. He also remembered that it had a bell.
Denny was a member of the
There’s a lot of history to us as well. Whether
The former
It was
clear by
fourth grade that, for me, a career in math was just not in the
cards—the flash
cards. When Miss McCormack had the
parent-teacher conference with my mom and detailed my struggle with
multiplication facts, it was intervention time.
“Todd’s just got to memorize them,” she said.
And so began
the evening ritual with the big deck of times table cards. I can still
conjure
the scene: the living room sofa and lamp and the steady parade of
numbers
multiplied before my eyes.
It was a chore; it made me
cranky—but knowing the facts of multiplication was a life skill I
needed to
acquire. Fortunately, however, my parents also realized that math was
an area
of weakness for me that was probably not worth fighting over. My
affinities in
other areas stood a better chance of long-term success. In other words,
it was
becoming clear what kind of mind I had. They had an intuitive sense
that there
was a reason I was drawn to certain tasks, and not others.
Nonetheless, the flash cards
continued, thank goodness.
In our
Our discussion was focused by a
recent interview with Levine in Education
Leadership. “Within any school you can
almost
divide the student body into students who are well-rounded and those
who have
highly specialized minds,” he says. “We often punish the ones who have
highly
specialized minds. I’m not saying that kids ought to get out of
anything.
Everyone needs to become mathematically literate, even if math is
anathema to
them.”
Knowing what to
look for is critical. “If you have a kid in your class who’s doing
miserably on
word problems, you can ask, ‘Is it factual memory? Is it procedural
memory? Is
it pattern recognition? Is it sentence comprehension?’ You can pinpoint
where
the breakdowns occur,” says Levine. “And no one’s in a better position
to do
this than a well-trained classroom teacher.”
Observing a child’s natural
affinities is key to defining the strengths and skills that deserve
emphasis. “An awful lot of important skills
can ride the coattails of
your affinities,” says Levine. “If you combine affinities with
strengths, you
begin to carve out a potential career.”
Sometimes
it’s the unstructured moments when
affinities emerge. Recesses spent observing monarch chrysalises,
drumming on
five gallon buckets, and playing four-square could have much to do with
a
life-long affinity. They may be as valid an indicator for some kids as
what’s
occurring in the classroom—and there’s plenty occurring in each and
every
classroom, for each and every kid!
A recent
Alas,
even Dr. Levine would have
prescribed flash cards in my case. Pattern recognition came slowly that
year.
But in fifth grade, everything changed: Mr. Lynch assigned the
“Young
man! Have you
heard about the ghost galleon of the Bagaduce—The Naughty
Lass?” said the gruff old seaman one evening, after a
few pints of grog in the Passports pub.
He hardly waited for my answer, but launched into a story,
careful not
to be overheard by the other mariners drinking at nearby tables,
whispering
urgently across the bar.
“On
October 31, every hundred
years, the galleon appears on
So
the stories were true! Though
the galleon had not appeared in living memory, it now seemed as if it
was more
than the yarn told by locals to perturb the young and deter the unwary
from
foolhardy jaunts to N— in search of dubloons—No, it was a legend worth
heeding.
And perhaps it explained some of the more fabulous episodes in the
history of
the
Naysayers
comforted themselves with
science or denial. “Madness ran in the family,” says the doctor.
“That
was the year of the whooping
cough epidemic,” say my aunts. “Great Gran was hallucinating.”
“The autumn storms that year were the worst
this coast has ever seen,” say the old fishermen. “Ghost galleon—bah!”
“Aye,
I can see you’ve heard all
the reasons not to believe,” said the
brown old seaman, that night in the Pentagoet. “But let me tell you the
reasons
why you should believe,
and you’ll want to lock the doors
tight tonight,” he said, pounding the table. “Because the ghost galleon
is due.”
The look in his
single, firey eye riveted me to the spot as I peered out
the pub window to
—Todd Louis
Stevenson
October 27
Into
the Woods
An epic
journey requires a wise old man or
woman, an innocent and earnest young man or woman seeking their
fortune, a dark
forest, a turtle, a hawk, and a Beloved One. And don’t leave home in
search of
a beloved wife or husband without The Golden Key--or is that The Golden
“E?”—for it is already a road fraught with dangers…and possibilities.
Any
profitable journey involves encounters with Wild Things. Sirens will
beckon.
The road will be long and the directions often cryptic. However, love
and a
warm hearth always spur the traveler onward.
The recent
performance of an epic journey story
by the students in K-1 was a case in point. Mrs. Thomas and I were
fortunate to
obtain front row seats for opening night and can now share the
highlights.
Once
upon a time, an old man with a
Viking helmet said to the young prince: “What are you doing in my
woods.” It
was clear he was a prince, because he was wearing his crown, even while
traveling. In some versions of the
story, it is a shape-shifting old woman wearing a veil and muck boots,
often
mistaken for a kindergarten teacher.
“I’m
in search of a wife,” said the
prince. “I heard the voice of a wonderful girl and I’ve fallen in
love.” She
is, of course, locked up in a tower and the prince must find the golden
key to
free her and claim her for his own. And so the journey and its trials
begin.
“Go
that way,” said the old
man/woman/kindergarten teacher. Old people know the way without having
to think
twice, and they are usually very tolerant and patient with young men
who travel
this route for the first time. They know that young men named Kevin, or
“You
must cross a great, wide
river, and pass through a deep dark forest, to the meadow where you’ll
find the
golden key,” said the wise old kinder-person. “Farewell, and good luck.”
Easing
on down the road, our prince
seeks to ford the river—and there is always a river in this motif, Oh
Best
Beloved. (Some times it is even a great, grey-green, greasy river, all
set
about with fever trees. Not today). He benefits from the aid of a
turtle, who
allows him to step on his back and pass safely and dryly to the far
bank,
though he complains of the weight of our princely pilgrim. “That pains
me,”
said the turtle. The animal world is sympathetic to the search for a
wife,
evidently. Turtles especially know how
long a trip it can be.
Not
all animals are as aware of
their designated role. The hawk asks,
“What am I doing in this play.” Character motivation can be so
perplexing in
even the greatest drama; good agents are hard to find. Kevin looked
like a good
morsel, though, and the hawk swooped down and latched on with his
talons,
saying, “I’ll feed you to my young.”
And
then there are the tricky
girls. In this version, they ply our hero with “fresh chicken and
water.” It’s
too much to resist. But too much drink leads to too much sleep and the
journey
is interrupted and potentially thwarted.
The
thing about stories with such archetypes is that they need no
explanation. They
are already written in our hearts. We are all in love with the
beautiful voice
calling us. We all tread the banks of rivers looking for a way across.
We are
all spooked by the woods, tantalized by the sirens, and joyous when we
discover
the golden key. It is how we reassure ourselves that even an unfair,
random
world will respond to our individual perseverance and heroism. As poet
Richard
Wilbur wrote, “how much we are the woods we wander in.” And we are the journey.
When
Kevin wakes from his chicken
and water slumbers, he is victorious, as we expected. Our hero finds
the golden
key and approaches the tall tower and hears the line that every
journeyer wants
to hear on their arrival or return to home or hearth—a princess saying,
“Welcome. I’ve been waiting for you.” To
which he replies, romantically: “Let’s go,” followed by, “Taxi!” Down
swoops
the now-friendly eagle to whisk them away.
That’s
as good an ending as it
gets—unless it’s the voice of Mrs. Thomas calling all the actors to
return from
where the wild things are and come to the kitchen for their lunch while
it’s
“still hot.”
Why?
This
anecdote may be
apocryphal, but I like it all the same. For the final exam of an
advanced
philosophy course, the professor asked just one question: Why?
Faced with many blank pages to fill,
and an assignment so open-ended it could be defined in hundreds of way,
the
students went to work feverishly spinning through all the exotic
proofs, syllogisms and rationales of
Western philosophy and the professor’s course syllabus—except for one
student.
He had a pleasurable couple of hours sitting and thinking. Finally, he
wrote
down a single sentence and handed in the exam booklet, then left.
His answer:
“Why not?”
The next person to try this probably
won’t get the same complete credit. There’s no second act in such (your
choice
here) flippancy/effrontery/ recklessness/daring/ingenuity. The question
pendulum usually comes to rest somewhere in the middle, where proofs
and syllogisms reside.
I’ve been
thinking about questions in the classroom lately. One science textbook
for
teachers recommends, “asking questions that produce conceptual
conflict….Learners should be in a state of mental disequilibrium to
help them
adapt or add new mental constructions to their thinking.” Why not?
When
you think about it, most true
learning is based on asking “why?” And contemporary teaching styles
have
emphasized better and better uses of “why” in an authentic and
stimulating
manner. A lot depends on who’s asking the question. Why can
simply be testing to see if you know my sense of the
answer, or it can be genuinely practicing a kind of
thinking. There are scientific, mathematical, literary, and artistic whys.
In this
constructivist approach to learning—immersing kids in real problems to
solve,
rather than data to absorb or predetermined equations to factor—the
good
question leads not only to an understanding of facts and information,
but to a
kind of intellectual literacy that can become a powerful habit of mind.
Questions are as much about nurturing process skills as about getting
answers.
When Bill McWeeny asks kids to set up tanks with mini-eco systems in
them, he
is asking why. In most of our Everyday
Math curriculum, there is an
underlying question: how can we think in numbers to describe
relationships in
our world?
Why takes time in order to authentically
investigate, explore, experiment, synthesize and conclude. It’s best
served
fresh and hot. It’s not something you can pull off the shelf or pour
from a
can—never good frozen. Why is local,
free-range, organic. You can read about it in a book, but it loses
nutrients
when you just heat it up and serve it as leftovers. Why
is fine dining, not fast food.
Why is street level, like when you walk
out the back door of the school and suddenly wonder, “Why
do monarchs choose milkweed?” Or when you wonder, “Why does
I imagine
most parents have their own why/why not
story, since it can also be an
exasperating phase that children go through as they assert
their independence from parental explanations—as two year-olds and
again as
teenagers when they assert their independence from parental controls.
Sometimes
the answer is an authoritative, simple “Because I said so!” That too is
about
learning. It’s all good. The question, however, is knowing when
it’s good.
That
philosophy exam question was a blank canvas, awaiting definition and
inviting a
treatise on the process of thinking—as was the rogue answer, “Why not?”
Or
perhaps it was simply a story that philosophy professors tell as a
cautionary
tale for the ill-prepared, or to make the philosophy majors think extra
hard.
As to which superhero power is more desirable? Speed and ice-making
were
popular at
I like to
gaze out my office window here at
school and imagine the town common in former eras. The kids play
football at
recess on the former pasture of errant cows and horses; the gathering
place for
the dedication of the Civil War monument; and for delightful evenings,
to this
day, such as appreciating the town band on the fourth of July. Quaint!
But it
makes me think about the modern sense of the commons. It’s an old
concept that
we need now more than ever. It’s what
we’re hinting at when we talk about community pride, investment in the
future, and
support of education. It’s a soulful quality that makes us great.
Between the
lines of school and municipal
budgets, the support of the citizenry for the local health center, the
discourse about preservation, conservation, and ownership of land and
traditions, is where the cultural commons lies, thought it is somewhat
hard to
define. It is more than the sum of its parts, an essence, perhaps, of
our
yearning for community and neighborliness—a kind of emotional
infrastructure
that makes us feel like we belong to a particular place, at a
particular time.
It exists in the interstices of budgets and agendas of any
municipality. It is
the feeling of what poet Wendell Berry calls “the having in common”
that makes
a town a community, and makes it a community for young and old. It’s
precious,
and fragile.
We
regularly tot up the dollars and
cents involved in running a community. We fund community services,
coming to
agreement on the rights and responsibilities of “stakeholders” as they
pertain
to items as mundane as the style of exterior lighting on a residence,
the
treatment of sewage, and crucial stewardship of the local watershed to
keeping
paint on the school building. This is the economic and civility commons
to
which we are all abutters.
I
suggest a commitment to more. The
cultural commons is our most valuable equity, and best value. It’s
actually
free, but takes assiduous care. The concept of a commons as a kind of
watershed
is a good model, since it integrates stewardship of past, present, and
future.
For instance, when we fund the local school for another year, buying
transportation, paying teacher salaries, and supplying materials for
kindergartners through twelfth graders, it is really an investment in
the
cultural commons extending lifetimes, generations, and localities
beyond the
town border in