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He Never Quit Trying; Never Tried Quitting

22/12/2018

 
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How can one experience the life of a barrier-breaking achiever in science, agriculture, art, music, social justice, and inventor of many products from plants, particularly peanuts? The premise of this series  "for Kids" is to include many hands-on activities in a biographical narrative, so that the reader can replicate some the challenges faced by the subject of the book.  George Washington Carver lived from about 1864 to 1943. (He was never certain of his birth date.) Peggy Thomas brings Carver to life with vibrant storytelling that is so engaging that you don't want to stop reading in order to figuratively "smell the roses" of sidebars and activities.  You know, intuitively, from this impressively researched book that "smelling the roses" was at the core of Carver's intellectual, spiritual, and practical interaction with his natural world.  

At a time when everything is a quickie and a sound byte (bite?), George Washington Carver is a book designed to be studied. There is depth here. What emerges from his story is a man who kept going no matter what.  He learned what he needed to learn to move his life along to the next step, acquiring skills along the way that opened doors for him to all societies at a time when African Americans were looked upon as less than human.  When he first started college in art school, he was immediately labeled "other" by the students because of his race and his age (he was slightly older).  He supported himself by doing other people's laundry.  As Thomas tells it:


"When students brought their laundry to Carver's home, he'd unselfconsciously offer them a crate to sit on, and they would stay and chat.  One day he came home to find his crates gone.  He walked in on a room full of new furniture.   All of his friends had taken up a collection and purchased him a table, chairs, and a bed.  It must have been difficult for Carver to accept such an extravagant gift.  He prided himself on being self-sufficient and working for all that he had.  He never took handouts.  But the boys must have felt that his friendship was payment enought.  Years later Carver wrote, 'They made me believe I was a real human being.'"

Real learning takes work, and practice, and applying oneself.  Effort and discipline. There are no short cuts.  Peggy Thomas' George Washington Carver for Kids  introduces us to an exemplar extraordinaire of such virtues.  She  also offers today's students many activities to do as George did, in gentle and fun ways, gaining an appreciation that such acomplishments for George Washing Carver were necessary to his own growth and survival.  Sudents who immerse themselves in this book, will know what it feels like to walk in Carver's shoes.  It's an  opportunity that's worth the effort.

What Generates Passion?

7/12/2018

 
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credit: careersingovernment.com
  “The notion of emptiness generates passion,” wrote the great poet, Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). When I first came across this line, many years ago, it occurred to me that the word “notion” is most significant. “Notion” means that you’ve had a taste, a vision, an inkling, a snippet of something—enough to alert you to its possibilities and whet your appetite for more.  My passions started when I was very young.

I was one of those fortunate children whose parents read to me.  The stories were not what hooked me.  I saw that books were full of possibilities, a portal to other worlds.  I also saw the the only way to access these worlds for myself was to learn how to read.  I remember being four years old and looking out a high-rise window over the myriad signs that decorated New York City rooftops. My companion was an eight year old girl named Brucia.  “Can you read everything you see?” I asked her wistfully. When she assured me she could, I remember wondering if I would ever reach that point where I could read everything I saw. (Here is the “emptiness” of Roethke’s line.) Then I could get into books anytime I wanted without being dependent on my parents. So in my determined way, I pestered adults for help and taught myself to read.

When I was eight, we made papier maché finger puppets in class.  Mine was of my father, featuring short lengths of yarn pasted vertically around his head as a frame for his bald pate.   I received a lot of praise for my cleverness. Over the weekend a mouse in the classroom came and ate the nose off my puppet leaving behind a disfiguring hole.  (The paste was an edible (tasty to a mouse?) mixture of flour and water.) My teacher was worried about my reaction. How would I feel about having my work so unforgivingly destroyed? Much to her surprise, for me it was no big deal.   Even at that tender age I realized that the puppet itself didn’t matter. I could always make another and no one could take that ability away from me. That same year my favorite doll fell off the bed on to her nose and it, too, was irrevocably marred.  I was inconsolable and vowed to myself that I would never invest so much emotional energy into a possession. The loss was too hard to bear. Acquiring skills and creating new things thus became my passions.

    Passion can be described as a feeling but it manifests itself in the world as behavior, strong behavior that recurs frequently despite obstacles, setbacks, and long periods without obvious feedback.  Passionate people are often unreasonable; they persist in spite of off-putting events or lack of approbation and support that might make others quit.


 “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him.  The unreasonable man persists in his attempts to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (George Bernard Shaw, 1903 play “Man and Superman.”) [GBS was a misogynist so he was not about to include women in such a profound statement.] 

Behaviorists know that strength of behavior is built with payoffs that are highly intermittent and might only be perceived as a reward by the individual exhibiting the behavior.  The well-struck tennis ball becomes its own reward and is a first step in the steep learning curve of a potential champion. Hitting the ball in a racket’s “sweet spot” feels good. But the pursuit of a world-class trophy requires a commitment and a faith in one’s own abilities that defies the inevitable (reasonable) naysayers who know that the odds of reaching this pinnacle are extremely long.

"
Invictus" is one of my favorite films.   It depicts an unreasonable Nelson Mandela, played brilliantly by Morgan Freeman, who believed that he could unite his post-apartheid nation if only the rugby team, the Springboks, could do the impossible and win the World Cup.  He had formidable strikes against pulling this off—the team itself was an underdog that didn’t believe itself capable of such a feat and the freshly empowered black citizens of the “newly christened Rainbow Nation, South Africa” hated everything that stood for their former Afrikaner oppressors, especially this team. They were certainly not about to root for it.  Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Addiction is not passion.  Dr. Gabor Mat
é, a family physician with a special interest in child development says: 

"
The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.." [For more on Dr. Maté watch his Ted Talk.]

Passion motivates learning, exploring, becoming a part of and interacting with something larger than oneself.  It is sometimes interpreted as "grit."  There are passionate teachers out there.  They are the ones that change lives.   I'll be you can think of one right now.  

Passion for writing nonfiction for children is experienced by the authors of iNK Think Tank. 
We authors work against all odds, creating works of literature to engage, inform and inspire children about the real world. You can get a delicious sampling of our work and our passionate voices in our Nonfiction Minutes.   If we want kids to learn and think about the real world and foster a passion for learning, why not give them great reading material?  One issue is that our books are not used in most classrooms where they can do the most good.

Our problem?  What can we do to change this small part of the educational landscape?
The answer:  Whatever it takes.  



Why Teaching Isn't Fun Any More

1/12/2018

 
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By Intel Free Press - https://www.flickr.com/photos/intelfreepress/9527140076/sizes/o/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27914424
 These days I'm getting all kinds of reports from teachers that today's students are a game-changer for the teaching profession and not in a good way.  Admittedly, these are anecdotal, so I'm keeping my sources anonymous.  But what I'm hearing is distressing and challenging.

In higher education, a teacher of engineering was suprised to discover that his students in an A-List university did not like to engage in conversation.  When he asked a question during class, no one raised a hand.  When he gave them an exam, he discovered that they performed less well than his classes at a community college! He told this to his elite students. Perhaps many of them, who are used to being smart  and know how to Google answers, had thought they could wing it.  This professor had told  his students  in both venues that if they did the assigned work, they would learn the course material.  The  grades on the first exam for more than half the class of the A-listers  was a rude awakening.  These students are not used to doing poorly. Interestingly, the students who sat in the front row did significantly better on the test than those at the back of the room.  Hmmmmmm.  The professor pointed this out and the next time he entered the class the students were fighting over seats.

Speaking of chaos in the classroom, a high-school science teacher friend in an upscale school district has found her students disrespectful, entitled, and sometimes,  just plain nasty.  She teaches a lab course so there is less formal control than the old-fashioned sit-in-your-seat, shut-up-and-listen, reading-and-recitation (aka known as work-sheets) class format. After spoon-feeding a project with a power-point and dividing the group into working partners, she told them to proceed by reading the instructions for the state required lab.  She would approve their work as they made progress through the procedure.  But they couldn't seem to comprehend the directions and all they cared about was getting the check mark for completing each segment so they had the record of doing the work without actually doing the work.  She feels frustrated because she cannot establish a rapport with her students and was horrified that they could not follow the simple directions that they had to read.  

The other day, a colleague in Kansas City told me that parents stormed a school board meeting demanding that they remove iPads from the classrooms.  I found the link to the story but  only the headline. Apprently, when at home, their children never put down their devices, constantly chatting with friends (which is NOT writing) and playing video games.  Some parents in Silicon valley who work for the tech giants are sending their kids to a Waldorf school that eschews technology.  Read the piece to discover what that's all about.  

Apparently, this change in student behavior has been going on for a long time.  Back in 2009, Christy Price, a psychology professor at Dalton State College in Georgia studied the gap between students expectations for success and their willingness to work for it.  She came up with "The Five R's for Engaging Millenial Students," published in 2011.  Lotsaluck implementing them.  

Her conclusion is that now teachers have to be perceived as their students' "cheerleaders." [My terminology.]  Since the beginning of time we've known that motivation is the key to learning.  We once believed that showing up at school was enough to do the job.  No more.  The authority of a teacher is no longer a given.  The pleasing of parents is
 grades. They're seen as vital to the check list for parental aspirations for their kids.  Failure and stumbling blocks are not seen as stepping-stones to responsibility, agency, and maturity.  Parents have become fixers; some are even ready with lawsuits that intimidate school administrators from backing their teachers.  And I'm talking here about the  institutions that  have traditionally generated good students!!! Think about what's happening in underserved schools.  The most effective way to catch up on lost opportunities to learn in school is........  (drum roll): TUTORING!!!! One-on-one interactions between human beings.  My sister is a math tutor and she's really busy these days. Socrates lives on.

Technology, standardized testing, data-driven instruction are all dehumanizing education.  Everyone is looking for "scalablilty," the mass production of learning.  The only thing worth scaling in education is good books, art, music, media.  We must stop trying to "scale-up" good teaching because it is not scaleable.  There are best practices and there are good teachers who come with diversity of personality, culture, passions, all of which are stifled in the classroom.

There is joy and motivation to be discovered in both the teaching and learning processes. Such discoveries can happen anywhere, not just in classrooms where it now happens less and less.  
Once found, it is the secret sauce to a well-lived life.  







     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

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