Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
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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.  



What’s a New School Superintendent to Do?

30/7/2018

 
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The “School Reform” movement is characterized by a top-down, disruptive administrative process bent on privatizing public education.  It includes charter schools (start-up schools using public funds with little or no financial oversight thus becoming ripe for corruption and other forms of failure) and voucher programs (where public funding is siphoned off so that students can go to private schools). It has had a great deal of criticism from Diane Ravitch, who aggregates reports of successes and failures in support of public education, a necessary institution for our democracy.

Last week I attended a conference sponsored by November Learning (BLC2018) which is focused on children and how to help them learn effectively.  Jonathan P. Raymond was one of the speakers.  His new book Wildflowers: A School Superintendent’s Challenge to America got my attention.  As an author, I don’t know much about school administration.  Raymond followed Rudy Crew as the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) in August of 2009 to December of 2013 with 46,000 students of which 75% had family incomes below the federal poverty line and spoke more than forty different languages.  It was also the period where the State of California was in its sixth straight year of budget cuts to school districts.

Raymond moved to Sacramento with his family and entered his three children in the public schools.   Then he spent the first hundred days visiting every school in his district, sometimes as many as three a day.  He came armed with a vision of educating the Whole Child— “head, heart, and hands”—a philosophy that looks at children as individuals and addresses issues of readiness to learn (like good nutrition), and reaches out to the parents and community as partners in this vision.  He identified the six worst schools and decided to make them a priority.  He hired insiders, with proven value, to become part of his team. He is anti-standardized testing and is profoundly influenced by John Dewey and the contemporary formidable educator Linda Darling-Hammond.  All of these things made me sympathetic to his journey.

There was one aspect of Jonathan P. Raymond’s preparation for this job, however, that gave me pause.  Raymond briefly summed up his early career as a lawyer and politician who became a Broad Fellow at the Broad Academy for ten months in preparation for an administrative job in education.  Diane Ravitch offers this post on some of what the Broad Academy has done and what it stands for.  His belief in educating the Whole Child and his experience of the Waldorf school progressive education overrides some of what he learned from Broad.   Here’s what Raymond says about “school reform” and teachers:

“It’s no secret that some people in the so-called “school reform” movement are at war with teachers’ unions, and whether they intend it or not, are perceived as being at war with teachers themselves.  What I learned in Sacramento and keep learning as I move forward personally and professionally, is that no effort to transform a school or a district can succeed without recognizing the dignity and worth of teachers [italics, his] through appropriate compensation, opportunities for professional development and positive collaborative working conditions.”

He also said:

“The Broad Academy did me no favors with it came to union relations.  ‘People who come from outside education are more used to working in performance culture versus entitlement culture,’ Broad’s director told The Sacramento Bee when my appointment was first announced.  Disparaging hard-working educators by calling them ‘entitled’ is not how I would have set the table. “

His last chapter, “Solutions: Five Keys to Reimagine Schools,” puts leadership in the center with input from students, teachers, and community resulting in compromise in which all factions have buy-in.  He is at odds with the entrenched top-down organization that is a tradition in most districts.
​
Jonathan P. Raymond’s title Wildflowers is a metaphor for the potential of all children to find a way to bloom when they encounter the proper nurturing environment for the special idiosyncratic germ within them.  This is a passionate, thoughtful book that can bring vision and hope to our public schools.  




Magic in the Classroom: One Teacher's Guide

12/7/2018

 
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Dr. Pamela Davis
Dr. Pam Davis is a friend of mine and a consummate teacher.  I asked her if she created magic in the classroom and in her blunt straightforward manner she said, "Not really.  I just capture the magic that's there!" So I asked her how that happens and her responses are the basis for this blog.

Is magic in the classroom the norm or not?  "I think magic in the classroom is overlooked and when it's harnessed that's the exception."

How often do you experience magic in your classroom?  "To me teaching and learning are both magical so I experience magic quite often?"

What do you do to make this magic happen?  "First, I prepare by deciding how to share myself through the material. For example, I have a natural sense of humor and I love to read and listen to music.  If I can find a way to share any of my passions with my students through the mandated content, that's the first step in inviting them into a safe learning space.  So when I teach social studies to 6th grade, the kids need to learn about the term, the "golden age." I introduce them to Jill Scott who wrote a song called "Living Life Like It's Golden," which I believe represents a golden age in popular music.  Then I invite them to debate the properties of a golden age in history by comparing my generation's music to theirs.  This leads to discussions all kinds of golden ages and gives the students ownership of the term." 

What do you look for in the material you use to connect to your students?  "I have to look for outside material to supplement the mediocre required texts, which gives kids facts but doesn't inspire interest. I can say honestly, that in order to connect to my students and have them connect to each other and eventually connect to the material, I have to be some kind of voice--an author's voice, a musician's voice, an artist's voice that transcends diversities and keys into common humanity." 

How have you used the Nonfiction Minute?  "When we were learning about the Medieval Period in history, I used the Nonfiction Minute called "Gong Farmers."  I then posted the  link on my class page with the warning, "Read at your own risk.  This is disgusting.  I don't want to talk about it."Of course, most of them read it but then I had them lead a small group discussion about some of the pros and cons of the feudal system from the peasants' perspective.  And several children brought up the idea of a gong-farmer and explicitly explained what the job entailed while I barely contained my composure."  

Pam, you are an exemplar of what I call the "artist teacher."  How do you get away with it? "I get criticized by administrators and sometimes other teachers.  But parents and students give me consistently high ratings, so I persevere.  I get some encouragement from my work outside the classroom.   I teach teachers. I evaluate content and even provide really fun robotics to kids facing family trauma.  I've never seen teaching as anything but an opportunity to share magic.”
 

If you are a teacher who has never experienced magic in the classroom, you must first know yourself and be fully and confidently self-expressed.  Next you must be constantly on the lookout for excellent content material created by others who are also fully  and confidently secure in their form of self-expression. Shared humanity is at the heart of it all.

The Joy of Learning and “Education”

28/6/2018

 
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In 2010, I saw an amazing film called “Babies,” which documented the first year of life of four infants born in Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo. The transformation from tiny, dependent newborns to little persons is extraordinary in two ways. First, the pattern of development for each baby is predictable and universal; they are each doing the same thing at about the same time. And second, the cultural differences seem to have little influence on this development. What we are watching is learning that comes from total immersion in the environment created by place, parents, and siblings. This movie is an exemplar of what behaviorists call “contingency-shaped” learning. Humans are born to learn. It is an emotional, engaging process with both triumph and tragedy, albeit on a very small scale.

Let’s say that one of these babies (me) became a teenager and wanted to learn how to speak another language. I started to learn French my freshman year of high school. I was given a book that started with simple sentences and rules of syntax and grammar. As the course progressed the sentences became more challenging; we learned about tenses, and questions, and other complexities of language. Behaviorists call this “rule-shaped” learning. The purpose of rule-shaped learning is to fast-forward the student to a point where contingencies can take over. I studied French for six years and had to pass an exit exam in my college which demonstrated that I could read and write French. When I went to France, and started to speak it, others assumed I was fluent from my few initial words which evoked a conversational barrage that was incomprehensible to me. Sadly, I was never immersed in a French-speaking place long enough to become fluent. Fluency means that all the rules fade away and language is a skill to express oneself. Rules are training wheels for beginning learners but hamper practice after a certain level of achievement has been reached.

Education today is flooded with rules, called standards, and assessments, which proclaim to measure how well students are learning the rules. Teaching is complex professional behavior, comparable to lawyering and doctoring. Becoming a teacher takes training, evaluation, constant learning, and experience. Teachers can live with standards but need the autonomy reach their own successful differentiated methods and styles. Constant measurement and assessment distorts their ability to teach effectively. Teachers learn from the total immersion of themselves in their jobs. They learn from administrators who are experienced in what makes an effective classroom. They learn from their colleagues. Training rules are not laws; useful if they help and discarded if they impede.

Today’s teachers have their wings clipped by rules. Some are so indoctrinated that they fear to stray from the rules and trust their own judgement and ingenuity. They are losing their freedom as our schools become more autocratic, mirroring what is happening to our country. It feels safer to “go by the book.”

Critical thinking, buzz-words for education, means to reexamine what is before us and make new kinds of decisions. We need to reevaluate some of the rules that are imprisoning us, especially since today’s education has been mandated to produce students with high-level skills, creativity and ingenuity. When you look at the engagement of babies in their first year of life, the joy of learning is palpable. How much engagement visible in today’s K-12 classrooms?
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Artists, entrepreneurs, high achievers in every field know how to think “outside the box,” a value esteemed by the marketplace, where rules don’t apply. These folks are in total immersion with some aspect of our world. Yet we have drained our schools of the joy of learning that is our birthright.

     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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