first thoughts
current events
My name is Denise, and my "titles" include student, mother, grandmother, friend, sister, Christian, graphic artist, director, photo enthusiast – and in the course of this degree program (MSEd in Information Technology) – usually feel compelled to explain (apologize?) that one of those titles is not teacher. I have never taught in a classroom. But upon reflection (here I am - thinking already!) recognize that as a mother/human being/social creature, I “taught” my children every day. As a non-trad student, I've helped mentor my younger peers. As a non-trad student, I've learned even more from my younger peers. As a grandmother, I enjoy spending time with my three-year-old grandson sharing toys, games, stories and experiencing the thrill of rolling down grassy hillsides in the early evening.
in younger days
My mother enjoyed telling people that as a toddler, I would sit for extended periods of time holding encyclopedias in my lap. That I would carefully turn the pages with very un-babylike behavior – never tearing a page. I wish I had the pictures to see it for myself, it's far beyond my powers of recollection. (My own children were not as fascinated with the beauty of written words as I was. I loved the shapes before I began to crave the words they created. As a parent, I’d secretly hoped that this passion for words - and appreciation for the rhythm and beauty written words can create - was genetic. Happily, they both did embrace reading for pleasure, and not just for the sake of an assignment.) Reading to them nightly was a ritual I typically relished. There was one brief period when my son’s insistence on reading The Berenstain Bears Family Vacation – to the point of memorization of the entire book – did grow a little tedious; but I never denied reading him the story he craved. I can hear his voice in my head to this very day, twenty years later:
"Hooray, hooray, we’re on our way
Our summer vacation starts today…"
He could “read” the entire book – of course, both the nightly repetition and the rhythm of the words played a significant role in that. More proof of the success of a classic learning style - as if we needed any! As pointed out in our reading this week, learning doesn't have to be a chore, especially if it comes from a place of contentment and pleasure. And while we enjoyed watching television as much as the next family, there was rarely a battle between books and other forms of media. I know they were responding to my love of reading, as well as their own. I was one of the lucky moms. We had our favorite televsion programs, but they rarely interfered with story time. This week I read a passage that tied in nicely with the struggle some parents and children might have with this situation - vying for attention in a media-dominated world.
"No one tells children that they must watch so much television per night because it is A Good Thing To Do. People watch it because it gives them pleasure. The need to watch it to relax.
Reading books, in a non-ideal school, is often set for homework—a certain number of pages must be read and marked off on a book mark by the following day. The child perceives no need to read. Reading provides no pleasure and is anything but relaxing when the anxious parent barks out the correct word every time the child hesitates or guesses wrongly. Television and books have one thing in common—it’s what the child gets out of them that matters. Reading is not inherently good. Television is not inherently bad. What counts is the pleasure, the experiences, the relaxation, the growth in understanding, the satisfaction of need in each medium. Mem Fox, Teaching, Learning, Living (www.memfox.com/flashing-screens-or-turning-pages.html)
For a couple of years, I helped out during our church summer camps (usually as a cook/baker/entertainment coordinator, that sort of thing). One year I accepted a role as counselor, and was in charge of a cabin of nine young girls (grades 5 and 6, if I remember correctly.) The first night there I discovered one of the girls had a copy of a Nancy Drew mystery. I had read the entire collection as a child, and they held great sentimental value. So every night, after prayer time, I read from the book by flashlight. I was nervous about telling the camp director about it at first, because I didn't know if I was breaking any rules. (There were a few raised eyebrows, but I refused to back down.) The girls were so excited for story time - every single night that week - and not just because it wasn't religious canon. I recognized how hungry those girls were for stories, and for the connection of a mentor reading with them - not to them. I didn't have to fake my enthusiasm, and neither did they. It was very special, even if time and distance tends to soften those kinds of memories. I'd like to say our cabin won several awards that week - but I also got the girls in trouble for teaching them how to bounce from the lower (double) bunk bed onto the upper (single) mattress. It was easier to get more lift starting from an adjacent storage locker— but our enthusiastic screams and occasional thuds nipped that activity pretty quickly. Which, in hindsight, probably gave us even more time with Nancy, George, Ned and friends.
watterson steps in
When my son was about ten years old, and my daughter seven, I branched our reading out a bit. We started reading Calvin and Hobbes comic books together nightly - and we each had our roles to play. (Over the course of that year, we ended up purchasing all the volumes we could find, I think there are seven or eight books still in T.J.'s possession. Somehow I lost ownership along the way...an all-too-familiar experience for parents, I'm sure.) Naturally, some of the vocabulary tripped them (and me!) up at times, but I can see clearly now how the fun of the experience made teaching those words easier. There was more humor than struggle, and more reward for the experience. Calvin’s defiant personality, his parent’s often weary, frequently sarcastic, but always unconditional love, and Hobbes unwavering support and crafty obervations were valuable life lessons. We loved the trouble those two could get into – the thoughts that Calvin had were truly inspired.
I was reminded of this experience with the comic series while reading from one of our books this week, The Book of Learning and Forgetting. Our nightly ritual was classical learning at it’s best. At the end of chapter two, Frank Smith says that “[u]seful learning doesn’t occur when we take time out of our normal lives and knuckle down to serious study. Learning is an inevitable part of our normal lives, and it only takes place, in any useful way, when we are in a normal frame of mind. The main thing we learn when we struggle to learn is that learning is a struggle (p. 13).”
Sometime during this period – after at least six months or more of T.J. as Calvin, Tess as Hobbes and myself as all the other characters - that some of the girls in my bible study group were education students at Western. (Long before I began working on campus.) Two of the girls used T.J. as a test subject for their classes, to test his reading ability, comprehension, etc. I admit I was quite proud of my son’s willingness to help them out. They were a little surprised at the results. It turned out he tested at college-level vocabulary in all areas. (Their teacher even questioned the results - and wanted to have him re-tested. I have no doubt that the combination of his own desire to read – at levels probably beyond the typical ten-year-old - and his ability to recognize root forms of words, held him in good stead.
rote memorization for fun. seriously.
One night my teen-aged daughter, Tess, and I were watching TV, distracted and bored. She was about thirteen at the time, and had her history book on her lap. Out of the blue, we started listing the U.S. presidents in order – to see how far we could get. And for the next two or three evenings, we kept at it until we both could recite them in order. There was no test she was studying for, no assignment due that demanded this knowledge. She simply wanted to learn it for herself.
When she told one of her friends what we had been doing each evening, she was scoffed at, and criticized for doing something so “dumb.” She was disappointed that her friends couldn’t see how learning something challenging was fun for her. Even if it’s a self-imposed memorization challenge that we’re bound to forget down the road. More important to me was that she not only initiated the challenge, but that she enjoyed it. And that she still remembers it with fondness. I always had trouble in the era between Jackson and Johnson, yet somehow still remember that Millard Fillmore was the last Whig-party president. It hasn't yet come up in a Jeopardy episode that I'm aware of...
gatto strikes a chord
My experiences are so different from those of my kids; it's hard for me to reconcile the changes in the system. In the Seven-Lesson School Teacher by John Taylor Gatto, one quote in particular struck a note with me, but only because it so contrasted with the kind of homelife my kids had that I didn't. Or rather, the homelife they didn't have that I did. To put it into context: I grew up in a two-parent household, with a stay-at-home mom, a younger brother and sister, and a dad who spent countless evenings making sure our motorcycles, backpacking, fishing and camping gear were ready to go not only on weekends, but all summer long. We lived in the same house throughout childhood. I thrived in public school system. My creativity was encouraged, recognized and I achieved high marks in nearly every subject I took. (I am SO a product of the official theory of learning - and of the practice of behaviorism psychology. Curiously, inspite of of the evidence many writers have proven to the contrary, I still don't feel that rewards impacted my intrinsic love of learning and achieving in a negative way. But (to get back to the present day) as Gatto says, homelife is different nowadays. And the first lesson he would teach us is that "[i]n a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work or because too many moves or too many job changes or too much ambition or something else has left everybody too confused to stay in a family relation I teach you how to accept confusion as your destiny."
I was very fortunate. but I couldn’t give my kids the same level of safety, security or permanency. My kids come from a broken home (their dad left us when they were 12 and eight – and stayed out of touch for several years.) I worked full-time, and went back to school to earn my bachelors in graphic design. Those years were marked with confusion and busyness, but I can't blame the school system for their "failure." My son dropped out to get his GED, took a few stabs at community college over the years, got married, and is now pursuing linguistics with the Marine Corps. (Semper Fi!) The school system has it's flaws, (far more than I realized before listening to Alfie Kohn and John Gatto) but did he learn emotional and intellectual dependency, or indifference, or even provisional self esteem because of the over worked, understaffed and underpaid teachers at his schools? Perhaps some of those things in part – indifference, most certainly. Yet schooling was (is) only one component of his learning, of his understanding of life and meaningfulness. I always believed the old adage, that my job as a parent was to train up my child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6) ; and as Smith tells us - those lessons, classically learned and lived - will not be forgotten. His education was so much more than an unhappy experience with high school, or lack of a father figure in his life. His experiences were far more complex than can be confined to six or seven hours in the classroom.
Actually, I do remember now one instance where the junior high staff inadvertently failed him. Though he didn't tell me until a year or so after the incident, he was crushed to have been forgotten when the school awarded certificates for the honor roll (and gave parents stickers to display on their cars.) It was an oversight, and they missed his name in the award process. He said he never really got over it, but at the time was too hurt, and then later too angry and embarrassed, to tell me. The advisor later apologized for their error, but by then it was too late. That missed recognition in front of his peers and family was significant for him.
cynical? maybe. true? yep.
I don't think anyone can argue with the facts regarding the dumbing down of our language and curriculum. "Pick up a fifth grad(sic) textbook in math or rhetoric from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be college level," Gatto says. What an unfortunate testimony to our times. Imagine the average citizen today listening to the election speeches of the Lincoln and Douglas debates. Not even taking into account vocabulary and oratorical skills, can you imagine today’s youth (or their parents?) standing for hours to listen to speeches without any other form of extra entertainment? Patiently waiting; not to be entertained or catered to with glittery, spray-tanned debates?. In this instance, Gatto is dead on. In our current televsion culture we see Kardashians and Jersey Shore-ians gaining fame and notoriety simply for the sake of fame and gratuitousness. It’s so unforunate, these "role" models of today. What are our kids learning in or out of school? If it’s true that “we learn by the company we keep” (Smith, p. 9) – or from those with whom we identify (Smith, p. 3), and I believe it most certainly is, then what does that say about these icons of today? What are we learning from the sponges of society, who offer nothing of substance to our culture?
Gatto sums in up the cultural environment quite well. "Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the 21st century cannot concentrate on anything for very long, they have a poor sense of time past and to come, they are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction."
Truth might not pretty, but it is powerful. We have to recognize it to accept it.
Photos at the header and footer sections in this site are mine.
| home | wk 1 | wk 2 | wk 3 | wk 4 | wk 5 | wk 6 | wk 7 | wk 8 | wk 9 | wk 10
