Most people agree that pinewood derby cars fall into two classes: those obviously made by kids and those obviously made by parents. A few years ago two of my sons built winning cars that fell into the kid made category but were viewed suspiciously because they won. Liam, too young to be officially eligible for a ribbon, built The Stealth, a car that beat every officially participating car.
Their dad showed them what to do but made them do the work. He passed his expertise to his sons and showed them how to implement everything from axle polishing to weight placement to wheel alignment. He gave them the knowledge and skill but required them to do the work with their own hands. This is a dad who mentored his sons and believed they could succeed.
In the end, the pinewood derby reminds me that I’ve observed three classes of teachers: those who don’t bother because they do not think their students can succeed, those who do it themselves because they do not think their students can succeed, and those who truly mentor, passing on the knowledge and skill necessary because they believe their students can succeed.
Passing on knowledge is a noble purpose, believing in a child’s potential, well that is revolutionary.
I didn’t really need anything from the market that day. What I really needed was a diversion from my work. Sad but true, Trader Joe’s did the trick.
All was going according to plan until I noticed a display near the frozen aisle. There, right before my eyes were stacks and stacks of enormous chocolate bars imported from all over the globe.
A normal middle-aged woman might have responded, “C-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e! Yes!” She might have cracked open a bar and taken a big bite. But not me, no, I’m a teacher. So I grabbed a handful of the luscious bars and got in line, while simultaneously crafting a lesson for the next day.
This would be a cross-curricular writing lesson. I would begin with a session of chocolate taste testing, gathering sense words and phrases with the group along the way. Then, after my students chose their favorite variety from the tasting, I would direct them to a mass of geography books, the ones I was on my way to pluck from the shelves of my local library on my way home from the trip to Trader Joe’s (the trip that was supposed to divert me from my work). My students would then research the country from which their favorite chocolate originated. After they gathered some notes, they would craft a poem of place and taste! By the time I pulled into my driveway a thought crossed my oddly refreshed brain, “Tomorrow will be grand!”
“Really? Does your mom, like, never buy sweet stuff for you guys?”
“Are you kidding? Why would she? My mom bakes cookies, cakes, and pies all the time!”
My son Wesley came home appalled. A dish is only as good as its ingredients. We know when we use fresh produce instead of canned that the dish is going to have a higher nutritional value, that we are going to experience much better flavor.
I don’t start with a box mix. I cook from scratch. I make my cakes with flour, fresh eggs, butter, sugar, and chocolate. People notice and love my baking. Sure, anyone can go to Costco and buy a chocolate cake, but it has three paragraphs of obscure ingredients on the metallic label and a metallic taste to match.
I believe every child is like a blank recipe card and that our job as educators is to teach them how to bring their unique spice to a bland world. Each child possesses a unique cabinet brimming with flavor. One might be like chili powder (which you really need to make a good pot of chili), another cinnamon mixed with sugar, yet another oregano (which gives a great background flavor to many dishes).
What if our job is to challenge our children to explore the potential of their flavor? Let’s help our children develop their unique recipe for life.
– Sara With this new year, we welcome a new contributor to four&twenty!
Sara and I actually grew up in the same town by the sea. We lived parallel lives as children and as grown-ups, moved miles away from our hometown to the same small town location raising our children. Go and figure. My teaching career took a sharp turn at an unexpected bend in the road when our paths finally crossed at a garage sale. We became fast friends and kitchen table philosophers. Her wisdom is an orchard teeming with fruit. I know you will be blessed!
Welcome to the conversation Sara! Read more about Sara here.
One of my earliest memories of fourth grade is sitting in class listening with rapt attention to my teacher reading a mystery story about a castle. Somehow the title is long forgotten. Oh, how I wished she would read out loud all the time and skip math lessons. The other strong elementary school memory is my hours in the awesome school library. I became a library assistant, filing cards and learning the Dewey Decimal System. The best part was handling all the books and challenging myself to read authors like Madeleine L’Engle and John Steinbeck. Books took me away from my troubles at home and on the playground. Books were like a vacation for my brain!
Fast-forward a few decades to my kitchen table where a mass of local teens hangs out quite frequently. I’m on about my third conversation with different kids about the importance of reading and I just can’t believe another young adult (two years from voting) is telling me that “they just don’t like to read,” or “I just don’t care to read.” I’m thinking to myself, this is a crisis in the making.
I home schooled my two children who are well into their teen years and I’m really glad we spent LOTS of time reading and discussing history and current events from the beginning. I see now how it was vital to developing their critical thinking skills. So many of their peers don’t have this ability, worse yet, they think the decision to be a reader on par with deciding that they don’t like spinach! This is scary to me for obvious reasons.
Would you believe me if I told you that everything I know to be true about education in America has come from my observations of illiteracy creeping into the population?
I decided to home school my children long before I had them. It was a miracle that I found Kim at a tag sale where we began discussing education. Out of this conversation came many glorious years educating our children together and developing a philosophy of education. We schemed and planned by night the curriculum and art projects we would do with the kids all the while making sure we tackled stacks of great books. That decision has paid rich rewards.
Now that my children are busy in their teen years, my daughter a freshman in college, my son a junior in public high school, I am listening intently to that world in which they revolve. I see how sensitive these years are and how much teens are still affected by their parent’s long ago and present actions. My heart is with them as they try to make sense of this world. I want to gather them together as much as I can to encourage them and love them.
So, that’s who I am and what I’m about these days.
———————
Sara Evans embraces an individualized philosophy of education believing that each child’s raw potential is a worthy investment. For this reason she homeschooled her two children for 10 years as co-director of a cooperative micro-school dedicated to cultivating individuality in students. Through the years, Sara has facilitated workshops in the arts for children of all ages. She considers working with children a privilege and loves to see their talents blossom. Sara is a Blackbird & Company partner and author, contributing ELA expertise in the area of curriculum development and editing. She is passionate about cooking, gardening, and is an accomplished artisan who spends much of her time creating works in various media including, rug hooking, ceramics, and mosaics. A graduate of the Color Style Institute in Menlo Park, she received her Bachelor of Science in Child Development from Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo.
I am squirming, back-to-work-Monday, the first of the year smirking around the corner. Let’s face it, even teachers who love teaching have to oil their gears after three weeks of fa la la.
So I find myself clicking through my past philosophical musings trying to remind myself why, exactly, I chose this profession until I stumble on an apropos reminder, “The comfort of routine, once established, will set roots deep into soil, establishing a framework for the tree to grow strong. When a routine rhythm is established from an early age, the student will value the work of exploring…” That’s the one!
To value the work of exploring, now there’s a worthy goal.
Math is a subject where consistency is a must. Fine-tuning a math routine is fingernails on chalkboard, a nearly archaic metaphor to be sure. Seeing as chalkboards have gone the way of record players, here’s an opportunity for a few seconds of Youtube diversion:
Okay, back to math. Math is a keystone subject that presents bumpy stretches of road along the way. Challenging our students to do their math consistently will give them the ability to be successful.
But what else can be acquired on the journey?
I learned a long time ago that, like all subjects to be tackled, a systematic approach to math will not only enable students to strengthen their math skills but will allow them to experience the discipline of working through a process to accomplish a task, and this, this, my friends is more valuable than the actual subject being tackled. “Process” after all, is the key to writing, literary analysis, visual art, music, and historical research. The list goes on and on and on.
What do I want to see in the classroom this year?
Students totally immersed in their learning, students discovering their individual efficacy.
And so I nod to myself, yes, that’s why I venture into unfamiliar territory, that’s why I take a whole-brain approach to solving problems, yes, whole-brain even when it comes to math problems.
Numbers and number relations, fractions, patterns and functions, data analysis, probability, algebra, no matter the strand, my goal is to help my students to move from simply completing a math lesson or math exam with exceptional accuracy to something much more.
Each of my students are plugged into a traditional math textbook and set on an individualized journey. I currently utilize Teaching Textbooks or Saxon depending on the individual needs of the student because of the exceptional didactic element that, if utilized over time, provides a potential for students to own their study of math. Beyond that, I am bent on incorporating concrete instructional materials that allow my students to delve into an exploration of critical and creative thinking. Students who engage in concrete learning are better able to apply what they’ve learned in real life situations. Fact of the matter is that students who use concrete materials develop more precise and more comprehensive mental representations—especially math students. Often times that these students are more motivated because experience with concrete materials have enabled them to develop longer attention spans. The benefits are endless.
Learning that moves through stages is learning that sticks. Students should begin in the Concrete or “doing” stage of learning because it enables new ideas to connect with familiar ideas. Building conceptual understanding of this nature supports retention, prevents common errors, and allows students to make larger critical and creative connections. From here students will move with ease to the Representational or “seeing” stage of learning, transforming the concrete into visual representations or pictograms. Moving through these first two stages often eliminates “holes” in mathematical understanding and allows students to confidently reach into the Abstract or “symbolic” stage of learning. Once arrived, the capacity for logic, for reflection, has blossomed to the point that the student begins to believe in the diligence that makes them hungry for more.
I have been striving for years to perfect my vision of a “Math Lab” upon which to found the math textbook. Funny, this year the goal is creeping to the top of my list.
A couple months ago the boys ran barefoot, shovels in hand eager to pull out the remnants of our summer garden. Last spring we transformed the decorative raised beds that edge our suburban lawn to vegetable patches, set up a compost pile on the strip of land between us and the neighbors, and kept a journal of our progress. At one point my youngest turned to me and remarked, "Happy Winds-day, Piglet," which made me burst out laughing because it truly was a perfectly wonderful blustery day indeed!
As the boys pulled at pesky crab grass, harvested the last of the tomatoes and onions for afternoon salsa, they stumbled on an unexpected treasure. Growing in the midst of the grass were a handful of taller weed-like plants that we decided to pull from the soil. The boys were delighted to discover potatoes beneath the surface in various stages of development. I asked them how they thought potatoes started growing in our garden when we had never planted potatoes? After some thought and discussion they realized that these were volunteer plants that must have come from our rich compost soil.
I photographed the plants, and placed the real thing in plastic bags in the refrigerator for observation research later in the week and ran to the local library for a handful of books on the subject.
Be looking, be flexible, be ready! Sometimes the most unexpected treasures make the most interesting subjects for observation!
Back in the summer of 2003, I took my children to Modigliani & the Artists of Montparnasse at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sketchbook and pencil in hand, I patted each of them on the back and set them free to explore the works as they saw fit. I love observing the creative process. I felt fortunate to wander with them among works that we have admired from afar in books and on the web.
The exhibition, a collection of works by Modigliani, his friends, and contemporaries, might have been better titled “Conversations from Montparnasse” because the collection was a reunion of works developed long ago in a bohemian Paris neighborhood. I was excited to see how my children would join the conversation.
My oldest son Taylor was nine. He had been studying piano for a bit more than a year, but seemed at the time more interested in visual art. Three works captured his imagination at this exhibit: Dancer, Second Version by Sonia Delauney 1916, Black Hair (Young Seated Girl With Brown Hair), Modigliani, and The City, Fernand Leger 1919. These are the works he decided to study. I watched him study and sketch the first two carefully. When he came to the third, Leger’s painting, he simply stood there, soaking the image into his imagination.
Later that day I heard Taylor plunking away on the piano, but didn’t give it much thought until this past spring when he won a competition for an original piano composition and had to write program notes:
Industrial Animation, a composition for piano by Taylor Bredberg
The story behind this piece began seven years ago after visiting an exhibit, Modigliani and the Art of Montparnasse and after watching a set of short films called Masters of Russian Animation. Here I learned to appreciate industrial beauty and fell in love with the dissonance of Russian music that inspired the main melody. The next part of the journey is very dull considering that the melody sat dormant until recently. In a moment of composer’s block I began to sift through some of my older sketches and came upon the melody. It was unrefined but still had something to it, so I took to it and started working. Prokofiev and Shostakovich, being two of my favorite composers, heavily influenced its mood and shape. Soon enough, along with four brand new melodies, the work is finished, an Industrial Animation at last.
Da Vinci’s sketchbooks come to mind, page after page teaming with elaborate ideas, “Art is never finished only abandoned.” All those years ago when we visited the LACMA exhibit Taylor was simply encouraged to abandon some of his ideas into a little sketch book.
Guess it was worth the trip to the local art museum.
The slow sizzle of sautéing onions was interrupted when Søren, donning a plaid woolen flat cap, came wandering into the kitchen asking for an interview with the cook. The accent was, thick, Russian gone awry, picked up most likely from his brother’s daily Rosetta Stone lessons. The newsboy was serious about collecting data for the morning edition. I told him that the evening special was vegetarian spaghetti. He scribbled on notes of Post-Its neatly organized on a hand held whiteboard, thanked me for my time (I think, the accent was t-h-i-c-k), and went on his merry way.
When everyone was tucked into bed and I was tidying up for the next day’s chaos, my knee jerk reaction was to be annoyed with the little newspaper reporter slumbering angelically in the other room who left a trail of sticky tabs, pencils, and dress-up clothes from the kitchen to the end of the Earth, but thought twice when I read, “Window takes over World.” I burst out laughing. Window takes over world? What an awesome headline! Forget the headline, tomorrow that awesome phrase would become a fabulous prompt for my poetry workshop!
So I collected the trail of little handwritten notes for future fodder, put the pencils in the drawer, threw costume accessories into the closet, and sat with a cup of tea crafting a lesson in my mind around the phrase of the day. Sometimes the best writing lessons happen spontaneously in the kitchen.
