Brief Movie Review.

“Did you see that Slum Dog won?”

“Yeah! What did you think of it.”

“I just love the music, and that English boy, he is very good.”

“Yeah I saw John Stewart interview him. I heard some people are upset about the title, you know “Slum Dog” is kind of a harsh term.”

“But, in India that’s the way it is, you know. They are treated like 4th or 5th class citizens. But we have our own ways of doing that here too. “

There you have it. Great music and the English boy is very good with a few harsh realities thrown in. Now I will have to see this one. We never get to talk alot at work as my Punjabi friend says, “A teacher’s plate is very full.”

A Failed Experiment: A New Plan

I started out this week intent on focusing on the light and got lost in a dense gray fog of fatigue and indifference ending in a black funk. I have no idea how things happen this way. This all ended with my lovely Mary telling me I had to make a plan for what I was going to do with my life because this isn’t working for anyone. She is, as usual, right, but making long range plans is not one of things I have never been good at. I tend to just take life as it comes, and living out a scripted plan makes me feel like I am on the gray road to the end without surprises or bright spontaneus  flowers of inspiration that bloom by accident on a less planned route. But then I have been thinking that maybe by not planning I have looked at all the possible roads and have spontaneusly moved myself down smaller and smaller roads until I have run up against this dead end. Maybe if I look at a larger map, I can plan a route with the option of taking unplanned turns.

I need to pull back my perspective so I can see the options available to me. For five years I have been working with people myopically focussed on what they can objectively quantify. I know that this is not the only approach to education or life. I have experienced places and people who are not confined to the clinical academic roads that trap life into boxes of jargon and numbers. I need to find a community based on ever opening vistas of human experience and creativity. I need to make a plan that opens out into broad roadless fields and rugged wilderness of unknown adventures. Maybe my plan will be to construct an offroad vehicle that will take me to places I haven’t been before. I have little bits of my mind that I can spare from my work and class focussed brain,  busily nibbling away, gathering bits and pieces, with mouselike energy constructing a plan for such a vehicle. I see the progress in my dreams and my attitude. Today I am full of hope even though I still have to face the almost overwhelming wall of small thinking each day. I have the power of creativity, synthesis, poetry, and the magic language of dreams working tirelessly to make a me sized hole in that wall. I will see the light of a new life of my own making.

What can I do now? That is the question at this point. I can write each day, which I didn’t last week. Writing frames my world in possibilities and allows me to exorcise my dark demons of despair. I need to put ideas into words every day that will at least save a little bit of my sanity until I can devote more time to my escape plan. It keeps the door open just a crack so the light can leak in. It is really impossible to get any quality work done in the dark.

Time for another self-experiment

It is so easy for me to dwell on negatives. My mind just tends to get trapped on the dark side of things. Things are rarely as bad as I think they are and later after looking back I often find I could have enjoyed my life at least a little more if I had looked at some of the little lights that always shine no matter how difficult and dark things get. So I am going to challenge myself to find as much light as possible and hopefully make some to write about each day for a month. In the end I hope to be in a much better mood while I am dealing with a month full of challenges. Maybe focussing on positives will bring some good things forward. Hopefully I can make my forced positive focus permanent and natural as the negative feelings have been.

Bringing a Little Wonder Back to my Work

I have worked in programs that are supportive of the kind of child led learning that I believe in, but often administrators pay lip service to it while piling on prewritten curricula and norm based goals which in my opinion dilute the learning process into a gray soup of letters and numbers instead of a rich interactive environment in which the children and teachers collaborate on the curriculum as passions and interests and opportunities present themselves. It is more about a static norm based approach as opposed to a fluid child based approach. We have so little time for projects or even the kinds of conversations necessary for developing the ideas that children have. Parent involvement is also difficult since most parents work and many have infants and toddlers. My time is also an issue as I am expected to do the social service work for 19 families as well as the educational planning and running a classroom for the children in 40 hours a week.

As I write this it sounds so negative. At this point I am so burnt out and mentally exhausted by the paperwork and academics that I have to make a commitment to do at least a little each week to move toward creating more wonder and excitement and interaction in my class. I made some easy changes to the environment to attract children to little used areas (a mirror on the science table, and a magnet board in the library). This week I am starting a car project as I have mostly boys who are completely into cars. I already am feeling more positive and energetic toward all of my job. I am also working on a class project on the Reggio approach so this will give me some good examples of my own work to include.

Here is one a poem by Loris Malaguzzi one of the founders of the Reggio Emelia approach in Italy. There is alot in here about the way I like to teach.

The Hundred is There

The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

Loris Malaguzzi
(translated by Lella Gandini)

Unbound

Darkly tangled in the vines,

loops and twists intertwine

knotted and woven, fiber and nerve

sharp things, sharps things, cut them out

to examine each subtle curve

stretch them in straight dead lines

drying in the sun

so many taken from the one