Beautiful Weeds/ finding the cracks in the curriculum.

I think so much of working with children is about the teacher finding something that she has a passion for, something that she has fun with and finding a way to use this passion to energize the children. That means you have to look at yourself and what is exciting and interesting for you and see how that might help you with the children.
I have also found that I usually have a few natural teachers among my students. I will watch them and see what is inspiring them and then use that to drive us in a certain direction.
I work in a program that is so not Reggio inspired(child centered approach that sees children as capable drivers of their own learning) and I have no colleagues or supervisors who support my work the way I want to do it. I often have to work around the canned curriculum and data collection to infuse a little bit of inspiration into my work. And, sometimes I get some negative feedback and heavy handed interference from my supervisors. But, the way I look at it, either I can find another job or keep working to enlighten the people I work with. I do not see this approach as an all or nothing idea. Any amount of authentic inspiration the teacher can bring to a classroom makes it better. And, to me, there is no alternative to listening deeply to and having dialogue with my students. Now the documentation may not get done in the way I would like, and the classroom I share with a teacher and a supervisor that just don’t get it may not always look like a place where children are truly creating the environment. But, Reggio approach has to do with me and what makes me want to be in that classroom. It is an approach, not a stencil, a philosophy not a concrete model. If you have studied the approach and used it and made it a part of your make up as a teacher, then either you will get to a point where you can’t work in a situation, or your approach will grow through the cracks like beautiful weeds to inspire you and hopefully others.

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.

Nailed to the Floor of My Life

It seems like lately I have no ability to rise above the busy noise of day to day life and enjoy my life as thinking, dreaming, living being. I am trapped in other people’s versions of the world and frankly, I am bored by the small rooms they build to surround their lives so they don’t have to use their minds too actively. So much of the world is about data and objective reasoning, which in their place serve a purpose, but I need more imagination and joy mixed in. I need to paint ceiling with unlimited spaces and my walls with the world all around. So I will let the part of my mind that handles the part of the world that is nailed down and painted by the numbers, and let my dreams take me to other places where there are no walls and no nails, only things of light and music and maybe a few scary monsters just to keep it interesting.

Winter Shell

huddled in a ice white caccoon

I drink warmth from earth

ready to rise

with the coming dawn.