Chasing the River

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As a teacher learning along with my students, I met Donna Williams, watershed wizard at the Massachusetts Audubon Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary. She told us that the word watershed means the area from which rainwater or snowmelt drains into a particular body of water. You’re always standing in a watershed, even if your feet are dry.

Watersheds are often split by town or state boundaries, complicating efforts to protect them. Before the Blackstone River could be cleaned up in any significant way, the watershed of the river, draining large areas of both Rhode Island and Massachusetts, had to get over those political identities, and some economic rivalries, too, and start thinking like a watershed, an area with a lot to gain by working together. Knowing about watersheds can help us understand both the organization of ecosystems, and the impact of environmental damage–and environmental improvement.

To make it even more interesting, we live in watersheds within watersheds.

When my hillside gets a heavy rainfall, whatever doesn’t soak into the ground runs downhill into one of several small brooks which braid together to be called Indian Brook. So I live in the Indian Brook watershed.

A couple miles downstream, Indian Brook runs up against a dam and forms the Hopkinton Reservoir, in Hopkinton State Park, which looked like this on September 18, 2013, at a time of low water and not much color yet in the leaves.

Hopkinton Reservoir cropped

After it emerges from the reservoir, Indian Brook twists and turns some before it runs into the Sudbury River, near the tracks for the MBTA train to Boston. Meandering through Ashland and Framingham, the Sudbury runs beside the Massachusetts Turnpike briefly, then heads north, through the marshes of the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. In Concord, the Sudbury joins up with the Assabet River at a place called Egg Rock, to become—presto change-o—the Concord River.

This photo of Egg Rock was taken in 1904 by Alfred Sereno Hudson [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons] from the very beginning of the Concord River, with the Assabet to the right, and the Sudbury out of sight to the left.

Egg_Rock_1904

By the time it gets to the Concord River, my backyard runoff is traveling with that of many of my past students, from Hopkinton and Southborugh and also from Westborough, Marlborough, Northborough, Sudbury, and Wayland. The story isn’t over, though, until we get to the ocean.

In Lowell, the Concord joins the Merrimack River, saying hello to a tremendous share of the runoff water from New Hampshire and central Massachusetts. Go check on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_River, and you’ll see what I mean, unless someone takes the map down. Hundreds of thousands of people live with me in the Merrimack watershed. Of course, for a humbling comparison, you could check out how much of North America is drained by the Mississippi.

Anyway, back to New England, all these waters head for Newburyport and the Atlantic, shouting for glory as they go, especially in flood season.

Many explorations opened up this story for me: walking parts of my watershed pathway, canoeing other parts—swimming in some places!—and tracing all of it on maps.

Like so many explorations in my life, this one started with something a student wanted to do. For a big individual report, David Gelman wanted to ‟chase” his own watershed pathway. Here’s something interesting: although David and his family lived only a couple of miles from me, his pathway was completely different, and led to the Atlantic via Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

While everyone else was reading books, David and I sprawled on the floor to read topographic maps. Step by step we figured out which body of water led to which, using the topographic contour lines to make sure we were headed steadily downhill, the way water does. At the same time, we figured out all the places where roads followed, or where bridges crossed, the succession of brooks and ponds that led David’s backyard runoff to the Mill River and then the Blackstone River.

Armed with that information, David and yet another amazing Touchstone parent, his mother Rosemary, went adventuring, ‟chasing the river.” They managed to find almost every road crossing of their watershed pathway. At each stop they did simple visual tests for water quality, and took photographs. Their thoroughness was inspiring to everyone else, and deeply satisfying for them.

David wound up knowing something about his place in the world that I wanted more kids to have a chance to know–and more grown-ups, for that matter, beginning with myself.

This stream of thought (I couldn’t resist) could go on for quite a while–It would take much more than one blogpost to tell about everywhere that led. Think of your power, David, wherever you are!

Next time, finally, I’ll jump forward to the 2012-2013 year, when we were studying New England, and did some work with watersheds using Topo software. Down by the virtual riverside.

Mapping the community

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One of my grandfathers died when I was not quite two years old. Photographs show me sober-faced and blonde on his lap—but I can’t consciously remember him. As I was growing up, though, I treasured stories about him, souvenirs, evidence of any kind.

I remember a wall covered with maps which my grandfather had joined together, to show a wide area of many towns centered around the Maine farm he and my grandmother bought in the late 30s, when the world seemed to be falling apart. To make this map collage, he had used USGS topographic maps, first bought (pre-farm) for fishing trips, for knowing the ways of brooks and ponds. Tiled together, the maps gave both a huge view, and detailed views–the paths of the largest rivers, and the wiggles of the tiniest brooks, all on the same wall.

Fast forward many years, during which I grew up in a house with more maps on the walls than pictures, and then married a man whose idea of unpacking, after a move across several states, was to open a box labeled MAPS in the middle of the night, and put up a good selection. The Pisgah National Forest on the bathroom door; a map of the known universe on the wall of the dining alcove. Etc. (Some other wife might have been less pleased.)

milford quad smallerFast forward again through several other kinds of work, and find me, eventually, teaching classes of kids from towns all over central Massachusetts and the northern corners of Connecticut and Rhode Island. I wanted to help them know where they were all coming from, and use that as a start for thinking about the worlds we didn’t share and the worlds we did.

It was my husband who said, ‟You could get a whole lot of USGS topo maps.” And it was my memory of my grandfather that said: in a classroom, there are really large walls.

For years, then, a new school year officially began for me when we put the maps back up.

map array smallerI arranged the array of maps, still folded, on a table, and then handed them one by one up to my husband where he stood, somewhat precariously, on a counter below the largest bulletin board space. I folded back the margins to the edge of the map itself; he worked to make the edges of the maps match up as well as possible, so that roads, in red, or brooks, in blue, or town lines, in black, wouldn’t stagger from one map to the next. We marveled again—him from two inches away, perched high; me from the middle of the room—at how much of our relatively urban state was still woods (in green) or swamp (stippled with those funny little swamp symbols.)

Enter students. I usually began, the first week of school, by encouraging kids to compare the map array with the satellite photographs hung nearby. Those big purplish splotches on the maps matched up with cities easily visible from space. The major highways, 9 and 90 and 495 and 290, showed as arteries on the satellite photos also.

But then we zeroed in. If their houses or apartments or condos weren’t too new, and if they didn’t live in downtown Worcester, kids could find on this public document a piece of their private lives: their homes, in the form of tiny black squares. We marked each student’s place with a flag pin specially augmented with page markers, to hold their names.

Here’s most of one year’s map flags:

map array with pins

The kids who lived at the top of the array, up near the ceiling, had to call instructions to a grown-up climber, but the kids down in the nether regions of the Blackstone Valley could stand on a low stool and place their own map flag, sometimes finding the pinprick left by an older brother or sister in a previous year.

Students who lived in city neighborhoods or new houses—or, oftener and oftener, as the years went by, on brand new streets—had to look carefully at nearby streets and intersections, tiny ponds back in the woods, the shapes of hills given away by topographic lines, in order to see and mark where their houses would be. Sometimes it helped to replay the trip home from school: and here we turn left, and that’s where the old drive-in theater is.

Kids whose parents lived in different houses generally chose to mark both. Parents came in during morning sketching, to clarify confusing locations. Other grown-ups wandered by, and pointed out their own landmarks.

As we traced routes between each others’ houses; as we figured out who lived furthest from school, and who closest; as we crossed bridges and followed off-ramps—all of us developed increasing fluency going back and forth between our knowledge of the three dimensional world, and the abstraction of a two dimensional map.

Like a story, a map shows relationships that we didn’t realize before; it also leaves out things we know better than it does. We need the map and the map needs us.

Next post, I think, we use maps to chase rivers. My grandfather would have approved. Andrew working with Topo cropped

The butterfly

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John Hildebidle, a dear friend from my poetry life, wrote to ask, ‟What about the butterfly?”

Sheryl Erickson and Martin Fuchs gave me the butterfly, which is a kite, at the beginning of their daughter Sophie’s time with me.

It felt like an apt emblem for everything parents gave, year after year, to the life of the class:

  • the gossamer but tough, often hard-won strength of parents’ faith in our mission and methods;
  • the powerful, buoyant, transforming lift given by parents’ contributions of time,  patience, shared skills and new ideas;
  • the brightness of parents’ joy whenever students shared their learning– enthusiasm not just for their own child’s efforts but for every child’s.

That last one seemed especially apt. In classes before mine, Sheryl had put lots of volunteer energy into exactly that, to strengthen parents’ care for each others’ children.

I hung the butterfly high on the classroom wall, and waited to see what else it would mean for us.

butterfly smaller detail sharpenedFor some students, the butterfly was above all a rich collection of colors. During morning sketching, over the years, many students chose to draw the butterfly, reproducing all its shades and shadings with our markers or colored pencils, as faithfully as they could. In this way the butterfly multiplied and flew away, onto shelves and into closets, but also into hearts–the way things can, even when they seem to disappear.

Meanwhile, gradually, privately, the butterfly became a reminder for me, to try to be fierce in moderation, as wacky as that may sound. I had had teachers myself who cared enormously about their subjects or their students or all of it, as I did. I knew that to venture into a classroom with the passion I brought inevitably carried some risks. Day after day, I looked at the butterfly and told myself to breathe, to ask questions and listen, to have faith in the fullness of time. To try, as much as I could and when I could, for a light touch. Of course, I often had to forgive myself and start over, every day, as all of us must.

None of that was what I wrote back to John, because ultimately all of that combined with something more, and the butterfly became, in the words of my email to him, ‟a sort of guiding spirit for the classroom, encouragement to use whatever freedom we had, to be vivid and colorful.”

The life of a progressive school is full of determination to do the right thing, to ‟make meaningful things happen,” as one past head of Touchstone School, Steve Dannenberg, used to say. Teachers and staff, parents and grandparents, all carry a profound sense of responsibility: to students, to the spirit of learning, to the truth of the world. None of that intends to be grim–or fierce–but it can become so, as the things most important to us can.

Early in my teaching career, I explained to a friend that I felt weighed down by the incredible opportunity, the freedom, to teach exactly the way I believed. If I could do that, I had to do that, and I was getting very little sleep in the effort, straining too hard.

I can’t say that ever completely changed. Still, here’s what I’ve learned about freedom: We never have as much freedom as we want, for pursuing what matters to us–and yet we never actually use all the freedom we have. But there’s also this: the more earnestly we try to inhabit our freedom, the more we become like butterflies whose wings have grown too heavy.

So the butterfly kite is flying high on the virtual wall of my blog, to remind me that yes, I want to be true to many important things; yes, I want to make meaningful things happen, in what I explore and write about in this “year to think it over.” But I want to do that with the wind in my sails, with the wonderful colors of classroom life in my heart, with a grin and a whistle when that’s called for. With joy. manikin sharpened

As for the artist’s model with her arms spread wide, gesturing: it’s possible that you just had to be there.

Building Average

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I’m here to confess: I’ve spent a good portion of my teaching career guiding students in freaking out the cleaning staff.

Each year, in Level 6 math, we built a model of the Average Student, statistically accurate, earnestly assembled, vaguely lifelike. We set it up in a chair toward the back of the room. Usually the students chose a book to balance on its lap. I myself sometimes entered the room, at the end of a long meeting after school, and did a double take.

Traditionally, we took a group photo of the assembled class, with the dummy. Here, for example, is an unusually small class, from the fall of 2010. (Clockwise from the top, Kelly, Ben, Seth, Anna, Lydia, and Gianna,)

average 2010 better

A few weeks post-portrait, when stray arms or eyebrows began to fall off and litter the classroom floor, we held a funeral, usually with dual caskets–since one cardboard box couldn’t hold it all. We paraded more-or-less solemnly to the dumpster, and gave heartfelt testimonials about everything Average had helped us learn–

–which was a lot. If you ask a typical adult what an average is, chances are you’ll get the series of steps followed to find the mean of a set of numbers: add up all the numbers; then divide by the number of numbers.

That’s not wrong, as directions. But what does an average really mean? What can it tell you about a situation or a set of data? What can it not tell?

MathLand­—a wonderful math curriculum no longer in print—gave Level 6 students a chance to explore the idea of ‟average” from the inside. Many years after we had shifted to another curriculum, I kept starting the year with this unit, because it was perfect from so many points of view.

Setting a goal

You could build an average kitten, or an average bookbag–but it worked really well to build an average math class student. Kids took it all more personally, and paid more attention to interesting questions: Is Average identical to any individual in the group? How does the model represent each person’s data?

MathLand provided a data sheet which included a variety of measurable attributes—such as the girth of the neck, or the length of the upper leg from the hip to the knee. The sheet also asked about attributes that had to be described in other ways—such as the color of eyes or hair.

Some questions were yes or no: Do you wear a watch most days? Some questions had been wisely left out. Average was always just Average, neither he nor she. We weren’t asked to measure around the waist, or chest, just shoulder to shoulder.

Some questions deliberately provoked discussion. How do you measure the length of the neck? From the bottom of the ear? From the hairline? The whole class had to stop and decide, together, or the data would be meaningless.

Gathering and recording data

Before we could begin collecting data, we had to choose an appropriate unit of measurement, and an appropriate degree of precision. I did specify metric units, partly because I wanted students to get some practice with decimal numbers. The kids agreed that the measurements had to be at least as precise as the nearest centimeter. Even that could result in very unrealistic hands, though; so we almost always wound up agreeing it should be to the nearest millimeter, which we recorded as a tenth of a centimeter. (Fertile fields, of course, all of this.)

Boys helped boys measure, and girls helped girls. All the data was kept anonymous—and we said that the study subjects were unreachable for clarification of messy handwriting, so the recorded data had to be both readable and reliable.

Working with data

On the other hand, the occasional inscrutable handwriting also offered a relevant opportunity, once we reached the computation stage: If you can only read the data for 11 of the 12 members of the group, what should you use to divide the total? What would happen to the mean if you divided by 12 instead of 11?

Also, once you got your mean, would it tell you anything about the huge variation in sizes of kids this age? No–only if you added information about the range, which wouldn’t actually get built into our model.

Could a very long-legged class member and a very short-legged class member cancel each other out? Yes, in effect. But in a class with several unusually long-legged people, would the mean probably be affected? Yes, again.

Meanwhile, what about the attributes described by words? For those, we found the mode, the most common answer or value, with interesting results. A math class with only 4 out of 13 blue-eyed students could wind up building a blue-eyed Average, if the rest of the kids were divided evenly among brown, green, and hazel. ‟So my brown eyes have disappeared from our Average representation?” a certain kind of kid would ask, even without being paid or prompted.

Representing data:

Ed's arm blueprint croppedAlthough they were working together, every child measured, and recorded measurements. Every child took part in finding the mean or mode for the attributes of his or her team’s assigned body part. Finally, every child drew a “blueprint.” Here’s Ed Pascoe’s blueprint for the arm and fingers.

Julia's face blueprintEach person on the team assigned to manufacture the head and facial features, for example, started out by making a basic sketch of a face, and then labeled the mouth with the mean width of the mouth, the eyes with the color of the mode for eyes, and so on. Here’s Julia Bertolet’s blueprint for the head.

Then, following the suggestion of the curriculum, but apparently against common practice in most places using MathLand, we actually built our model. We were armed:

  • with blueprints, measuring tapes and invaluable partners, for quality control;
  • with brown grocery bags for skin, crumpled newspaper for insides, Sculpey for ears and nose, and miles of masking tape to hold it all together;
  • with paper fasteners for knee and elbow joints and a meter stick taped to the back of the chair to make this character a vertebrate, able to sit up proudly;
  • with the almost invariable blue jeans and t-shirt that fulfilled those modal mandates;
  • and with endless jokes. “Where did you put our torso now?” Etc.

Being mathematicians

All this took time, it’s true. Gobs of time, all of it worthwhile. As teacher, I could observe difficulties with measuring technique, awkwardness with calculators, challenges maintaining focus even with the physical reminder of the unfinished body part. I could identify unusual ability to ask the salient questions, or to solve construction problems, or unusual gracefulness in helping a partner stay on task. The kids could figure out what to expect from, and give to, each other. I could cheer on strengths, provide the necessary re-teaching or skill-building support, and encourage insight—and kids could do all that for each other—within an atmosphere of fun.

We were having fun. We were also thinking about questions central to so many math applications: questions about reliability of data; questions about precision; and questions about whether a calculated answer fits an intuited estimate, given the range of the data. We were doing what many adult users of mathematics do: using that language to explore the world.

And of course, we were united, and found truly memorable group satisfaction, in making life more interesting for the cleaning staff. Or anyone else who wandered by.

average 2010 goofy

Hummanacrafts and the spirit of invention

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It’s not some fictitious contraption. The drawing below, made by Justin McCarthy sometime in the fall of 1990, advertises something real. It represents a retooling, a chopping and channeling, of a small paperboard tray, the kind in which take-out french fries used to be served. It’s a design for a hummanacraft, a vehicle that could hover gracefully, thrillingly, along the updraft  from our classroom air vent.

hummanacraft3edit

That classroom’s air intake occupied a shallow metal box under the windows along the outer wall, like an over-sized radiator. The grated vent on the top, about 6 inches wide and 6 feet long, worked perfectly for hummanacrafts.

What gave the hummanacrafts direction along the vent? What kept them from just getting blown off?

Justin now lives in California and works as an engineer, a developer of ideas. If you knew him in his hummanacraft phase, you are not surprised. Colby Brown, another hummanacrafter, grew up to be a transportation planning technologist—obviously as a result of this early influence. Recently, Colby heard the word “hummanacrafts” and had a lot to say.

We’d cut one of the short flaps of the little tray, and bend it up or remove it. The air flowing out that end, the back, propelled the craft forward. The front end just barely touched the top surface of the vent, and that provided stability.

Colby went on to remind me that this particular class had operated as a design workshop for years. For example, several years before the hummanacraft phase (and before organized paper recycling) members of the class had engineered long cardboard chutes to carry crumpled waste paper to the wastebasket.

That group of students were entrepreneurs, also, with a thriving economy on the playground, buying and selling real estate, using all sorts of natural objects as currency. (Kate and I had to ban the indoor stockpiling of pine cone currency in paper bags under desks, because they got buggy.)

IMG_20130824_221010

Not everything these kids made involved a cash exchange. Colby made and gave as gifts a whole series of ducks carrying marbles. (Nobody remembers why.)

The hummanacrafts fit into a proud tradition.

I’m pretty sure the kids first invented hummanacrafts with Kate, in the mornings. She would have been the one to ask, ‟What if you make the vent flap smaller?” Or ‟What if you add some weight?”

Justin and Colby were both talkers. Some of their classmates weren’t, at least not in the same way. Watching the evolution of the hummanacrafts in all their hands, listening to their explanations, triggered my first deep awareness that some kids make a lot more sense in motion. I’d read Howard Gardner. I knew, from the experience of my own family, that there are many kinds of intelligence. But hummanacrafts, crazy little paperboard crafts for imaginary drivers the size of mice, convinced me, to the soles of my feet and the outer margins of my plan book, that kids could be smart in ways that had nothing to do with my own.

In fact, some of my students, I saw, would do their best work only if I arranged (or permitted) the sort of learning experience that might have terrified me, or at least intimidated me, when I was a student myself.

And that was the beginning of many stories.

Hooray for hummanacrafts! Hooray for their engineers and operators! Hooray for many things slightly illegal, happening off on the edges of classrooms; things that can teach the teacher, if she’s lucky. (And I was.)

I’m going to try again to get other people to commit themselves in writing. (It’s free, after all, and it can be really short.) (Or long, too.) Did you ever invent or create something on the edges of  classroom culture? What was it? And–I always want to know this: then what happened?

Down the turnpike and around the world

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A kid named Ben Redden wrote this almost 20 years ago.

One of the most interesting parts of the trip to Boston University was the part when we could go around the room and collect everyone’s signature. It was hard to remember each person’s name, and what country they came from. The lady from China was sitting in her seat, and I came up and asked her if she could sign her name in Japanese instead of Chinese, by accident. But it was fun and neat to see the way she wrote my name. I’ll try to write it at the bottom of the page. It was neat to meet so many people from different countries.

For many years, my class made annual trips to Boston to visit the classes of Janet Entersz, a Boston University teacher of English as a Second Language.

Each of Janet’s classes included students from all over the world. Mostly in their 20’s, some older, they had traveled far from their homes in Korea or Colombia or Saudi Arabia, and many were lonely for younger brothers and sisters, for their own children, or for nieces and nephews.

My students, averaging eleven years old, lived in rural or suburban towns well to the west of Boston, where they were exposed to plenty of ethnic variation, but few speakers of other languages.

Janet’s students and my students, and the parents who came along to drive us and join in the fun, all were equally exotic to each other, and in some way equally thirsty for each other.

To help us feel less ignorant, Janet sent me her current group’s country list, a couple weeks ahead. The kids and I ran a country treasure hunt, seeking and sharing information. We practiced skimming by searching the Boston Globe for references—a crash course in world geography.

During the visit itself, our conversations evolved into another kind of crash course, in comparative linguistics. A typical group of Janet’s students spoke ten to fifteen different languages, just counting their first languages. They wrote in four or five (once seven!) different alphabets or writing systems. Seeing samples of all these languages was a treat for the international students, too, since their ordinary class sessions focused on the language they were working hard to share—English.

janetatboard cropped

Many of Janet’s students could write English beautifully, but resisted speaking in class. Others spoke easily in class, unafraid of making mistakes and eager to make contact—but they dreaded writing.

In any case, almost all the international students relaxed, faced with the eagerness and innocence of my students, who soaked up a sense of shared language as a source of power, and of unshared language as a source of possible confusion—but also a source of fun. The richness of difference; the value of work to bridge difference.

One year, Janet suggested that the international students tell the Massachusetts students what various animals said in their languages. We all laughed and laughed, hearing what cows say in Japanese or Ibo; what roosters say in Italian or Arabic.

Janet Entersz, wonderful teacher, dear friend, brave soul, developed cancer when she was still in her 40’s; continued teaching with a scarf on her head through rounds of chemo and remission and return; and left us in 1999. Moments before she died, I sat at her bedside, reading aloud her favorite Antoine de Saint-Exupéry story about air flight over northern Africa.

And Ben Redden, the student I quoted at the beginning of this post? He eventually learned Chinese, and now lives and works in Beijing. No kidding. Here’s a link to his blog full of wonderful photos and wild tales from his travels in China and nearby: http://benredden.blogspot.com/

And here’s his rendition, from long ago, of how the Chinese lady wrote his name: Whatever it lacks in accuracy, it makes up for in spirit!

beninchineseenlarged

Losing and Keeping Dana

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On a mid-November night in 1992, I received a phone call from Dick Zajchowski, the Head of my school. One of my students, Dana, ten years old, had been hit by a van while crossing a busy road through that wet and foggy night. She was badly hurt; she had been taken by helicopter to the teaching hospital nearby; nobody knew whether she could recover.

Dana lasted about ten days, in a coma from which she never emerged, although there were times when she seemed to lift, and our hopes lifted. When I visited and sat with her, reading aloud to her some of the book we were sharing in class, I watched the traces on the machines attached to her body. The electronic lines jumped up and down whenever she heard my voice. Was that good? Was that bad?

I had taught Dana for only a few months, but I had known her in the school community since she was very small. Her older sister, Megan, was also in my class.  Dana, so vivid, so full of life, full of opinions, full of energy—how could she not survive?

treasures for DanaWhen I cleaned out my desk this spring, I found the small box made of popsicle sticks, full of tiny things kids wanted me to take to Dana in the hospital when—we held on, so hard, to the idea of ‟when”—she woke up: braided wristbands, a tiny troll with long magenta hair, small folded notes.

IMG_20130815_100624 - Copy-001But the injury to her brain was too severe. Here’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a teacher: calling the families of my students, family by family, to tell them that all of us working and wishing, all of us folding small paper origami cranes, hoping to save Dana–all of us had to let all that go. She had gone from us.

Dana and Megan’s parents knew immediately that they would need to find counseling to help Megan. Some of her healing happened out of our sight, though with all of our thoughts and prayers.

Meanwhile, a wonderful grief counselor visited the school to help the faculty help the other kids. Wisely, Dick Zajchowski arranged for Maria, the grief counselor, to come into my own class to work with us directly. She talked us through the stages of grief as she had come to understand them.

  • First, we each needed just to tell our individual versions of how it had happened, or how the news had happened to each of us.
  • Then we needed to confess and work through the universal inclination to blame ourselves, irrationally.
  • We needed to share memories and images of Dana, as she lived.
  • Finally we needed to share our ideas about ways we would carry her forward.

It was true: every single child needed to tell both how he or she imagined the event of the accident, and how his or her parent had relayed the news. One child wished he’d told Dana that the movie she was going to see was a waste of time; if he had, she wouldn’t have been crossing that street. I myself had thought, ‟If only I’d assigned more homework that night…” But when I said that out loud, one of the students said, ‟No, that wouldn’t have stopped her…” All of us worked together to face the truth: this was something we couldn’t have controlled, and didn’t.

One child felt Dana’s death as a blow to his own body. He became physically ill whenever we talked about her in any way, and several times had to go home. Still, it was important for us to talk about Dana, not too much, but enough. We couldn’t just dodge what had happened. I struggled to find the right balance.

One girl, Kerry, seemed to have no defense, no delaying numbness, no way to hide from the events or her feelings about them. Again and again, even when we were doing something with no direct relation to Dana’s death, Kerry broke down and cried. But she was touchingly brave in facing and experiencing those feelings and letting them be, crying and then recovering, moving forward. Each time, I felt her carry the rest of us with her.

Whatever we felt, and however we felt it or expressed it, each of us was a resource to the others.

Months went by. I had known enough of other griefs to recognize, in myself, the feeling of trying to walk underwater; a deep weariness. Maria, the grief counselor, had told me to expect some regression from the kids: neediness, crabbiness, helplessness. All that happened. No way out but through.

At home, I worked on a poem based on Maria’s four stages of grief. That helped me move forward, in the way Kerry’s tears had helped her. In school, off and on, I worked with individual kids to write their own letters to Dana, or short accounts of what had happened.

When our class picture was taken, one of the girls held a photo of Dana.

blog photos

Late that spring, Dick asked me to lead the rest of the faculty in writing through that same sequence of parts, the stages of grief, which Maria had explained to us and which I had used in my own poem. Like so much about that whole chapter in my teaching, the memory of my colleagues, crying as they wrote, will never leave me–and I will always be grateful to Dick for discerning, step by step, how our mutual caring could help each of us.

Over the next year, in Dana’s memory, her parents and many of their friends donated the seed money for a new wing to our school. On the wall in that hallway, a painting shows her grinning her inimitable grin, holding one of the cranes we had folded in hope for her. IMG_20130815_100624

Maria, the grief counselor, said that the children who’d been close to Dana could not truly process their shock and loss right away. At ten, or even at twelve, they were too young. ‟Every transition they make,” she said, ‟they will come back to process it again. With any luck they’ll stay in touch with each other, and do some of that together.”

In fact, many of those students have stayed in touch. Many of them, including both Megan and Kerry, are my own Facebook friends. In a way especially needed, somehow, I treasure every smiling photograph they post.

Love and fluency

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By the time José came to me, his reading challenges had been identified long since, and he’d had years of tutoring, and could decode word by word with some skill. He could translate letters into sounds, following the rules he’d learned, and then translate those sounds into ideas in his head—very slowly, with deserved pride in persistence.

Nobody could mistake that for love of reading.

José did love listening to stories read aloud. If he didn’t have to decode, if he only needed to make sense of the story he heard, his face was like a field full of the weather of the meanings, as they shifted. Every feeling in a story, he felt in his own body. If I asked the group, in discussion, to connect the events in the story to events in their own lives, what he said enlarged the story for us all.

MooseyMeanwhile, he adopted one of the stuffed animals in the room, and dressed it in his sash from a presentation costume. He gave Moosey a back story, and kept adding pieces of story as we moved through the year. He knew how to do this with big kid cool, from a place of high status in the group. He excelled at the collaborative, mutual storytelling we call friendship.

What did José need most from his year with me? He needed fluency with print, with these tiny symbols, hard to distinguish visually, with which stories get told in the academic world for which he was headed. A child with extraordinary fluency as a social being, he needed fluency as a reader and as a writer. Various kinds of group instruction could be helpful, but more than anything, José needed time to practice those things he could do by rule; time to let these awkward constructions of skill become something more intuitive.

He also needed help finding the books that would claim him and keep him reading. Because he was so sociable, I thought José would want books full of characters interacting. The book that clicked for him, though, was Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen.

I just started to type a sentence about the loneliness of the challenged learner, then thought better of it. One way or another, we’re all challenged. Each of us has some way in which we are alone in the Canadian wilderness, when the pilot has had a heart attack and we’ve somehow survived the crash. Each of us knows some aspect of life in which we feel our way forward awkwardly, and only very gradually make sense.

In the late spring of José’s year with me, when he’d read all four Hatchet series books in our own classroom library, we discovered that the school library had a fifth. José received it with his trademark enormous grin. He didn’t stay long to chat; he was off into a corner.

When I come to José’s folder in one of my boxes, and find his list of books for the year, I grin pretty widely myself. There’s no guarantee that love of reading, once found, will last; but if it goes into eclipse, somewhere on a hard road to the end of school life, it can still bloom again. Skill is very good, but for the distance, if you have to last through the winter, love matters more.

I want you to know that José and his mom gave me permission to use his name. (Moosey, too.) Today’s question, for anyone, but especially for you if you’ve faced reading challenges: is there a book, or series, that you fell in love with? How? When? Why? And then what happened?

a year to think it over

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About ten years ago, my teaching partner and I were forced to look back at a big joint project. (Our grant required a lot of summary writing, to be posted on the organization’s website.) Six months after our giant thematic exploration ended, we went back to reconsider students’ writing and models and illustrations, and our own plans.

Looking out my kitchen window during a break in our work, Kate Keller said, ‟What if we always taught for one year, and then had a year to think it over?”

We did, of course, think as we went along. If we hadn’t engaged in ongoing reflection—grabbed chances for that out of the hurly-burly of teacher life—our teaching would have withered, our students suffered.

Still, what extra dimensions did it give Kate and me, to look back after a good-sized chunk of teaching was actually over? So many things:

  •  When we no longer needed to evaluate each child individually, we got a really clear picture of their work together, as collaborators—especially the ways they had taught each other. And us—the ways they had taught us.
  •  We got a clearer picture of some ways our students had struggled with the theme. Parts of our thematic study of transportation had asked students to consider their own transportation choices, and the impact of different choices on the environment and on other people. One student said, ‟I’m never getting into a car again,” as we walked down a Boston street after hearing a presentation by Stephanie Pollack, from the Conservation Law Foundation. At the time, we weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Later, looking back, we remembered a follow-up discussion about all the reasons why a person might not be able to make the ideal environmental choice, and valued, even more than at the time, what kids said to each other in that conversation.

We were critical; but we were also proud. We looked at the study whole, and saw that it was good.

Now, by Kate’s plan, I’m due about 25 years ‟to think it over.”

I’ve left my full time teaching gig. I’ve walked away with binders full of lesson plans and observation notes, boxes full of copies of kids’ work, folders full of communication to kids and parents, and from them.

I’ve brought it all to a barn in Maine, a place where I can open the back doors and look out at a wide meadow and a long pond. It’s a barn very full, already, with family treasures, so I have to compress this new pile radically.

barn back view try 4

As I stare at the meadow, listen to the crows, and sort (radically),  I’ll see what there is to think about. Already, for the posts I have in process, I’ve called people, written emails, asked questions.  Others’ responses have reminded me of additional topics I want to explore and reconsider–and of everything I’ve loved about teaching! What will find its way into actual posts? Time will tell.

Somehow, though, I am sure that looking back–carefully, thoughtfully, mercifully– will be a good way to start looking forward.

I’m so curious to know, if you’ve gotten this far, read this much: how do you reflect on your own learning and practice and profession, whatever they may be? What does it give you to do so?