Slowing Down to Learn

At this point, we are a couple of days into social distancing and staying at home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Michigan schools, like so many other schools around the country, are closed for the next few weeks. In response, educators are sharing an abundance of digital learning tools and home-schooling suggestions. I must confess, even though I am an educator and consider myself digitally saavy, this is all just a bit too overwhelming.  Too many suggestions, too many lesson ideas.  It's just too much! I love the passion and collaboration that is growing as a result of needing to quickly address our new learning landscape, but slow down!  My own boys, now 4th and 5th graders, have received messages and optional assignments from their classroom teachers, art teachers, music teachers, physical education teachers. And although they are communicating with the best of intentions, it is overwhelming my dudes...and me.

I want to encourage my own kids to pause and reflect on this particular moment in time. Yes, it is scary. We've never lived through something like this before, and so we don't know what to expect.  The adults don't have all the answers right now.  But, we have the gift of time. We don't need to rush. We don't need to try to replicate a traditional school day at home. We have time to reflect and explore and learn together. So rather than trying to cram in a science lesson and a math handout and history project and a writing activity each day, we're taking it slow.

Each morning, my boys and I get up, chat, make breakfast, and take the dog for a walk.  Then, I use the prompts above to guide our morning reflections.  We talk about the prompt, write a little, read a little, and make something.  Yesterday, after we talked about what we would like to learn in our next four weeks together, my boys and I went outside to build an epic fort.  We then came inside to figure out the best tools for learning how to code.  Today, we talked about the power of our hands after listening to Sarah Kay's spoken word poem "Hands." My boys and I completed a writing activity that had us writing our own poems about a something special that we've held in our hands.  After viewing the photojournalism piece posted by the BBC on Tim Booth's photography of hands, my boys wanted to take a black and white photo of their own to add to their writing piece. So we discuss, we write, we read, we create.  And that's enough for now.  We don't need to fill every moment.  We have time.

Feel free to join us and use the prompts above.  I will add new prompts each day.  We'd love to hear about what you are learning, reading, and making during this time.

Remember, we're in uncharted territory. It is okay to not have the answers. It is okay to slow down.

Are We Virtually Connected Or Are We Connected?

I attended elementary school in the early 80s. My school pictures are filled with a lot of vests and big feathered bangs. At one point or another, every one of my classmates came to school with the "bowl cut," when mom stuck a Tupperware bowl on your head and cut around it. I knew every one of my classmates, and not just because I grew up in a small town in upper Michigan. Our families relied on one another for information, for advice, and for support. We didn't turn to the web to figure out how to sign our children up for a bus to and from kindergarten. We didn't scroll through the school's online portal to to learn about which standardized tests were being given and when. Instead, we asked the parent who had a child older than ours. We talked with our neighbors. We built our community, both students and parents, through face-to-face connections and informal mentorships. And having just spent the morning clicking and filling out online forms so that my soon-to-be kindergartener is signed up for the correct bus and so that I receive text messages and phone calls and email alerts of every change, I'm beginning to question how impersonal school has become.

I find this ironic having just spent the summer attending and presenting at a wide variety of education conferences where many of the presenters, myself included, are sharing strategies and ideas for addressing individual learners needs.  Recently, while attending a session at the EdTech Teacher Summit in Chicago, I participated in a two hour session in which we wondered about the impact of individualized learning on the development of learning communities. When I look at how I am connecting with my own child's school, it is increasingly impersonal. Our avenues for learning about the school are typically through a screen of one sort or another. And when information is not emailed or posted to an online portal, it comes in the form of paper...lots and lots of paper.

When I attended kindergarten orientation in early summer with my son, he was led to a room with other soon-to-be school-age children and sent through a series of "stations." At each station, he met briefly with a teacher or school staff member who assessed his "level" in 10 to 15 minutes. Can you read this word? Can you count to 10? Do you know your phone number? I stayed in the auditorium with other parents where we were handed a bag of papers that contained procedural information about getting our student's health and dental records for the school but which also contained packet after packet of homework we were to go over with our child during the summer months. Yup, pre-kindergarten homework. Handwriting exercises and shape sorting games, basic math problems and sight words. And my son's school is not unique. Just a few weeks ago blogger Philip Kovacs posted "An Open Letter to My Son's Kindergarten Teacher," and like Philip and his son, my son and I have not opened that bag of homework.

However, what surprised me most was a little brochure tucked into our parent packets on Virtual K, an online kindergarten program that the school encouraged parents and students to access as a supplement to their half-day kindergarten program. The staff member standing before the parents at kindergarten orientation explained that the school used the virtual program to provide the instructional time that kindergarten students needed to be successful in later grades but which the school couldn't provide in person. Wait! What? So our schools are encouraging our youngest students to disengage with the school community in order to learn from a screen?

Technology has opened up so many avenues and possibilities that were not available to students of the 80s like me. When used well, technology can connect and engage both parents and students to the larger school community. And we see so many examples of teachers and schools doing this well: teachers who email welcome letters during the summer and encourage students to share their pictures and descriptions of summer adventures through blogs and online bulletin boards, schools that use Google Hangouts to virtually meet with students over the summer, and teachers who share video playlists introducing new students to their future classroom and learning adventures. However, each of these examples illustrates how technology is used to supplement the community that is also being built in person. Without that face-to-face connection, technology instead serves as a wall to divide parents and even students from the school. Simply moving all those handouts and information to an online space does nothing to build a sense of connection to a school. Just because information is easily accessible, does not mean that community is. It is worrisome that during kindergarten orientation parents are told with pride about online kindergarten. Remember that poster that hangs in nearly every faculty workroom -  "All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten"? Read through it. Most of these lessons cannot be learned online.

But it's early. The school year hasn't officially started, so perhaps I am wrong. I just hope that my son and I have more opportunities to be connected to our school community rather than virtually connected.

Hand-Me-Down Baby

I've heard the same comments so many times recently that I'm starting to repeat them.

“No need for new clothes. After all, they'll be the same season.” “Oh, how nice, you won't have to redecorate. You can just use your first son's nursery items.” “It makes it so easy and so affordable to have two boys instead of one of each.”

I feel like this is what I should say, what everyone expects me to say. But it saddens me to think that I will be raising a hand-me-down baby.

I'm expecting my second son in a few short weeks, two boys, a little less than two years apart in age. I imagine them running the neighborhood together as they grow: the older boy gregariously greeting all our neighbors with his little brother in tow. When I start to write down some of these hopes in my newest pregnancy journal, I realize that everything I am writing is tied to my first son. “When we first learned that you would be joining our family, we started to teach your older brother how to say 'baby.'" "At the first ultrasound, your older brother giggled when he saw your little shape moving on the screen.”

Prior to my first son's birth, I journaled weekly, posting my reflections on a blog for long-distance family and friends to follow. I reflected on my changing roles, my changing identity. I spent hours planning and painting the new nursery, picking out just the right organic bedding set, scouring through Craigslist for gently used cribs and rockers, strollers and gates, changing tables and toy boxes. The monitor was hooked up long before the baby's arrival. The new clothes, freshly washed and folded, were neatly stacked in the little dresser months before his arrival. And all of this is meticulously recorded in my first son's pregnancy journal, pictures, cards, ultrasound print-outs, and all.

And although I'm already 35 weeks along, I have very few pictures of my belly, of this pregnancy. My newest little one's pregnancy journal sits safely tucked away in our bedroom bookcase, a thin layer of dust on its binding. I pulled it out last around 22 weeks to record my weight and the date of the most recent appointment with our midwife. I've brought the old baby clothes out of a rubber tub in the basement. No need to wash them again. I did that before packing them away. No need to get a new car seat. The old one will do. Our new little baby boy will fit right in to his older brother's model. My hand-me-down baby will fit right in.

And that's when I started to worry. How do I make sure this new little life grows into his own person and not into the mold of his older brother?

But when I watch my nearly two year old son excitedly gobble down green beans, splash in the tub, contentedly sleep, I am reminded of just how unique we each are. My son did not learn to be gregarious from me or my husband. I'm pretty sure he was just born friendly. As much as I coaxed him to say “mama” or “dada” as his first word, he clear as day declared “cat!” soon followed by “bus” and “skkrrrl” (squirrel). He seemed to born with his own unique perspective on the world.

So although his younger brother will grow into the clothes his older brother now wears, I will find ways to honor our new little boy's unique personality and perspective. There would be no hand-me-downs if it weren't for this new little life, no one to hand down to. My first son would not be a brother without him. And so I honor this new little person by handing down what I learned from parenting his older brother. I learn from my mistakes. I hand-down my wisdom, my patience. I hand down my love and respect. I create spaces for him to share his unique view of the world. And I hand down my open heart to his open hands. I hand down the best of myself.

Teaching and Parenting

Before becoming a parent, I naively thought that my experiences as a teacher would help me as a mother. Come to find out, it was really the other way around. Being a parent has taught me to be a better teacher. Parenting has little to do with standing in front of your child, dictating instructions. Instead, it’s about letting moments unfold, learning from them, and trying to help your child explore and learn from those moments as well. Parenting is not about filling your child’s head with all your wisdom. It is about letting your child find his own wisdom and having the patience to let him come to that knowledge through a series of sometimes faltering steps. Parents guide their children. Parents coach their children. Parents are there to structure the environment, to provide models. As parents we don’t assign our students worksheets on how to behave. In the case of my son, just learning to walk, I don’t design activities for him to complete lock-step (forgive the pun) by a particular deadline. I provide him with opportunities to explore. I encourage him to try and try again. And I hope that I encourage his excitement about trying new things.

Isn’t this what good teaching also involves? What I’ve discovered is that the more I reflect on who I want to be as a parent, I am also called to revisit who I want to be as a teacher. Is it really important at the end the day, at the end of the year, at the end of high school for students to know what year Kahled Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner? Will the daily lives of my students be enriched for knowing that in chapter 16 there is a metaphor on page 211? Is it really important if students remember verbatim the definition of verisimilitude? Or, instead, is it better that my students know how to identify a theme, analyze it, and connect it to their experience of humanity? Isn’t it more important that students are able to critically analyze texts for their bias? And if this is true, if teaching should be about helping our students develop applicable skills related to our content area, why do I continue to feel it is necessary to give what essentially amounts to reading tests at the end of units?

I don’t think I’m alone here. I’m in the process of putting together my unit teaching Middle Eastern literature, centered around the reading of The Kite Runner. And in the process of gathering materials, I of course stumbled across the various pre-packaged units, many of which rely on multiple vocabulary and reading quizzes. However, even when searching various teacher prepared lessons on sites like TeachersPayTeachers, what I discovered were rafts of multiple choice quizzes bogged down with plot questions. What does a test of plot-based questions really test? That students read a text. Really, is that all we expect? I hope the message I send my students is not that we read simply for the sake of finishing a book. Instead, we read to connect to others, to empathize with the lives of others, to learn more about ourselves. Shouldn’t our unit assessments reflect that learning?

What I’ve come to realize as a parent is that the learning that sticks with a person is the learning that cannot be measured (usually) by a multiple choice test. As I mentioned in an earlier post, good teaching involves setting the stage for learning. What this means for me is that I need to spend less time standing in front of the class, and more time thinking about the skills and themes that I want my students to understand by the close of the unit. Teaching becomes more about what I hope my students are able to understand and do by the close of a lesson, and less about what they can recall for a test. That is not to say that all discrete knowledge should be dismissed. Instead, it means that I need to find more meaningful ways of helping student understand how to use and apply that knowledge rather than simply recall it. Teaching is about helping students become more than just book learners. It is guiding them to be life learners.

Welcome Little Harris!

I'm happy to announce that Harris Robinson joined us on Friday, September 26th at 10:59 in the morning. After a relatively short delivery, little Harry arrived weighing 7 pounds, 9 ounces and measuring 20.5 inches long. We've been enjoying getting to know our little boy over the last two weeks, and I'll be sure to blog more about our adventures in parenthood soon. New mom, dad, and baby are all doing well.