Math 1, Reading 0

At the beginning of a second grade lesson the teacher announced that the daily schedule had been changed. The next lesson was math rather than reading. The children cheered.

I was not surprised. After 30 years of visiting elementary and middle schools, I have seen a pattern: Math and science are often more popular among students than reading and writing. It’s a broad generalization for which I have no data, but much anecdotal evidence.

Why the pattern? Here is my theory: Math and science can satisfy the curiosity of children about the physical world. Reading and its affiliates (writing, grammar, spelling and literature) are tedious and abstract, at least as taught in the testing-crazed culture of modern schooling.

While reading and writing instruction tends to focus on the abstract rules of written language (the sounds of vowels and consonants, the rules of grammar and punctuation), math and science instruction is built on the concrete logical of the physical world. The content of reading and writing instruction involves ideas and events that are often imaginary or unfamiliar. Physical space and objects available to all, regardless of language, culture or region, unify the content of math and science. Butterflies, bugs and blocks are ever present. One bean plus two beans equals three beans, always and everywhere. Math and science provide the intellectual mechanisms for satisfying curiosity. If you want to build a tree house or a dollhouse, it helps to measure accurately. If Mom expects you home for dinner by six, you need to be able to read a clock and estimate how long it takes to walk a mile, or how much longer you could play if you could bike home rather than walk.

Curiosity naturally involves examining, arranging, hypothesizing and testing. The effects of mathematical rules and processes can be visually confirmed. Reading and writing instruction in the fashion of modern teaching, lacks that connection of common experience. Learning the conventions and grammar of standard language defies our native dialects. (Johnny: We was tired. Teacher: No Johnny, we were tired.) Language instruction requires students to trust the teacher is correct and the speech of friends and family is wrong.

While second graders in math instruction use small cubes to learn addition and subtraction, during reading instruction they summarize an unfamiliar story or infer a main idea.  While a second grader can take away one fourth of a pie to leave three fourths of a pie, they cannot point to a particular word or sentence that summarizes or represents an inferred main idea. Summarizing or inferring requires reconstructing what has been encountered – a mental task that can be very difficult for a young mind. Math for youngsters is concrete, thus more accessible and attainable. Language is abstract. No wonder young children cheer when reading is replaced my math.

It does not have to be this way.  Here is my advice to teachers about making reading and writing more enjoyable and successful for children. Make better use of the familiar and the meaningful:

•      Use rhymes, songs and stories that are familiar and memorable.
•      Use invented stories and real observations, discoveries and experiences dictated by children and transcribed by teachers (constantly transcribe children’s speech to text).
•     Dramatize and improvise familiar stories.
•      Use choral reading and reader’s theatre
•      Connect reading and writing to math, science, social studies, sports and recreation
•      Give equal time to writing (learning to write is learning to read)
•       Surround children with their own written language (flip charts, walls of their stories, reports, drawings with captions)

Learning to read and write can be at least as enjoyable as learning math and science if the teacher uses the experienced world as a bridge to the abstract world.

Not Fair. You're Picking on Me

Timothy, a seventh grader, is in trouble with the teacher. He’s talking while his history teacher is instructing.  The teacher pauses for a second and makes eye contact with him.  Timothy stops talking for a minute, then begins whispering again to the girl in front of him. The teacher pauses, looks at him and says, “Timothy, stop talking.” A few minutes later, Timothy is talking to the girl again. The teacher sends Timothy to a seat in the corner of the room. As Timothy ambles his way to the desk in the corner he says, loud enough for the teacher to hear, “This isn’t fair. Carlos talks more than me. You’re picking on me.”

The dilemma illustrated in this anecdote plagues every teacher and parent. What is fairness? What is justice?

There is the possibility that Timothy is right. The teacher may treat some students more favorably than others. If the teacher has favorites, if he has not established an understanding of “fairness” as it applies in the classroom, then the teacher has a problem. Providing justice is more than a momentary problem related to a couple of students. Failure to provide justice creates an ongoing problem that will interfere with the teacher’s authority and the students’ opportunity to learn.

But Timothy is likely wrong to claim he is being treated unfairly.  There are probably circumstances he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge; and therein lies the crux of problem for all.  We struggle to explain or understand justice.

Piaget said that young children are mostly concrete thinkers who understand fairness in a way that is different from adults.  From a young child’s point of view, the one who accidentally spills a carton of milk is in more trouble than one who spills a small glass of milk. The size of the mess determines the size of the wrong. A wiser adult sees it differently.

A young child is more likely to grant an adult the authority to establish justice. If a parent or teacher says a wrong has been committed and a punishment is necessary, a young child is more likely to accept the judgment than an adolescent. A middle school student’s sense of justice is closer to an adult view, but still varies in some important ways. Middle schoolers are likely connect fairness to equality – equal treatment for all. Adolescent also are more susceptible to group norms of justice. Membership in social groups is often determined by standards of dress, appearance and behavior. Adolescent who are excluded from a particular group feel that life is not fair.  It’s a hard lesson, unpleasant at the least. Life isn’t always fair.

Good teachers strive for fairness and can usually achieve it, at least within the walls of their classrooms. They provide a model of fairness and help students move beyond a concrete view of fairness and beyond the reliance on social norms to determine who is in or out or who has power or not. Fairness has to be achieved by the whole classroom community. If the teacher is sole arbiter of justice, then the scales of justice will often be unbalanced.

Let’s go back to the problem of Timothy who thinks he’s being picked on. The fact that the teacher warned him twice doesn’t give him much room to claim unfairness. The teacher should not interrupt instruction to deliver a lecture to Timothy about fairness. It wouldn’t be fair to other students. And, Timothy might be trying to provoke a confrontation that is going to be more disruptive.

If I were Timothy’s teacher, I would talk to him at the end of class. Maybe it would go like this:

Me: Timothy, I’m disappointed in your behavior today. Your talking was interfering with the lesson.

Timothy: But Carlos . . .

Me: Stop. This is about your talking. It is not about Carlos.

Timothy: But it’s not fair.

Me: It’s not fair when your talking prevents other students from learning. I know you are capable of understanding that. This conversation is about your behavior today. I expect better from you. When I pause while I’m teaching and make eye contact with you, it’s all about learning social studies. I’m doing it for you and everyone else. Do you understand what I mean?

Timothy looks down and is silent.  I bend down, make eye contact and raise my eyebrows.

Timothy: Okay.

Me: Thanks, I’ll see you tomorrow.

The classroom is a small space where a teacher can be authoritative and fair and can teach justice as well as the academic curriculum. We can teach students the relationship between classroom rules and ethics, but it cannot be done in a day and we cannot rely on authority alone. We need to bring content and activities to the classroom that help students see the room as their room – a safe place where home, neighborhood and cultural experiences are valued. Elliot Wigginton sent his high school students into their neighborhoods to collect oral histories about families and communities. Those stories became the content for their reading and writing. (Read about it at The Foxfire Fund.) Wigginton gave us a good lesson on teaching reading, writing, history and justice. 

We should not preach responsibility to our students. We should give responsibility by making students our assistants and teaching them to teach others. There are many ways to promote justice in the classroom. Maintaining fairness in the classroom is not easy, but it is possible. 

While the Gathering is Good

A blue winter sky hung brightly over the lake. While the gathering was good, the ducks and geese worked the shallows gathering weeds and roots.  A gray squirrel scratched through the stark shadows of barren trees looking for overlooked acorns and hickory nuts. The sags along the trail were puddled and muddy, except for the northern slopes where remnants of two-day-old snow remained.  It was a winter day – a good day to be in the sun with other living things that appreciated the sunlight and the various states of water along the woods and lake.

I visited my mother yesterday and left her in the room far removed from woods or lake, left her in the gray light of her dreams. A walk through the woods along the lake changed the scenery of my own dreams, bringing light and focus on things immediate: the emerald mallard’s head, the track of water seeping through the leaves seeking the lake; the vapor trail of a plane thirty thousand feet into the blue.

There is a Turkish proverb: A heart in love of beauty never grows old.

I wonder if the beauty of the world was often apparent to my mother. She was prone to worry about things slithering, smelly or stingy. She preferred the indoors; the television. She warned against the dangerous path, the unfamiliar, or worse, the unknown. She worried about the night, about tomorrow or next week.  She invented things for the purpose of worrying.

I don’t know if she now lives in a world of worried dreams. But it seems that way. She mutters and grimaces. It could be troubled dreams, but it could be her broken hip, except that if she recognizes you, she’s ready to go – to go with you, to leave this place, to go with you to a place more familiar.

I miss the mother I have known for 60-plus years, but I cannot take her with me. So I am determined to see the details of the world: the small, the colorful, the movement of things subtle, the waffling lines and curves, the emerging and fading shapes. I am determined to hear the sounds hidden behind the distractions: the faint whistles, calls, rumbles and rhythms. Awareness is living. Learning is naming the small and the insignificant. By acknowledging the completeness of the world about us we build our dreams. In the end, the shape, the texture and the feel of our dreams may be all that remains.

From my mother I have learned that we might exit the world through our dreams, so we must take care to nurture them. As Lao-Tsu admonished us: “Taste the tasteless, magnify the small, increase the few, see simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things.” In his song “It’s a Dream”, Neil Young sings about exiting the world via our dreams and leaving our memories “without any where to stay”. It is a sad song only for those left behind and for those who fail to nurture their dreams.

It's a dream
Only a dream
And it's fading now
Fading away
It's only a dream
Just a memory without anywhere to stay

Listen to the song: It’s a Dream

Our Alternate World

A few days after Thanksgiving my mother, who was already deep into the throes of dementia, fell and cracked her pelvic bone and broke a bone in her elbow. She is now in a nursing home. The day after Christmas we sat in the day room with an episode of Bonanza playing on the television with Mom’s withered self slumped in her wheelchair at a table, with me beside her and a plate of food between us. Her glasses were missing. A bib was tied around her neck. She ignored what was once her favorite TV program and stared blankly at something outside the window. I scooped up a spoonful of the pureed spaghetti and put in front my mother’s lips. “Mom, open up.”

She opened her lips slightly and I put the tip of the spoon in her mouth. She got a tiny portion of spaghetti on her tongue. “Open wider,” I said. She opened wider and I slid the spoon into her mouth and she swallowed. “You like it?” I asked.

She looked at me, then at the plate. Eventually, she ate all the spaghetti and drank a half glass of tea through a straw. After a few spoonfuls of pudding she refused to eat anything else. She dozed off for while, then lifted her head and looked at me with empty eyes, then looked around the room. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Where do you want to go?”

“My Daddy.”

“He’s not here.” Grandpa Messer died in 1958 when I was eight years old. “You want to go down and see the Christmas tree?” No response. “Want to go back to your room?” No response.

I stood up and turned her wheelchair away from the table and pointed her toward the door to the hallway. “Let’s go,” I said.  “Lead the way.” Using her feet, she maneuvered the wheelchair into the hallway and stopped. “Mom, which way do you want to go?” No response.

I pointed the wheelchair down the hall toward her room.  At the intersection where she needed to make a right turn to her room, she wheeled the chair straight through the threshold of another client’s room. I grabbed the chair, pulled her back and parked her beside the nurse’s station.  I didn’t want to leave her alone in her room. I sat beside her in the hall for a few minutes and we had a one-way conversation – me telling her about Max and Sarah. Then I kissed her, said good-bye and walked away. About halfway down the hall, I turned to see what she was doing.  She was standing up, looking at me. “Mom,” I called and started toward her, but a nurse got to her and sat her back in the wheelchair. I stepped back to her and kneeled down. “Mom, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said.

I left.

Life has its own curriculum to teach us things we rarely learn intentionally: how to feed an adult who cannot or will not feed herself; the reality of dementia; the reality of becoming old and staring at this life’s exit. But what do we take away from these difficult lessons? If learning means altering our understanding of the world, what is the altered understanding?

Learning is not always a pleasant thing. Sometimes we don’t know what we know until knowing is churned by chaos. I thought I knew the meaning of dementia.  But I didn’t until I encountered my mother’s unknowing eyes, until I had to decipher her garbled language that revealed that her present was the past. This unpleasantness, this chaos drove me with her into the past, browsing her high school yearbooks and our family photo albums, remembering her has the flirtatious young woman standing on her toes to kiss the young man who would become my father, remembering her as a grade mother who brought cupcakes to school for a Valentines party, remembering her as the dogged monitor of the weather who insisted we could not play whiffle ball until the rain had stopped, until the last piddling drop of water had been squeezed from that summer afternoon cloud, remembering her as too meek to administer a paddling, but conniving enough to threaten me with “wait ‘til your father gets home”,  remembering her as a woman afraid of snakes and water, remembering her as a woman brave enough to step between my father and my jerk-of-a-teenage-self when Dad had me by my collar ready to smack my back-talking mouth.  Life is here and now until it is the past.

For now, we exist briefly together as Mother contrarily sits at the exit, only the shadow of herself. Chaos reigns, testing our capacity for learning and loving. Learning can be painful. Loving can be challenging for the mind and the emotions.

Here is a glimpse of wisdom that seems relevant:

From 1 Corinthians 13

Where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears . . . ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

We live within circles of family and friends. Happiness and wellbeing depend on the quality and endurance of those circles. Our ability to learn and grow is effected by those circles. The gospel hymn borrowed for the title of this post asks the universal question of whether our circle will remain unbroken when we pass into the next life. The hymn expresses our imagination and faith.

We seek a circle of pleasure, learning and stories - a circle of people who share and build a common history.  We become more and more as our circle grows and endures.

Tell me a story.

Teach me.

Listen to my story.

Let me teach you.

We can be friends.

Maybe forever.

I’ll remember you.

I am because of you.

Family Cemetery in Montford Cove

We stood in the old family cemetery in Montford Cove looking over the layers of hills, ridges and mountains toward a distant range of mountains. We were supposed to be working with the crew cleaning up the cemetery.  Rodney’s chainsaw buzzed at the edge of the tree line. He and James tackled a big pine hanging over the graves. Rodney manned the saw and James pulled a rope to keep the tree from falling on the graves. I was more interested in browsing the encyclopedia of Don’s 90-year-old mind.

“Is that Hickory Nut Mountain, that biggest one there?” I pointed toward the mountains to the west.

“That first one, the little one closest to us, is Oak Hill.” He said, then went to naming others to the left and right. “That most distant mountain, that’s the Hickory Nut Range, runs from Lake Lure up to Black Mountain.  I used to hunt deer all over that range.”

“Oak Hill, wasn’t that the name of the school down there?” I pointed toward the intersection of Bill’s Creek Road and the Cove Road.

“Yea, but the first Oak Hill School was right down there,” Uncle Don pointed to the base of the hill below the cemetery.

Uncle Don is my access to the circle of ancestors. He is a son of my great-grandfather, George Hosea had 13 children, seven by his first wife and six by his second. Don’s grandfather and great uncles were veterans of the Civil War. Hugh and Fritz, two of his half-brothers, helped write the family history, a big circle that intersects about 100 other circles of in-law families. Mind-boggling is the mathematics of our genetic lineage. It spreads like a giant web across the centuries. But that’s just math and has nothing to do with the important circle. The stories make the circle vital to us. We keep the circle unbroken by preserving the stories.

Lydia Louisa, was the two year-old child who survived being scalped by Cherokee Indians. When the Indians returned to her father’s farm a few years later and found the girl missing half her scalp, they knelt in a circle around her, asked her to stand on a warrior’s hands and began a chant to channel her strength and endurance.

Elisabeth was the wife of James who was off with the colonial militia when British Major Patrick Ferguson marched his troops through their farm.  Elisabeth stood up to the British major and kept his troops from butchering her sheep.

Lydia Louisa’s granddaughter and namesake married John Hosea Hemphill. In 1846 they established the farm in Montford Cove that is the site of our family’s pilgrimage.

Israel Leander, the oldest son of Lydia Louisa and John Hosea, was the lieutenant who gave his chaplain a watch and a letter for his mother when he foresaw his death leading his Confederate soldiers across the battlefield at Mechanicsville, Virginia.

John Posey (J.P) was Leander’s younger brother who joined the Confederate army in the desperate days after Gettysburg, left home and disappeared into an unmarked graveyard for prisoners of war.

Posey, named for his deceased uncle (J.P), was a skilled carpenter working on George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate, who loaned Mr. Vanderbilt 50 cents so he could buy some eggs offered for sale by a woman employee.

Francis Emma, a granddaughter of John Hosea and Lydia Louis, was a young woman skilled in gymnastics and music. She joined the circus and worked as juggler, acrobat, clown and musician.
George Hosea, a grandson of John Hosea and Lydia Louisa, raised two sets of children and kept the family and farm together through the Great Depression.

Uncle Don

My great Uncle Don was George Hosea’s son who survived the European campaign of WW II and then survived a deadly fire in 1956 when he rescued the driver of wrecked fuel tanker. He, his wife, daughter and son-in-law maintain the family farm and the old cemetery.

These are just a few of the memorable stories that go on and on, most existing only in oral history. The web of stories and personalities is the circle that defines us. If we are inclined to worry about the endurance of the circle, we need to worry about a modern culture trending toward the dispersion of children across a much broader landscape where aunts, uncles and cousins are fewer in number and prone to get lost in the distant masses.

The failure of our schools has less to do with pedagogy and curriculum and more to do with the fragility of our circles. Posey, the skilled carpenter, as a younger man, taught school in the log building below the family cemetery – one teacher for students, ages 6 to 18, hardly a school we would duplicate today.  But his students belonged to a bigger and more local circle than most modern day students.  Posey’s students had many other teachers – mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and neighbors. Learning was face-to-face, hands-on and centered on facts and skills related to a smaller world.

We still sing the old hymn because we yearn for what we know we are missing:

There are loved ones in the glory 

Whose dear forms you often miss.

When you close your earthly story,

Will you join them in their bliss?

Will the circle be unbroken

By and by, by and by?

Is a better home awaiting

In the sky, in the sky?

Will the Circle Be Unbroken is a popular Christian hymn written by Ada R. Habershon with music by Charles H. Gabriel. 

Politics and Learning to Swim in Murky Waters

Image from inkcinct.com.au

You might think politics is an inappropriate topic for a blog about learning and living; but, like most things in life, politics involves learning. We were not born Democrats, Republicans, Libertarian or Undeciders. We learned to be those things. Here’s the short version of my political learning - without candidate endorsements.

Conversation with my dad (@1960):

Me: Dad, are we Democrats or Republicans?

Dad: Democrats.

Me. What’s the difference?

Dad: Democrats are for the workingman and Republicans are for the rich man.

No elaboration needed. We were not rich. My family worked to earn money, so the workingman-logic explained why we were Democrats. As I gained some family history, the logic held up. During the Great Depression, my great-grandfather twice lost his money in bank failures, which, according to family narrative, were the fault of President Hoover and the Republicans. President Roosevelt and the Democrats saved us. The REA brought electricity to Montford’s Cove. The WPA and the CCC provided work for the unemployed. Social Security provided some assurance old people would not become totally dependent on their children. It was a consistent narrative: Democrats for the workingman; Republicans for the rich man.

My family’s loyalty to the Democratic Party actually goes much deeper, all the way back to when Andrew Jackson turned Thomas Jefferson’s Republican party into the Democratic Party, through the Civil War when two of my great-great uncles died fighting for the Confederacy, through Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. My branch of the family has been loyal Democrats for 180 years, with only a few wayward relatives.

But learning politics is not all about family tradition. Given the tendency of my generation to reject tradition, predisposition only partially explains my political leaning. Experiences outside the family affect the political values that underpin our political loyalties. I grew up in a segregated culture rife with prejudice. To me, the Civil Rights legislation championed by the Democratic Party seemed like the right and moral course of change. While many Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party because of the events of the Civil Rights era, my father’s family remained steadfast Democrats.

The Vietnam War and Watergate were powerful lessons in the fallibilities of politicians and generals.  The skepticism born of those events was confirmed by my experience as a college student. Exposure to thousands of students from different places and cultures expanded humanity. Science ran headlong into the mythology of religion. Classes taught by real historians, mathematicians and literary critics nurtured a different and, hopefully, more critical mind. Truth became illusive.  What had been black and white in childhood turned multiple shades of gray in adulthood.

Twenty years of working and living outside of small town North Carolina brought a wider circle of friends: a multitude of African-American students and teachers, Catholics, Mormons, Hindu, Moslems, atheists, gays, lesbians, people of Iran, India, the Philippines, Greece, England and Cuba, soldiers and ex-military people, prison guards, prisoners, people who lived in communes and people who smoked pot. They have been my friends, students and co-workers. The variety of people I have known and liked has contributed to my belief that inclusive laws, equal rights and protection of the weakest, poorest and least able are essential properties and responsibilities of government. Government based on religious doctrine or the concept of manifest destiny has no place in society. A narrow view of “the people” is the precursor of fascism.

The experiences and principles I’ve acquired do not necessarily point to one political party or the other; but they do exclude many personal values and beliefs that we typically think belong in the political domain.

Finally, only in my late years, have I arrived at a view of politics that I would recommend for everyone.  Be wary.  All political speech is deceptive. It is an exercise in selecting and spinning facts.  Political speech is laden with words and phrases charged with fear, anger, pride and other emotions.  Political speech is designed to encourage decisions based on emotion, not on knowledge or reason.

Here are my recommendations prior to November 6: Disregard the news, the polls, the speeches and the political ads. For the most part, forget the events of the past four years. Study the broader history of the political parties and their candidates. Judge the politicians on what they have done, not what they have said. No one knows the future, but we can know the past. Deciding how to vote may feel like treading through murky, murky water.  But we have got to do it to live in a functioning democracy.

86 Words for Kid-Trouble

Got to thinking about the troubles, fears and discomforts of childhood - the dark and now the humorous part.  For me, that was 50 years ago.  Is your memory of childhood different from mine?  Maybe you weren't troubled.  Girls, maybe you had a wholly different perspective on trouble. If your childhood was only 10 or 20 years in the past, maybe your trouble was more digitized or electrified.

I'm inviting you to comment on my list of childhood troubles.  Suggest additional words.  Help me see the other perspectives.

Abandoned houses, Attics

Backrooms, Basements, Baths, BB guns, Beggars lice, Bicycle chains, Black widows, Broccoli,      Broken windows, Bullies

Cherry bombs, Chiggers, Chores, Cigarettes, Cockle burrs, Copperheads, County fairs, Cousins, Creeks, Culverts, Cat briars

Dinner time, Doctors, Dark

Excuses

Farts, Fibs, Firecrackers, Flat tires, Flirts, Four letter words

Grammar, Green beans, Gnats

Hammers, Homework

Idle time

Jawbreakers

Kisses

Ladders, Lawn mowers, Locked doors

Matches, Mud, Multiplication

No-see-ums

Outhouses

Peashooters, Peeing contests, Playing cards, Poison ivy, Preachers, Principals

Questions, Quarrels

Railroad tracks, Rain, Riverbanks, Rocks

Spelling, Saturday matinees, Sawdust piles, Saws, Shovels, Slingshots, Snowballs, Spitting contests, Spray paint, Sunburn

Teachers, Television, Teasing, Ticks, Tree swings, Tree houses

Umbrellas, Underwear

Valentines, Vacations

Wasps, Welts, Whippings

Exaggeration

Yellow jackets

Zippers