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April 28, 2007
Down Memory Freeway
Sometimes you get the chance to take a step back in time. I did this week.
I had a friend to meet in Anaheim, California. Our meeting was on Tuesday evening, and I could have chosen to fly down Tuesday morning, but there were a couple of other people to see. It just made more sense to go down Monday evening.
I had arranged for a car in order to get from one place to another. I didn’t need much, a compact would do. I expected a Ford Focus, but it seems they had run out of them. Aw. Would I be willing to take a new black Ford mustang instead? Gee, it was hard to turn that down. I didn’t.
My morning schedule got moved to the afternoon, so I had a morning free. Here’s where the time travel came in. I started teaching in Huntington Beach many moons ago. I always go to schools when I visit anywhere so I decided to find several of my old teaching assignments.
My first two stops were the last two places I taught, my second and third schools. They were still there, both with a few more pieces on the playground than I remembered. I didn’t stop. I just sort of soaked in the memories of children, families, teachers and administrators I’d know there.
The last stop was the first school where I taught. I was 21 years old when I started. Right out of college, I thought I was ready for the world. I knew everything and nothing at the same time. As I sat in the parking lot Tuesday morning, looking at the additional 10 plus portables and the numerous classes of special ed students now at the school, I just remembered. I felt the scary first few days. I thought about one student in particular I knew was given to me because I was the new kid. Dexter needed a great deal of help and was a catalyst for me going into special education.
I had a couple of classes I needed to take so I remembered running from school clear to heck and gone to take the required California courses. Being from out of state, I knew next to no one when I started. Taking classes at least let me meet a few people other than the teachers in my new school.
As I thought through the years to today, I realized how many wonderful experiences I have had. I’ve met wonderful people, had children teach me how to teach them, worked on legislation, and in some small ways changed not only the course of learning, but more importantly sometimes perhaps the course of someone’s life. Those I’ve met certainly have changed the course of mine.
Most people don’t talk about going into education for the money or the power or the prestige. We go into it because we love learning and teaching. We want to make a difference. I have had the opportunity for almost 40 years to do exactly those thing-learn, teach, and make a difference.
It was a wonderful trip. I didn’t expect to have the opportunity to reminisce, but I was very glad I did. I’d only wish for my own kids or anyone else’s that they have the same kind of joy from doing the work they choose to do that I have.
Posted by Dr Joni at 06:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2007
Mom Flunked!
This week I was talking with several Moms about what to do with their kids in school. One was lamenting her sixth grade son's lack of involvement with anything other than basketball. She was about ready to string him up. The rest of the group was giving encouragement and suggestions. We talked about several other topics, but the evening's topic was report cards and assesments. We finally got around to those two, but only after the other pressing matters were out of the way.
On the topic of assessments, we we discussing tests and test taking. We had talked about being prepared and studying. We had gone over getting a good night's sleep before a test and making sure to eat a good breakfast. They'd all agreed it was better not to have stressful discussions or decide to move or some such upset beore taking tests. Of course, part of the discussion was around the upcoming state STAR testing.
We had been talking about testing for a bit when one of the Mom's told a story about her recent test taking situation. It seems she was taking a class for work, and there was a required test at the end. She studied and studied. Her children watched her studying. Her two-year-old, a nocturnal child, sat on her lap until two in the morning while she going over the material. Obviously this was something important and she wanted to do well.
The night before the test she tried to get in every last minute of cramming she could before the big day. She stayed up half the night, and thought she was ready.
When the results came in she had not passed. Her boss told her he was really surprised. She'd studied so hard, he thought she'd be okay. She, of course, was disappointed but undaunted. She could take it again. Afterall, 80% of the people who take this test don't pass the first time. She'd do it again.
Now our Mom was okay, but her daughter wasn't. Her fourth grade daughter was truly concerned. Mom had failed a test. She actually flunked. What was she going to do? My guess is, she was also asking how does it feel to fail a big test, how do you act, what do you do when that happens? Will you live?
I was very impressed with Mom's reaction. Iit was such great modeling for her daughter. Yes, you're disappointed, but you did everything you were supposed to do. You went to class, you studied, you worked at it, and this first time you didn't get all the answers right. You're going to have to study more, work some more, and try again. You don't give up. You don't quit. You don't get mad or blame someone else. You just go back and do the work until you get it.
What a great message! What a great message for her daughter, the rest of her family, her co-workers, her boss, the group of Moms for the evening and me.
I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel to this story next time I see her. I want to know if she passed and what it means for her job, but more importantly how her daughter reacted to her extra efforts.
Posted by Dr Joni at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2007
Two and Four Months
Yesterday I spent a good deal of the day with preschool activities. The new Learning Foundations are now being reviewed and will be released soon. For us educators the Foundations are the learning standards we want children to know and comfortably do in preschool. They help guide what kinds of learning activities go on in preschool classrooms much as the Standards have guided school activities in the past few years.
So later in the day, I got to watch some of those new Foundations in action. I had an appointment in a school district office and was waiting in the lobby for the person I was to see. School offices are fun because there’s always a lot of activity, people are usually quite friendly, and there are often kids coming and going with interesting tales to tell.
While I was waiting a man and his son came in. The man had a good deal of work to do at the front desk and was chatting with the people he knew. His son in the meantime was to sit in a chair with his Tommy Tippy cup and something to play with. That lasted about 32 seconds.
While Dad talked I watched Kenra. I heard his Dad mention his name a few times so I picked it up. Kenra never made a sound the whole time he was there. He was quiet, but oh was he curious.
First it was just looking. He looked down the hall that left the lobby on the right. Then he walked over and looked down the hall and around the corner to the left. Next was the big glass double door leaving the lobby to the room outside. He spent a great deal of time pushing each door one at a time to see how far he could open it. They were quite heavy, but he’d put his body into it and open it just about far enough to slip through. Surprisingly, he never went out nor did he mash his fingers as the door closed. I was concerned he might do either, but he didn’t. He was very careful.
Once satisfied with the doors, he watched several people go in and out of an iron gated half -door to the back offices. The gate itself was just a bit taller than his head and he had to reach up to touch the dead bolt knob at the top of the door, but after watching several people he had the idea how they’d gotten in. He walked to the gate and put his hands around the bars. He pushed on it like he had the glass doors, but it didn’t move. He put his hand up to the knob, but that didn’t move either. He looked puzzled, but moved his hands down and tried pushing again. It didn’t work.
Just then someone wanted through the gate from the other side. A buzzer went off and the person walked through. She didn’t completely close the gate and Kenra didn’t miss a beat. He pushed on the bars and was through in a second.
“Oh, look what I have,” said one of the secretaries scooping him up. She gently placed Kenra back on the other side of the gate and I heard the click. She was nice about it, but he wasn’t going back through. Several more ladies filed through, but the click was clear this time as they filed out.
Not daunted Kenra wandered back over near me. I was sitting in a chair near the doorway to the hallway on the left. There was a door open to the hallway. Kenra put his hand on the door and then touched the knob on one side. Then he reached around and touched the knob on the other side. He found the lock side and tried several times to move it, but it wouldn’t budge.
Satisfied for the moment, he went back to his chair, but watching his eyes I knew he wasn’t through yet. There was more to explore. His Dad had kept an eye on him and talked to the ladies about him while he was exploring. He hadn’t made a sound the whole time, but he hadn’t missed a single thing in that lobby. He’d explored and made connections with everything in the room at his height.
I chuckled as I thought about what I’d been doing all morning. I’d been fussing and concerned we might be asking too much of our 3 and 4-year-olds in the Learning Foundations. Kenra was only 2 years and 4 months according to his Dad, and he had nicely put my concerns to rest. This young fellow had easily understood everything he touched and explored. He knew all there was to know about doors-glass, wooden, or iron gated. He understood looks and door knobs, what they were for, and I figured he could get into just about any room he choose with a little perseverance.
I appreciate learning lessons. I especially appreciate them coming from a source who is less than two years old and doesn’t talk, but who so completely let me know he’s very competent and capable. He'd certainly let me know how ready these little ones are to learn and explore their world. Thanks for the reminder Kenra.
Posted by Dr Joni at 08:22 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2007
On the Road Part III
Okay now Pa and Nick have done geography with maps, science with land forms, history with prehistoric fish, and math with money. So is there anything else to come from a three day road trip?
Sure. Wild Burros. A herd of wild burros is interesting whether you’re 12 or 68. I watched some recently in the same general vicinity of this trip myself, and was fascinated to watch them wandering through the desert. My questions ran to what do they eat,
where do they find water, and, of course, how did they get there in the first place?
I didn’t know some of those answers, but with a little bit of work on the Internet, I found several sites with valuable information. I’m sure Nick has already found them.
Anything else? Well, there was also Wilson Lake, Wilson Creek and a canyon you wouldn’t expect to find in such a desert country. I would imagine the fishing was pretty good. It must have good hundreds of thousands of years ago too. The boys found information about miners coming across a fossilized fish that was up to 60 feet long and weighed 60 tons. That’s some fish story! If you want more information about the fish, you can find it in a notebook at the Jim Butler Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada.
I don’t even have to go into detail about the learning on this trip. I’ve done some of that in the last couple of blog entries so this time I’d just say, if you haven’t gone for a ride in a while-short or long, you might want to think about it. Yes I know the gas is expensive, but the value in the learning and the fun sure outweighs the cost of the trip.
Enjoy. Have fun and let me know where else to suggest this venturesome pair should try.
Posted by Dr Joni at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
Learning on the Road Part 2
Have I mentioned road trips are great places to learn new things? Well, the road trip to the mines of Nevada by my friends Pa and his grandson Nick lent itself to even more learning than just the geography and science components of Nevada’s back country.
It takes planning to go on any trip. Planning requires some research. Pa had done the research on Goldfield and a few other of Nevada’s old mines. Nick was interested in turquoise and backed up Pa’s research by doing some of his own. Between the two of them they came up with a variety of locations to appeal to their interests.
Next were the additional skills needed to get them from one place to the other. First there was the navigation aspect. Someone needed to do some calculation about how far to go, where, and how much time it might take to get from one location to the next. Navigation became Nick’s job.
He mapped out their location, planned the trip, and set their path. It was his job to keep them on track, which I mentioned in an earlier blog, was a challenge. Navigation requires planning and research. It also requires math skills particularly around distances and time. There’s a delicate balance around arriving at a location and arriving at a location during daylight hours when you can actually see and visit it.
Another skill is managing the finances of a road trip. When my kids were younger, they’d know how much there was for the trip, and where we were going. It was their job to stay within budget. Nick had a similar challenge. From a stash of funds for the trip, he was responsible to handle all the money exchanges on the trip-gas, food, lodging, and snacks. Oh, don’t forget the all important snacks.
They were in Nevada so no one could go through Nevada without a little additional learning in math. There is no where in Nevada you can miss an opportunity to gamble, even gas stations. Pa, willing to expand learning to some extent, used the chance to explain chance or at least games of chance. Fifty cents in a slot machine turned into $1 then $2, but quickly faded to a loss of well, let’s leave it at a loss while we move on to the next stop in our travels.
So once again, the teacher in me wants to be satisfied. Was something learned from this great fun? You bet. Besides the geography and science, there was research, planning, and math skills. I’m a big believer in getting as much learning from an activity as possible and road trips lend themselves to lots of learning really well. Perhaps even more important was the learning didn’t feel like learning.
To me, when learning is a part of living and the fun activities of what we do in our lives, the learning is natural, not contrived or artificial. The skills learned become important to making a child’s work happen, not something that happens apart from the rest of what he or she does everyday. Letting kids use the learning skills they are acquiring to enjoy themselves seems like such a great reinforcement for wanting to know and learn more.
Anyone up for a trip to the Grand Canyon?
Posted by Dr Joni at 08:15 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2007
Learning In Action on a Road Trip
Two friends of mine just had some great learning activities within the stretch of a few days. Pa , age 68, and his grandson Nick, age 12, often consider themselves the same age, and when left to their own devises, they are.
Pa and Nick took part of Nick’s Spring break to go explore a bit of Nevada. Pa’s background is in surveying, and Nick has developed an interest in mines of almost any kind-gold, salt, turquoise, silver, uranium. You name it. He’s interested in it. Off the two of them went to explore.
Nick mapped out the trip and acted as navigator. Pa drove almost as directed. I say almost because I heard from them the first evening they were gone. The reports were great as far as the trip had progressed other than Pa’s ability to do his own navigation. Remember I said left to their own devises?
Pa decided they needed to take a side road not on Nick’s planned route. It was over the old trail coming over the Sierra Nevada’s and just looked to tempting to pass up. Nick suggested that they not do it, but ever the intrepid, Pa wanted to check it out.
A few hours later after having to be pulled from a snow bank, Pa had to concede that Nick’s plan had probably been the better one.
Turning their attention from snow banks to mines was not too difficult. Along the highway were holes in rocks and hillsides where it was evident someone from years ago or even more recently had tried to find the earth’s treasures. Most looked played out before they were ever really worked. The bigger mines farther into the foothills, abandoned now, still had equipment, rusted and broken, lying beside them. The actual working mines were mostly salt, and seen from the road after their deserted predecessors, looked like a beehive of activity.
A little reading on the subject of the history of one of the gold mines came up with more than just gold. It seems that this particular mine had yielded not only gold, but a fossil of one of the largest prehistoric fish ever found.
Now, as an educator, if I was looking at this trip for its value, I would say so far, “Lots of geography including maps and terrain, great earth science activities with the maps, and wonderful science and history with the fossil find. There was also plenty of research and reading before and during the trip.” This would be a great learning activity.
For the two travelers, they’d tell me it was great fun with just enough adventure and plenty of stops to satisfy curiosity.
Guess it would please both sets of interests.
Posted by Dr Joni at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)