Work and play

Here is the teacher and the student:

Only just learning about the concept of beginner's mind, but naturally the place to find it would be in elementary schools:

There is inevitably going to come a point where the adults in positions of authority ask themselves if they aren't the problem. If the students supposed to be having this restorative dialogue with you keep pointing at a breakdown in the way of that dialogue--I beat him up because he called me a Em Ef En, a dirty En, and you always take the white people's side. I'm done talking to you. Goodbye!--for example, lack of respect, prejudice and perceived injustice, desire to push further and get in more trouble rather than less, and so on--at some point, if you are listening, you are bound to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. And wishing for someone to listen to you, to talk it through.

So there is a good lesson to come out of the new behavior intervention plans, at least for the teachers. Maybe there is something similar silvery-lining-ish around the new, ever-reforming curricula?

At one extreme, you have the high school students, who were the guinea pigs, unable to go all the way through any curriculum from beginning to end but dropped in more or less ungently into the middle of it, who now sit through their classes with headphones in the whole time, on their phones, doing something that looks, from the outside at least, only a shade away from sitting in the Buddha nature of Zen.

At the other end, say a fourth grade classroom, in trying to teach a particular concept, like finding a common denominator, it seems like the Engage NY curriculum really places an overemphasis on the exposition of the concept as such, when what is really needed is to practice that fundamental skill, the operation of multiplying and dividing, so that the concept could even begin to be grasped, or be seen as something meaningful rather than arbitrary.

To state a few more basics, not even at the level of multiplying denominators, but as simple as addition and subtraction: So we don’t like doing work, unless we feel our effort means something, maybe even just that I am good, or just, I am not bad, because it is bad not to get the work done, and it is good to do our job. We have a job to do when we come in, I have a [thing] for [kid] for doing [work]--these are the reinforcements there; calling home, losing free time, etc the consequences. Time management through project-based assignments allows something else to seem to determine what happens when, namely, the project, the work itself, but otherwise the time gets managed by the teacher as an ultimate authority, to give or to withhold, to fill up with words or images, work or play, or to fill with busy work and clean-up chores. Some efficacy is given back to the kids in that they know what to do when they arrive and when finished with any given work, and their being able to do it: reading silently or free writing, which often ends up looking suspiciously like drawing, but comics are OK, just not coloring so much. And here is the room for enrichment, or for extra practice with fluency, basic English and Math, which somehow this brilliant new curriculum seems to not actually be able to find time for at all, unless it was supposed to happen already, but clearly something went awry.

The younger the students, the smaller those chunks of time, but no matter what the age, the all-important thing is deciding how to use the time wisely. A whole life is only so much time waiting to be given and taken up, crumpled up or folded into airplanes.