I heart children's books

Can you do this?

http://www.carlemuseum.org/blog/?p=818

Better yet- do you know the 2nd line of these books?

ok, that's enough

I've hit a wall.
I'm finished.
Done.
Put a fork in me.

In the past this would be my last day of summer. Tomorrow would (should) be the first day of teacher work week. I should be meeting my kids in 2 weeks.

Even last Wednesday I was saying that I was thankful for this long summer. I had so many projects to do that I was excited to have the whole month of August. Wasn't it glorious, this long summer?

Then Thursday came. I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere during Thursday I lost my summer love. Maybe it was the heat, or walking past an office supply store and checking out all the school supplies, or the fact that I've broken all the needles on my sewing machine, read every book on my summer list, spent an afternoon at every museum exhibit in the city, given way too much of my hard-earned money to the nice folks at Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Ann Taylor Loft, and spent beyond too much time at the pool. By the time Mr. Lipstick came home I was rocking in a corner with boredom.

I have to go back to work.

This forced vacation is utterly unfair. If I don't teach someone to read soon, I may throw myself off the balcony. That, or my cat may just learn her abc's.

Do you see what I've been reduced too? And that's even with spending two days a week at an inner-city daycare. And another day at the library at my school.

And yes, come October, I am going to be dying for a break. Longing for a day or two off. But that doesn't make this long ridiculous break any easier.

Yes, I would like a break in October, when the weather is perfect for reading outside, or sipping coffee on the back porch. Right now it's too hot to put one toe outside.

And in October I will only want one or two days off. A week max. None of this weeks on end forced holiday. This is crazy. Who ever thought this schedule was a good idea?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read Brown Bear, Brown Bear to my cat.

** ** **
I welcome any summer reading recommendations you think will somehow get me to the end of August.

today's walk

My adventures this summer include spending two days a week at a daycare in DC. Part of the day includes walking with the children, whether to one of the many parks in the neighborhood, to a basketball court, or just slowly walking the sidewalks, enjoying being outside. I'm seeing the city through the eyes of two, three, and four year olds- looking at fire trucks with new found excitement, having conversations with pigeons, and viewing cracks in the pavement as reasons to jump and dance.

On the surface every walk is the same. We get out the rope, the kids take hold, we walk down block and around the corner, past the same buildings everyday. But can anything actually be the same from one day to the next when you are two?

Today I walked with the two year olds- children on a rope, each grasping onto one colored ring. Each hand on the ring promises that at least it is busy doing something- holding on- leaving only one hand on each child free to explore the city's textures as we walk.

Everything must be felt. The smooth medal fences separating us from the restaurant patios, the poles holding stop signs. The rough bricks of the building, the freshly painted exterior of a row house. The pebbles on the ground from where the sidewalk is breaking apart. The flower boxes with their yellow and orange flowers, so tempting to pick if one has the fine motor skills to pinch off a blossom with one hand before a teacher can remind, "look with your eyes."

Anything that cannot be felt must be invited into a conversation. "Hello statue. Hello statue. Hello statue. Goodbye birds. Hello car. Goodbye car. Goodbye car. Hello airplane. Goodbye Fire truck. Goodbye fire truck. Goodbye fire truck" And hola, hola, hola, to all the people we pass. I am forever amused that the children speak in English to the objects we pass, but when we pass people, 9 times out of 10 they greet them with "hola".

As teachers we search the paths in front of us for what will give us the most shade, but the children don't seem to notice the heat. The fire trucks going by- two today- take precedent over everything else- leading us into a chorus of "whooo, hoooo, whoooo, hooooo" for another block.

Spontaneously someone begins to count, and the others join in, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10!" over and over again. They swing the rope in rhythm with their choral counting. A counting activity that was completely child-led. If any adult had attempted to start the chant it would have been abandoned after getting to 4. But since it was started by the little boy with big brown eyes at the end of the rope- everyone else joined in.

One boy leans down to grab a small unseen item from the sidewalk and a chorus of "look with your eyes" arises from his friends. That turns into song too, until we see the basketball court. "My basketball court!" a girl shrieks, and her friends argue back, "My basketball court!" "Mine!" "Mine!" Until someone hits someone else over the questioned ownership of a city structure that is too big to be grasped and held in a two year old's fist.

Distracted by the colorful flags flying above us, we start to call out colors, "red, black, blue" until all hurt feelings have disappeared. We walk back, chanting nursery rhymes, until one friend reaches up and smacks the teacher in front of him.

She turns and sighs. "They are training him to be a man" she says, shaking her head at the little one, whose hard two year old eyes have already moved on, scanning the sidewalk for something new.

Creativity, working memory, & trivial pursuit

If you have ever played Trivial Pursuit against Mr. Lipstick, most likely you have lost. I try my hardest to always be on his team, just because, against him, there is little hope. I mean, why does anyone walk around with such tiny little facts swimming in their head? Mr. Lipstick doesn't watch much tv, and he doesn't watch any movies, but he can still rock the entertainment category. He's like a trivia freak of nature (and I say with complete and utter love).

In college I hated playing trivial pursuit. Absolutely loathed it. And because I went to one of those colleges that isn't an ivy league school, but most people that go there thought they should have gotten into the ivy league, people played it a lot to prove how smart they were. (It never occurred to me to compare actual grades- I immediately figured that if I couldn't pull random trivia out of my rear end then I wasn't nearly as smart as any of those peeps walking around talking about how they turned down Harvard. Hmmm....)

Anyway, I absolutely assumed that something was wrong with me because I didn't walk around with these little facts swimming around in my brain. I couldn't figure the game out. Really? I was suppose to know every movie Carrie Grant was in so I could identify which one he didn't wear a bow tie? It didn't seem possible.

Then I watched Mr. Lipstick play and I realized that despite the fact he really does know a lot of ridiculous trivia, most of how he plays the game is in his strategy. He reasons things out, he uses what he knows and then pulls what he knows together in order to tease out a guess. (A guess that is usually right). So he's actually not a walking encyclopedia on useless facts. He's pulling information out of his long term memory and pulling it into his working memory, where he can link it together by making connections between what he knows. Because he has random facts in his long-term memory he's able to group facts together, make these connections and distinctions. He does not know every answer to every question. He is able, however, to answer questions correctly because he's able to play with the facts that are already in his long term memory.

The Newsweek article on creativity made me think about playing trivial pursuit with my husband. When we're memorizing facts and trying to get children to regurgitate them on a test, we might be putting information into their long term memory (we hope...) but we're not actually teaching them how to use that information to make connections, problem solve, and apply what they know to other tasks. In fact, sometimes they're not even able to use that information on a test because although they know the information in one form, they aren't able to pull it into working memory and use it to answer an awkwardly worded question. They know the trivia, but not the strategy.

Our education obsession with accountability and standardized testing has left us teaching scared. We are giving them facts but not anything to do with those facts. And somehow (which is a post for another time, when we teach scared, people seem to like it. It makes people more comfortable to know that we're teaching facts because it's clear, defined, and controlled. It seems measurable and makes everyone accountable.)

We have to put information into our student's long term memory. Whether it is the names of the letters, the sounds they make, or the laws of physics, there is some information our kids need to have in their back pockets that they can pull out without even thinking about it. Allowing them to have this information tucked away frees up more room in their working memory for them to be creative, make connections, analyze new information, and problem solve. But knowing the information isn't enough. If we only teach to knowing the information you are left with me, depressed college student, listening to a trivial pursuit question, thinking there is something wrong with me because I didn't automatically know that small detail even though I know information on the topic of the question being asked. I didn't know how to use what I knew in any successful way. I might as well have not known the information at all.

The Newsweek article points out that a Creative Quotient predicts what a student can do more than an Intelligence Quotient. It makes sense. It doesn't necessarily matter what you know- it's whether or not you are able to use & apply what you know.

The article also sites that creativity can be taught with practice over time. It makes it essential to not just be teaching our students facts, but also teaching them how to be creative. How to think, not just what to think.

Of course, once our students know how to use their long term knowledge in new situations, and how to apply it, analyze it, transfer it, question it, compare it, and connect it- they'll be better off at answering standardized assessments. Like Mr. Lipstick, they wont have to know every answer, but they'll know enough to reason out the answer. And isn't that what we want our students to be able to do- use reason?

The Newsweek article's stance on creativity made me think of Daniel Willingham's book, Why Don't Students Like School? which I read a few weeks ago. Willingham makes the case that in order for our children to be able to problem solve, they need facts in their long term memory.

So as teachers, our tasks (along with keeping them safe, making them good citizens, collecting lunch money, etc, etc) is to:

1) Determine which facts are essential for our students to know

2) Get those facts into our students' long term memory to free up room in their working memory

3) Teach them to think creatively so they can use what's in their long-term memory along with new information, in order to problem solve and think quickly within their working memory.

Now, just how do we do that?

Creativity

Have you read Newsweek's article on the Creativity Crisis?

If not, you should.

These are a few quotes from the article that struck me:

1. "The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." (when discussing a creativity assessment developed by Paul Torrance.)

2. "Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling." (this falling trend began in 1990).

3. " A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future."

4. "Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach."

5. " When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ” "

6. "University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern."

I have so much to say on all of this that it's far greater than one blog post...

social skills, inclusion, & success

With my busy schedule of napping, volunteering, napping, reading for pleasure, and um, napping, I've managed to take an entire week to blog about this article I read last Sunday in the Washington Post.

An 18 year old with Asperger's Syndrome was arrested for loitering outside a library. The exact details on the story seem a bit fuzzy. It seems too be the police's side verse the mother's (who wasn't there). So what the boy was actually arrested for is tough to put a finger on. Did he threaten police like the police claim, or did the police react inappropriately to his race and his odd behavior?

For an educator, the details don't necessarily matter. I can't shake the story, perhaps because it brings up the same questions in Jodi Piccoult's fictional book, House Rules, where a boy with autism is arrested for murder. Yet, with Piccoult's book we could tell ourselves it was fiction and not worry about it much more. Yet this is real, and reminds us that innocent or not, our children with special needs have to live in the 'real world'. Are we doing enough to prepare them? How do we prepare them for how to deal with police and other authority figures? How do we help them understand reading social cues enough to not endanger themselves when they are outside of our care? Can we teach them to advocate for themselves when they are in stressful situations? Will they understand the importance of advocating for themselves with authority figures?

I'm always an advocate of teaching social skills. But when I really examine my teaching, I have to admit, I tend to lean toward academics over everything else. It's not that I don't teach social skills- it's that when it comes down to what is important- learning to read always wins.

In kindergarten and first grade I feel like learning to read is essential- and not only is it essential, but every child MUST learn to read. If they can only do one thing- either sit quietly or read, I'll choose reading every day. It's a nonnegotiable. We will learn to read.

But when have I sacrificed social skills and survival skills for academics? We all do it, after all, we've been hired to teach. Our job is not to make sure that our children are prepared to handle being arrested in a social appropriate way.

Except, in special education, it kind of is our job.

And when do you teach it? If I don't do it in first grade 'cause we're learning to read, then do you get it in second grade? They're busy polishing up those reading skills to get ready for testing in third grade. And after that, it's the tests are what become non-negotiable. There is no time for anything else. And with inclusion (and don't get me wrong, I love our full-inclusion model), when do we teach these straight forward skills that typically developing children do not need to be taught? When do we teach strategies for dealing with authority figures, how to stay calm in a crowded public situation, how to advocate for your own needs when you are stressed?

The ironic thing with autism is that the higher functioning the child is, the more we keep them with their peers. Which is how it should be, 95% of the time. But the higher functioning someone is, the more promise they have of living a successful life in society, making those social skills they struggle with essential for them to fully meet their potential. People with high functioning autism in society are less likely to have had any social skills coaching- and most likely that will lead them to missing out on opportunities, rubbing others the wrong way, and in some cases, ending up in dangerous situations that could have been avoided with the right amount of social skills training.

But when do we do it? We don't want to keep our children away from their same-age peers just because of their disability, but we do want them to be successful- not just academically, but socially as well.

How do we prepare our children with Asperger's to not just be successful academically, but also be successful navigating the real world? How do we, as special educators, help our students to never end up arrested over a misunderstanding due to their disability?

published!

Last August I blogged about a little boy I taught years ago, and my journey with him in our year together as we worked together on his behavior. Responsive Classroom contacted me about turning the post into an article for their newsletter. Needless to say, I was thrilled and honored since I usually read every word in RC's newsletter, devouring it for all the great ideas it usually holds.

We spent the last year tweaking, re-writing, and then re-writing it again. I absolutely loved working with an editor and seeing all the different ways the original piece of writing could be driven in so many different directions before finally settling on one piece.

The print addition is due out in August, but the on-line version is now available!