Getting Ready for a Wedding!

As everyone else is going back to school, we are getting ready for the wedding of our youngest son in a few days.  It is going to take place at the family farm that has been in Ashley's family for five generations.  Ashley, (who is flying home from working at School 33 in Buffalo right now), has worked for 6 months with a team of his brothers, in between everything else, to restore the classic, white Vermont barn to be wedding ready.  Hard to believe how transformed it is. It takes attention to so many details to plan a wedding... a joyous, fabulous, amazing event!  When we put the manuscript for In the Spirit of the Studio in the mail on August 15th, the very next hour I started on wedding planning full time.  Much anticipation, imagination, choices, putting all the pieces together like a puzzle, getting ready for the arrival of friends and family from far and wide.

The first event in the new barn was the memorial service for Ashley's father which was in early June.  This barn is serving as a place to celebrate important passages in the life a family.  We found a piece by Antoine de St. Exupery that expresses so much of what we are feeling right now.

In a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another up, the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds.

Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between generations. 

Therefore, we do not neglect the ceremonies of our passage: when we wed and when we die, and when we are blessed with a child; when we depart and when we return, when we plant and when we harvest. 

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. 

Wish us luck! We will see you in September when we will be ready to go back to school ourselves.

What Do Baseball and Soccer/Futbol Have to Do with It?

What Do Baseball and Soccer/Futball Have to Do with It? Those of you who have tracked this blog over the years will recognize a pattern in the title.  I have a passion for sports, and sometimes I see connections between sports and our life’s work, education.  (For another related blog click here.)  In this case, the recent three weeks of World Cup Soccer games and then this week’s Baseball All-Star Game got me wondering about soccer and baseball and schools.

David Brooks of New York Times is the catalyst for the following thinking.  On July 10th he wrote a fine piece, Baseball or Soccer?  Brooks sees this difference between baseball and soccer: the former is individual while the latter is collective.  He writes, “Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities.  Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a ground is primarily an individual achievement.  The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.”

This is in contrast to soccer, where Brooks cites Simon Critchley who writes, “Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part assigned to them, which means they have to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.”

It strikes me (pardon the pun), that the predominant model for schools is that they are like baseball, essentially a “collection of individual activities.”  Teachers are the players and administrators are the managers.  They act relatively independently: teachers in the silos of their respective disciplines and administrators behind the closed doors of their offices.  Students are the balls thrown and batted around.

I have seen and now work to create a different model in schools, like soccer, a “collective” model.  Teachers and administrators and students are ALL players.  Each understands the part they need to play, AND they understand that their part is essentially interdependent with every other part.  The teachers understand that their “discipline” is related to every other discipline and every other aspect of the school community.  Teachers look for those connections.  Administrators, too.  And, students are not the objects of the drill, the ball in the game, rather they are collaborative participants with the teachers and administrators.  The ball becomes the idea(s) understood and created, the community generated.

When schools work like baseball, the results are measured in individual statistics.  When schools work like soccer, the results are apparent in both individual performance and collective achievement.  Baseball schools send individuals on to the next league, minor or major.  Soccer schools graduate citizens for the future.

Sweet Summer

We are in Maine, on an island.  The only way to get here is to take a ferry and that is nice.  Nice to leave so much behind.  Today is a breezy, bright and beautiful day, the first day of July.  In many ways, this is the first day of summer for us, first day to fully embrace the freedom and sea air and fragrance of rugosa rose that summer brings. We worked hard in schools and alongside educators right up until the last day of June.  Now, all of us who work in schools have earned some free time. I am transported to my childhood when I am in Maine.  Everything seems so familiar, as if I have always known it...the sound of wind in the pines, the white caps on the dark ocean, the pure song of the white throated sparrow, the tart taste of blueberries.  Because I spent many delicious summer months on the Maine coast when I was little, I am instantly happy here.

Tonight, we will cook lobster, laugh, go outside to find constellations and fire flies, and love being with dear friends.

Wherever you are, we wish you a lovely summer, full of all the things that make you feel relaxed, rested, happy and free.

And, Happy Independence Day! Louise and Ashley

From a Wonderful Newsletter...ExchangeEveryday

Every week, and sometimes more often, I receive a newsletter from Exchange Press called ExchangeEveryday.  My friend and colleague, Carol Hillman forwards it to me and I love getting it from her.  Recently, I officially signed up which is easy to do. This newsletter is filled with thoughtful articles and references on many subjects of interest to teachers and parents of young children.  The article below is one example. A few days ago, I forwarded it on to our other friends and colleagues at the Cramer Institute because it is so aligned with their work in asset-based thinking.  Kathy Cramer's new book, Lead Positive, is rich with stories about what can happen if we look for assets and build on them in our lives and when we work with others.

Ashley and I have been influenced by the work of the Cramer Institute and it is now fundamental to the way we work in schools.  This way of working seems to create energy and momentum in many ways, as well as a sense of possibility and reassurance and trust.  Below, find a simple story from ExchangeEveryDay that illustrates the power of starting with assets rather than deficits.  May we all take this way of being in the world to heart.

Supervision Advice from 1936 June 2, 2014A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows. -John Powell"Make the fault seem easy to correct."  This is one of the principles from Dale Carnegie's classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Although this book was written in 1936, in 2013 it was still listed as a one of the nation's best-selling management books.  As Carnegie does throughout the book, he uses stories to illustrate this principle:"A bachelor friend of mine, about forty years old, became engaged and his fiancée persuaded him to take some belated dancing lessons.  'The Lord knows I needed some dancing lessons,' he confessed as he told me the story, 'for I danced just as I did when I first started twenty years ago.  The first teacher I engaged probably told me the truth.  She said I was all wrong; I would just have to forget everything and begin all over again.  But that took the heart out of me.  I had no incentive to go on.  So I quit her."'The next teacher may have been lying, but I liked it.  She said nonchalantly that my dancing was a bit old-fashioned perhaps, but the fundamentals were all right, and she assured me I wouldn't have any trouble learning a few new steps.  The first teacher had discouraged me by emphasizing my mistakes.  The new teacher did the opposite.  She kept praising the things I did right and minimizing my errors..."'Now my common sense tells me I will always be a fourth-rate dancer, yet... I know I am a better dancer than I would have been if she hadn't told me I had a natural sense of rhythm.  That encouraged me.  That gave me hope.  That made me want to improve.'"

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leafs a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

This week I went for a spring walk on the Trail Around Middlebury, an 18-mile path that encircles the town and links several hundred acres of town land and conserved properties, as well as schools and other local landmarks. The trail is open year-round to area residents and visitors.  The TAM’s continuing success is owed greatly to the generous permission of private landowners.

Boston and Vermont give us the chance to have two different experiences in time and space of the arc of the seasons.  This year's spring in Vermont is at least two weeks behind Boston and seems particularly glorious and gentle after such a very long, cold and hard winter.  Also, it is a bit easier to get into the woods in Vermont to see the wildness of spring.  On the trail, I was struck by the abundance of spring wildflowers, white trillium and yellow trout lily and the flowering serviceberry, all delicate and seemingly small treasures poking out of the brown carpet of leaves.

Accompanied by a oven bird on my walk, I was serenaded by the bird that says, "teacher, teacher, teacher!" in a loud voice.  I could even see him flying and alighting on branches just above me.  All the while, I was thankful to really see what was around me and to take my time and to love this spring landscape and all its sounds and sensations and delights.  This enjoyment and happiness in the natural world is largely due to my mother and all that she taught me by her side in the out- of-doors. Rachel Carson, in The Sense of Wonder, writes that we each need at least one adult who loves the natural world as our guide when we are young, and we also need lots of time to explore and play and imagine in natural landscapes. Both of these things I had and for that I am grateful.

A book that I could not put down is Ann Pelo's, The Goodness of Rain, Developing an Ecological Identity in Young Children.  Ann takes us on a year-long journey with her and a toddler in her care, as they explore outside every day delighting in discovery and adventure.  This book brought me home to my own beginnings and confirmed our natural inheritance as human beings to bond to the natural world in all its myriad forms.  We highly recommend this book! I sent it to my friend and author, Carol Hillman and she told me that she ordered 12 copies and was going to send them to parents it as baby gifts.

This subject is also the focus of the Opal Summer Symposium in June where I will be a part of the team that presents and reflects with participants on how we might best nurture children's relationship with the natural world.  Come if you can!

Tonight the peepers are peeping, the full moon is rising and the apple blossoms and lilacs are blooming.  Their fragrance fills the night.  May you be enfolded in the gentle spring wherever you are.