When you enter the Museum of Tolerance In Los Angeles California you will watch a video on the vast variety of prejudices all designed to show you that everyone has a few.   And then you will go into the main part of the museum through one of two doors.   One door is marked prejudiced the other door is marked unprejudiced.  The door marked unprejudiced is locked in case anyone misses the point.   Occasionally a few people will demand to enter through the locked unprejudiced door.   

Each one of us has biases whether we admit it or not.  Our brain is designed with blind spots making it difficult to question our own thinking.  It’s hard to see when we are wrong even when the wrong thinking is made clear like the locked unprejudiced door at the Tolerance Museum.  

Prejudice is a paradox because it’s the greatest thing that divides us and also the greatest thing that connects us because it’s something we all share. National Public Radio did a segment recently in which they examined their coverage of both presidential candidates.   They had received an enormous amount of mail from viewers from both parties criticizing the amount and type of coverage given to the opposition.   So they examined the number of hours given to both parties and type of coverage.  The results were surprising; both candidates had received almost the same amount of airtime. Despite what some viewers thought their coverage seemed to be balanced.  

Teaching tolerance to children might be any teacher’s greatest challenge because before this universal inclusion can begin the teacher must first acknowledge and accept his or her own biases. Teachers must look at their own thinking to begin to expose these blind spots.   One good way to start is next time you are tempted to use a stereotype to explain someone remember to someone else you are a stereotype too. 

This same introspective thinking can be practiced with students.   Create informal games in which students can label and then unlabel the stereotypes they believe about each other.   Allow them to recognize how limited stereotypes are.  Learning tolerance is essentially knowing the importance of appreciating the differences of others and how to treat every individual with the same level of compassion, kindness and respect. 

The Internet is a great resource for teachers wanting to incorporate tolerance lessons into the curriculum

• Education World at www.educationworld.com - has a lesson planning articles on teaching tolerance with five lesson plans
• Scholastic Magazine on Diversity scholastic.com/professional/teachdive/ offers lesson plans and professional resources to help teachers develop a diversity curriculum
• Teaching Tolerance Magazine www.tolerance.org/teach/indes.jsp distributes information to support the efforts of K-12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity.

This year’s presidential election was an historical event.  For many Americans this was the first time they felt empowered by the election process.   Unfortunately after the limelight fades many will allow the work of government to continue without interest or input.   The attitude and approach to civic education is an often-neglected one, yet it plays a critical role in determining how children develop, how they will view themselves as citizens and later apply their learning to community involvement. 

How can we teach our children to respect the rule of law if they do not understand the reasons for the rule?  Children must learn the importance of participatory democracy and they can only do that by understanding the history behind the struggle for a representative government and the right to vote.

Civics education does not have a benchmark standard in many of our schools.  Yet teachers can incorporate civic lessons into many parts of the curriculum.  In the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss played a band teacher.   He captured the importance of civics in this speech.

He said, “We need to remind our kids and ourselves of the importance of where we come from.  We have to paint a picture of republican democracy that is as romantic and irresistible as it really is.  We have to teach our children our history, our mythology, our culture, with passion, with wit, with rigor; and by doing that, we will create the possibility of that civic virtue that ties thinking individuals to their communities.”

Some simple lessons for teachers are:

1. The Day I Was Born – students practice online research by using their birth date to determine historical and literary figures that share their birthdays.  Student can compare their figure to current day American and imagine how their person would act in today’s current political climate.
2. Why do civilizations fall?  Students can do online research on ancient civilizations and construct timelines for their demise, make compassions to current day problems, and hypothesis solutions.
3. The right to vote.  Students can chronicle the struggles of women gaining the right to vote in American and other countries, and the civil rights movement.
4. Peace Corps project.  Visit Worldwise schools at www.peacecorps.gov/wws/ for lesson plans and information to connect with Peace Corps volunteers.  Students can gain understanding on this global scale community involvement.
5. Arrest.  The purpose of the activity “arrest: is to give students first hand knowledge about an arrest of a classmate and their subsequent trial.  Students become active participants in the legal process as they become witnesses, jurors and defendants in a trial simulation.

Encouraging active citizenship among the young requires more than just election year reminders to study the issues or watch the candidates.   It means teaching students the founding principles and understanding how they should apply today.    Allow students to practice freedom by giving them a real voice in shaping the school culture.  Creating a free student press and encouraging freedom of expression.   Schools are the best place to teach students how to engage in vigorous robust debate while keeping a tone of civility and respect.   And last students must practice tolerance by learning about other world religions and cultures.   Ignorance and hatred are the greatest threats to our democracy. 

Recently I heard Barack Obama talk about his early childhood.  He recalled how his mother would get up at 4:30 in the morning to get ready for work.  His mother got him up as well to review his lessons for the day.  He said as an eight-year-old child he would complain about this early rising and his mother replied that she didn’t like it any more than he did but that it was necessary.  

Barack Obama’s mother was creating a habit for her young son.  She was instilling in him the importance of learning and that the momentary hardship of getting up early was part of becoming a successful person.  His mother had a clear understanding of the destination.  She was beginning with the end in mind. 

In parenting if you want to raise responsible self disciplined children you have to keep the end clearly in mind as you interact with your children on a daily basis.  You can’t behave toward them in ways that undermine their self-discipline or their self-esteem.

Anytime you make a plan in life you are beginning with the end in mind.  Planning a trip you determine the destination and the best way to travel before you leave.  Planting a garden you plan it out before you plant.   The end in mind is the creation of a desired future.  How you get there is taking the responsible steps and living in harmony with the plan. 

Beginning with the end in mind is based on personal leadership.  Unfortunately in many schools directing students to a desired outcome is based on management.   Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things. 

So how can a school truly direct their students with the end in mind?  One simple way is to have a dedicated program of character education.  It must be consistent and deliberate and everyone from the youngest student to the oldest staff member must be part of it.  

Creative World Connections daily messages are one such program.   It is a simple tool to give students direction and purpose.  Both of these help create self-awareness.  With self-awareness students discover their imagination and conscience.  Their decisions can be in harmony with doing the right things.

You have to be amazed at the profound influence that Barack Obama’s mother had on him.   Her end in mind helped inspire a person who in turn inspires others other single day.  

The potential for greatness lies in all of us.   Oliver Wendell Homes said, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” 

One often-ignored fact about learning is:  if you are free to fail you are free to try.   It’s not the skills you actually have that determine how you feel but the ones you think you have.   This idea at first glance might seem like a form of self-delusion but on the contrary if you believe you are capable you get into the flow of creativity and learning in any activity.    If no one is telling you you’re not good enough you are free to just explore your possibilities.

Think how empowering this thinking can be in school.   Most children begin their school careers at the age of five with a mixture of excitement and fear.  The excitement is about being big, riding the bus, having school stuff like a backpack as they join the ranks of the “older kids.”    The fear is connected to the idea of failure.   Unfortunately for some children they experience the failure first and it leads them to doubt their own abilities.  They are now not good enough.

Why does the school culture create this thinking? 

It’s not intentional but the language of school itself has more negative words than positive ones.  It begins with the rules punctuated with the word “don’t.”  Don’t create limits and judgment.    Other negative language comes in the form of assessment, children are rated and the rating in the form of grades begets competition. 

The Latin root of the word compete is competure which means to seek with.  During the Golden Age in turn of the century Paris artists lived and worked in each other’s pockets.  All new innovations, new trends were immediately known and could freely be incorporated into the work of others.   There was a lack of envy.  So instead of taking possession of ideas, they shared.  

Teachers are fortunate because they can create the type of learning culture they want in their classrooms.   To help students become more adventurous in their learning begin by:

• Finding opportunities for cooperative learning groups.  Encourage students to explore answers together, help them share and listen by modeling that in the larger group.
• Make all classroom rules begin with Do.   Look for ways to affirm and reward positive behaviors.  Invite students to contribute to the good list and make a habit of using more encouraging words.
• Devote one day a week to “fun learning.”  Fun learning is based on what if thinking.  What if can be applied to any content area.   Take a social studies lesson and ask students to rewrite the past with a what if hypothesis.   Students can be unencumbered and allowed to explore new possibilities.
• Be patient with students freewheeling thinking.  Keep in mind a lot of crap will be created but crap plays an important role in discovery.  It’s the fertilizer that allows the good stuff to grow. It’s an important ingredient in all-creative thinking and in all discovery.       

What do you tell yourself? 

Almost every waking minute of every day you are listening to the same re-runs in your mind.  It’s recycled chatter about your life.   Perhaps you tell yourself that sometime in the future you can let go and relax, start changing, or be happier.  Maybe your re-run is playing over and over conversations about your fears and anxieties, or reviewing grievances and making past offenses stronger and more meaningful, instead of letting go.

Whatever it is that you tell yourself it’s not original material.  The sad truth about what you tell you is most self-talk tends to limit and restrict instead of liberate and expand. 

It’s difficult to not become a victim of your own thinking.  But once in awhile a story catches your attention and allows you to re-think the possibilities. 

Today I heard one such story on Good Morning America.  It was the story of a remarkable little boy named Mattie Stepanek.   Mattie died just three weeks before his 14^th birthday.  He suffered with an incurable disease called MDA, which interrupts normal functioning like breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.  Because of this Mattie lived on a ventilator in a specially equipped wheelchair.  But that’s not what is remarkable about this boy.  He was a self-appointed peacemaker and poet.   He is the author of seven books and become an inspiration to millions simply because he embraced the idea that every day is a gift and he made the most of it. 

On Saturday October 18 The Mattie J T Stephanek Park was dedicated in Rockville Maryland.   The park is a 26 acres recreational facility.    A peace garden with Mattie’s statue is open including benches with plaques and quotes from his books and speeches.  

You have to wonder how so young a boy could accept the severe limits of his short life and become such a powerful inspiration.   Mattie was an original thinker.  What he told himself was to seize the moment, seize the day and see what develops.  His body limited him but his mind ran through boundaries most of us will never cross. 

What you tell yourself is important because your thinking becomes who you are and it influences others.   As a teacher your influence is substantial.  Every day you have a captive audience of learners who can take their lead from you.  They are open to be inspired and lead into new ways of thinking.    Let what you tell yourself be empowering, tell yourself how important your job is.  Today travel with your students to Mattie’s website at www.mattieonline.com.   Who knows what they might begin to tell themselves.

How much sunlight do you eat every day?  The caloric sun content of your food is based on where your food is on the food chain.  If you are eating mostly whole foods with no processing you are consuming sunlight, which through the process of photosynthesis allows for plants to grow and absorb nutrients from the soil.

Most Americans have a diet sadly lacking in sunlight, the average American diet consists of one half pound of meat per day, corn, soy and sugar which are consumed as ingredients in highly processed food products.  This low nutrient high calorie diet contributes to the growing health care problems in the US. 

Almost fifty years ago President John F Kennedy created a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children.  The president’s council on physical fitness was implemented.  He elevated the importance of physical education making it a requirement in schools.  Today American children are lacking in a high sunlight diet.  The center for disease control estimates that one in three children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes.  What’s needed right now is a new initiative to improve the diets and overall health of children.  

The same commitment to fitness can be applied to a commitment to nutrition or “edible education” as Alice Water’s author of the slow food movement phrased it.    Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in school.

Schools can make lunch part of the curriculum, based on the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill.   Every primary school student should be taught the basics of growing and cooking food, and then enjoying shared meals.  The only way to change the current food culture from the meat, corn and soy based chicken nuggets and fries to one of fresh vegetables and fruit is give children the right lessons about food.  These lessons can only be learned if children are allowed to grow, cook and taste what’s being taught. 

This thinking presents a radical change in the status quo.  In the last thirty years Americans have been seduced into eating food that’s fast and easy with little concern given to how it was produced and the health benefits it gives.  It is no coincidence that as spending on health care went from five percent to sixteen percent of national income that spending on food has fallen from eighteen percent to less than ten percent of household income.  Cheap food prices have taken the idea of quality food off the national agenda.  Unfortunately we cannot expect to reform health care without confronting the public health disaster that is the modern American diet.

Every school in American right now has an opportunity to set a new standard, to begin it’s own initiative in educating children who will be healthy consumers demanding and expecting more from the food they eat.   Once schools plant their own seeds of change they can lobby their local districts to do the same.    ”Be the change you want to see,” and begin now. 

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered, the point it to discover them.” 

Galileo Galilei

Are you leading your students on the path of discovery?  

The commitment to learning needs to be more than just obtaining competency in a certain subject area, it needs to be a desire to know more.   A teacher who leads their students into the unknown nurtures that desire. 

So what is the unknown?   It’s the great mystery of life, whether that is how the universe came into being or how numbers, order and sequence affect our daily lives.  Once the search begins the mystery unfolds.

The current bestseller list is full of titles that explore the mystery.

• The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, is about how randomness rules our lives.  The author explores how chance and probability affect our financial markets and our own individual choices.

• Change your Brain; Change your Life by Daniel G Amen.  The book gives instructions for conquering anxiety, depression and anger

• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.   The author devotes his book on the cognitive miracles of music.  It is a study about the pathologies of musical response and what they teach us about the anatomy of the human brain.

• The Power of Limits by Gyorgy Doczi.  Explores the discovery of patters in nature, and how these patterns are repeated again and again. 

• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  A book about how we think without thinking.  It explores our choices and how we come to make them.

All of these books give their readers something more to think about.  Perhaps that’s a good position for every teacher, give your students just a bit more to think about, give them a glimpse of the bigger picture help them become an explorer. 

Galileo is remembered not just because he put forth the model of the sun-centered universe but also because he stood alone against the authority of the science of his day and of the church.   He represented the humble reasoning of one man and was strong in that conviction.  

For many teachers Friday is the best day of the week.  It means relief from the hectic schedule of early mornings and late nights, from emotional meltdowns with students and sometimes parents and struggles with learning and discipline.   You have to wonder is it possible to have that liberated Friday feeling on a Monday? 

It is but it requires a disciplined mind and a willingness to embrace a new kind of thinking.   Creating your day means you believe in the power of intentional thinking.  That you believe that the thoughts you have when you start your day will actually affect what happens.   This paradigm shift is a life altering change.  

The power of intentions already shapes what you do.   It also shapes the physical world around you.  If you intend to mow the grass, you eventually mow it and the grass itself is changed.  Intention means you have a plan or design in mind.  Your plan has an outcome.   The power of self directed intention is a creative process and you share it with everyone on this planet because each one of us has intentions for good or ill.   Your intentions are communicated through you interactions with others.  Your words and actions along with a multitude of non-verbal cues let others know what you desire. 

Imagine the power of this kind of thinking at work in your classroom.  You imagine a day in which students are excited about learning, a day in which kindness and respect become contagious, a day in which your colleagues are excited about best practices and share without ego or judgment.   This day allows for the best in education, because all those words in your mission statement don’t just take up space on your school’s website they are translated into actions.

Creating your day is not just idle daydreaming; it’s the possibility for a better today.  Before you dismiss this completely try it, create your own paradigm shift, imagine what you want  and then act as if it’s already happening.    

When you do this you become part of a growing movement in thinking.  You have changed the paradigm of what you see, how you think and what you do.  Your worldview has just expanded in an infinite number of ways.  

George Bernard Shaw said,  “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don’t believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances that they want and if they can’t find the, make them.” 

Americans look to their doctors to be healthy.   A doctor’s advice is considered gospel, you’ll often hear “my doctor said.”   The irony of this is that the greatest advances in public health did not come from individual doctoring but rather in increasing awareness about health practices and sanitation.   That awareness is responsible for increasing life expectancy in the United States because information is more powerful than any single doctors visit. 

Tragically right now in American’s public schools health awareness is at risk.  Currently there is no dedicated funding for comprehensive sex education in our schools.  Schools have become hostage to political and religious ideology about what’s best for all children. The abstinence only curriculum guarantees that our youth will not learn reproductive information that could potentially not just save their lives but also determine the direction of their lives. 

Today one in four American teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. Nearly half of black teenage girls have at least one sexually transmitted infection.  The Center for Disease Control and Prevention also reported in the study that for the first time in fifteen years the rate of teenage pregnancy has significantly increased.    The United States has high rates of unintended pregnancy, abortion, and STD’s.   And what is our answer to reverse this situation?

Federal funding to schools limits and denies information in our sex education programs.  Abstinence only programs ignore the fundamental precept that sex is powerful in our lives and that it does have consequences.   Education is not taking this problem seriously enough.  Much of what is learned in school is not just learned for the present moment it’s learned to take students through a lifetime of choices.  It’s learned to give children information on how to base decisions.  Decisions about sexual activity happen at all stages of life not just during the teen years. 

What can educators do to improve this situation? 

Become a powerful and compassionate voice for change in your school.  First recognize that all parents fear the possibility of their children having a sexual life, and their greatest desire is that their children delay sexual activity until later into young adulthood.  Often these fears and desires keep parents acting in the most proactive way by demanding a comprehensive program.  The principles of abstinence programs do give a voice to the importance of relationships and communication but they totally lack the substance of information to help children make informed decisions and avoid the consequences.  

Teachers have the ability to engage with parents on the most personal and intimate level.  They both have a child’s best interest at heart.   Teachers can begin a dialogue with parents especially those at the middle school level when students are first given reproductive information.  

So what’s a good way to start?

Approach this taboo subject by bringing awareness to parents about the minefield of influence their children will navigate.  Teens have this perception of being immune of being invulnerable.  Many don’t know what risks they face; they can’t make decisions in the dark because they aren’t properly prepared to make them.   Myths about pregnancy continue like urban legends.  Some girls believe that drinking or douching with coke with prevent a pregnancy.   This type of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen. 

If parents see their child’s teacher and their child’s school as a partner in the future of their children perhaps they will trust educators to make decisions on what’s best for all children instead of politicians.   

How many school principals can say that they have said to their disruptive students, “I’ll see you at your house tonight,” and mean it?

Geoffrey Canada is an education and social-services reformer who leads the path breaking Harlem Children’s Zone Project.  One of the chief tenets of his program is the belief that children respond to the consistent leadership of the adults in charge.  That when the adults in charge are unafraid to deal with the serious issues in a school that children will respond with respect to this leadership.  Canada says, “word gets out and once students realize that you will be at their house, behaviors begin to change.”  He admits it’s hard work but work that pays off. 

Early on in his education career Canada learned that no child could thrive in a school in which there is violence or fear.  He believes all school principals should take on the role of being the new sheriff in town. A sheriff that is both loving and firm.

In the Harlem project violence is not tolerated and that means all violence.  If a child gets into a fight outside of school it is still regarded as an offense to the school’s code of conduct.   All the adults who work in these schools are also highly involved in the community.  The schools offer an integrated approach to education.  Students receive both academic and social services.  Families are offered counseling, after school programs and health plans. 

In what he describes as a conveyor belt approach to education children begin school with an intensive all day pre K program.  Parents are also involved with workshops on learning skills to improve their roles in their child’s life.

In these schools underprivileged children are thriving.  But it’s only because it’s founders have embraced the “whatever it takes” mantra.  They have created a holistic system and sealed up all the cracks in which a child can fall into. 

In order for this project to have prospered they had to experience horrible outcomes year after year.  Students whose futures were no employment and often jail.  No school in American wants to face failure of that extreme.  Yet without the type of consistent extraordinary interventions that outcome can become a possibility.  

Any school facing a crisis in dealing with student behaviors needs to first unite their entire staff in solving the problem.  All staff has to agree to sign on to extra-ordinary measures.  All staff must regard their own role as an adult leader in the school.  Students will see the consistent and logical consequences to bad behavior.  It’s important to embrace this type of measure with a loving heart, so children feel safe and supported.   The school becomes an extension of a loving parent and the students who go there will prosper.