Archive for: October 2008

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.”