I’m A Grownup And It Makes Me Crazy To Be Treated Like A Child Who Doesn’t Know Who She Is Or What She Wants.*

I was the kind of kid that had some talents or ability, but it never came out in school. • Francis Ford Coppola

In my experience, school is mostly about teachers telling students they’re not smart, they can’t learn, or they didn’t do it right, and proving it through tests and dozens of other classroom interactions that show students who’s boss. • Pam Parshall, former community college instructor and student advocate, 2005

My mother loved learning, but she hated school. She read voraciously and kept current on what was happening in the world until her death at age 89. She philosophized and enjoyed talking about big ideas. She was a talented musician who began playing the piano by ear before she started kindergarten, her skill discovered after one of her older sister’s piano lessons when my mother sat at the piano and began to play the exercise her sister Mildred was supposed to be learning, but couldn’t master. My aunt hated piano lessons and quit shortly afterward. My mother became the teacher’s youngest pupil.

For more than two decades, I’ve been asking people when learning was fun for them, and here’s what my mother told me in 2001 when I asked her:

I just survived school. It had nothing whatsoever to do with who I wanted to be. My life in school was always about who and what I should be and keeping me pointed in that direction. You’re young and you don’t know better, so you buy into it, and even though you’re doing well, you know in your heart you’re not making the grade.

She went on to describe how little recognition her years in school provided for the things she had talents for or was interested in and how much of her time was focused instead on what she didn’t do well, but would need, teachers told her, in some ill-defined future that didn’t bear any resemblance to what she envisioned for her life. “I struggled with many traditional school subjects, always being told I would need those things to be successful in life, but I never did,” she said.

Throughout the Second World War she supported herself with her music. As a single mother after her first divorce, she supported the two of us with her music. Her music allowed her to remain in her dream house after she and my stepfather divorced. It was her music that kept her moving forward many months after doctors predicted she would be dead. It was her music that was her gift to the world, that brought her a lifetime of joy. “This is something I do well. I know my music touches people,” she told me as she shared stories of people she’d connected with because of her talent.

My mother could never understand how I could go back to school again and again as an adult. “I’d never survive,” she told me. Sometimes I’m surprised I survived it too. Sometimes I’m not sure that I did. It is hard to stay grounded in the possibility of what school can be when you are surrounded by messages of multiple kinds communicating what it is not.

I was recently in a meeting where one of the values I didn’t check on a “good work”-related list was honesty. In the subsequent conversation, I realized why. I do value honesty—although not the for-your-own-good-and-needlessly-cruel-kind—but when it comes to school, I am often not honest. I have more often been compliant, my smiling acquiescence masking an unruly brain trying to figure out how to bend the system to engage my interests. This is not always possible, and as a teacher I appreciate the difficulties inherent in truly addressing the idiosyncratic needs of individual students, so I do not fault my own teachers.

When you’re an adult and you go back to school, your expectations are colored by the years you’ve previously spent in classrooms. If those experiences were positive, or if you’re a person who doesn’t really mind being part of a system—“just tell me what to do and I’ll do it”—perhaps you don’t mind being an adult student in systems often designed primarily for those who transition seamlessly from high school to college. But if you’ve had some life experience, if you’ve discovered for yourself that some of what you were told by your teachers about “real life” is actually myth, if you previously resented being cooped up in a classroom where your interests were seldom considered, you may be disappointed, disheartened, resentful, and recalcitrant when you encounter more of the same.

You may want to know why you should put up with more of what you know will likely prove to be myth as well. You may believe that this time—when you’re paying—the experience should help you become what you want to be, not what a system thinks you should be. You may want to focus on what you’ve discovered interests you. You may actually believe that you know what is best for you.

I am a teacher. I love my work. I believe in the possibilities of school. I believe in the power of education to change people’s lives. I cherish every educator I know who longs for her or his classroom to offer opportunities for true intellectual engagement coupled with recognition of individual interests and talents. But sometimes I am reminded of how much there is to do to achieve this dream in every classroom and how inadequate I am, even in my own. I want to make a difference, but I am overwhelmed by how much I cannot do. If she were reading this, my mother would tell me that it doesn’t matter what I cannot do. What matters is that I keep doing what I can, no matter how imperfect.

What difference do you want to make? What keeps you motivated to keep trying?

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. • E.M. Forster, British author whose epigraph to his 1910 novel, Howard’s End, is “Only connect.”

In total, I can say that I learned nothing in any school that I attended and see no point in mentioning places where my body sat at a desk and my soul was elsewhere. I wrote some poems in high school but stopped when my mother suggested that I had plagiarized them. • Anne Sexton, from her “Resume 1965,” found among her papers by her daughter

School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn’t want to learn. • Leonardo DiCaprio

* The title quotation is from an adult student who asked to remain anonymous, commenting on her experiences in college and being told by her advisor that he knew what was best for her, 2009.

If They Give You Lined Paper, Write The Other Way *

A box of new crayons!  Now they’re all pointy, lined up in order, bright and perfect.  Soon they’ll be a bunch of ground down, rounded, indistinguishable stumps, missing their wrappers and smudged with other colors.  Sometimes life seems unbearably tragic. • Bill Watterson

In my imagined memories I assert myself, tell my teachers no, refuse to do more of the same-old-thing, confess my ignorance, celebrate my strengths. In reality, I did none of these things. I was physically visible in my beautiful-to-me outfits, but I was intellectually invisible. What good were brains?

I hated school. Even to this day when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids. • Dolly Parton

Ranting digression: The start of school is on my mind because stores are getting ready for day one before I’ve even finished my final day. I’m still teaching. June is too early to start getting the shelves full of school supplies, but they were already appearing. July arrived and red-white-blue was quickly replaced by the colors of back-to-school. This happens every year, and while I can live with turkeys in August and Santa in September, there’s something about pencils and crayons and rulers and lined paper and bottles of glue and all the rest of it lining July shelves that irks me.

Certain peer pressures encourage little fingers to learn how to hold a football instead of a crayon.  Rumors circulate around the schoolyard:  kids who draw or wear white socks and bring violins to school on Wednesdays might have cooties.  I confess to having yielded to these pressures.  • Chris Van Allsburg

Thinking and asking questions only got me in trouble in school and at home. I learned my lessons well just like thousands of other children will learn or have confirmed this year when school starts again. They’ll comply, think convergently, take tests, raise their hands before talking, line up quietly, follow the rules, and learn to play all the games that adults believe good little girls and boys need to know in order to make it through life.

But I hope that they’ll also learn other things. How to think for themselves. How to have ideas. How to question accepted truth. How to ferret out lies. How to create, whether it’s with words or music or movement or with all the marvelous hands-on stuff the world is full of. How to appreciate themselves and how to appreciate others. How to find joy in little things. How to be optimistic and realistic at the same time. How to be themselves and revel in it.

Actually, all education is self-education.  A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education.  What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book.  You must fill in the colors yourself. • Louis L’Amour

What do you hope children will learn in school this fall?

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him [or her] to learn by creating curiosity, s/he will continue the learning process as long as s/he lives.• Clay P. Bedford

* This quotation is attributed to both Juan Ramon Ramirez and William Carlos Williams, so I provide both.

If I Were Queen Of Education, There Would Be Only Two Grades: Cares Or Doesn’t Care

There is, in the act of preparing, the moment when you start caring. • Winston Churchill

Whether you are a student or a teacher or an employee or a parent or a partner or any one of thousand other roles that each of us plays daily, you have to care about what you do if you want to produce good work. You have to love your work—not in the sense that every moment of your engagement with whatever it is that you have to do will bring you unbridled joy—but with an acceptance and a level of involvement that acknowledge its importance in your life.

I’m a teacher. I can tell when students hand in done-on-the-bus work, the kind of stuff that’s cobbled together at the last minute with little thought given to its creation. I’ve written about this before. It brings me no joy to receive this kind of work and even less joy to assess it. Sometimes this worth•less work even meets all the requirements and thus, my assessment can’t be too harsh. The work is likely to pass. But it still makes me sad.

I understand that there is meaning•less work distributed in classrooms all over the world. I understand that students don’t see the point of many things that they are asked to do. Sometimes there are assignments that don’t seem to have much of a point, although if you asked the teacher, there may well be a rationale. As a student, I’ve been asked to do some things that I consider hoopjumping, but I’ve also turned many of those hoops into opportunities to expand the possibilities of exploration in ways that please me and that make what might seem to be an empty exercise into something I cared about and was proud of when I finished.

You can do this too. School or work or parenting or whatever it is that you must do in life is always offering you the opportunity for authentic and enthusiastic engagement. Most teachers won’t tell you this explicitly, but they’re hoping you’ll get it. It’s the secret at the heart of lifelong learning. So your teachers create activities and assignments, design scoring guides, and try to provide helpful guidelines, but they’re also imagining that at least some of you will see beyond these things into the real purpose of education: making your life better, richer, more meaningful.

I’m teaching summer courses and in my on-campus courses everyone is completing a complex yet useful assignment as a major part of the requirements, a plan for their first five days of school. The class includes students who’ve had courses with me before and those who haven’t. Those who haven’t are nervous. What do I want? What will please me? One of the students who’s had other courses with me articulated my philosophy better than I could have. Here’s the essence of Jim Janousek’s comments to the class:

Read the assignment, get the gist of it (what’s the purpose of what you’re being asked to do?), and then produce something that you can use in your classroom (I am teaching teachers right now, but this applies to other student experiences as well—I’ve used much of my undergraduate work as the basis for my professional work). I stress: do something that you can use!

This takes away the anxiety of the assignment and makes it more fun when you’re thinking about implementing those ideas in your own classroom. (There are times when I have very specific goals for students and I am explicit about them, but often the guidelines I provide are simply meant to be helpful for those who don’t have ideas yet about how they want to proceed. I always welcome thoughtful alternatives and suggestions from students.)

What works for you, works for Zinn! (If your intentionality shines through, it’s likely that I will be delighted.)

As long as you put thought and time into your assignment, remember Zinn’s grading scale is cares or doesn’t care. (You got it, Jim!)

What do you need to care about?

We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creting, and adventuring. Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime. • Herbert A. Otto

When I Was Having That Alphabet Soup, I Never Thought That It Would Pay Off.*

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? The guy who wrote that song wrote everything.
• Stephen Wright

I colllect alphabet books. It might seem as though they would be similar, but they are actually extremely varied. Playing with the twenty-six letters that form words in English provides countless brainplay opportunities:

Actually,
Bernice
Cried
During
Every
Friday
Gathering
He
Instigated,
Journaling
Knowingly,
Leaving
Many
Nearly
Overcome,
Pretending
Quietly—
Relieved
Secretly—
That
Unless
Verbiage
Was
Xenophobic
Y
Z

Oh, fudge, these alphabetical things almost always fall apart at xyz, don’t they? But that’s the advantage of doing this sort of thing. I know now, although I cannot currently use it, that xanthous means having yellow or red hair and that a xebec is a small three-masted pirate ship. I am equally fascinated to learn that when I am gracious to my visitors, my hospitality is xenial.

But perhaps my favorite x word is xenodochelonology or the love of hotels. Not one I’d like to encounter in a spelling bee. I’ll be staying at a motel tonight. I wonder if that counts and if I can work this into the conversation when I leave: “Thanks for your graciousness and for the clean sheets and tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner. They have increased my xendochelonology!”

And while I’m thanking people or things, thanks to www.phrontistery.info for their exceedingly thorough lists. This site is a real boon for Scrabble® players too. A phrontistery is a place of learning; I work at one and didn’t even know it.

“lol this isent me cheating on my HomeWork or anything this is me challenging the minds of young Yahoo people” someone on Yahoo Answers claims about a query looking for synonyms to replace boring words. I say good for them and good for you if you use online tools to improve your writing. If I were being really diligent this morning, I’d hunt for replacements for those two goods.

I love dictionaries—it’s relaxing to page through them, but you probably have to be a logophile to want to do this. Hunting for specific words online is more likely to help most folks improve their vocabulary.

And so it goes. I have not nagged about vocabulary for weeks. Weeks! Have you been adding five new words to your vocabulary each week? Five new words a month? One new word since last I wrote about it? It’s never too late to turn over a new leaf—or turn to a new page in the dictionary—and begin.

Come on—make me happy. Learn five new words this week and use them in your everyday conversation. Just imagine the self-satisfaction that will accompany this feat! You’ll feel a humongous sense of pride and accomplishment! Small children will throw rose petals at your feet and a chorus of chanting cartwheelers will follow you about, praising your name! Perhaps.

We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
• Booker T. Washington

* Vanna White is the abecedarian whom we can credit with the title quotation.

There Are No Rules Here—We’re Trying to Accomplish Something!*

Beaver: The rules are a lot easier on grownups than they are on little boys.
Wally: Sure they are, Beave. The grownups make the rules.
• Leave It to Beaver, Season One, 1957

You’re a grownup. What rules have you created for your life? What do you do and refuse to do? Why? What rules do you believe other people should observe? I’ve been going through 3×5 cards looking for quotations to include on my summer syllabi and found this list of rules:

Living Wisdom School Rules

1) Enjoy yourself.
2) Practice kindness.
3) Choose happiness.
4) Be a loving friend.
5) Laugh often.
6) Trust yourself.
7) Find the joy within.
8) Use your will to create good energy. (I have an 8 here as in the numeral eight, following the numeral 7, but I see on looking at this post that it turns into a smiley face, and thus I am reminded that computers are mindless hunks of junk good only when I direct their doings.)

I Googled® Living Wisdom School to find out more. These are rules I could live by. These are rules I already try to live by. According their website (see http://www.livingwisdomschool.org/), the slogan of the Living Wisdom School in Palo Alto, California, is “Where Learning and Joy Come Together.” As a fun researcher, I was delighted to read further and discover this: “Our success is based on a tested principle: when children are happy, they approach learning with enthusiasm.” Indeed. Isn’t this true for pretty much everyone?

The LWS rules leave room for diversity, for creativity, for idiosyncracy, for individualizing, quite different from the kinds of rules often found in schools and other public spaces. As one of my students observed last year, “Is there anything more constrictive to learning and creativity than a room where the walls are plastered with what you cannot do?”

Yet as William Howard Taft, twenty-seventh President of the United States and our tenth Chief Justice—the only person to hold both offices—said, “No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.” Sometimes we even create rules we can’t follow ourselves. Anyone who’s ever observed a group of teachers knitting, whispering, grading papers, passing notes, reading, and otherwise paying zero attention at a faculty meeting knows this.

What we would like to have happen is often far removed from what is realistically likely to happen, whether it’s in a classroom or at home or in line at the DMV. The Living Wisdom rules are appealing in part because they are positive, although they would take deliberate and ongoing attention to achieve. They’re all things that sound worthwhile—and easy—until you try to live them daily. I know because I try. The truth is, rules are no easier for grownups than they are for little boys.

Marilyn Monroe said that if she’d observed all the rules, she’d never have gotten anywhere. What rules have you questioned or broken? Why? What rules would you institute if you were designing a school to nurture the joys of creative learning (or whatever it is that your educational goals would be)? The Living Wisdom rules were stated in twenty-five words. Can you state yours in twenty-five words or less?

Freedom requires that you discover your own inner language—your own life rules—your own vision.
• Zephyr Bloch-Jorgensen

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible—the kind of atmosphere that is found in an nurturing family.
• Virgina Satir

* Thanks to Thomas Alva Edison for the title quotation.

Sightseeing in the Meat Department, or Why I Won’t Go Grocery Shopping Alone

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
• Plato, Ion

I am an introvert. I enjoy my colleagues, I love being with my family and friends, and I like teaching and the students with whom I work, but I also need lots of time alone to corral the herds of thoughts that are always trampling through my head. Despite this need for solitude, there are some things I just don’t like to do alone. Grocery shopping is one of them. My distaste for doing this chore by myself has its origins in a memory recently resurrected when I found this poem in a box of baby pictures:

Uncoupled
• by W-OZ, written many years ago in the backseat of my in-laws’ car

The preacher waits in the car for Gladys
who’s never learned to drive
and is too old now to learn new tricks.
It doesn’t matter where they go or
what they need:
socks or underwear or trousers or
new cushions for the sofa or
a gooseneck lamp for his study
or maybe two fried fish specials
from the Shrimp Boat on Watson Boulevard.

He’ll stay in the car thank you very much,
settling into
toetapping kneejuggling knucklepopping
impatience before the wait begins.
Today, we’re in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and
I’m just along for the ride.

“Take your time,” he tells her,
although she knows he doesn’t mean it,
“Get what you want. You cook it; I’ll eat it,”
rejecting her pleas for his companionship,
turning his gaze away from her lonely eyes,
as he grabs the Macon Telegraph and News
May 2, three months old,
crumpled on the floorboard next to me,
discarded wrapping from the African violet
she delivered alone
to Miss Ludie’s hospital bed.

He smooths it out and starts to read,
leaving her to hurry in and
worry her way quickly up and down the aisles,
short legs moving swiftly as I trail along behind,
forehead creased with anxiety over their three-meals-a-day,
wondering if he’d like black-eyed peas or okra,
and finally buying both.

And in the backseat as we leave the parking lot,
I vow that I will never
no not ever
live together, yet alone.

My husband and I hunt together for our food, wandering up and down the aisles, asking each other whether we are running low on cinnamon or linguine or marinated artichoke hearts, sightseeing in the meat department, wondering who will pay fifty dollars for a pork loin and why those uncooked roasts are sold pre-sliced, but knowing someone must be buying them because there they are, every time.

When I was in school, this was a date night activity, time to be together doing something that had to be done. We had—and still have—fun doing it, turning the mundane into a companionable activity. I recommend this strategy whether or not you’re in school, whatever the task. Julie Andrews, in her Mary Poppins (1964) incarnation, said, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and—SNAP—the job’s a game!”

When life is busy, you have to take your fun where you can find it.

How do you add fun to your life? Try writing about it and turning your words into a poem to help you remember.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
• Aldous Huxley

Poetry is life distilled.
• Gwendolyn Brooks

The True Object of All Human Life Is Play.*

Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.
•Diane Ackerman

I laughed my way through several committee meetings on Friday. Back-to-back meetings for several hours. It could have been torturous, but because of the various groups of people I was with, it wasn’t. I could have left campus bogged down and tired, but I didn’t. I felt energized. There is a lesson to be learned here for students.

There are study group sessions that suck the success right out of you, so boring and humorless that you no longer even care if you learn anything from the experience. There are study group sessions that waste your time when they devolve into giggling goofiness without purpose. And then there are the sessions that blend fun and camaraderie with seriousness. It might seem that fun has no place in a gathering devoted to test prep or peer editing or presentation planning or whatever it is the group’s meeting for, but shared fun is a powerful way to create cohesiveness within a group.

The degree to which playfulness becomes part of the process will depend on the group’s task. Memorizing complex formulas is likely to call for more seriousness than planning an engaging presentation.

When I teach a creativity course, I ask my students to reframe their instructions to students, asking them to “play around with” something rather than “work on it.” This simple twist of words can alleviate stress. Certainly the teacher needs to make sure that what students are playing with are the requisite ideas, but permission to play often frees new pathways in the brain.

One of the books on my shelves of favorites is Anne Bruce and James S. Pepitone’s (1999) book, Motivating Employees. I find lots of wisdom applicable to education in things written for business and I especially like Bruce and Pepitone’s list of the “10 Characteristics of Fun” (p. 91):

1)    Humor alleviates stress and tension.
2)    Fun improves communication.
3)    Fun eases conflict
4)    Laughter can help us survive.
5)    Laughing at yourself is the highest form of humor.
6)    Laughter has a natural healing power.
7)    Humor helps lighten the load.
8)    Fun unites people.
9)    Fun breaks up boredom and fatigue.
10)    Fun creates energy.

I’ve experienced the truth of these things in my own personal and professional life, most recently on Friday during a stretch of potentially boring meetings made delightful by the presence of others willing to laugh and take lightly—yet seriously—the tasks we faced.

In my research into fun in learning, I’ve found that the coin of fun has two sides: one is playfulness and the other is deeply serious engagement in whatever it is that needs to be done. This seemingly paradoxical duality has to be experienced before you can fully understand it.

Have you ever had fun while accomplishing a serious or meaningful or difficult task?

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.
• Roger von Oech

* Thanks to G.K. Chesterton for the title quotation.

Books Can Be Dangerous. The Best Ones Should Be Labeled “This Could Change Your Life.” *

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
• Oscar Wilde

The things that influence a person’s reading choices are another of life’s many chicken/egg questions. What comes first? Do we seek out books—or websites or magazines or other reading materials—because of what and who we are, looking for affirmation, or do the things we read influence who we become? Is there power in any kind of reading to truly change who a person is? No simple answers here.

I cannot imagine that anyone who writes for public consumption does not harbor some small hope that her or his words will make a difference for someone. Of course, writers intend to resonate with others of like mind, but there must also be some small secret dream that words can change minds.

I have long been a fan of Martin E.P. Seligman’s work. Seligman is the author of Learned Optimism (1990), a book that influenced my work with students in a dropout prevention program. His work in positive psychology also affirms my research into fun in learning. Focusing on the positive through discovery of students’ strengths and virtues and passions rather than targeting solely what they cannot do well is at the heart of my explorations into building students’ skills of interest and activating their desire to learn.

If students only learn to do adequately that which does not appeal to them, if they spend day after day doing things that they don’t enjoy or do well, if no opportunity is provided to become immersed in things that interest them, it’s not surprising that many students do not like school and that they view their experiences with teachers as largely adversarial. Teachers become people who keep smaller or younger or less experienced people from doing what they love, drowning them in a sea of “not fun.”

In 2001, my mother, a talented musician who started playing the piano by ear before she began kindergarten and a poet whose work has comforted hundreds of people, told me, “I just survived school. It had nothing whatsoever to do with who I wanted to be. My life in school was always about who and what I should be and keeping me pointed in that direction. You’re young and you don’t know better, so you buy into it, and even though you’re doing well, you know in your heart you’re not making the grade.” In 1988, three days before he died, my youngest brother, Greg, told me that he didn’t understand why I was hoping to become a teacher “because no one ever has any fun in school.”

I have a stack of books in my bedroom, overflow from multiple bookshelves in the room. The stack includes books I revisit and reread regularly because they remind me of important truths. Seligman’s (2002) book, Authentic Happiness, is in this pile. I remember it, oddly enough, when I am quasi-watching an episode of The Real Housewives of New York City (yes, I know this is trash, but I’m not really watching—just listening for breast quotations while I do other things).

It’s not just boobwords that tickle my antenna. I’m working on an exhibit I call The TechNObots about the human costs of technology, and when I hear Jill, one of the housewives, playing a months-old voicemail message for another housewife and a psychic, saying that she keeps it and listens to it to remind her to stay strong in her fight with the person who left the message, I hunt out Seligman’s book. Jill is wallowing in hurt feelings and determination not to forgive and her choice is not making her happy.

In Authentic Happiness, forgiveness and mercy is a category in the “signature strengths” the book helps people identify. I make myself a note to add to my TechNObot Collectory: technology makes it much easier to capture and cling to hasty or intemperate words spoken in anger and frustration. I also note a benefit of technology. If you’re looking for real life examples of psychological theory, reality television is a bonanza.

You need not buy a book to find lots of information about Seligman and his work, just Googling® his name will work. I recommend doing so if you are hoping to activate your inner relentless optimist.

Finding happiness in school takes work. You have to be determined to focus on your strengths and passions at the same time you’re working on things that interest you less or are more difficult for you to master. What are your strategies for building on your strengths and engaging your passions? What kind(s) of reading could help?

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready and which have gone a little farther down our particular path that we have yet got ourselves.
• E.M. Forster (1951), Two Cheers for Democracy

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
• E.M. Forster, British author whose epigraph to his 1910 novel, Howard’s End, is “Only connect.”

* Thanks to Helen Exley for the title quotation.

If You Want Creative Workers, Give Them Enough Time to Play*

Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.
• Diane Ackerman

Warning! There are small people in danger of exiting childhood not knowing how to play. Certainly they’ll become grownups knowing how to log onto multiple kinds of electronic devices and they’ll be familiar with technologically-mediated games galore, but they won’t know how to entertain themselves outdoors with nothing but their friends and maybe a ball or other simple accoutrements. Good old-fashioned get-your-clothes-dirty-and-run-yourself-out-of-breath-fun is becoming foreign to many kids whose schools have cancelled or truncated outdoor play.

Over the past decade, elementary schools have been built without playgrounds so that students can devote more time to studying—often for standardized tests that will demonstrate their school’s accountability in meeting standards. Some schools have turned their places to frolic in the schoolyard into more formal learning experiences targeting students’ pro-social skills (their ability to get along with one another). There’s nothing wrong with that—and I understand the need to address bullying and a general lack of civility—but it’s not really free and imaginative play or the “spontaneous activity of children” that Merriam-Webster.com notes.

Recess coaches are providing children with the skills they need to make nice with each other, get active, and engage in organized activities. That sounds a lot like physical education to me, something that’s also been lost to budget cuts and standardized testing in many districts.

Imagine that you get a break at work or at school and instead of being able to do what you want, someone is waiting with a completely worthwhile activity you have to participate in whether you want to or not. It’s good for you. It helps you stay fit. It fights obesity. And you have to do it. It’s your break from work or school, but not really. And that’s the problem with recess coaches. PE isn’t recess. Both are necessary. And particularly necessary is the kind of break from learning that refreshes the mind. It’s important to learn from experience how to do that too.

Plato said that you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. If you’re part of a group that needs to get serious about something, consider a bit of play first.

Do you remember any outdoor games from childhood? Find some friends or a study group or your partners for a presentation and play tag or hide ‘n’ seek or Mother May I? or something else that sounds like fun.

Live and work, but do not forget to play, to have fun in life and really enjoy it.
• Eileen Caddy

* Thanks to John Cleese for the title quotation.

“Fun Is Good,” says Dr. Seuss

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.
• Mary Lou Cook

I was once part of a collaborative presentation where two members of the group left in a snit*—and left the rest of us to address key issues without their materials—because audience questions and concerns had put the presentation behind. Not only did they leave, they left vocally, calling the rest of us inconsiderate and rude. Their parting shot: “Thanks a lot for wasting our time,” pretty much signaled the end of accomplishing anything productive. This experience has left me skittish. It was difficult to finish, although the rest of did our best, feeling as uncomfortable as the audience.

Yesterday, I had the opposite kind of experience and here’s my advice for you if you’re a student who ever has to collaborate with your classmates on any kind of presentation: Be kind. Be generous. Be understanding. Be flexible. Smile. Create comfort with your presence. These things matter and you might as well do them. After all, once the presentation is going, it will be what it will be regardless, and your bad attitude can turn what could have been a meaningful shared experience into a disaster for everyone. I’ve seen this happen in class.

Over the years, I’ve observed a student “walk out” on fellow presenters by going back and sitting at his desk. I’ve seen others interrupt colleagues who are speaking. One student asked her partner to “shut up.” Fortunately, even though I’ve been teaching more than two decades, I haven’t seen much of this uncivil behavior, and I’m grateful for that. Teachers can see what’s happening when one person is hogging the time (although we also know when it’s happening because other member(s) are ill-prepared).

I am sympathetic when I see such things happening and I debrief with groups to sort things out for grading purposes. Publically humiliating anyone—even a schmuck who isn’t giving you your allotted speaking time—is unlikely to endear you to a teacher’s heart since that kind of behavior can affect the whole class negatively.

Yesterday was a delight because everyone from audience to co-presenters was generous and understanding as we did our best to stay on track and on time, even though we didn’t entirely succeed. I’m a teacher who researches fun in learning and I appreciate experiences that remind me of the importance of other people in helping make learning of any kind fun or a drag. On a recent episode of the television show, Community, Troy (Donald Glover) said to Britta , “You’re more of fun vampire because you don’t suck blood, you just suck.” It’s much better to be someone who infuses activities with joy than someone who sucks the joyful spirit from the room.

The occasional bit of ill humor or grouchiness is understandable, but are you generally fun to work with or are you a drag?

I cannot even imagine where I would be today were it not for that handful of friends who have given me a heart full of joy. Let’s face it, friends make life a lot more fun.
• Charles R. Swindoll

* They could have left in a huff, but on this day, they’d driven their snit to work. And since a snit is a fit of temper and a huff is a peevish spell of anger, snit seems to fit their behavior more closely. See how gracefully I work a vocabulary lesson into this post?