A Day In the Life: One Life Will Always Make A Difference

Taken in a place with no name (See more photos here)

I'm going to share some inner thoughts.

They have been in my mind these last few days rolling around with the sadness of saying goodbye to a child. My student, from a class seven years ago in 1st grade with students that are so very dear. So they aren't the words of weekend cheer many would prefer.
But it is something I'd like to share.

Sometimes when I'm teaching it comes into my mind that our future is right here in my hands. Kind of like a spiritual, "He's got the whole world in his hands." Teaching involves understanding that confidence and creativity, flexibility, discipline, introspection and joy probably can be taught over mistakes, failure, correction and fault. I write it here rather commonly. We make choices in this like everything else.
I personally find test based work when it takes over the focus, when it is disproportionately used to punish and label, or rather to "identify" and "fix," when it is used to reinforce narrowing opportunities in curriculum, when it is fixated on error in others, or in process to see a child through what they don't have or don't know how to do, over what they do have, or when it asserts science to negate questioning and eliminate any critical looking at its credibility, that's a pretty hard way to start the game of their educational life on top of real issues that are in our world for kids to face like economics, race and the truth of system supported inequity. I think my issue is in giving students affirmation and guidance, literature, choice and some self-direction, having some trust in their teachers who in turn have trust in them.

You will absolutely be playing catch up if you look in deficit ways. To be moving us away from positive relationships to learners appears to be the last few years in what I watch, my opinion. I find it fails. There are others with strong reasons and loud voices (sometimes voices that are better at inspecting me than inspecting themselves) that say I'm so very wrong. I do listen. I still find the adversarial dynamic a part and parcel of these choices I trace to growing in NCLB, underfunding, lack of leadership and a nation not really understanding the walk away from public schools into corpor-hools too well. I agree with Susan Ohanian, Standardnistos is a great term to coin.

I say this asking you realize that I've done some looking at just the time on testing in my particular Sheltered Immersion 1st grade program now. Last year I pointed out the assessing in reading took about a month and a quarter of the instructional time in the subject. It was upside down. Also looked at the time on motivating a love of reading. Which got the lion's share of the talk and work. It matters that this be understood as both taking away time in reading as well as taking a 6 year old and using an inordinate amount of our day to fix them on bubbling score sheets. The application of this seems to be on the almost malpractice going on educationally around getting into "good " colleges with high stakes tests.
But as I sit facing the pain of the passing of this student in a real life I'm not drawing on the days my teachers gave me assessments. Not the good feelings of good feedback from them nor the orientation around the process of preparing for them. I'm actually drawing on the classroom in the hills of my 3rd grade in Morgantown, WVA at "the Annex" and a wonderful teacher, Gladys Peyton. She did in fact prepare you to do well in reading, writing in fairly traditional ways in that room in 1968. Her work was in getting you ready to lead a good life, do constructive things, mean something to others that caref or you. But I'm pulling on her warm hands holding on to mine with a teacher request I go on in my life treating others as she treated me once long ago. Recalling her life of teaching service, mostly to kids segregated in my town I learned as I grew up, how she held so little bitterness for this and such a dignity and courage. Man, she would know what to say to me right now. I feel dumbstruck.

So over the years I intuitively was attracted to teaching children about the arts, responding through making, to learning through books, using music to elevate, taught out of "projects" around science and math and within lessons that could differentiate so that students brought a self into the room. Less workbook. Motivational theory was a necessary understanding in an active lexicon, and that is why Maslow is so important to me personally. Students must be motivated. And I would hope that's understood as inside their own "self" over a system of petty rewarding tickets, points or imposed trinkets from external forces. I was actually trained in a Carl Rogers foundation. This said my classrooms worked on reading, reading process as ways to know. I had a great deal of reading training, it wasn't a sloppy understanding, it took me 10 years to acquire it. But sometimes you don't really know if what you think you do and what you do are all that correlated.

Last night my daughter and I went shopping at Trader Joe's for some flowers. I got paid and wanted to get flowers both for my house and to take to the grave of a student I lost.
I want to mourn. And I need to mourn, so this is just a part of the process of honoring until I figure out a way to mourn that is really honoring.
The clerk was a lovely boy, cheerful, happy. He greeted us both, said he loved his job was so cheering. He asked me about my day. I was a bit tongue tied. Trying to give him the credit bank card after already putting it in the machine, distracted. But somehow we talked about my 1st grade. Oh I know, he asked if I'd enjoyed the 29th. Leap Day. And that is an amazing thing.
Or maybe really he asked my lovely Sophia.

My first graders were mystified by the 29th yesterday. I explained until one child asked, how can there be a 1/4 of a day left over? He asked me, "Mrs. Puglisi we don't have part days and the days get darker and longer. I can't figure out why you need and extra one, does it keep things not pushing forward until we are off the seasons?"
So I told my student these were good questions that we need to look at further.

Mostly because I struggle with this myself a little, simplifying for them to see it. This is what I do everyday all the time. Try to take all the ideas of life and put them in the terms for a 6 year old that allows them to understand. It's rather a chore sometimes. A beautiful chore.
Or I was struggling to recall how leap year works. I know the value of group investigation so figuring on our doing this figuring out together next week.

At the store this nice clerk listened and explained what he learned from Conan OBrian. This was that the rotation of earth and around the sun are not a perfect correlation.
But of course there is much to be understood here. He talked further that every 100 years there is no Leap Year. Since my children participate in the Exploring Space and Time Project they know we have resources, people, ways to find out why there is a 29th. Because...
we asked a question and wanted to know. Motivational theory taught me all work starts there.

However this is only part of why I'm talking about this, what interested me the most was how engaged this young man was in telling us about this and how engaged I was in listening to him in his engagement there was a kind of infectious quality. His interest in my classroom and their questions was really a lift. One teachers really do appreciate. The value it was bringing to me last night was a good experience for sure after a long week. I often talk of these personal value additive processes.

I sat alone several days ago past at the services for my student who was killed through the violence of another child. In an unbelievable haze of pain the child, Larry reached out to me in some very important ways.
First the family sought to celebrate his short life. He was recalled for his love of butterflies and bugs. He was remembered for crocheting scarves for service people, he was remembered for loving song and singing. As the service went forward presenting these pieces of his life I recalled our year in my classroom. Echoes ringing really loudly.
Monday I'm planning on making the Green Eggs and Ham that March brings in Read Across America a program that encourages reading remembering Dr. Seuss. I remember cooking our eggs and bacon ( kids like the bacon a bit better I'm afraid, and Larry passed on either the eggs or the bacon I forget which he wasn't too sure he wanted) together in Larry's years with me, so many good days of doing the kid stuff we do that has such value. I remember the crocheting I was doing then, making hats for the kids, I remember the days when my love of bugs and animals took shape within our walls.

Sitting on a pew in this service, looking at how his life was touched by mine was as awake as I've been in years. Fully present in the work of my life in the life of a child. Another kind of Exploring Space and Time. How my life was enhanced by the children I've taught, really wonderful. How woven together, we have done so many good things for kids within their time in our school. I felt that there. The service was a celebration of the normal, happy good things to work on in the classroom that, in my case, were embedded in children's literature and the beauty of learning. No small thing to realize.

The earth turns, revolves around the sun in a kind of wondrous process. And the lives on earth connect and have meanings as we communicate and live our days. I felt that last night. My life greatly enhanced by the children I was fortunate to teach. The deep concerns I write to in our world, funding, poverty, need for technology access, world help and awareness, the fairness aspects seem so encumbering right now, so large, so lumbering as if a Goliath I never imagined. A child lost to a senseless act
of hatred...it crushes the community. You walk through this a bit like a zombie, just bereft of
a way to find sense.

As I was buying the butterfly habitat for my classroom for upcoming work again in the company of my daughter found myself telling her that we take for granted so much, so much good. Our friends, their time, our children's company, the days. And trying to say to her that the time with her is so precious to me. Fleeting like the beauty of a butterfly. She laughed the bell like laugh she has to say..." Momma it's okay."

Honor the moments.

This seems to be what I understand.
I have this desire to mourn this child with every fiber of my being. To strive to say how beautiful, how unique, how important he was. He left indelible marks on my heart. He really understood the power of the arts, he reached towards finding out about himself through the understanding of our capacity to do good and fascinating things. I knew him to be thoughtful and considered, and like a butterfly. They released them at his service. A good thought.
Perhaps I can begin the process of healing by looking towards these things I saw as teacher work in a life by reminding all of us that we work within the hearts and minds of children.
And they too within our hearts and minds as seeds for the actions of the future.