Exploring Space and Time On a Midnight Express

Yes , well, I'm supposed to be methodically unfolding a project I worked on for a year with my students. The thing is, I'm finding it really hard today to focus, I'm fuzzy and artistic, frankly. This means of course I'm not much use to anyone who needs me to write something of value. This often happens to me IN teaching, and would I'm sure horrify the trend to scripting I am currently dealing with, strike that, "dealing with" me in an under-performing school. But.....actually there is a place in the tasks and themes and units I do that requires, as I'm wired, me to shift off center. Then to work to pull from that into a way back, essentially to steer a course. I'm not sure that an extended metaphor about working an oil painting would quite work for this for another as it does for me, and maybe it reminds me more of a long, long hike.

So I'm fuzzy today and I got many more prompts for specific kinds of reflections, this one I can do at 2AM finally putting down the last Harry Potter I never read...

The prompt

here is another data tack

can you write a poem or paragraph or two that describes what you wish
the EST project would be?

I wish that any project would be a way to suggesting art, film, music, making, poem, writing, thinking that somehow taps the core being of a child so they can recall it again one day oh..they might think of school....we could work together and do something as a group and it was utterly amazing. So very few times in my life was collaborative even a notion such tht I built quite a few notions of self in competition, and as it happens looking at things I realize that there is a lot to the minds of people working in groups. It was in art I most appreciated watching another's thinking made visual. But now i see within this project first meta cognitive pieces. As children processed together how to ask and answer, notice, reflect, praise, be awed, cooperate towards goals, initiate tasks, act on their ideas. Then going back like rituals, what did we find out, how did we see that happen, what was the reason this was important, who might need to know this, cycles and cycles of Socratic echoes in a little room so thrilled to be out and about, 6 years old and fully alert.

Like perhaps when I teach a new art lesson, maybe came in with lush colored fuschia, rose chartruese, turquoise, pomegranate, viloet and indigo, lemon and colors that I'm naming that now they are naming in their brilliant hue as i say today we are constructing a park of flowers.....a play park of strawberry fields what could this be.....playdough and this germ of an idea, this seed but it really hadn't been seen, it was yet to grow. A place to honor the fun of playing peacefully...I say.

So I enter this place of 20 people, little people and unless the doors are already shut then I have my idea and my enthusiasm, they have trust in me about this and I trust them because it's unformed expectation, I didn't think it through with every bit designed for them to mimic. but i have visions.

And then I look around after awhile of noticing and restraining myself from nodding to one over and ruining by my choosing to early on but as my dauhghter said so well affirming effort, always that, saying "come look" over "sit down," which is hard actually a skill set of mine, hoping really that the child will take this in and do something with concentrated effort, or zeal, or bemusement, or react against me with an antithetical barrage, but take it up!
or if possible the child will look deeply in still waters

and I'll find these germinations, the metaphor might be off here it can be like crystal snowflakes growth so different, and what happens is I begin to feel unrepressed joy, they are stripping from us this joy of life and learning as a school right in NCLB narrowing and the puppet admins. unhappy want to share that instead, and I start to feel this thing when they draw tht pulls me to what can be, I see so few in my work understanding

But sometimes in another adult I feel their displeasure in my feeling this, as they look in displeased, and rather than being as happy as you are they want only for you to take up their shroud.
A project in art...and this one actually...it's like the kind of cadence when I had my daughter a euphoria really follwed her birth which was odd if you know of how I was damaged by it, but it was nothing compared to the utter joy of having her as hope in my life. That love. Somehow when I say this it is often seen as rambling nonsense or am attacked, but learning can feel this way. My work is designing and executing this in 6 year olds.
My class went out within this project just at the start and a few times later on with chalk to drw and trace their shadows. and in a minute standing frozen the shadow was ...over there...they thought I did something, that it was a trick. Over and over we thought and thought...humm...what could be happening. A child, and he is bright, said something is moving...and later after we made sure it was not a child, he said it must be the earth or the sun. And they then thought that was very smart and so the project started to grow. But that initiation felt...well so alive.


But it feels remarkable. and in this joy, or work, or study, a current begins to move person to person to have something to share, show, copied, adapt, and then it suggests next steps and other things and something is recounted from a life and a child appears

with a parent and something comes into the spaces from outside that somehow was noticed there in that doing. Good teaching I once was told
Is about lighting a fire, but sometimes I see that more in the way I picture synapses as a kind of crystal bloom

When children are involved in Exploring space and time, and yes this is completely a response in the way I am within my mind teaching most often, as a stream

I want then to have the wonderful experiences like we did this year writing poems, talking, going out and looking, saying prove it with data, (that funny to hear in a play time of boys talking to something inspired by it), want them to wonder about the light they see from a star and just how long ago that really was shining

and wonder about the ways the sun might shine in another kids country or if you flew into the face of time could you beat times arrow, I do want the freedom and trust with my oppressive leadership and national leaders to be seen as not defying something teaching poor kids to fish in the language and longing for tomorrow today

You know what holds man, beside the earth and mommas arms, we are held bound in the blanket of time to which we are delivered and this is a construct of meaning that our brain evloved within a beast that hunted and noticed and survived into niches and that was at his core a backboned animal with brain

somehow the harmonies of the galaxies to potentially place consciousness and sentience and grace into the structuring and order of our trying to look back through two eyes at all that was and glance forward and all that might be and ask, why? how?

I would want EST to develop strands of philosophy, measurement, science, artistry, the joy, to have games, teach coordination and caring, to allow a shadow to take on man ah, for it to be a way for me to see more than just my one student but many in new lights in the community of learners, to redefine my role

I had a student that lacked so much, despite my efforts it was all pathology models ( what was he not doing) in my seeing him, and within this project that turned around.... as he says now a 180, he who cannot count to ten, a 180, 360 he can show and say
He can run the coordinates
he orients and he knows

I want the children that come to this to have a teacher leader that can be systematic and also open too something like that, can design and let go so that the child can discover, apply rigor, understand the ways things are figured out methodically looking, to see the ways that this might look in different domains, sense there isso much more to understand ...

And then of course what it really affords and I am blabbering is that blanket around the child the time holding him, a long time a years time with you, is in gaining this experience within this place so that you/they are transformed...you have something new and different within you to face your days that felt good and positive and whole in the getting. It's sort of idealistic night nonsense writing, this an exercise in viewing the way I look to something that by definition is amazing...we the tiniest most insignificant of specks bound in an instant have contemplate the totality of infinity with the tools that we have to see an answer to why we are here.



--
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. ~Khalil Gibran