Gardner, Common Standards, Gifts

Someone just suggested I read Howard Gardner.
Not quite like the guy at the party that wants to talk to you about a painting by Norman Rockwell when someone spills you are an artist, but close. Sure, I've heard of him.

Coincidentally today on-line I read two things. One by Ohanian, and then her take, and the other by Nancy Flanagan. I just realized their names rhyme.
I hope I get a few points for noticing that. And, in a way, they are discussing something i find similar. Giftedness, all children and what standardization might be about.
It's rather nice to hear two former long term teachers talk about teaching.
We so rarely do. Most people, many bloggers included, seem hell bent out of that position.

These three things, taken together in the spontaneity of the net, made me think of a poem I wrote and posted here in the past:

Multiple Intelligences Definition, Kid Friendly Elegy

If you can pitch a ball, it moving through the eye of a needle, all the skills that you use to throw the slider or the curve can be translated into the classroom as how you angle the eraser at the bubble you mis marked and are now carefully erasing COMPLETELY so that the scan-tron can get an accurate measure of your ability.

If you can fold an origami koala bear out of a dollar bill then you probably have the dexterity and the kind of talent that can collate the class test booklets arranging them here in the test center, thank you in advance for helping us with the core mission, arranging for our success. Artful.

If you can play an instrument or have the potentials to see the mathematical relationships in the beauty of the compositions of Beethoven soaring into your mind and heart as immortal then possibly you can write the six sentences required for the perfect paragraph on what you did this Christmas using the preposition phrase, adverbial clauses, subordinate clause, introductory adverbial subordinating clause, the santa clause and the dangling participle dissected so that we can sing, dance, hum and enjoy the beauty of your writing score on our District test as we examine it in the data pile.

If you can feel a skateboard under you like riding the waves on Doheny, Rincon, Trestles, San Onfre, can grind, ollie, manual, kick-flip then you may have the capacities to carry these booklets to each class and assist your teacher in lugging down the textbooks. Certainly the 45 pound backpack full of your texts that we now require will be something we can count on you to handle. Especially on the days it rains or smoke is out in your air as you eat out with 4000 of your peers stuffed into the three picnic table space we provide you outside.

If you can draw your favorite linebacker, TV personalities, like to do line drawings of what the teacher said or need to draw to represent the meanings of the words or to grasp and visualize that would be so very good because down this blind alley we'll surely need you to draw the map back out again as we ask you to draw a cartoon for our newest edition of "Tests Saves" in the school bulletin.

If you can hum or sing out in the darkness and grasp the notes and know the tune you can help us think up the song we will be singing this year at the inspirational prep rally, not for the child we almost lost to the car accident, no we mean the song about how this year we are all going to "try our best" and do well on this allimportant state test, NO MATTER WHAT.

If inside of technology you are as if inside the dendrites and synapses of the mind of a man speaking across a universe of meanings like the light in the darkest hole, you can help us install this canned workbook drill and kill for your peers and firewall all our potentials so that we can lead them to our water hole and force them to drink of the importance of this technology "practice". You can help us establish the "norms." We can certainly use your vision to blind their's.

If you can dance in the dream of bringing to our eyes the sensual pleasure of every feeling man, how through the body he has felt through the winds of time every meaning, you can just sit still and hold your arms, legs, body in this plastic Formica chair with very nice posture for 6 hour stretches listening to me guide you in the importance of this position during the demonstration of what you really know on this test given to prove it.

If you can hear, see, feel, taste, intuit, dance, draw, march, mime, whirl, envision, touch.... then please, please , please explain to someone how to design a few tests so that children might be able to be seen for these things you know in ways that knowing can be....as well as the very, very, very few limiting ways of test makers who seemingly lack any of them now. They need you sooooo as they design devoid of multiple intelligence the tests that define schools as places that can see only you, child, with blind eyes.

Which, in turn, made me think of my own kind of Standards...


Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Which also made me think about how it has looked turning schools into more corporate entities. Not too much different than I once thought it would. No one is fighting to be the first to recognize giftedness in kids in poverty and, pretty much, giftedness seems to follow opportunity, economic affluence and access, much like we see most folks associating "wisdom" with "millions."

My daughters and son were gifted. They were gifted to me to raise.
Along in there somewhere I realized that they were unlike any child I'd ever known. What they did, how they did it, all the moments of growth and independence, were fascinating to watch and required some degree of gift on my part to put into contexts for my understanding them. Rather than pursue the best schools in the nation I sought to take them to the schools I worked in-now labeled "the worst schools"- because it seemed to me that would be the right thing to do.
And I believed in those schools, though they have taken a hell of a ten year beating.

They didn't get violin at school as I had in West Virginia, or symphony, they weren't taught choir, no art instruction, very little competent PE and recess yards that looked like prisons. They were exposed to much technology and certainly the facilities were clean and neat but old. And overcrowded. But clean. And the food was and is appalling. And it doesn't have a fairy tale ending, except that they could go to college, but I still found much to admire about not feeding the beast of the elite.
Their cousins are presently in an enclave for education almost no one in the world can know or certainly afford.
That isn't appealing. To me.

I suppose that people make these choices that can.

But my concern is why we allow so many to be in such abysmal poverty they have only to suffer and hope that they get lucky. Ah well....when we standardize around the things that matter then someone besides ourselves will start to care and start to listen.

Until then I'm afraid we lost the audience and just blog to ourselves.