A Day In the Life

Just fed up

2012-01-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

I'm seriously disturbed by the violence in the area I teach.
Teen stabbed near Oxnard junior high school » Ventura County Star

Yesterday I did not hear this as our school day ended, and it's so close to us-didn't take in 12 police cars responding-as they came in force because of the proximity to the Junior High. I did hear my young kids in class trying to tell me this morning.My mind was on this lovely play the 5th graders were doing-many of my former students... But I just went into teaching this morning, not hearing.
This afternoon my husband asked me about it, calling from Monterey and a Superintendent meeting, where the Super of the High School District talked to him about it. He wasn't checking up on me though, it was kind of an after thought. That made me look it.
Wait a minute.
It's just heart wrenching to think my students walked home by this.
Not to mention everything I think.
I believe I'm placing this here because I feel this. It's very hard for me at the moment.

My car was keyed today "I love" was written across the hood. No protection or coverage for our cars by the school.A group of highschoolers, junior highers has been on our lawn several days playing football. They don't belong there but no ones minding them.
So they obviously did this too.

Somehow I find it all a mess. A darling student told me after school he's not going to Blackstock, the junior high because of things like this. It particularly pained me because my daughter went there and her Dad was the Principal for a year.
I just felt....so sad.

He added, "if Dr. Puglisi was there I would for sure go."

But all I could think was, what world will this child grow up in?

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

I'm The "last thing that is their's"

2012-01-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am The last thing that is their's.
The following is an article about a child very near and dear. As a teacher I'm able to share this public article that tells a story of just one of the many myriad responsibilities that teacher's like myself face.

And, the children.

Ventura County Reporter - The Raw Deal

Photo by: Karen Castillo Farfán/ Brooks Institute

The Raw Deal

Sleeping in cars

By Karen Castillo Farfán 01/05/2012

“I don’t want to sit in the middle,” said Juan Carlos Zepeda Jr., 8, the youngest of three boys, to his mother. He stared at the pile of clothes and linens sitting in the back seat of their family car. “There’s no room.”

“I don’t want to sit in the middle,” said Juan Carlos Zepeda Jr., 8, the youngest of three boys, to his mother. He stared at the pile of clothes and linens sitting in the back seat of their family car. “There’s no room.”

“Just sit down,” said his brothers, Adrian Diaz, 11, and Chris Diaz, 9.

To make room, his mother, Alicia Cerda, removed the pile of belongings from the back to securely seat her sons, then refilled the backseat until the boys were chin-deep in clothing.

“This is what we have to do to get around,” explained Cerda. “It’s all we have left. Our trunk is also full.”

Cerda is a single mother of three boys, and homeless.

Her situation began three years ago when she lost her laundromat managing position after breaking her toe. A confluence of low income and child-care expenses caused her to turn away other employment opportunities.

“I don’t have anyone to help with the kids,” she said. “How can I work and care for them?”

The decrepit vehicle with permanently locked doors, clear tape for a broken window and a dying engine is the last possession she owns. The car is their storage, their family room and an undependable mode of transportation.

She said that high rent and coming up with a deposit and credit check make renting impossible.

She’s lived in and out of friends’ houses and hotel rooms for three years, moving her sons back and forth. The only consistency she’s able to offer, besides the family vehicle, is keeping them in the same school they’ve attended since kindergarten.

“I don’t want to take from them the last thing that’s theirs,” said Cerda between tears.

Living out of a car had been the norm until just recently, when she temporarily relocated into the Lighthouse for Women and Children, a Rescue Mission Alliance sub-program. The nonprofit Christian shelter is a “hand up” approach to providing clients with their immediate needs, like meals, showers and beds, so they can focus on their greatest needs.

It also has a recovery program that offers vocational training, counseling and addiction assistance.

“We work with the women and show them life outside of what they know,” said Mellanie Temple, the Lighthouse children resource coordinator, who says the program includes free tutoring from School on Wheels Inc., a nonprofit tutoring organization that offers homework help to homeless families. “Women don’t have to worry while here,” she said. The goal of the program is to help families find healing and independence; no family is ever turned away.

Temple says the homeless epidemic is everyone’s concern.

“With this economy, we are all a paycheck away from being homeless. It’s our problem,” she continued. “You wouldn’t want someone to say, ‘It’s not my problem,’ when you find yourself homeless tomorrow.”

The program functions through donations and volunteers and doesn’t receive government funds.

This week, Cerda will begin her first steady job as a telemarketer, earning her $10 an hour. She is already planning to rent a place with a friend she met at Lighthouse and is hoping it will bring the fresh start she seeks.

But child care remains a concern. Her babysitting arrangements were unexpectedly canceled, and she faces having to find last-minute babysitting or not making it to work at all. Furthermore, her time at Lighthouse will expire on Jan. 21.

“All I want is a home with a kitchen to cook a meal,” Cerda says, as she closes the car door and prepares to leave. Her engine starts making an egregious exhaust sound. Her crammed boys sit incognizant in the back, playing with the new Christmas gifts they got from the Rescue Mission’s Toy Give-Away; they’re on their way back to the Lighthouse where, for now, they’ll find a warm meal and beds and a hope for a better future.

The Raw Deal is a news column, featuring those hit hardest by the flailing economy. If you know someone who wants to share his or her story, email editorial@vcreporter.com.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

2012-01-20T11:14:00.000-08:00

Rest in peace, Etta James.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Beautiful Pencil Illustrations of MLK

2012-01-19T18:35:00.000-08:00

In a series of posts I've been showing here the last day or so what my students drew for Dr. King's holiday. Hanging in our room right now are large portraits.
Today I passed out each child's acrostic poem which they had typed. They drew AGAIN and did delicate pencil portraits, entirely on their own, looking at a photograph of Dr. King.
These were then copied in sets so I could bind as books.
These shaded drawings just fit the pages so perfectly.
After school I bound our books.
We try to make a book a week, which we read and share as a part of ELD.
It is an extremely valuable art of the experience of sharing oral English, the children read what they wrote to the group, or partner and read one another. I call this "Author's Circle."
I'm thrilled frankly at this book, it is extremely beautiful. Please watch the slide presentation. It's like a show of jazz players- a beautiful book.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

The Many Faces Of Martin Luther King Jr., in Acrostic Poem

2012-01-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

Acrostics, even the name gives me the notion of some coded trick.
But just the same we took on this simple form to talk to Martin Luther King Jr. today in third grade.
My students are involved in an extended study connected to the holiday we just celebrated. I felt these were fascinating. You might think I "helped' which I would gladly accept as what I did. But not really. My sheltered Immersion and EO students watched the 17 minute "I Have A Dream Speech" following the text they had ( and they thought of getting it out ) and then used their dictionaries, sharing with each other, and simply getting at it while I was prepping other things we are doing. In the end I found these lovely.
For the picture, I passed out photographs and they drew in 15 minutes.

I'm pleased!

M arch master magnificent

A frican America

R ainbow repose

T alk very good

I nnocent

N egroes never give up hope

L ucky man

U n stoppable

T ruthful teller

H arder worker

E xcellent

R espectful

K ing of knowledge

I mportant

Nice

G od was generous to give us MLK

Desiree Hernandez

M artyr

A very brave man

R ainbow

T ruthful

I ntelligent

N ever afraid

L eader

U n stoppable

T hankful

H andsome

E qual

R espect

K ing

I mportant

N ice

G od

Janet Barragan

M ighty

A rmy strong

R ighteous

T hinker

I nnocent

N on Violent

L eader

U n stoppable

T ough

H ero

E xcellent

R espect

K ingdom of God

I ntelligent

N ation

G enerous

Mark De Los Santos

M artin Luther King

A Mountaintop

R escue

T ook care of people in hospitals in his ministry

I had an Idea

N atural

L uther

U people made the world Unfair

T ruthful

H ero

E xpected success one day

R enew

K ing

I mportant

N on Violence

G reat

Esthela Zamora

M an mountaintop mighty marvelos

A ble approaching

R eal righteous

T hinker

I ntelligent

N on Violent

L eader

U niversal

T rustworthy

H andsome

E xcellence

R espectful

K ingdom of God

I mportant

N ice to everyone

G ood, great, generous, glory

Bryan Calderon

M artin, march

A ble , American

R eal, rainbow

T ruthful, thinker

I nward, impatient

N ever, nobel

L eader, lucky

U niversal, unusual

T ruth, teller

H appy, hero

E qual, everyman

R espect, respectful

K ing, know

I deas, important

N ation, nice

G od, great

Fatima Torres

M agnificent

A nnouncer

R eader

T eacher

I dea

N ever afraid of hate

L oud

U nusual

T ruth

H appy

E xcellent

R espect

K nowing

I mportant

N ice

G reat

Lixvect Garcia

M artin Luther King Jr.

A mazing African American

R eal

T eacher

I have a person

N ever afraid afraid

Limitless

U nable to be mean

T inkerer in history

H ardworking

E veryman

R espect

K ind of king

I mportant

N ice to people

G od believer

Bryan Lopez

M anly man

A ctive African American

R eal righteous rainbows

T ruthfully thinker teacher

I ntelligent innocent

N ego never afraid nobel

L eader luck loud

U niversal unusual

T ruthful thinking teller

H appy hero hard working

E veryman eager

R eality

K ing know king of the soul

I mportant ideas

N on violence is nice

G od good great

Carlos Gomez

M an

A dventure

R ainbow

Tough

I mportant

N on Violent

L eader

U n stoppable

T hankful

H ero

E qual

R espect

K ing

I nnocent

N ice

G enerous god

Antonio Perez

Desiree Hernandez

M arry He got married.

A ble Martin was able to rescue us.

R eader He was a good reader.

T eacher His teacher helped him understand.

I nteresting He was interested in giving people his words.

N egro All the Negroes were fighting with ideas.

L oud His loud clear voice was beautiful

U niversal The message was universal.

T hankful He was thankful for all people.

H ardworking Martin did some hard work.

E qual Helping kids to be equal.

R espect Giving respect to other people.

K ing of God

I ntelligent

N ice He was so nice to all people

G ood. He was good anywhere.

Fredy Morales

M agician

A pple

R ainbow

T ruth

I ntelligent

N egro

L eader

U niversal

T eller

H ero

E veryman

R espect

K ing

I mportant

N on violent

G od good

Gabriel Rojas

M anly, Marty, Mission, Martin Luther King Jr.

A ble, Airtight, American

R eal man, relative, retell,rainbow, reader

T offee, thankful, thinkful

I deas, incensed, intelligent

N atural, non violent

L ittle loud

U niversal, unlimited, unstoppable

Talented, transformative

H andsome, hero, happy man, human, hardworker

E earthspectator, excellent

R espect, rich in mind

K kind, king, know, Kingdom of God

I mportant

N on violent nations

G enerous God

Maria Ojeda

M artin

A frican American

R ethink

T ake care of the people

I mportant

N ation

L uther

U nited States of America

T hankful

H ero

E qual to people

R espect he had

K ing

I deas

N ice to others

G ood person

Juan Zepeda

M ighty

A frican American

R eal radical

T ell the truth

I ntelligent

N ever afraid

L oudly

U nusual

T eller

H ero

E veryman

R esourceful

K ind

I ntelligent

N on violent

G ood

Elijah Franco

M an, a very nice man

A ble, he was able to rescue the family

R eader, boy he was a good reader

T talks, he simply talks to everybody about what is right

I ntelligent, Martin was so intelligent but he could hear too.

N on violent. His life was forged in non violent action.

L eader, Martin took up leadership.

U nmedicated. Martin used no drug.

T hankful, To God Martin was thankful.

H ero, Martin is a hero.

E veryman respected this man.

R espect, Martin fooled with no one.

K ing, This man was a king.

I mportant. He was so important.

N ice. He was very nice this man.

G reat, That he was.

Brando Gomez

M artin Luther King Jr. Like his family a lot.

A ble to read about African Americans.

R eal and read also about his dream.

T urth because he liked to be a teacher.

I s Martin Luther King Jr. famous?

N ever would be afraid of white people’s hate.

L eader Martin liked to talk a lot.

U n stoppable and like a President in leadership power.

T ruthful and for this his words he is famous for truth.

H e always said he had a dream.

E veryday he had fun with words and speech.

R ead about Martin Luther King Jr.

K ings are famous guys to read about.

I like Martin Luther King Jr. because he had a dream.

N on violence is nice.

G od is a great, good form of generosity and love.

Jocelyn Gutierrez

M an, mercy

A pproachable, admirable

R aise, real

T ake, transform

I nclude, involve

N on Violent, native

L eader, likeness Luther

U nfathomable

T ramsformational teacher

H ospital, home

E xcellent

R ainbow

K ing, knows

I ntersting

N ice

G od, good

Daniela Zamora

M ohammed, Kenisha, Yolanda, Renisha these names came to mind today

A s I sat with my class watching them write to you

R eading your words

T elling themselves the story

I nscribed upon the skin of our nation

N egro they said, slowly, and then again in Spanish, they heard you say it Martin

L ooking at me I said, it was back, and a child finished, ah, back in the day-it was different

U glier, the pictures in black and white

T hrew bodies into walls with water cannons, they watched, incredulous

H ow did you go to school they asked me?

E veryday in third grade I got to go to the school where blacks once went, with Mrs. Peyton

R eally? They looked at me. Did you protest?

K inda I was nine. Like you. Watched the TV, learned, loved my teacher, she was a Negro.

Interesting the kids said and resumed talking about words that start with N.

N ice, I asked them, please don't just say nice, but they all did. He was nice.

G iving me, their teacher, a smile. Yes, Martin was nice. And died for a day I could teach you.

Mrs. Puglisi

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

"Only When it is Dark Enough, Can You See The Stars"

2012-01-16T08:05:00.000-08:00

This title is a piece of a quote from Martin Luther King Junior.

It is from his speech I've Been To The Mountaintop. It resonated with me this morning.
The fuller quote is:

As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and esthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya: Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

(I took it from this page, I recommend perhaps you go there to read MLK quotes today. )

This year we saw, and still see, massive amounts of folks rising up in our world. Brave, facing incredible violence, undaunted. Some in peaceful protest, many in waves we never anticipated. Or so I've heard our national leadership say, as they reacted to changes that seemed unprecedented. Facing death in other counties, overthrowing dictators--it was a year that brought us to the streets. Even facing off against moneylenders here. For me the Biblical proportions and the words of MLK really resonated throughout my watching the year progress. As we start a new century I have wondered what he might think of all this. I wondered that as well over 25 years ago teaching in South Central LA in the midst of gang violence and what seemed insurmountable poverty, shame and hopelessness. Today on his day in our nation I sense many of us might find MLK a challenge to hear, to make a better world along the lines his lifetime delineated, that would be a fine thing.

There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence…
- "Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)

So the man that chose his time as the time to be alive, as the time to be called to action, I find this inspiring-- having seen the work of his days I am better for him. As I sit thinking this morning about how to best serve this day, I decided to write.

Something else is a part of this day.
It is very personal, a piece of my family history, important too in my heart. Almost unutterable.
It may not coincide, as it has today on January 16th again for awhile with Dr. King's day, but on this day of remembrance of Dr. King I am called to remember a cousin. Maria Ellen Rice's passing from our world. She died a year ago.
She died before her time, and her death is tragic.
But it is a lesson to me that we are here but a blink.

Someone I know, for reasons I do not understand, felt it was important to me to convey that in the end, all is meaningless. That reverberated with me too this day and in the last few years.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Martin Luther King Jr.

After a blow like her death, and the realization that depression was a battle within her, one that consumed her, this took a toll within me this year. An invisible enemy like this, it is truly a horrible, frightening, lonely and terrorizing thing for my family to face. Perhaps this made even more real to me, and less able to be ignored, because along side this loss I held the stories of students in my work who lost lives, faced violence, became violent, live in prison, had few choices, lost jobs, cannot afford colleges, saw families lose homes, faced foreclosures, had parents unable to find work, were hungry, homeless, battling cancer, saw opportunity affected by race--yes, and generally saw times become harsher amid the greatest greed and opulence I can imagine in our country, as a very few hardened hearts to construct the impossible--their wealth as a god. As their wealth became what they serve foremost. Their prophet.

Perhaps because after a 30 year career teaching I couldn't make sense out of the violence in the student lives, it took a year of feeling great pain calmly taking a day as it came. Perhaps the echoes of losses for my two daughters in six different suicides with students and faculty in their lives--this echoed to me through the loss of my kin as well. The loss to our world of these good people. It was also this year my husband lost a dear friend to his taking his life, apparently he too was weighed by depression and the ravages of mental health issues, and economic stress-- that in no way could contain the truths of his wonderful life one in which he set himself to live in caring for others. The year returned again and again to talk to me of personal loss, and the struggle of those I care the most about. And death. Defeat.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recall when she was born, our Maria.
I recall visiting my Aunt as she was bed fast awaiting her birth, as she considered her name, while family thought if her carrying this baby might terribly hurt my Aunt's health and worried. I recall of course the utter joy her life brought to my Aunt all her life, and the time before her death with the serious concern that she was slipping. I shared a very long call through a night with my cousin where we caught up our lives, just a year or so before her death. My blindness in not understanding more, what wasn't said, I will hold onto as something I failed. It may well have been a kind of goodbye.

It seemed to me last year I had to look at the reasons we have our lives.
Why we are brief stars in the darkest night.

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recently heard a report on the lives estimated to be lost in the struggles for freedom this year. It particularly centered on the children. Without making a judgment about the fact children were tools in these struggles of protest, it talked about the numbers of children that gave lives turning over countries to different days. It would seem from what I heard that we live within a world that compromises many things-turned sideways. Please listen to this HERE. And it would seem I held onto this, in this year as I struggled with the loss of my cousin. Sometimes we are not choosers of the touchstones in our life. But they do cause us reverberations.Her life will be that for me.

The argument for the senseless grows.
Things I cannot understand, reconcile, seem so logical to others. War is just. A must.
The suffering in our world blamed upon the sufferers.
This last year was a struggle within myself, a depression, a kind of slowing down. If anything just looking at unfathomable things with a kind of defeat.
How can a person feel so sad that they give up living? And how can we comfort what may well be a chemical disturbance over which the suffer has no control? These were the things within my days, the fleeting thoughts. I arrived at the door of looking at mental illness and how we respond in a greedy world, where medical care is a "commodity."

At one time we mourned the dead among us in shades of black worn for a year, two, three. Now we quickly move into the colors and fads. But my year as were so many others, was engulfed in real mourning and grief. It seemed to me to grieve my cousin, and to speak of my student's lives and losses-- at least a year of silent grieving was necessary.
And still I am unsure what my voice can say.

My Aunt, Maria's dear mother, just wrote to me, her pain and her hurt palpable. Yet she is not hopeless or defeated by this death, not in the way I might think. I find in her words love, comfort, caring, ultimately the hope that she will assist me. She celebrates the life, love, meaning of the relationship with her daughter, knows her value, and the fact that her daughter, my dear cousin means many wonderful things in the lives of many--often those she has yet to come in contact with. She understands a lifetime ripples out much like the theory I so like of Kurt Lewin in fields, affecting the whole, a quiet beauty of vibration. That to go on requires us all to look to the meanings of such a good person trying to cope in a harsh reality, or just trying to cope with her reality. My Aunt just states plainly that the darkness enveloped her. That she tried valiantly to deal with things internal, but was ultimately defeated. It meant a great deal to me to read her words because in her caring for me, I knew that my cousin had had such a caring, wise and thoughtful mother.
That she lives on in us.

It seems to me that one of the things the arc of living has taught me, through these dark days of loss is that we can, indeed, be driven by the fear of death. Consumed really in despair. By the fact we are mortal, that we are flawed, that our minds and hearts are difficult and capable of things like hatred, greed, discrimination, anger, lust, and actions that in combination with other actions bind and hold us in pain and layers of struggle. When I then look at a Dr. King writing the process of freeing himself from these fetters and addressing the work of truth, it's a daunting and amazing thing.
To read him is to see someone revealing a mental and spiritual journey towards freedom from despair and death. He triumphs when he lifts us off the page today from a window box in time that was my yesterday. A prophet, yes.

Each of us lives in two realms, the "within" and the "without." The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our [lives], the bottom -- that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live. Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.

I find this utterly remarkable. And I cannot believe anything other than the reason he spoke, through all of us, would be because that work is to be done by our age, to fail it would be to lay down our mantle. What I read when I review Dr. King's quotes deals with the equity and equality of humanity, and yet speaking ever louder to me is the necessity that wars must end.
It is hard to ignore.
And, in that war is something we have in our nation, I wonder what might Dr. King think of us. Say to us. I can read his words.

We’ve been in the mountain of war. We’ve been in the mountain of violence. We’ve been in the mountain of hatred long enough. It is necessary to move on now, but only by moving out of this mountain can we move to the promised land of justice and brotherhood and the Kingdom of God. It all boils down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent. Martin Luther King Jr.

So I go from the very small life of one student, one cousin, my own life teaching, this morning into the realm of a holiday, to thoughts of struggles in our world-protest-fights for freedom, to our actions in war, and to the words of those that have inspired us on a day marking loss for me and hope for me.
A day Dr. King's followers called a Day of Service.

It is a strangely personal mix.

Somewhere within the last months I realized that love and hope are forces, that these were the tools Dr. King called upon in his work. Somehow as I read of medicines and treatments and began to face depression in my daughter and in self, family, I began to think about how in our world that the hope for better days, for opportunities, for jobs, meaning making, improvement, for opportunities to make this world better, to be better-- do, in fact help us. That the medicine of possibility, of truth, of care, of unconditional love propel us forward. My sister today wrote to me talking of moving forward. How great it is to have an awareness that love, compassion, care are the force of that movement. We CAN improve our lives.
Hope is something we must cherish and allow for all of us.
It may seem a small point, but keeping hope alive, it is something we tend.

When I work with students, despite the many obstacles that seem to be imposed by self, system, so on, I do have to operate within the tenets of hope. For this will inform my actions. That said, one hopeful act we can do is to speak to one another of the difficult things, we can celebrate the lives and lessons we learn from each other, we can speak to one another, reach out, we can care. we must be there for each other.
We can use the active lexicon of love, despite the fact we are flawed, failing, often very immature beings.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother.

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the day of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?".

Martin Luther King Jr.

I found that thought again today, thinking of Dr. King and my cousin who share a day of remembrance.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."
Martin Luther King Jr.

I hope for you today, that you have dreams, possibility, understand the love you bring to the world is beyond measure. You, in the world, it is the expression of the divine. We are needed. And our shining as the star- is what we offer to a very dark night.

" I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I've seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality."
Martin Luther King Jr.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

The Heart Shaped Box

2012-01-15T06:19:00.000-08:00

The Heart Shaped Box

Often I ask people what they think or remember of school.

After 30+ years teaching public school in areas of poverty--some of the “worst,” apparently, in the nation--it interests me what the answer will be. Most often it has to do with a relationship between a student, a teacher, and the student’s feelings of recognition of a gift, talent, ability, possibility. This is how hope operates in a real-world context. The stories usually celebrate what assisted that person to try to “make it in a tough world.”

I call these the echoes of my work.

Sometimes I ask teachers too what they remember about their work teaching. These stories highlight relationships--serious stories, ones that are hard to look at in the present ‘accept no excuses’ culture. It's hard to look openly at what teachers know when they are simply labeled "excuse-makers". We cannot look into the eyes of the children, these traces of our nation's public work, people alive within their teacher hearts, from a position of shame.

Especially held within the teacher in schools in poverty.

Of all the folks that have been forced into silence, these teachers remain the most demonstrably eliminated from the dialog about teaching work. They are now called the dealers in failure. It might be because they are blamed, called ”bad” or failing the children. It might be because under the covers of the policies and political spin we haven’t wanted to hear them. In any case, their voices are not the ones I hear on education policy now so front and center.
Yet these are the people that best know the children left "behind."

After all, who really writes? What voices frame our understanding, especially in a world more decidedly divided by income than ever before?
My voice is concerned with a one percent, but not the one percent that may well be having lobster on wheat toast this morning.

Yesterday, after work, I went rapidly home. This is unusual--like most teachers in neighborhoods like mine, I usually stay, off the clock, for tutoring, prepping, and other responsibilities. But my son had a migraine. Halfway there to his high school, my husband called to say he had found the way to get him first, and somehow this put me at the grocery store getting him milk. I tell this to set the scene--just an ordinary moment in my life.

In the store, I glanced at a product. And I started to cry.

On the shelf this year they’ve returned those lovely boxes of chocolates in the red velvet boxes. The last few years I didn’t see them. I bought one, when I found them last, and I took it to the gravesite of a former student. He was killed the day before Valentine’s Day. You might have heard of his story. It’s complex. He died because of the fact still today violence is a factor in our neighborhood. In all our lives all the time, violence stands.

My former student died at school in the 8th grade. But when I see the box, I remember him younger--when he was a student in my 1st/2nd grade combination class, and he brought me a beautiful box like this one. His father escorted him in, very upset, asking him to apologize to me. This wonderful child looked up so sheepishly. I see him clearly to this day, looking downward, looking up. Swallowing--swallowing food. On his way over from the gate he'd opened my present and had a chocolate or two. I laughed! And, seeing that, so did his aggravated father. His father wanted me to understand that they sent the box in for me. And like any father might be, he was upset. What teachers do, all the time, is assist the child. And what I did that day was the same. “Oh thank you,” I said, “I just cannot eat these all by myself, I’m so plump, let’s have another.” And so we did. Happily I gave him a hug and I would hope, all was right with the world.

Most of us, teachers in poverty schools, must find hope now in a nearly empty Valentine’s Box. Because hope is untestable, ineffable, undefinable, the nation has chosen to ignore it--but it is probably the most precious commodity we pedal. Just the same, I’m aware of the role it plays in the relationships we build in public schools. And how really incredible hope is. Like the force of love, it may embarrass our leadership to speak to such stuff, but if you talk to students who live lives forging possibility--it’s everything. That I know.

This school year, several years after the Valentine’s where I went to the burial of this child, I am again brought face to face with the issue of violence in our community, in America. I’m dealing now with the consequences of domestic violence for instance; what it does to my students. Limiting their cognitive development, forming their fears. I see children that are not best served in highly competitive, test-based and high-stakes cultures, children who are still trying to do their best for us every day. I sit after school talking to the home-school tutor, or the social service caseworker, or looking over at the apartments wondering just where the stabbing actually took place. I liken this to looking over the wounds to the body of my work, the scars. It doesn’t stop me from hauling in my telescope, buying my own iPad to share, buying books, prepping lessons; it doesn’t keep me from making a book a week for the children with them to fuel our enthusiasm for reading. It just sits with me sometimes as I reflect.
A silent fact of the lives of my children.

I often am praised for my use of the arts with the children. Luckily, I had a high degree of training in the arts. That the arts improve the experience for my elementary students goes without saying. Sometimes though the feedback stops me. As we make The Garden of Abdul Gasazi in play dough from our reader, it strikes me when children are so effusive, so thankful, creative, what fuels such intense feeling?
“You are the best teacher ever in the world,” they say elevating me off the floor in their hearts. I think to myself, well, hum. Perhaps so, but when I was cooking that dough I felt a bit grumpy, muttering to myself something along the lines of "what was I thinking." But we press on, drawing, designing and photographing these imaginary best playgrounds ever. I recall one child a few years ago, who returned later to say to me: “These things you did, this changed me, it’s why I went into architecture then engineering. All the designing, I had to keep doing that.” I sat dumbfounded.
Back then, her math wasn’t even that great. Now it is essentially her everyday.
Hum. I started to say to her, well I can’t do all I once did with you, not now under the control, structure and mandates NCLB wrought, but I hesitated.
We were in her dreams, and now my hope come to life.
Why alter that with my present cloudy feelings.

Why rain?

I think the most amazing thing about working with children in the arts is supplying the children with firsts.

Poverty often makes getting the supplies, the food dyes, the play dough, the crayolas, the access to the technology harder, if not impossible. So my glitter, my cloth, my puppets, these things that have taken a backseat to workbooks and test prep and classroom uniformity, are first experiences for many children. This is why I walk a bit on a cloud within the children. Because they do know that their learning will be embedded in an experience, activity, project, model. It is a foundational right. And now, in these times, as has been true for years, I’ll reach in pocket and pay for it.

Still for the wandering here, I’m experiencing a year where violence and helplessness as I said, might be the lessons that are really shouting at the children. Taught within their lives and community. The other day, due to a tragedy within one family, a brutal violent one, my class came in with plenty of weekend “news” and, worse, the association of this to their life, their fears, their experiences.What they see and know.

How can a teacher talk to you about that?

Especially in a world deeply embedded in denial? A world that thinks when I talk about poverty and violence in communities I might be looking to make an excuse? Or that no matter about that, my standards need to be set higher and the pressure always on. A Tiger Teacher. If one is reading what mandates required me to read, how do I address a Ruby Payne who sees the poor pathologically and needing to “Step up to Middle Class Values” the way we now “Step Up to Writing” with the aim of perfect paragraphs? Perfect people, perfectly living perfect lives. Except we see and know the truth.

One of our best writers, say a Steinbeck, would never write to talk to the pain, struggle and impact of living in poverty to mark the people in the life as “our problem” or “bad’, would they? Truthfully it’s tricky.
Because in the end I look at the gratitude in those students I teach in poverty, and at the creativity first. I see them as using the relationships we build for personal growth and motivation, and needing the school they go to, to fire imaginations, to gain hope and skills as well as bring to us their awareness. I see them as our answers. They grow up to assist us in focus upon what we value, what and how to change-their backgrounds are essential to what they offer, understandings of resilience and real success spring from them.
To become filled with a desire to care for another, to hear one another, this they offer you. This they gave me.

I see my work as a place where we build the leaders, address the human values; the complex understandings to actually improve the world, and know what that might actually mean--firsthand. Essentially I don’t necessarily implant middle class values into children, I try to work on students wanting a life of value. One that sees them as an asset to us all first and foremost.
I’m not sure where we got off track in our dialogs in the last few years on schools. I saw we were off track when I dragged myself through the previews of the movie about Superman and teaching, and listened to Michelle Rhee happily denounce the losers she was firing to the three of us in that theater waiting another show. Not so much because of her effort to take out irresponsible adults in teaching, but more for what wasn’t being said. No talk of the people, giants among us, that have taught and assisted children in public institutions, learning their story, opening their heart, building teaching relationships, giving their care tending the communities. To not see that- I saw the train headed for the derailing.

Soon it will be Valentine’s. Day. Yes, my kids will exchange cards, ones they’ll write. I’ll engage in having some math activities, secret code heart writing and walk down the halls seeing my peer’s children so happy too. The rooms will be excited, the memories will last. My own children certainly remember the 100 dot Love Bugs I make with students, recall special lollipops, lessons they assisted, or, mostly, the warm sentiments. Memories are made. And I’ll cry a bit and place a box over at a gravesite for a child that didn’t grow up with us, RIP.

But in my mind will be the importance fundamentally of the relationships that are formed and forged within our schools, that are essential to our children, how the children transformed me by challenging me to improve as an instructor- so that I might better prepare them for our world. And how, at the end of the day I take this everywhere, even to the grocery store, as I look upon the hope that springs from a heart shaped box of chocolates.
As I see our nation’s hope in them.

( There is a little back story to this piece.
I was trying to write it- to guest blog for Anthony Cody, at his invitation-believe me an honor. But he indicated a 1500 word count after I submitted it to him. This piece is 2600 or so words. Unfortunately I have never been good at cutting a piece of writing. I can start however with an idea of length, but trimming something inevitably makes me think of what is important here, what is not. Then I decide, or see, that all of it can be cut, and I'm left writing again. I have no idea what to cut from this.
I'm sure my amateur status writing is one issue of mine and the fact I've not taken any courses on writing and have no training other than rereading several books on it to assist me. So I'm just going to have to try to frame another piece for him, if I get time, as I couldn't get this one into that girdle. It's something fit for these days- so I thought to sit it here in my visible life files. Also I never have a piece edited but my daughter Sylvia did edit this one. Usually I do what I can on the fly. I hope you enjoy this, because it seemed to be wanting to pop out, like much I do.)

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Epiphany Comes To A Teacher In A Poverty School

2012-01-07T14:16:00.000-08:00

Six days into the New Year, the forces of 2012, whatever they are, decided that this public classroom teacher could look harder at some serious business.
In her own backyard.
And maybe with my resolution to write, speak again about my work teaching in the hope this helps us all somehow- by communicating-I'll find meaning.
In spite of myself I am going to take up the challenge of finding words.

School for me started on the 4th, and by the early morning of the 7th, I was really glad to see the weekend on my horizon, though I stayed late and did a good deal of preparation each day for the 3rd grade, wonderfully had a visit on the 7th as the universe brought me Corine Reeber (the dearest friend and a teacher beyond compare) to help me through this day, and assist in the learning and growth this week and new year must bring.
So....My third graders returned to school Tuesday, with stories of holidays, a few new clothes, and plenty of warmth and good spirits. Not everyone returned to school-a desk is still empty waiting one return I am hoping happens soon.

None the less we started units on the solar system, I brought in a telescope. I'm planning a "Star Party " for one day next week, or the following at 6PM. I don't think I have any skill at this but I do have two telescopes. We got into a new story, Raising Dragons, and are looking forward to the dragon drawing, the year of the Dragon coming up for New Years, lots of adventures starting. As we came in- on our first morning-we built a New Year's Resolution book which I'll share as it gets finished. The children were great at thinking of new goals, things that they'd enjoy trying to accomplish.
All of that is normal, happy classroom life. I set goals-in math- sharing this with them-I'm dedicating more energy, time, better use of technology, trying the Kahn Academy, so on. In reading I'm offering time every afternoon children can stay after the day to read with me in books sets we have-so far no shortage of volunteers. My class likes to read with me. I like to listen. Then we discuss it. Build a love of reading. Another goal.
Yet another of my resolutions is to be helpful and positive in that support.
"Data" on the children culled from, say, Dibels that is used to attempt to freak me into responding like a 5 alarm fire isn't going to elicit the positive responses that can get going forward from my taking in and using professionalism, scores, observation, and reflection.

All that said, our first day back I noted a child at lunch sharing a belt buckle that displayed an image that I've never had come to school before. In 31 years actually in my students. Since the child did know what the image was, and how it is used, sadly, the school had to intervene, did, and that was rather upsetting overall. But done respectfully and fairly. Especially so from my perspective- considering the entire context.
Let me say this-sometimes in teaching you come up against families that aren't "on the same page" whether through poverty, crime, choices or combinations of many things- you might realize all in a minute that there is that really serious disconnect. It might take the form of hearing that the child is being taught to be dishonest with you, or evasive within the context of a situation, use a substance, exposed to language or behaviors, maybe while you thought you might be getting to go get lunch, or when your mind is on multiplication table practice-reality "hits." You might realize that many people, maybe even teachers in some 5 second remark in your ear, folks hold vastly different "codes" of conduct than those legislated.
For children those confusions, disconnects, are difficult.

This week I ran headlong into that for a child in my work.

No matter what a person "believes" or argues, whether they love to watch Bill Maher wax on on this, when a child is exposed to using controlled substances, or an awareness of them as a very young child and begins to associate being cool or being "adult" with this behavior, and the child desperately seeks status, attention, "coolness" and this awareness lends it-you enter one of the areas in teaching that seems to miss the mandates, the notice of the Ed. Bloggers, the fancy festivals of ego of the consultant. That child deals with something that can shatter their success both as a student, but later on as they try to live their life.
Adults have to be aware and caring about themselves as models. And I wish my student could rely on his parent, but no, not in this mess. At least not at first.
But adults are watched by children-all the time.

Just a real situation presented itself in my class with that child, and his buckle, allowing me to realize that the school is the government, you are a representative of a collective system of rules and regulations, you work within codes, ethics, compulsory control and at times kids do things impulsively, or to be valued, or to gain status, that are foolishly unaware of that. But you are teaching. And they watch your responses and look to you to help them understand.
Understand things the adults themselves seem to struggle with.
It's not easy stuff.
One child asked me Wednesday just back to school by way of this but far, far more humorously and age appropriately, "If a child tastes Champagne, can they be hurt for life? "

My answer finally, "Well, you look ok to me."
Delivered with a calm quiet thoughtful voice of a grandmom.
And adding. "Never again."

I am now aware that for at least one child in my room it is my duty to try to assist him in new ways. Not only does he struggle with poverty, with language, with understanding grade level and comprehension, but also in knowing who to look up to, who to take orders from, who to value and in how to value himself. And all in a child that cannot "do" long thoughtful meaning filled sharing on my part. I get about ten words in and it's done.

So. A thought goes into the back of my mind of how, over the time remaining this year, to try to build a person that might not one day find himself in more serious trouble. Who is very young.
A responsibility our school takes seriously.
I take seriously.
And, no, I am not alone in this, we have the personnel involved at our school to care. But the relationship I am building with this child does matter, in the end again I realize this is really hard to mandate.

Teaching is relationship building.

So, that, was on my mind as I stared at the ceiling on Wednesday night. Until about 3 AM when I fell to sleep. While something very different was brewing in the lives of my students, well for one.

Thursday I drove into school hearing a story on the radio that caught my ear. Someone captured. Who had stabbed his wife nearly to death, I thought I heard, I thought I heard a name, but the words "Fashion Park" flew out and stuck. Held onto because that apartment area is next to our school. We pass it weekly on our short enjoyable walks to the Public Library (we went on the 6th delightedly getting tons of new books for a New Year) . Many of my students over the years have lived there, in that spot, and many do right now.
It has a pool and the children like to talk to me about that. I saw two rats in the bushes there two years ago as big as cats. I've been in several of the apartments over the years, returning a book, dropping off a pair of glasses left at school. It is a place that holds a lot of memories for me of teaching children.

Anyway. I went in to work to be met by my lovely Principal. To see her that early in my room, now that's serious.
Well.
Not all the news we get in our work is good. I was lucky this day it was not one of my own three children.
But I was not that lucky Thursday.
One of the more serious days of my teaching life actually.

Later in the day one of my students asked about one of their peers, and other students came from other rooms to tell me of one of my students..... and in the way of things I sat for a little bit talking to my class, listening, reassuring them that they were fine, that families can sometimes have serious issues.
I could tell you here about another child, a nerve hit for them as the story spread through the recess sharing and children telling what they heard in the middle of the night, literally yelling out that their father a few years ago so seriously hurt their mom the child had to go to a courtroom, that they now live far away with this parent in jail, another talking about drunk behavior in a parent, and then, oh my. I did not allow children to share all their private news, but I did allow them to talk and that is an artform of careful, experienced, and intelligent guiding, and I am not sharing this as they stated it, but I am telling this here to talk about the serious issues I am working within. If I ever "forgot" that things are serious in my student lives, or didn't understand that or communicate that here, this week carefully and explicitly and clearly re-prioritized my attention.
I hold it right here now.
Right here in my heart.
First.
A look at the court orders in my room, at the needs, at the things the families faced, turned to glare out at me.

Friday was a very nice day ending with looking at the sky and mountains with our telescope.
As one student stated, "It brings far things close up."
In a way so did the Epiphany. Or as my students call it, King's Day thoughtfully translating for me.
Friday I went with my partner teacher to lunch, I'm very worried about her health, if she gets any thinner I'm deeply afraid for her life, we were getting lunch at La Fogota on Saviers in Oxnard, I like the cerviche. So as I ordered the lovely clerk stopped me saying, "Did you have a hard morning, you look so stressed?" I generally told her what was happening. My face was raw and red, I realize now what stress does to my skin. She just listened, she cares. Later another person at our school asked about my mother. Those expressions of care, those threads of relationship meant everything to me.
Along with several teachers giving me support, my Principal.
It is just us quietly holding up one another through these times.

In the evening I watched a report that somehow talked to me of this as well, to my heart. I'm not sure why. But this came on this Epiphany as well.

Watch Fri., Jan. 6, 2011 on PBS. See more from Need to Know.

Today, Saturday, the day I finally did some of that sleeping I did not get this week, brought me an opportunity to read a bit about Domestic Violence. I found some things I didn't totally know on this short little Powerishly Point piece. Please watch:

These are ten very sobering things to know.

Top 10 Alarming Facts About How Domestic Violence Impacts Kids
1. 63% of all boys, age 11-20, who commit murder kill the man who was abusing their mother
2. 75% of boys who are present when their mothers are beaten were later identified as having demonstrable behavior problems
3. Children from homes characterized by domestic violence are five to seven times more likely to experience significant psychological problems relative to children in the general population.
4. Domestic violence exposed children are four times more likely to visit the school nurse.
5. More than half of school age children in domestic violence shelters show clinical levels of anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.
6. Researchers have linked exposure to chronic abuse and violence with lower IQ scores, poorer language skills, decrements in visual-motor integration skills and problems with attention and memory.
7. Cognitive problems associated with exposure to violence and abuse comprises one of the most direct threats to the developmental task of school adaptation and academic achievement.
8. Witnessing violence as a child is associated with adult reports of depression, trauma-related symptoms and low self-esteem among women and trauma-related symptoms among men
9. Children in homes where domestic violence occurs are physically abused or seriously neglected at a rate 1500% higher than the national average in the general population.
10. 3.3 million children witness domestic violence each year in the US.

And in the knowing, can we use this to do better work, design and fund solutions, prioritize care?

Do I know of serious things within student lives?
Oh yes.
Yes.
And yes.

And when that is happening, do I think about the impact of homework, reports on student behavior, and what the student's reaction to needs for forms to be signed, or money to help replace a book or some other aspect of our work brings? All the time.
It was still news to me though to consider the following:

"Cognitive problems associated with exposure to violence and abuse comprises one of the most direct threats to the developmental task of school adaptation and academic achievement."
(from here)

Reading at another site it talked about elementary children and the effects of domestic violence on the child, stating one might note that the children :

Elmentary Age

Vacillate between being eager to please and being hostile.

Verbal about home life.

Developmental delays.

Externalized behavior problems.

Inadequate social skill development.

Gender role modeling creates conflict/confusion.

I had not considered well enough the connection to the cognitive issues. And yet, I have noted it in all the work over these 31 years, the meetings on children, the considerations and speculations.

So, here I am.

Reading and thinking about the services that are losing funding.
Thinking about my students.
Thinking about the price of domestic violence.

8 Days into the New Year I think of what happened on the Epiphany in my own life.

You'll have to excuse an abbreviated post now, no fancy ending, the tears that didn't come this week have arrived, as I think about what this student in my room faced and how the arrival of the epiphany found form for me in 2012.
I must believe that it is a part of what I do- to ask that we all become even more conscious, that I become more conscious, of the lives of the children. And become more dedicated to caring for them, and thus for each other.

We might really consider these standards i'm proud to have penned....

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

The Ten Resolutions (Happy New Year)

2011-12-31T19:58:00.001-08:00

Every New Years
I try to think of a few sustainable Resolutions.
Since I am a teacher these are usually intertwined with goals for that teaching work, but inevitably I read others on New Years and scan the blogs or FB, listen to folks back at school and then I'm in such a fit of "why couldn't I think of that one."
Because I've always been good at adaptation, or outright idea stealing, this kind of feeling served me in art- but in New Year's resolutions it's annoying. Feels a cheat.
So here I go as the New Year dawns on the east coast over many I love....

My first resolution is To Work On My Envy Issues

There is no use pretending that I don't seethe with anger at the fact some kids work with iPads and laptops nationwide but my kids, students in a poverty school in CA, despite money coming from the state, do not. The best we've done is get 4 computers in the rooms replacing the ones 15 years old that never worked. And locked up much of it with blocking.
I cannot pretend to be thrilled reading the travel of various pals when I have not traveled in so long, mostly sickness, and I can't look in another teachers classroom without feeling insecure about my own.
So I'm going to consciously try to be happy for those that "got" and work on that envy.
If tomorrow I read a beautifully written, articulate, super set of resolutions for 2012 I'm going to work hard on that voice in my head that will start beating me up for failing to think of things like that.
Maybe I'll think of that person as evolving ahead of me into a state of clarity.
As a beacon.
Stated another way....

Celebrate Your Neighbor.

So, in recognition of that,

I plan to celebrate student success, those that stand up for others, accomplishments, giving, altruism, facing demons, honest emotional responses, truthfulness, creativity, creation, life, each new day, bravery in the face of defeat, the 7 french sauce families my daughter intends to learn to cook, effort, those I know and care about, our common humanity, your new stuff, the children's drawing and trees-all the things I see out there I so wish I could attain as a state of being. Among a host of other things- I plan to try to blog a few times a month about that celebration.

So that admitted on to Resolution Number Two-

well.....let's give it up for gratitude.

I'm going to resolve to be a bit more grateful.

For the opportunity to work, enjoy the lives of the children, use my capacities to design learning, for my children, for that really fresh air I'm breathing in slowly tonight.
Thanks and if I can put it in my head, every day, that you are EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE it will help me.
I am where I am supposed to be.
You are too.

That simple thing frees us don't you think?

Resolution Number three-

We are all aspects of whatever cosmic "knowing" there is. Whether you speak the dialect of in God's image or understand the thousand arms of love, the enlightenment is,
we are all the consciousness. Here now, in this moment, the cosmic is aware in you.

Shall we resolve to care for our earth, our self, our awareness?

I'm going to bring forward this awareness this year.

How?
Ummmmmm

Well I'll definitely try to look harder for ways to free myself from what I see as silences, gobbles, greeds, defaces, defames, and generally lowerers of the truth.

Resolution Number Four-

Darn it this one is going to be tough.
Write, write everyday,
try to see it
and tell it....
like
it
is

once in awhile pull it out of the trash and post it

Resolution Number Five

Fight for the homeless, poor, our nation's children, announce the truths of poverty, tell the stories,
witness,
witness,
witness,
witness
witness
brothers
sisters
I'm going to tell you
about the kids you need to know

Resolution Number Six

Let go of a little anxiety.

Parenting kids in late teens and early twenties is a lesson in letting go.
Humbling me to the ground.
I barely can speak it to you.

Considering I never let them ( my kids) cross a street it should shock no one that I...need...to...learn
How To Let them GO into their lives.

I don't know how to do this one.
I'm struggling with it.

You know that old expression about the butterfly, let go, if it returns, all that.
I'm going to simply meet the days this year with the thought I have to see others
as butterflies.
darn.

And that is setting me up for a very difficult resolution.

We do it all the time in teaching. It's a transition in a process of change.
We meet, work together, move forward and on.
Some of our students do return, check in, become friends, but we are always good bye artists.
I need to better apply his into the days now.
For a lot of reasons.

Resolution Number seven

This year 2011 was not a kind mistress.
She took my cousin Maria Rice.
She died due to suicide.
Depression.
It took the life of one of my husband's closest friends, John Leiderbach.
I gather the reason was the same.
Two better people you'd never meet.
Seriously.

It stole the parents of two dear friends, the Steve's.
The year plucked me up and hit me hard with an awareness of what we often fail to acknowledge.
Many people struggle with mental health, with a fight with loneliness, with fear, with anxiety, with the challenges of sadness, alcohol, drugs, addictions, struggles with the past, traumas.

I'm making a resolution to tell these stories, hear them, honor their lives, love harder, listen, reach out, try not to forget to send an email to say Happy New Year, I think of you.

Isolation is not a way through this.

In the New Year I'm going to better educate myself about these things.
In my personal life I'm going to try to help a daughter that struggles with these feelings.
I'm going to be present with the truth of this.

Resolution Number eight-

Be more creative....
See in a new way...

Try to do that darn Motown hits song show I've wanted to do forever with my class...

Resolution Number nine-

Bring some understanding everyday.

and I'm going to try to blog better
What's Going On, here on A Day In The Life...

Resolution Number Ten-

Love others.

Happy New Year.

Thank you so much for sharing my thoughts and being there with me through this blogging journey.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Turns Out It's the Anti Zen Again

2011-12-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

Well this IS the post about 2011.

Just my 2011.
In a tiny underperforming CA school that went to safe harbor after a mysterious 40 or 50 point rise in 4th grade.

This is a year in review post that should be insightful and hopeful.
And I am hoping.
In teaching all these 30 years I do generally take a moment in December to think about where my class is, and what I need to improve, and then I try to do a better job in the months I know remain. For me this year that will focus on better math and writing daily. And figuring out how to take my class and make them better at requiring more of what they do for themselves.
Moving towards an internal self directed sense of purpose. I have a few too many that work entirely asking me repeatedly if I approve and most certainly most of the time the work lacks any sense of self=direction.
I think this is what the school "taught them" frankly.
(It may be not worth noting these goals of mine are 100% in opposition to the last ten years of demands and training heaped on me by my "work" setting and defines the last possible thing that most of the adults running the place are planning to do themselves)

I'm not especially good at articulating the year's lessons for me because I'm pretty much at a point of loss of all voice.
I started the 2011 school year trying to take a day at a time after a cousin died, then I'm looking back at a summer where I couldn't go to a March On Washington for teachers that I thought was important to attend. It was the year of standing up nationally FOR something.
That absence of mine was largely due to lack of funds, for that matter, being unable to see my father again, not getting the presents for the holiday, missing times I wanted to get things for my children this year like a computer for my daughter, all had that same issue, one that has plagued my career in teaching. No money.
I've never met a teacher that missed that understanding.
Teaching is underpaid to the point I still struggle with my struggle-I am a mental slave to it, since I put a part of my income into the classroom as well, I then struggle even more- keeping up with things at home that get further thrown onto an impossible list- like getting phones, technology, overwhelming bills to prioritize, the impossibility of travel, better medical care, fresh foods, cleaning, new furniture, better looking shoes, access to plays, music, entertainment and so on. All are met with "no, not for you." No amount of planning seems ever to get around what I seem unable to do.

I didn't March with those that did, as I stated, and I failed to make enough of a case for stopping the relentless drive in test based education again both at the grade level, school level, District level, county level, state level, national level. Again. Not that anyone was listening.
The District and my staff are so good at marginalizing any voice contrary to the choices they make- you are marginalized until you begin to believe you really have nothing to offer.
I now have nothing to offer.

And maybe if you sought, changed, bought in, gave over, sold out, caught on, climbed aboard, or just "saw the light" then everyone would be so much happier and then I'm told, you would be too. And yet I can't figure out how to champion Dibel's, state tests, value-added, the tying of all kids do to lame assessments as their curriculum, the narrowing that is now accepted as the all of "what we can do" and the privatization of a public system. Especially for those "without."
Step one in that for me appears to be the embrace that anyone else, even some annoying Skinnerian in Oregon named Randy Sprick, knows more than you do about what you are doing.
And the path to success is to lie and say they are "teaching you so much."
And thank you.

The first precept that was foisted on me this year again is the hardest for me.

Their first precept-
Be them now.

That I cannot seem to get done.

But 2011 certainly presented numerous opportunities to be them.

And the first thing I'll do as a teacher in 2012 will be to be dragged into a training having been assigned on my time "homework" unpaid, to enforce a behavioral plan Mr. Sprick and CHAMPS will require of us in a couple year "implementation" to control every aspect of social interaction within my classroom. Rigidly. Same page in EVERY room.
That is SO Critical.
But we never ask why.

My compliance will, of course, be required.
So will posters, cheers and a "look" that will unite us all again in the "same page."
My duty as the employee will be the same as it was years ago when we got "Ruby Payne'd" and I was told that poverty is a state we can "explicitly" shake out of kids with lots of good basic skill drills, rooted in their understanding the real pathology of it all and catching onto the "middle class values" that "all good children" need to be regularly tested and exposed to in our "academics." Thus my entire family for the generations was reduced to something like a bad case of class dysentery.

Their Precept Number two-

There are "them" and there are "us"

So I'll be involved in a behavioral program Tuesday that resembles a straight jacket for me, that teaches them how to be "us." And I seriously doubt Mr. Sprick CAN entertain what role he is playing. But he can sell. And that is real value apparently.
It will start with making sure I'm on the "us" bus.
Because anything less that -100% "buy in"- is intolerable, fire-able maybe, and at no time will critical comment, thinking, discussion or anything from that world of education be tolerated. Learning has a "look" we will learn, and we will all "look" the part. With a damn smile and a positive attitude.
That "look" and the code of behavior, the undercurrent, the message of a dominant culture, the notion that poverty is way more than a state of lack of funds will be reinforced in the gentlest and most immediately apparent ways one can. Or else.
Depriving anyone with a thought of their own their individual's voice.
Skinner was famous for this.
Rock on Randy, and great name btw.

I recall that Skinner stuff best in my days of early training. When I had to do a multiple choice test a thousand times because I would not choose another answer than "I go to school to earn a degree. " That was not allowed. Ultimately I was placed in a graduate level class to overcome my failure to pass for my failure to change that one answer. This was Skinner's daughter and I remember it all.
When you won't concede another point of view, only talk within your context, and don't allow anyone else to challenge you -it gets the "results" you are seeking. You are either a mirror or a stooge of some sort.

their Precept number three-

"we know your own good"

I'm not going to speak at the training Tuesday no I am not, but that will not be enough. We will be required in exercises, groups, and activities to do more than speak, we will be required to speak their words. As if they were our own.
So I'll see and hear myself thumbing the manual, digging out the ways students have to conform, rewriting a set of cheer-leading things to be pasted in every room on among other things acceptable vocal level, ways to be in "here," and that won't be enough either.
Anything I say in their voice, will be out voted, discouraged, democratically and ever so politely rejected. As I am shown that "the group" has better ideas. And all of them will be stepping right from that manual word for word.
Having gone through this already, and seen it enough times, I see where this is headed.
Silence is not enough. What is required is I fully reject myself.

their Precept four

whomever you are- if you have a sense of who you are "it's wrong" unless it is about the acquisition of wealth and power-in that case -it has to adhere to where we are with that now

Oh well. This last year taught those lessons again. Oh yes.

I went into my room and tried to do my job as quietly and as voicelessly and as lowly as I can.
I'm very pleased about book making with the kids, art projects, our social dynamics, their kindness. I'm trying to hold onto this as value.
I'm sorry that the math program is so poor. Everyday Math It Spirals Downward.
It seldom really teaches, it leaves kids behind, it moves through complex operations without the children, it is very hard to prep for, it seems to not prepare for the state test and in general it requires I teach other than the program "secretly" because it isn't designed for children. Umm...that's all top of the head reaction not the analysis I need to do.
I dislike the way it avoids time for acquiring the basic skills the children need, the games often seem to be ungame-like, it feels like this......Suppose that teaching art required someone that could make art, had a feel for the reasons for art, someone self driven, someone inventive. Suppose that to have good product the teacher had to have a working knowledge of making things, an eye daily for picking up ideas, clues to how this connected to the bigger picture of living. An aesthetic. Imagine a math program where there is a failure to communicate THAT to the instructor.
This is Everyday Math,.
You were evidentially "too stupid to know," so follow the cookbook.
But oddly the recipes keep flopping.

But you lack the skill sets to tune and polish in their odd formats. Because you are moving daily "to the next thing."
That's all off the table where I work.
There will be no discussion.
No voice. Remember?

their Precept number five

Everything is always great

So in this last year, no matter what, I plodded along.
I kept my voice quiet. I kept my own counsel.
I shared as little as possible, I worked in reading groups, math groups, tried to see how humor worked withing the children, tried to lighten their load over make it more difficult, looked at poverty, looked at motivation, looked at the effort.

I noticed that humor can create a way to establish social rank or hierarchy. I saw kids with really difficult lives that diffused tense situations with humor. I saw children specifically use humor to bully. I saw how if I started the day with a little funny theme or observation, say in the form of an idiom, I could return to it through the day- and they enjoyed that. I saw that the element of humor had positive and negative- like all else -and we could talk about and observe that to become more aware. I saw humor required intelligence, plays on meaning, and ultimately it could be a defense or offense.

In my classroom this year I saw the effects of poverty.
My school has 100% of the kids eating the crappiest free meals on the planet.
I don't know how else to put it politely. It's so bad I think people should lose their jobs for fouling up one of the easiest things and best things public school should do.
Yes, lose their positions of power.

Please understand these are randomly recalled thoughts on poverty.

Interestingly I saw children who valued what we had.
An experience like using a computer meant something.
I saw children hungry.
I saw times where a family crafted, made, created, in response to poverty and passed this to their child.
I saw families completely ungrateful, and those completely grateful for the classroom and not always connected to what it means to their child.
I interacted with children "unaware" of aspects of the world, but so intrigued.
Poverty while limiting things like museums, orchestras, access to art supplies did not limit desire, innovation, memory, enthusiasm and a desire to know and do.
Ennui was never our issue.

My heart has been bleeding about a homeless child. He's in a truly difficult situation because his parent is difficult. Not able to fully put this in words, as much as the having nothing is hard the crazy behavior of his parent-that seems the major issue. The truth is even in that I find it remarkable the way they utilize a library, get services, cope and care. Keep going.
It's a kind of thing where watching, free of judging, leads me to conclude they are active, dynamic, just as strange as the rest of us and not unpleasant at all to me despite the fact hygiene is low on the list.While those that fail them counselor, school nurse, services make me want to puke with their low expectations, condescension, incompetence, laziness and general shiftlessness. I find I'm not over the hurdle yet of judging them.
As much as I want to say I abhor poverty, until they are just in good housing and able to easily get food and someone cares- I do see them as talented-my student is such a good one and an artist-and resourceful. One day I'll write what I know of their story.
So in my heartbreak there is something else. The yang to the yin.

So I have my own precepts learned or reinforced or extracted this year to share. It took me awhile to get to this and it comes in fact from all the rigidity, absurdity, pain and healing I've been doing. Working in a public setting overtaken by what NCLB wrought us.

My Precept 1
Empathy is only possible when you can, in fact "be them now."

That done, it is a skill that can be applied anywhere, turned around on itself.
If I learned nothing else this year I re-learned that those kids we are fixing, or those children we are training, or those we are rising above, or that "culture of poverty," is really just us in another point of existence.
There is no us, there is no them.

There is only the capacity to become you when I lose me.

My Precept number two-

When a system is built on a duality-some having-others not-then it creates structures to support that perpetuating and calls it change, reform, vision.
It lies.
It makes the opposite.
It cements it into being.
Catch-22

We need look no further than Gates.
Look at this ridiculous set of things attributed to him circulating n the net that starts with something like "Life ain't fair." And goes on to blast life into an ugly exercise in excusing his having more.

It has happened throughout time, is not surprising, that artists transcended this, commented on this, revealed this to us, what is amazing is they often did so- tolerated or supported by these systems. The message got out.
Study Shakespeare I think.

A sorry set of Gate-isms so you will leave him in his place and you in yours is particularly in need of our artists and writers. But the control of technology and word is at a critical juncture.

And so the elimination of the arts and literature in classrooms is no surprise really, nor is the corporate take over of the arts.

My Precept Number three-

Make something everyday with children, art, music,
active learning (so popular in reform) it can easily be addressed in origami, weaving, drawing, illustrating and all the things the materials to do have been eliminate for. It was no surprise to me that knot tying was the hardest part of making the God's Eyes for my students. Just the connection of two strings.
They didn't know "how."
How is largely lacking now.

Nor was it that odd to hear them ask longingly to have yarn to take home.

I seldom see this reform described as crafting, making, designing "in things," in time, space, reality.
Because, I personally suspect, it is an anti-zen movement. But if children are taught the skills of the arts they can invent from there.

Make things.

My Precept Number Four

Try to inhabit your own body and truths.

When you get to precepting, proscribing, value adding, testing, assessing, for others, it's kind of a sacred trust sort of set up. Few of us are really cognizant enough of our own shadow, weakness, drives, errors and all that unwritten stuff to be very good at mandating all over everyone else. I'm sure Randy Sprick is a nice guy, ok, but I'm not sure he's a guy that should be setting up the entire context for ANY school systems to rigidly put in place to "prove" they look like they are in control and teaching.
After all he doesn't seem to have a single thing he's made, done, written, drawn, invented, created, designed, innovated, connected, flown, farmed, jarred, jammed, toasted, cooked, loved, laughed at, no literature from Randy in that CHAMPS lunking volume, no life, nothing but a canned control vehicle that he's sold. It might be best to look to him to do a presentation on "how to control special ed children" over "how to design the context for all interaction in the complex dynamics of schools sending kids out into life."

try to inhabit your own body randy

I'll do the same in my classroom.

Precept number Five

Critical thinking is not necessarily critical
asking a question is not necessarily anarchy
Seeking out truth is not necessarily easy

It might best work if we admitted that things aren't so great now
And worked out the idea that we can come together to work on both why and what and how.
Experimented, looked at the results, reconfigured.
Over ordering adherence.

I had a lovely talk with my daughter last night.
She was talking about England and little kids, children under eight. She was amazed that parents in England can ask the state for a nanny that comes in to help you learn to take care of them. At any time. That the state is not "going under" with this. She also had tons of factual information about parenting classes, aid for the things necessary for parenting there. She went on to talk about how she saw WW2 and all of the incredible devastation, the horror of that, as having at the least provided the opportunity to design and consider what systems would be put in place.
To think of societal supports.

Which led to my wandering into talking to the dysfunction I see in that in neighborhood where I work.
Largely because teachers come from more affluent areas where they live, they are not a part of the neighborhood, there are different cultures, groups, there are underfunded, dysfunctional supports, people who are lazy, poor hiring, and a nation and system wide expectation they are "failing" or schools anyway are too expensive or that the poor are a nuisance that deserves what they get, gets too much, are entitled or whatever...no words about this could contain what I wanted to say to her...
Until of course we couldn't fill the night with that any longer and began looking at the lovely lights that were up shining.

So I suppose as I sort of say goodbye to the year I'll end with my last personal precept-

value those you love.

This last year my cousin killed herself.
She was good, gentle, kind, caring and I think deeply hurt by living. Unable to see how much value she added to all our lives.
I think we're losing this skill set, but it might be my deep hurt.
I don't think we see and feel our value one to another and honor it with time, care and meaning, nor do we teach it.
I think we are losing our connection one to another.

Maria was all that we ought to try to be, yet I guess too troubled, depressed, she could barely allow herself something like a "mistake"- the thing that we are supposed to most value- because it teaches us who we are and what we can choose to be.
She could not hold her human frailty.

At times I know that as well.

I darn near lost another cousin. I am just learning.
And I'm still not sure what is happening for him.
I know years ago these same threads were his.

I realize my cousin would rather kill off herself than face in herself that she could disappoint a parent, think a negative thought, fail a marriage, be in a car wreck, choose to go to school for all the wrong reasons. That in her wanting to please- she could lose connection to what she most wanted to do herself- but this teaches me once again something I think school teachers can do for children.
We can see their capacities, we can recognize them as having choices, we can allow them the right to explore their interests, we can introduce them to structures, ways, plans and foundations but this is just as a starting place, we can admire their being inspired or being active, we can loosen our control as we increase their agency.
We can accept their mistakes.
We can teach them to cope OUTSIDE of rigid organizing and the illusion we are so sleek and mechanical.

And, gosh, though we can Randy Sprick them, we can also choose not to.

We can choose to close the door on BF Skinner.
Once and for all, and look to something else.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Guilty Pleasure

2011-12-27T13:10:00.000-08:00

'
I'm on a winter break. Vacation.
I am a 3rd grade public school teacher, now 3rd, after years in 1st (the funniest grade there is) and many more years of my 30 teaching in 4th, 6th so on, but the last few days I've just been a regular person on a much needed break. Before this all started, I was an artist. But we are talking a 30 year hiatus.
Some folks don't think I'll ever find a way back, I hope to.
Not a single moment went this last week to thoughts about school, well not consciously in the last few days.
Yes, I realize I'll really pay for that. I have decided on this coming Friday to go over to school, pull out a thousand things I'm trying not to recall. And get ready for "next year." This is not "the post about this 2011 year teaching" or the ever popular "2012 Resolutions" one we all so love in those hilarious Ed Bloggers posts, because I'm still thinking about it all resolutely.
Last year you will recall I dedicated my resolutions to better understanding comedy. especially the role in child's dynamics, in teaching, in relating with peers.
Or I recall saying it was a resolution, actually.
Like art or beauty- it's a water through fingers thing. Comedy, laughing. Humor.
But I learned a lot about it. I studied. I'm applying it in my work,listen to what gives children a laugh, watching the close relationship to hurt, to social ranking, to the unexpected, but...
This is rather the "Guilty Pleasures" post instead.

I bet you never saw that coming.
After school, after everyone goes home, while I'm doing my work I search out podcasts. I discovered comedy ones. So I listen to Larry Miller and hear about his hamper, and then I try an interview from this kinda angry guy who, frankly I fast forward through his monologues, but I like to hear the guests. I never know the guests, almost never, but I knew the first one, Levar Burton and I enjoyed that. Despite the awful volume issues it had, it was cute.
There are lots of other comedy podcasts on line so pretty much this keeps me going as I work on homework or whatever I'm doing. I'd recommend more, but cripes I've only heard about ten in all. It takes me awhile to get through a podcast. I stop a lot to go to copy machines.
Since I started reading about comedy a year or so ago, my project for the year, I notice that a lot like storytelling comic's comedy works in circles, say with a running gag, and I try to incorporate this into the relatively boring things I teach and talk about. I learn a lot from them, believe it or not. Try to notice when I actually laugh.

If I were teaching this week I'd be talking about "Brittany."
Her real name is "Annie." (which reminds me of John Denver and his wife, 1st wife and a section of a biography I read in which he chainsawed their bed. He had some issues.)
Brittany is my daughter's insane kitten. A Kamikaze.
She just ripped as I typed my other daughter's tights running and ruining them. We can't reprimand her as she won't remember doing it. She is the ultimate representation of zen.
She's here "now."
Sophia, my other daughter- the one that will never own pets, named her "Brittany" after Spears. She said she's the same "person" if you will. But she really is exactly like my mother, more than the dim wit star- so as they've pointed out we really need to just call her "Jean." Both Mom and pussy play the door game all day, are underfoot, don't mind biting you a bit, and generally have no short term memory for what they did.
One thing Brittany enjoys is racing for the doors if they rattle. She cannot go out, she is under house arrest with a bell as her leg/ankle bracelet, but on the neck. She cannot go out because she'd never find a way back -due to her tiny brain size- her head is sooo small-plus coyotes would definitely get her. My cat Robespierre, who is relegated outside right now, is planning her extinction. He's ten times her size and likes the ladies but will definitely make an xception in her case-he watches her thoughtfully through the window. The screen is ripped to pieces from his attacking it.
Thus, with all of that, she's been out hundreds of tension filled times. She is a force completely focused on escape. The best game we've got.
Night escapes have honestly given me heart attacks.
Brittany likes to strike things at high speed with her head. She also enjoys eating the plastic Christmas tree. I'm going to write a personals ad for her actually. She needs someone special.
It gets a little funny because the girl's father despises cats.
So watching him be face bitten, something she loves to do, and seeing her attack his weaving, it's quite funny.
We are basket weavers- as well as God's Eye and small pouch weavers.
Ah Brittany messed up those tights good, drew blood.

Here is her ad:
"Wanted playmate to a ADHD, happy go lucky, Mehitabel inspired (as in Archy and____), What the hell kinda gal. Loves Cheetos, neck nips, feet, toes, bras, fol de rah. Adventurous, humorous-would jump down on you from great heights shamelessly. No long term memory or short term. Wildly impulsive.
Beautiful, silky, sleek, thin, fit, athletic. Loves a good fish dinner. Fears water so water sport is out. Drinks excessively. Loves to roll around in bed, preferably with claws out. Purrs like a train. If you are brave enough to give this gal catnip, hope you have an exit strategy."

So that's one thing I do. Guiltily. I make jokes.Out of things when I can't think of what else to do about it all-that and commit grammatical heresy.

My daughters bought me a CD for Christmas, The Flight of the Conchords.
I know I'll listen to that thousands of times grading or doing whatever it is I'm doing after school-again when I've cleared out the kids of course- but need to accomplish a couple hours work.

This is one of my favorites:

But listen to this for a late holiday treat...I recall first listening years ago :

I always figure the genius of the piece is -it's probably what happened to Sedaris...I find that infinitely hilarious actually. Just like every job I ever did.

So I also like to stop for a short chapter reading the book
"If Men Could Talk"
I've easily read it 50 times.
It is presently interred in my memory.

I have yet to unlock anything. I've decided the operant word is "if."

So I keep rereading.

Just today my daughter saw me writing some silly poems.
I've been finding the less gross Craigslist personal ads, ones I find funny, and writing "replies" which are my poems, no, not to really send....well, not to send to engage in that way...just to laugh and she suggested I try reading The Best Of Craigslist.
Turns out that's fun to do.
Some of these are killing me today.
And I am just home trying to recuperate from a job that is often so absurd it makes Theater of the Absurd look like the soaps. A lot of hard reality in my work which I have to honor and hold.
It takes a lot out of me.
Especially at this time of the year.
More on that in the next posts.
You spend six years administering standardized tests to six year olds by the hour and get back to me.

Well it makes me laugh, this Craigslist stuff, and isn't appropriate if you are under 35 or maybe at all for anyone, so I don't know how she found this out, it must be people she knows, but I heard her in her room last night listening to a comedian on her new Kindle Fire and the subject was so racy I had to stand at the door for several minutes until it was over to be sure when I shamed her about it I had all the details.
It was very bad.

Mothering is a thankless job.

(well this admission of my guilty fun really is dedicated to, or coming from thinking of, one of the first people that taught me the real value of laughing, my cousin Bobby Lucas.
Who once famously suggested we freeze bananas. We laughed a week over my grandmother trying to deal with us.
Bobby was so funny we laughed through what really were the painful realities of our young days. On my visits to see my grandmother in Saint Petersburg, Florida, he served to make my days just infinitely fun along with my other cousins, and Aunt Merilee who did so much for me out of her kindness.
I've just learned that he battles a disease I am coming to understand as a true monster-alcoholism- and family tell me he has recently been found again, and things were scary for awhile-even ICU. I'm just taking in this news.
That, combined with my concern for another friend who is in his own battle with this nightmare, are some of why my defensive systems are in play. That friend first explained to me humor was a defense. I regret not having the courage to ask him at the time what he was defending against.
Surely he never told me anything of his heart. I can't always just laugh.
I can't hope to ever have Bobby know what he meant to me as a girl, so much, but he surely opened my naive Appalachian eyes to many things as he dealt with his identity.
I can't think of Yellow Brick Road, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, Caberet, without thinking of him....also days in St. Pete-those mermaids in Mass Brothers, yogurt, avocados,my first really scandalous dress which is a story I cannot tell here, so much more that I either tried for the first time or hysterically laughed about on his reality tour.
If you want to know why I'm often irreverent, you should have known Bob then because for years my inappropriate laughter found him and others and just released all the stuff I couldn't carry alone in the form of laughter.
Bob, I'm still off enough to post a recipe on this site for a chocolate cake in -which I put "onions" 1 1/2 cups onions over "chocolate chips." Not much has changed. Still a slip in any clutch situation. I'd love for my daughters to tell you their "best of" mom stories. Yes the one about the Scottish sword, the idiot in the parking lot and the other about the woman I velcroed in the Getty elevator)

For Bobby I will put this tune:

Man you gotta make it.

(One day I want us to laugh together again and I can't lose you kiddo, 2011 took enough.)

God's Eyes-an experiment in three days

2011-12-18T23:14:00.001-08:00

One I actually liked, that I made today......

God's Eyes, a set on Flickr.

I'm learning a new craft after teaching it to my third graders. A couple days ago i blogged their efforts, now after three days of making I'm sharing my work so far. Each one teaches me something about how to get a certain look-it is really applied math. I have a ways to go because what I'd like to do is a design about the size of a wreath for the door that could be put on the door in this season. These will be gifts for family and friends. When I get to something outstanding I'll post those for sure!
I agree with my students, thee are very meditative, time just dissolves making them.

A young blogger i know...

2011-12-18T04:44:00.000-08:00

I have a new favorite blog.
It's inspiring me to once again look at what the kids say.
And try to record it as it gets said.
While attempting to teach.

Shit Mah Students Say

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

"Winter" Show 2011

2011-12-14T22:25:00.001-08:00

Christmas Show 2011, a set on Flickr.

And Here is a glimpse at our "Winter Show"-a pretty cute experience.

God's Eye

2011-12-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

So sometimes I like to think of myself as something other than being an ordinary aging 3rd grade teacher in a public school. I envision myself going to the Comedy Club and talking about being an aging third grade teacher. Where the laughing I hear in my head at least would make more sense.

As I drive home I sort of review the day in that vein.

(It keeps me from ever being too self sorry with things I do blog here at times.)
Today I was driving to the coffee shop, Peet's, across the Oxnard Plain, after work at 5:30PM, and getting ready to take as many coffee sticks as my fat little hands could carry, and I thought of turning my day into a comedy riff. The thought of being this old and doing this with my evening might be why. I know I'd never do the same comic routine twice if I did that work.
No way. And I know I would just talk about the actual day, because I doubt I could remember anything I'd need to write down. Most of the time it strikes me as very funny "at the time." So, maybe I'll take you into my head tonight. This is where I am at:

"Hey, how are you all doing this evening? Great, yeah, shout out to fat people. You'd think I'd be talking, well, say, about being me up on a stage and being, well, you know, chubbers, but, no.
There are some great ones that do that. I can't even imagine filling those pants. ( this is my awkward stick, i'm not sure I'd ever start like this really)
I want to talk about what I do. I'm a 3rd grade teacher, yeah, you remember yours I'm sure.
I remember mine. She was fantastic. I teach Public. Hood, poverty school. And I really HAVE seen it all. Thirty years at this now. Older than anyone. Paid great, vacations, enormous amounts of perks. I think I last went to the restroom at like at 6 this morning. Bladder control, we are ON IT.
So, today, it was kind of funny.
I started thinking about nine o'clock this morning, early for me, thinking I'm going to have to figure out how to reconcile this project I'm doing with powers that be in my world.
It's almost unfathomable how weird this one is. I needed a project for a Parent Gift.
We have this thing in public school-we sort of separate church and state-you mighta heard of that- it's something I believe deeply in actually as a foundational principle-so you can imagine how I felt asking the kids to all come over to sit at the carpet while I told them we were going to start a project-"Today kids we are going to make God's Eyes, Ojo de Dios, so umm, well-this is a bit different than it sounds but I think you can make them for your family as a gift," and then after reprimanding a couple people for not listening, I started to backpedal about why we might be making this project by calling it a unique cultural experience, one from Mexico where many of my children's families come from, and it's a really nice ornament we could make, and not in ANY way something anyone in the class needed to "believe in."
A mouthful of something.
I actually had a family member suggest it because they know I love to crochet and do weaving and art.
And as we read the wikipedia article I just linked, and looked at samples from the internet with them, and generally I enjoyed the children telling me that Janet "can't do it." I heard myself say, "Why not?"
"She doesn't do Christmas." Kids call it as they see it. She is JW.
This isn't about Christmas, was my retort, just some of us may want to put it on our tree if we have one, or in a window, or just look at it and save it and use it as a parent WINTER TRADITIONS gift.
We all know the WINTER TRADITIONS gift drawer at home.
You probably sang those winter songs long ago and put things away in your winter drawer.

And then another child pointed at out student from Egypt and said, "What about Arabic?"
"That," I said pleasantly, "is a language", and I'm sure Joe will enjoy the project.
That settled the key question was asked.
"Who goes first?"
Followed by hands up all over the room, two shoves, and a student stating emphatically, "Why do they call it God's Eye?"

Well, it is important, so I stated (pure Wikipedia):

The Ojo de Dios or God's eye is a ritual tool, magical object, and cultural symbol evoking the weaving motif and its spiritual associations. For the Huichol peoples of western Mexico, the God's Eye is symbolic of the power of seeing and understanding that which is unknown and unknowable, The Mystery. The four points represent the elemental processes earth, fire, air, and water.

The Ojo de Dios, or God's Eye, is a simple or complex weaving made across two or more sticks and is thought to have originated with the Huichol Indians of Jalisco, Mexico. The Huichol call their God's eyes Sikuli, which means "the power to see and understand things unknown." When a child is born, the central eye is woven by the father, then one eye is added for every year of the child's life until the child reaches the age of five. Original Huichol Crosses are extremely rare to come by. There are many that are being made for the tourist market, but they do not carry the same traditional and spiritual significance.

And we were off.
Taking the "girls first" is a basically unfair, and yet entirely practical selection method. I went for it.
I sat down to teach my 8 of twenty students who are girls, and infinitely patient, how to make them- because I quietly told them, "I cannot teach a boy how to do this. I'm 52, you know, you might as well learn this now, at 40 you just can't do all the things you once did. I'm going to teach you and you are going to teach them." And that is exactly how it worked.
I may teach everything else this year the same way.
I'm somewhat serious about this sadly.
I haven't decided.
The boys stood around us looking over our shoulders, as I repeated the basics. Tie the yarn in the middle of two sticks we glued together last night with wood glue. Go under then over, under then over, under then over, and showed a couple You Tubes.
And demo'ed over and over. What a great job they did watching, they have come so far.
None of the videos I could find was as clear as they should be.
We will soon be filming our own.
TBA
As predicted by my girls -my boys began beating on one another, but they did wait.
And wait.
And wait.

Watch this You Tube to empower those who think going fast is EVER a good idea in crafting, his workmanship is horrible, my entire class did 100 times better, but he is excited:

This is THE best video:
Really awesome.

And if you want to completely confuse your class, but infuse it a bit with the "we are the down cast, the trodden, the forgotten," kind of an Occupy God's Eye kinda feel, go for this fantastic video, which for all I know is saying some kind of rabbit killing ritual magic chant.
I had to laugh at it though..

Then I started to think, did I see these art projects in the early 1970's?
Is this another thing that once was hung in the hookah parlor?
Am I doing something like recreating beaded doorways?

After the girls got started we had some fun instructing the boys.

My favorite teacher was Fatima. Her tutoring went something like this

"Sit in this chair.
Look at me.
Hold these sticks.
Not like that.
tie this in the middle.
Not like that.
Look at me.
Not like that.
Now you wrap it.
Not like that.
Look at me.
Over , under, over under.
Not like that.
Look at me.
Then you go around ten times.
No, not like that.
Look at me.
Now you have to change colors.
Cut it.
Not like that."

You get the idea.

Eventually she ditched four different people saying they were, "Impossible."
But it did work out.
And everyone treated each other in a lovely way. They did spread the project through the room. Soon every child but two made pretty nice things. Two refused instruction- inventing their own which were pretty ugly but, maybe in time I'll understand. It could be I need to re-examine my own need for symmetry.

Finished ones we hung up, Ok Desiree hung up, while I raged about, "the mess."
She totally cleaned my room as i went on about it.
The child is a saint.
I always feel the need to gripe.
(Because it was occurring to me it was really a mess and four hours were blowing by.)

Somewhere in there at 10:40AM it was time to head over to Santa 's Workshop.
Try to explain that if you are hung up on God's Eyes.
So, I started with asking, "Do any of you celebrate Santa?"
One child raised a hand.
"Well then for you we have a really neat thing going to happen."
And off we went with a Ho, ho ho to the land of buying. Children with $ got to pick out presents for family or self, or teacher (ha ha ha ha ha) and they had a really great time "touching everything in the library, opps, "Workshop."
No one really had much money.
That always kinda breaks me. Tomorrow I'm thinking of giving them 2 dollars each.
we do our Santa Mimes singing presentation tomorrow , eight classic songs in the afternoon so my daughters are coming. I go with this repertoire all done in sign, but sung. The Muppet's Twelve Days of Christmas, Rudolph by Dean Martin, Here Comes Santa Claus-Elvis, White Christmas Bing Croosby, Jingle Bells-Sinatra, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town-, Up On The Rooftop Audy Murphy, Feliz Navidad-Jose Feliciano. We follow this with cookies and milk.
It always is a very meaningful time for families. This spring I'm going to do a Motown tribute as well.
Anyway about the Santa Shop....
Our Librarian works her head off every year to do this for our kids, selling at cost and mounting a fantastic array of things mostly for a dollar or two. All from LA's toy District. Many kids get their entire Christmas in this store. For about ten bucks. It matters to the neighborhood, people line up to get in to shop for their kids. Yeah. I'd love for anyone to talk to me about tough lives.
When we went in we were about the fifth class to go-it looked amazing, truly, she makes it look awesome, and yet it was as if I had instructed them specifically to "Touch every single thing in the store and if you can pull on the plastic table cloths as you walk by."
Yes, I get embarrassed.
Sure I do.
No corner was left unmessed with!
True teamwork!

Do you enjoy children? Have you ever decided to take other people's children into a store setting? My own were never, ever , even for a second a problem for me in a store, ever.
Do you think you can round up 20 or so, mixed abilities, and run them into a plethora of cellophane wrapped toy studded tables full of goodies kind of store just to see how you are doing in the "serenity now" program you took on to help you manage stress?
I'm telling you the WAY to find out where you are with Jesus is to take a run through the opportunity Santa's Workshop presents. ZEN, Zen, Zen, I heard myself saying, "Okay that's it, we are leaving."

So we said goodbye to Mrs. Claus, and I gave a talk on shoplifting that lasted for at least twenty minutes back in the room that culminated in a nice discussion of the police. Because, they had asked the odd question, "What if you took it accidentally?" and I wasn't too happy with that.

Ah....it felt so good to clean that whole room and write out the times tables later telling about "The Good old Days."
Back when....

I didn't memorize my tables. In 5th grade Mrs. Summers ( and they asked "is she dead", well, actually, yes) I'm getting back to my story please, Mrs Summers asked me to recite the times tables to the class which I could not do then, but did today in breakneck time for my class.
Nothing is quite as nice as totally ending the illusion I am having ANY trouble with that skill now, at 52, and impressing the little ones, but back in my day I drew little bunches of lines on the paper to basically take an hour doing my worksheets. They were listening to this story as they wrote out their tables, in this cute way I have to do it with circles, stars and dice, and so back then she said no one was going to LUNCH until I did say my tables and had me stand in front of the room.
For a shy kid you might as well ask me to figure out dark holes.
No one went to lunch.
Period.
ah good old days.
Plenty of kids were ready to beat me into the dirt after school.

My Mom was called at home over my "problem."
In those days, about 1969, the intention was a call like that got you beat senseless. But my mom wasn't a beater. Times they were achangin'. My Dad was a beater, but he didn't take the call. And I don't think he'd have been upset at all actually over this. Just said, go learn them.
So she kept me up all night marching around saying the tables aloud. I did that all the night, literally learning them in one night. I recall my mother helping me with homework about three times in all. Once we learned the poem, "Block City" and this times mess, and a high school paper she wrote "On Daffodils." I never turned in, because it was absurd, each had the flavor of that "up all night" marching. Oh she also assisted in the "What Is Man" essay. Another "D."

My class was into this story.

What happened, they said?
When?
Oh.
Not much, I said, I recited the tables the next day and she said. "I guess you had to have a reason, lazy kids make me sick."
I took that to be me.

With that little story out there I looked around the room and asked if they thought I should be grateful or sorry about it all, and the consensus was "happy."

So there you go.

Happiness is....

After school I called to talk to the person that SUGGESTED God's Eyes to me in the first place.
Telling them it went pretty well.
Because it turned out to be wonderful, and just the tonic we needed, very much the hand's on work they need now, which is a mysterious truth about learning, and when they started to realize we can do more complex shapes- it got even better. Plus I used a lot of math language, like quarters, halves, counted by two so on...well, a lot.
On the phone...
I was told that this project was what they want to make for ALL our family too, so to please remember to bring home the leftover sticks. In other words, guess what you are getting this year folks?????
I realized I need more sticks because the kids want to go at it again, they have LOTS of family to make them for, so that put me on the road over to Ventura to Peet's Coffee.
That's the best sticks you can get, these super long ones.
I like Peet's because they have a great store and, frankly, I nail these super long thin wooden stirrers there.
Yeah.
well.
times are tough in education.

Naturally I decided I ought to buy something to make up for this a little, so I pick this beautiful cup.
Which she does not put in a bag.
The whole reason I'm in there is to get a bag, so I can nail these sticks IN the bag.
So I ask for a bag. The cup cost me twelve dollars.
I gave a three dollar tip.
I'm trying for Peet's sake.

So of course I go to leave, go to get the sticks on the counter by the door, and the girl comes over to service "the area." Meaning I have to sit 20 minutes and wait for her to finish.
And wait.
And wait.

But my serenity program is working because I develop monk like patience.
I drink my Peppermint Low fat Mocha like a religion.
I see the deeper meaning in it all.
Or the meaninglessness.
And finally she goes.
Finally.
My fat little hand nails a bunch of sticks worthy of the day.
Out I go.

Thinking about.....all I've done today.
In my public school.
and that I want to share it with all of you.
and thank you for listening.

Make a God's Eye, hang it from the car mirror, think of me!
Put it on your tree, think of whatever you think of and Happy Traditions"

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

A Movie I Like More Than Blogging

2011-12-10T12:13:00.000-08:00

Well I'm watching so maybe you'd like to watch as well....

Yes i'm making the mounds of Toffee today......it's the holidays. My rugs are filthy...and I'm just hoping for rug cleaning.

I'm Not "Allowed"

2011-12-09T07:48:00.000-08:00

At my work I cannot write an email to two people.
Unique apparently to MY email.
One is it.
No group shout outs for Sarah.
I also cannot see my blog. This blog.
But. I can read the work of Doug Noon. Because he had the sense to get an address for Borderland free of the word Blog. Partially.

So I have a suggestion. I'm doing it too.
I'm going to read all his posts. I do this every so often. After I read them I'm going to put them in my mind as "resources." You should too. Yesterday the post on Dibels helped a great deal.

So here is what will get you started:

Archives

Enjoy, Happy Holidays.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Gardner, Common Standards, Gifts

2011-12-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

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.

Baby I love You, Ah Ah ah....Janet's song For Her Teacher-ME!

2011-12-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

So hello, it's parent conference week in my elementary school, in CA, in an area of really palpable poverty, in third grade, in a school that after 7 years got into "safe harbor" for improving, and I've been completely enjoying the parent conferences. Extremely humble, good folks coming in to hear about their children. My news for them is fine, good, happy, and it goes well. Sometimes it's harder if a child is homeless or a family cannot afford a doctor.
Even when there is something we need to work on, it is okay because we sit and care about one another.

But today I got a surprise. One of my children "made an appointment" with me during the morning recess to see me "alone" after school. Now this child I've taught two years, which, let's face it, is very powerful. A true bond. Anyway I thought maybe she wanted to ask for my help with a "problem" or...well I finally suspended judgment, hoping nothing was wrong.
And actually nothing was "wrong" at all.
What she had was "a song" that she wrote for me.
She told me she wrote me a song to talk ABOUT ME.
Then she showed me this lovely set of lyrics, balled in this ball coming out of her pocket nervously. It looked so planned out. That struck me, they way I saw a poem on that page.
We talk about poetry you know.
So I asked her if she could hum it, just a little. She told me she was too embarrassed to sing to me. She then said, "I might be able to sing it, if I don't look at you, it's about you."
So she decided to turn around and sing it which totally surprised me again.

She is barely eight and charmingly turned around and sang this lovely song.
It was just amazing to me. It's her "first song."
She said it that way, and I thought I am so proud, so hearing "my first song," can you understand how that made me feel?
One day I'll remember that the best. I asked her if I could make a little movie and share it and she said, "OK" and later in her conference her mom said sure, post it.
She added she wanted to hear it too, so would listen. Because quite a few of my parents do have computers -thank you so much to whatever helped that to be possible.

Here's my song.

I had some help with several conferences. I like to ask someone very special at school to assist me in translating. She's great at it. I understand Spanish but, sometimes I miss subtle meanings. And she is so extremely complimentary to my teaching, it utterly bowls me over-and I so appreciate this. I get very worried I'll muddle meanings and that nervousness multiples in a conference, and she and I both several times shed tears this week as we shared things I wanted to say.
I can see these children in their futures-easily- now that I've taught 30 years, hoping for them and in my mind's eye already seeing them getting to go to Stanford, maybe, or where they choose. Being able to assist their families into other days is my work. Of course this grows harder to see now having nothing to do with the children, effort or possibility, but it is harsher in a world that is charging children for those futures as the "price" of the education-prices that are outrageous debts. But I see it, their future- still-possibility.
Unlike many people I'm optimistic about their futures because they are so earnest and they work with such dignity. I have to believe this will win out. I enjoyed sharing all they've been doing. Especially all their independent reading. Truly amazing. We have real goals to work towards. Daily they do better reading, and they love it. My biggest goal this year was understanding this aspect of 3rd grade, and building truly functional independent reading so it fills my head all the time. Dr. Krashen assisted me greatly. One major goal I set is seeing them take a leap into chapter books-a step that several are reluctantly taking. But taking.

In the conferences I learned of one very artistic child having an artist grandfather from Puebla, Mexico so today we went on-line to look at the art of that area.

My computer totally broke at school, what a nightmare, when report cards are all done on-line as is so much else. But I was lent a school laptop, truly helped right away, and hooked up today to my Promethean and I managed to wire the sound and got the printer installed, Adobe in to read PDF's and eventually everything was re-established, so I could show her the art of her parent's home. It's beautiful and all her color, bright, alive, I see there. Another student shared she wants to be a doctor, and I can see that.
It was a very nice experience talking to families about talents, observations, about their dreams, and seeing what together we can do.
The truth is....the sky is the limit.

Now if only we can shape the world outside this neighborhood into a community that looks out for one another and sheds this ridiculous outlook of winners and losers.
Because certainly my class is full of those that can help make the world a better place.

Totally off subject we are reading "Dogzilla" and I must share this set of poster's they made because they are so darling....

My Teacher, To Whom I Will be Ever Grateful

2011-11-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

(This post was in response to a National Day of Listening.
Of course it breaks the format. But I refuse to reduce this to a Twitter.
And I'd love to interview Sharon.)

If you take tissue paper, the white thin kind you find in a shirt box, and fold it up very carefully as you once folded footballs out of paper, then dip it in slightly watered food coloring a bit of each color on every end, take it carefully outside and step on it between colored cardboard sheets, then utterly carefully unfold it-you'll know a kaleidoscope of color. Saved for you on something thinner than onion skin. It'll dry to make a wonderful wrapping paper. But what you'll be doing is experiencing the beauty of a project designed by a teacher I had for many years, Sharon Goodman.
It is there, within that delicate unraveling I find her. Doing my work.

When I thought about who really impacted me teaching today, defining my gratefulness of this season, who really accounts for the years and years of teaching art with children that I've pursued in poverty schools, who I internalized as a teacher, mentor, artist, it was Sharon. I think above all for her directness.
I often tell children, and occasionally make a family member or friend rehear the story of being in her home, doing art, as I did several days a week after school, drawing happily, when she approached me to suggest that a round circle with looping petals around wasn't really what all flowers actually looked like.
I've drawn flowers ever since.

I steal from Sharon in my teaching all the time. I steal that directness as well. And they appreciate that.
Of course I also take her projects. I've yet to figure out how to do the ones at public school where we melted crayons or poured colored wax into slightly crushed cardboard carton milk cartons. Making these delightful candles. Several years ago I had a lumberyard in Northern California that would give me boxes of small pieces of wooden scraps. From these we glued and stacked and recreated sculptural forms that was another of Sharon's wonderful projects.
I cannot even look at oil pastels that I don't think of her.

What is interesting to me now that I'm 52 is how a begonia evokes Sharon for me. She grew them in her shady backyard. Sometimes we had art out there. I saw a macrame owl in my friend's classroom recently and it brought me to the fabric and string art that I saw hanging and created on her walls. Sharon taught me, as a girl about art within a life. And her life now is dedicated to her art, as well as family and living.

Some time ago I wrote a post that brought her forward for me. Thinking today of the impact on me, I must include it but before I do I will say this about my teaching. What I've learned after 30 years is that children need active engagement. Visualization is an important skill. These projects I did, and now teach are challenges, they are things to be solved. Sharon introduced me to something pretty unique at the time, the idea of being challenged to solve these visual problems.
As I read a new story with the children, study animals, think of the solar system, my mind always goes to how to make a model, an artifact, ways to actively engage the child. And I thank Sharon for bringing to the hundreds of children in poverty my training because seldom, very seldom, almost never have I seen anyone trained in the arts doing that work with those that need it the most.

It would seem this is one of the great unspoken realities in California. The materials, arts, instruction in fine arts is removed. In lieu of a behavioral control that Skinner would admire that simply is the mechanism their voice is removed....ah well...

For hundreds of sets from my teaching the last five years, here you go...link.
Here is the piece, written long past-2007 when many things seemed possible- if only people knew:

Earth day , Beautiful Stuff! and why ART is Everything in a Classroom (Edited and edited on Sunday morning after a re-read made me think...edit this)

A "perfect lady" by Sharon Goodman, my teacher.
I forgot her humor.

Found art and art made from the things around us takes a moment.

It is almost so undervalued in our consumer culture now as to be considered laughably hippy or some other tossed off nonsense.
So take a minute to recall what feels good as a child, felt good. Being allowed to make and to do always felt good to me. Putting icing on a gingerbread house, sticking on beans on a turkey shape, wire sculptures from telephone wire, felt terrific to me. Being allowed to find beauty in the ordinary, to invent, it felt very good. Being able to communicate meaning felt like I existed and mattered. A breath of this is the fresh air our children need now after the stifling NCLB nightmare of being forced to focus on tests to the exclusion of being able to develop creative potentials.

I think I have found a book, Beautiful Stuff: Learning with Found Materials by Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini, to begin my re- celebration of Earth Day, with the kinds of environmental and holistic artistic experience building for children that really matter for them long run. It is a book with powerful message embedded in happiness, common sense and just good art educational principles refined through many years. All of Cathy Weisman Topal's books on children and art are the best out there to teach a teacher or parent what we are doing in working and living with our children. Every parent needs them and every teacher. Children deserve the training they give and this process reflects the best of the best out with it's ties to Reggio Emilia, which incidentally lived in process in this country in the lives of children in the 70's. My art teacher, Sharon Goodman easily could have authored this text.
And as an aside I CAN LINK TO MY TEACHER THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING FOR ME.

I took a long minute reading this with such personal joy and gratification today to become again in touch with my younger self, my better self, my childhood days where I invented every chance I got or looked at life with a kind of open sincerity and a desire to make and do. It hasn't left me, obviously I am teaching now from those early values. So when opening this book for a moment I thought, oh it's long ago and far away. Almost cried thinking of the days when I strolled over to Sharon Goodman's for our art classes and created from everything found. A time when collage meant you felt great for weeks just for saying it. Yeah the 60's never died for me either.

And as I turned the pages today taking a brief rest and planned for 1st grade teaching next week, I began to re-love all my junk, my saving, my storing. As an art teacher, credentialed and degreed in art and in education teaching in primary in southern, CA in a school as devoid of making and art aesthetic as I have seen, aside from deep inside South Central where it was a little worse, one of my purposes is developing art for students as a working constrcution tool to bridge to meanings. Creation blooms in strange ways and this book is going to be used planning after school art projects. My program is several weeks underway. I am older and tired but this re-invigorates you even after an operation which you simply did and hit the ground running 2 weeks later....so let me see. The book discusses noticing, observing, finding, looking aesthetically at found pieces and found things. These are collected and brought to the school where the text talks about ordering principles, seeing form, and the art process inner dialogs (I believe you say "meta cognition" now), talking of working through the process of re-invention from this found thing. From this point of observation the student is going towards this other place of reinvention..to a work of art, creation of beauty. We better understand that process or how will we re-create this pretty darn messed up world?

Listen to this Topal quote early in her book after children have brought in found things from home to begin the process of working towards creating many varied projects. I think this ownership in bringing from the child's home, their place, their finding, this piece of recycling things from home, and collecting there first is such a strong one...an empowerment tool. But then this leads into:

"Noticing, Sorting, Collecting
After watching children pick out and study one item from another-commenting on it, guessing what it is and where it came from-it is clear that the children's main interest is in looking, feeling, comparing, describing, contrasting and exchanging observations with one another. They are really not interested in making anything yet.

By standing back, observing, and recording the children's discussions, teachers learn that children have unique and unexpected ways of organizing and catagorizing and describing-ways adults may not have even considered. Being open and attentive to the fresh and unusual ways in which children think is to be open to new ideas. This is one of the ways in which adults can learn from children. But these moments often pass, unnoticed or forgotten, if not recorded."

Let me talk about that for a minute. Right now our students are invested all day in test prep. Period. A nation-wide insanity, leading, I think to possible critical loss of something that has made our nation singularly strong. We have lost ourselves to some test based "see what my kids scored" competitive nonsense and the desire for a million dollar child. It's as if we forgot the lessons of our own childhood and where we found our joy, the thing given us to fuel our life and bring it meaning. And we are taking our children as far from psychological health and happiness schemas as they can go before some kind of psychosis will set in. You can't do this as a teacher without speaking, noticing, seeing the repercussions sitting in your room worried, acting out, feeling stupid or wrong relative to whatever is the test definition of the day..... I see it close up in teaching Under performing children as creative projects are jettisoned, they can't even be happy in art. Do you understand how serious this is when giving effort to art is hard for them?

Sarcasm, freezing, inhibition in risking to think are running so high as I listen teaching after school art there are days I force myself to remain steady and tranquil. In testing regimens these things called imitation and teacher direction are being sold to our kids as academic rigor. It's appalling. That's it with rigid teacher control. Teacher directs, students do. No thoughts deviate, children are in monkey see, monkey do mode.... So the limits of your teacher (for a student) are in a very real way are your personal limits forever. There is no appreciation or "allowing" divergence, no room to create, no give of self, no self direction. The result is you go to teach art after school and kids are unlike any I've ever encountered, fearful, burning through things, unable to see subtlety, awkward, clumsy in form. Also unable to listen to you talk to this process....so you get work that lacks aesthetic construction. Oh...I thought, I am thinking... oh no..., I can't change the child can only change myself in relationship to the child. So I have to back up and teach design principles, how to see, what is art. They just haven't had it.

All of Weisman Topal's books do this. They help me put my feet back on this good earth the way Susan Ohanian puts my feet back on this earth. The way Nell Noddings does. The way Doug Noon and Mark Ahlness and his wonderful The Earth Day Groceries project does. Oh yes, children, yes, I remember. It's about you. I remember what good teaching is. I am remembering my love of working with those who see the lights burning. The potentials that we are gifted to steer. The importance of what we do is...... it's process.... Adults have failed to get to these meaning too much in recent test prep nonsense. These must be children who can make, they have to make the future.

I know the found material Topal is presenting true to experiences in classroom that "work". Well, I've lived it. We had no money to buy in schools, so we "found" for one thing. And used this making in thematic and Whole Language projects. I'm not apologizing for that no matter the political ramifications. But I could fall down on my knees and kiss her feet for this book. Because I have no one, no one, to talk to about this and this, my dear reader, is the all of teaching a child the art of seeing. I know this observational piece described here very well is the foundation that art can give to the budding scientist. We are looking at the world under a lens or a set of glasses as little artists. A set of glasses that is tuned to what works, how to organize, how to measure, how to work with choices, observe results, re try an idea, accept and work out of problems, view making as problem solving.

Listen to this observation from her text. Here she is commenting on teaching after a stage where children are processing their found pieces, looking at them , sorting out groups they feel go together, playing if you will with the group collections, a stage moving them into other aesthetic dialogs and considerations:

"Teaching is learning
It is a learning experience for us to watch this exploration take place. The children are totally absorbed by all the treasures. The tone in the room changes to a quiet hum. The little set ups that children create are varied and inventive. Some children choose only a few items and stop. Some keep going and going until their entire (sorting) pages are full. Some children are so involved in looking at the materials that they never get around to arranging at all-and this is all right! We discovered so many exciting and interesting things about children's interests, intelligence, and ways of working-and about our own insecurities by standing back and observing."

All of this rich material is discussed through out the chapters. So then the book relates exploring found materials, using "universal" design principals , story telling through making which is just a powerful part of the book, if you have worked with the young you know they will be talking their concepts and projects. When I was in art training I used to sit and record what the children said at these times, something that has never left me. Their decisions, their finding relationships just can be very humor filled and insightful. Picasso got it. . As children talk the work they engage in visual metaphor making. See this for the power it holds as the child invents, he or she creates the story of what they are doing. It is another kind of place bound in language now tied to making and this thing they hold. It is this process that is the connection of mind to reality. It is for me the science. Perhaps another doesn't understand but i just hear hypothesis and trial and error when I'm recording their thoughts. This is the earth...child...art.....meaning making connection.
She slides this into become sensitized to "listening" to the child in creation...my most valued role is simply a listener as the room begins to generate objects and images. Always.
And then...you go forward into your role. As teacher carefully you make observations.."I like this" ...or "that works". You ask questions and everyone is a listener to the answers given, group constructions of meaning found in this room, in this time , in this place which is the true meaning of the making.

Here my art teacher of old springs through my being reappearing working with children again. Less is more. The teacher role is an art.

I love the talk about grouping and collecting the materials incidentally. The sensualist in me is captivated by the pictures in her book (absolutely perfect pictures)...things in luscious trays awaiting an organizer and a story with children so glad to assist.

I made Fandango-esque puppets with my group Friday..we too slid into chaos and out again as you do in making and I felt anxiety levels rise and fall. My task was to gather things I heard the children say, record them, things to bring up as we talked of what we made later. In my hearing I'm telling the children essentially, listen in your words I hear important and valuable information. And we had several beautiful products...better products, ones we could talk about and use to re-inspire better work. It is absolutely wonderful to see a child take a handful of blue feathers and turn it into the best blue chicken puppet I've ever seen made. It was royal blue with the bright orange feet and beak. Color selection, his self dialog, all a part of things recorded. When I asked why a blue chicken he said, "I can do it because in art i can change reality." Yes, little man we can.

This book such a help in setting up my thinking about what was working right Friday and what way to go. My Gosh will the world just wake up to these kinds of truths please. It's the language of childhood.

There is at section on constructing with wood scraps. I know this from childhood when Sharon brought the scraps from the lumberyard and we sorted and constructed. I still have mine today 40 years later glued together looking like a Stella. I just think truthfully that this sculpture process combined with drawing these forms is invaluable. The book writes of sorting the forms, noticing the basic constructs. Imagine not a ditto with a name of a sphere or cone or polygon, but actually looking, naming , drawing and then eventually working toward linking and building with the pieces. Larger, smaller, balance, and practicalities like gluing and affixing...soon you are helping a child into being your budding construction engineer. Thinking three dimensionally is built in actual doing. Don't we want a doing world?

At the end of Topal's discussions in her book Beautiful Stuff she is relating the principles of Reggio Emilia as students draw their wooden constructions and use self reflection in written and drawn language. This becomes a part of the trip in this making experience which has had so many stages. She follows with a book making "reflection" where the process of the art experience has been re-created. With photos and writing, transcribing the dialogs heard and thoughts written down during all the process... combined with the children's drawings/sculpture/found art the journey of making is represented. I liked this, it's why I think I'm blogging actually:

"The Need to tell our story
Telling our story is a way of documenting experience. The process of documenting helps us understand the children's thinking processes, their desires, and the surprises that they have lived through. Documenting gives teachers an opportunity to re-examine why they think a particular experience is important. It also gives them a chance to think about what they might do differently in the future.
Documenting is a vehicle for communication between teachers and between teachers and children. It is also a vehicle for communicating with parents. Parents become stronger participants in the life of the classroom when they can follow the interesting work that is taking place. "

Again from Topal after displays of the entire found process bring in parents to view all that has been done,

" Parents respond with interest to the display. They look at other children's work, not only the work of their own child. They become more interested in the kinds of interactions between children and between children and materials that they see documented in the chilldren's creations, photo's, and dialogs. This is a way to begin to create a sense of community in the classroom. We feel that we are beginning to understand what it means to see potential in materials.We are amazed by the many ways in which we can use materials."

When I hear people talking of the need for "creativity" for schools of the future with "out of the box" thinking I will redirect them to this book, Beautiful Stuff, and this writer's series of books because her language of meaning gathered from these kinds of explorations are the coat hangers upon which the structures of children's real life future are hung.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

A Blessing

2011-11-23T17:28:00.001-08:00

Untitled, a photo by Sarah Puglisi on Flickr. All poetry and pictures are by her hand.

Life handed me
A bowl of lemons
Sitting on a table
They served as a centerpiece
During a meal
Of Thanksgiving
The year I didn't cook
Because I had just come home

I remember looking down
Dressing
Seeing across the bowl
Appetite dissolved
No one noticed
Meal over
And washed
Before they saw

That I was missing,
Five years ago
When I talked to lemons
Played the odds
Wept
Rejoined the living
Bowed my head
Making lemonade.

Wayward Daughter

when are you coming home
to family
fresh sheets
some cleaning
(one can hope)
to several boys
that aren't even
biologically related
that I find

to gravy
and all things
you look upon skeptically
home to the
few folks
that you'll spend a lifetime
wondering about,
one who has
her mind

on you

Give Us This Day

Macy's Day floats,
Fruit loops
Football
Television
Cranberry sauces
Feastival
Tables clothed
A good crossword
Pan drippings
Succulent turkey
Just the basics
To look back
Upon our harvest

The one we reaped this year
Bless us this day
Once more
With hope for another one
Revolving
Friends
Family
Children
Love.

Amen

Thanksgiving Turkeys 2011

2011-11-22T21:15:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving Turkeys 2011, a set on Flickr.

Wishing everyone the best of Thanksgivings.
For my children that so badly want to try turkey or pumpkin pies and have a feast I wish you all your wishes. These are construction paper crayolas on construction. Laminated.
All wonderful as we studied "design" as pattern.

Sweet Syl

2011-11-22T21:00:00.001-08:00

Sweet Syl at the beach nov 2011, a set on Flickr.

My daughter and I go for a walk...

How my Brother Spent 15 years....or....The Doors Sing "Reading Rainbow" Theme - Show Clips - Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

2011-11-12T19:11:00.000-08:00

My kids say this is the ultimate proof Reading Rainbow was the greatest show ever.
Anyone that knows my love of Reading Rainbow knows it's the secret to my program.
And , yes, I did find this a hoot. (which is a word so old my kids will love this posting even more)

The Doors Sing "Reading Rainbow" Theme - Show Clips - Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Said The Raven

2011-11-09T20:53:00.000-08:00

Love this set of oil pastels.

We read a story about Ravens today in 3rd grade (in a poverty school I might add) as we started talking about Native Americans. Altho most students, minus four, of my 20 students are descendant of native peoples in North America, none seemed to know about it.
News to them.
It might not be a moment in time for you reading, but I had to pause, and say a little thought to myself in slight curse form, and plow forward into introducing them to themselves.
too bad no one thought of that before now.

That might clue you in about what is the price of poverty and our present culture of, well, I hesitate to name this kind of lack of disconnection. I'll call it getting an education that fails to tell you who you are and who anyone else is either. The high price of homogenization and the politics of ed.

So finally I said let's look at this map of the tribes that once existed in North America. Way back -yet another shocker for them, happily finding it on my whiteboard a rare occasion when I could click over to the net and it worked plus find the resource and not be blocked.
This map is great for United States tribes. And this was a massive resource.

Well you get the idea. Interestingly they wanted to talk about the idea of tribes in Mexico.

You might need to know that my 3rd grade are mostly first and 2nd generation immigrants from Mexico, altho we have an Egyptian native and, actually a rather interesting classroom with a student whose family comes from the Philippines as well. So today we took a look at something massive to take on in a day for an 8 year old. Heritage. Our current reader story is called Dancing Rainbows and it is a story for Pueblo Indians.
So we talked about the life we saw in that non-fiction story of a life that seemed so distant.

I started to sort out some things that we can tune into about these first Americans. The connection they have to nature, first. This they found of interest. My students live in cement. I know things are pretty serious, no one has ever seen a forest. All would like too. And just a few miles up the road they CAN see redwoods. But can I get them to the trail in Santa Barbara? Would anyone ever care enough to sponsor their bus ride? The reality is, it's doubtful.
But I can hope.
I think they can do some research on different tribal customs and learn about their own culture as well. We can start there.

Anyway I had a story to read about Ravens too today. I actually wanted to talk about Crows.
I recently saw a program on the intelligence of crows. What I connected to was the myth that I recalled from Northwest Coast Pacific Indians and the Raven.
So we read a story about this trickster taking the sun to give to the people. A story that they always are fascinated by when I read it yearly at this time. I think the part where the crow transforms into a pine needle and is swallowed by the Princess to be re-born as her child always gets them.
That's the kind of stuff children want to hear about.
How's that again?

So then they made their version looking at an illustration from the story as we discussed some technical art related things-"stylization," oil pastels, media, borders, composition, side and frontal view, the way to portray eyes. And I loved that we started with contour drawings done in marker- that by the end were totally hidden-so no one ever sees this early drawing. There was a lot of moaning about those designs. They don't care for not being able to erase. And with a marker they had to go with it the first time around. And did beautiful work. I love the smeary wonderful quality of oil pastels-this was the first time they ever used them.
It was hilarious to watch them fuss over "the mess" of it all.

YES, Lovely work resulted. Now we'll write a short three paragraph report on crows or ravens together, and follow it with a myth story in the style of these fantastic native story tellers.

And try some realistic crow drawings.

And just for my own pleasure as I liked this one...
Counting Crows as friends....don't always look for dots and lines here, float a bit..

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Word Problems

2011-11-08T15:41:00.002-08:00

Well, I had a substitute yesterday.
I was out for a medical "test."

And sitting on my table returning to grade was something I did not leave for the children to do. When I stop howling I'm going to type these in with titles of my choosing for you. Math word problems my students concocted. AGAIN, the titles are MINE.

First, you need to know this work does NOT look like work I allow.

Second, you need to know that I'm retaining their spelling and punctuation.

Third, you need to know that every once in awhile I need a laugh too.

And as all good jokes start....true story,

Because these really are "true" and when I'm not laughing I am shedding a tear over whatwe still "have to learn."

Apples, Oranges and Pairs

I have 1 pair of birds. I got 1 pair again. Then I got 1 pair again. 1 pair had 4 babys birds. How many birds altogether?

Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?

I have 2 dogs.
And they had 7 pupies but 5 ran away from my house and I couldn't get them. How many pupies all together?

And That's Where Babies Come From

I have 2 dogs.
One has 3 babies the uther one has 10 babies.
How many are there in all?

Everybody Was Kung Foo Fighting

I have 2 foo dogs the pink one has 30 foo babies, the purple one has 20. The pink one had two more and the purple one had 1.
How many all together?
Add it.

How Many are Right Handed?

There are 10 students on the playground but 5 of them went inside the classroom.
How many are left?

Eat But and Die

10 dragons had 6 lions of them
ate but the others didn't eat
How many did not eat.

Dog Bones

I have 19 K-9's.
They all have 13 dog bones.
10 of them digged up their dog bones.
How many dog bones are there now?

Change the Y to an I and add ES

My dog had 4 pupeys but 2 of them ran away
4-2=2
So I just have 2

Bratwurst

I have 10 braterfly and 2 had 2 baby.
How Many in all?

Someone Keep an Eye on that Komodo

2 komodo dragons plus 2 elephants.
How much are they together?

You Should Meet My Grandmother

My cusins have 3 dogs.
One had 5 puppy. The second one had 3 puppy. The third one had two. How many did my cusins have?

We Really Like Cats

I have 7 cats.
My mom bott 3 more.
How many cats do I have?

We Really Like Games

I have 10 games my mom bote me 9 more
how many do I have?

(Keeping in mind bought was on last week's spelling test)

Oreo (this is their title)

I have 2 cats. The gray and white one had 1 baby cat and the cat was black and white. The black and white stayed with her mom. How many are there in all?

Where Did You Put Your Police Officer?

I have 10 K-9's, each K-9 has a dog toy, 5 K-9's lost theirs.

Would You Prefer a Therapist or a Math Problem?

I have 1 sister
1 boy die
i had 1 sister left.

And the Answer is Always 42

I have 5 dogs.
Each dog has 10 frizbees.
2 dogs lost three frizbees each.
How many frizbees are left in all?

Signed, The Cat Rancher (title courtesy Heidi, my partner teacher)

I have 3 cats the spoted one had 5 cats. The white one had 77 cats the last one it was brown it had 8 cats. How many baby cats all to gather?

Balls in Oxtown

I have 6 puppys and Aady had 4 balls and 5 puppys had 13 ball and one puppy lost 4 balls and they have 4 balls.

So what did I learn from this?

For one thing- I had a good idea I work hard for my money-now I know I do.
So, this is how my students constructed meaning. They are now in third grade.
You can see that they had trouble with operations, finding ways to convey their meanings, and interestingly most could not do their own problem- bogging down in what they were asking, or in the numbers.
So, it's a starting place.

I didn't read them all the titles I gave. Because they aren't appropriate. I read most to them and they howled. I suggested that it might be a better idea to learn how to write a good workable word problem. And they agreed. So now for the next week or so I'll add this to our agenda. They probably won't be as funny, but they can try. Using real problems, real numbers. And I hope a little time, effort, logic.
FYI my favorite involved the Komodo dragon.

I think these would make for wonderful illustrations.

If nothing else they illustrate to me a moment in time.

No. 2, Pencils Ready Ohio?

2011-11-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

Just a shout out to the folks in Ohio.
Looks like you've arrived at the moment to be heard.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Elementary school in Oxnard briefly locked down during arrest nearby » Ventura County Star

2011-11-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

This morning I swallowed and found myself under a desk, with a group of students huddled with me, in the dark, locked down listening to "Chicken Sunday" (Patricia Polaco) a book I decided to read. I doubt I'll ever forget it. I also am not sure I'll read it again.
We were in a lockdown.
I asked the Ventura County Star and they put an article to answer why. What a wonderful newspaper they really are. The best.
I wish they could have the funding they deserve.
And give a bit more than this on the "suspect."

I'm sure we quickly got all the kids to safety, and did it excellently I think, but until 9:05, or 30 or so minutes later, I had no idea this was adjacent to us.
So I sat wondering if we had an armed person on our campus, or if we were going to be fine.Listening for police cars or helicopters which have been a part of other lockdowns.
One time at the nearby high school my dear friend Roger, the Principal, was facing gunfire...
I don't think you can rehearse for that.
This is my 15th remembered lockdown in an almost 30 year career.
I hope I never do this again. Because it is harder than anything a teacher can explain to those not in high poverty areas.
Not again Ever.

Later a former student came up and brought me his care.
Estevan just grabbed my arm. He knew.
And that made it ok. But it took hours and hours to get this anxiety out of my system, though I was testing, teaching, prepping, shopping for my snack day tomorrow and cooking for the staff later on and just now at 11PM wishing we'd sent a letter to our families.I just didn't think I should do it for myself....

Elementary school in Oxnard briefly locked down during arrest nearby » Ventura County Star

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Parade of Books, Happy Halloween, And Merry Day of the Dead

2011-10-31T17:31:00.000-07:00

My class says.........

Happy Halloween, err, Día de los Muertos!
I know that I was interested in both of these two days. And the traditions of both.

First, today my twitter got hacked. That's how it started, seeing an email. Uh oh...
Knowing at work I can't deal with anything.
The awful part of that was I got a message from a good friend saying that "a nasty blog was written about me." Rather than thinking I was being hacked, I thought I was being targeted.
Great.
Thus I've confirmed surely some personality dis-order, because my stomach just dropped. Oh my, yes it did. I'd been celebrating quietly inside that I was quoted in an article Anthony Cody wrote -one that got to the Washington Post. So this sufficiently deflated my ego until my daughter told me that it was hacking. I cannot check Twitter or Facebook at school, so I just stared at emails announcing these tidings.
Shifting onto what was on my class's mind.
Our big Parade of Books.
Otherwise know as "a really good morning."

So Happy Halloween!

My class had an exciting day. Our school returned to a tradition, dropped the last few years, our classes celebrated AR book characters or books by dressing up as characters. My class chose a book too, and together with Ms. Wolfson's class we made masks for Día de los Muertos. When we were called- we went out into the giant circle of classes and marched with our masks. I made a really short video. Yes, that is Bad, Bad Leroy Brown playing. Really loudly, uncut.
Which is still making me laugh.
I love how we can't stop being human no matter how many rules we get.
Yeah, damn.
Hot damn in fact.

I enjoyed watching the classes and children today in their Halloween gear. I always do. Fortunately we do save some of these traditions at our school.

We made these masks in our Art Program. Twice a week the children go to me for art, then to my partner teacher for Yoga. We are really enjoying this and the work the children are doing is fantastic. Yoga helps 1000% in focus, not to mention flexibility and all the things that these children so need.
We made the masks from construction paper and construction paper crayons. Then I matted them and put them on the Everyday Math yardsticks which I think is the best use of the sticks we've had so far. Certainly the most memorable. This a nice slideshow of the masks, which were beautiful.

Funny but we had to hound the kids a little to get this work. When you don't regularly look at art, make art, have it in your program you lose the connection to it. I see this happening. I'm rather a lone island at my school. Reconnecting to creativity is taking coaxing, work and....it worries me frankly.

But, after this parade my class was as good as gold, I asked why?
One child said, "Because you did this for us."

I love this picture! It says it all for me.

Well happily almost all my children wore their own costumes to our little party.
And my homeless child came with a brand new one-a gift at the shelter.
One doesn't celebrate and her costume was the best one I ever saw. Quietly she told several children that "God does not celebrate Halloween."
So that's settled.

I'm rather glad to have just been passing cupcakes at that moment. So I simply listened.

Yes we had our first "party." In school my parties are kind of like this.
We put out place mats after baby wiping desks. Then someone passes plates.
Another child napkins. One at a time children that brought treats happily serve them. This can drag out twenty minutes like today when you are selecting icing color and kind of cake. I loved hearing "green icing, white cake." Or my favorite, "Do you have a purple icing with a spider ring on white?"
Yes, as it happens we did.

And I got my complimentary four cupcakes.
Which I gave away later in AR because I kept eight readers 25 minutes after school.
I started a new program to help a bunch of kids with reading. But I forgot the first day fell on HALLOWEEN!

So we tried to get serious while licking icing off our fingers.

I love how the sun shone through our masks...

Our Kinders....

Well since this is what played to open our parade, well, here is the tune I sang in my head all day
appropriate or not!
As my kid's said later,
"Rock on!"

I'm honored, PLEASE Read: If Only the Billionaire Reformers Cared about THIS Data

2011-10-29T18:07:00.000-07:00

I'm truly honored by this post from Anthony Cody.
Honored because I'm quoted, but more so because poverty is addressed.
We haven't been "allowed" to talk to poverty in teaching for so long.
Teachers that did so were "making excuses" or "whining."
This year the ugliness of poverty is taking my breath, along with the beauty of my class.
My father grew up in poverty. I cannot look away now.

If Only the Billionaire Reformers Cared about THIS Data

Salutations

2011-10-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

In Charlotte's Web there are some lovely moments.
I found this out "again" by reading the story aloud to my class, we haven't finished it yet. It's the longest reading in history. I might not make it through Charlotte's leaving us. We'll see.

This story is how I first learned about death. So it always is a story that I both trust, for its truthfulness, and also face as the challenge in living. Knowledge. It requires a bit of gumption. A great writer certainly helps us confront these big ideas. (Despite the fact I just read a piece that asserts writers and artists create as a reproductive activity to gain a greater degree of reproductive success.) That just seems a glandular twitch-but EB White did something else. He helped me make some sense of something. Be a friend, Help out a friend, value your relationships. Reach out. That kind of truth.

Charlotte's Web is, however the story recommended in our first reading theme, so I'm taking them through it orally because I just have two copies, not enough for the class. Hopefully students will check it out to read for themselves. I suspect that's the best way anyway. To read within the context of a relationship with a caring adult.
Anyway there is a part in the story when Wilbur has been moved to Lurvy's farm, away from Fern. This is one of the "just must be so" realities that line the story. A pig cannot continue to grow up on Ferne's place. He eats too much. Children understand that. Realities sure.
Anyway, he is alone on this new farm, he is depressed and he has, it seems, lost the will to eat or to live. He is desperate for "a real friend." This is what he decides would make the difference. He knows Templeton the Rat and the Goose but they aren't able to really relate. No matter where or when or how I am reading the story I always identify with that drive to be heard by a friend. How important this is. It "saves" us.
Well, it certainly saves Wilbur. ( for an interesting aside please go here on EB White's writing of the story.)

That scene is so well written and so poignant my third graders were silent listening, and despite real second language issues you could hear a pin drop. It would seem they were totally "in understanding." The chapter ends with Wilbur calling out to the universe for a friend. A cry into the void of his barn.
I think this underscores the human drive to creation in writing and arts. Can anyone hear me?

I knew that feeling of needing a friend so badly, I did cry out here a few years ago starting this blog. I had reached a tipping point in my desire to communicate the real concerns I have with poverty, children in poverty, teaching, in changes NCLB put in place, and in the resulting educational decisions affecting the children I saw being bluntly implemented. (And not to get off topic but Jerry Brown, my governor, can tell you so articulately what's my concern I think I've developed a kind of hero here.)

So Wilbur calls out.
I can still remember my mother reading this book to me at the time I was four. It was one of the first books she ever read with/to me. I would look at it so badly wanting to read it for myself. Seeing letters but not meanings. And it resonates with those early memories I carry of who I was or where I was once. I see her sitting beside this silly bunkbed I grew up sleeping in, turning the pages, a chapter a night with her saying, "I'm not sure if I should be reading you this." That made me even more spellbound. To this day she says, "Well it had some real life stuff, you aren't sure if a young child should know." Believe me, we find out.

Wilbur's stomach was empty and his mind was full. Well, when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, It's hard to fall asleep. But sleep and Wilbur finally found each other. EB White

So Wilbur calls out for a friend.
And he hears a voice. A thin voice, a kind voice, (that I've never heard any movie replicate correctly), saying, "I'll be your friend."
But he has to wait until morning, because the voice instructs him to wait. It's a hard wait for him. Fruitless sleeping.
He goes to try to sleep with a "full mind and an empty stomach" and, in fact, doesn't sleep.
That friend will come to mean so much to him. In a way I relate to this looking at my life when a friend just came to be as naturally there as the moon and stars. Unthinkable the importance of the connection.

At that point reading I turned to my class, a 3rd grade sheltered immersion class in a 100% free lunch school in a poverty urban area, and casually asked," Do you know what that might mean, full mind/ empty stomach, have any of you gone to sleep hungry, but full of thinking?"

To my surprise a roomful of hands shot up. Hands that wanted to talk. Children that spontaneously did talk. Children sharing how they are often hungry at night. But the stories were not just life to text connection. Which is what the holders of mandates say I should be praising having lost the notions of art in teaching. These stories they shared so eloquently were ones of children whose parents can't afford enough food. This year I have two tiny tiny children. One told about how they eat at school. They stay in after-school programs until 6PM. The child said, "When I go home it's too late for dinner, so I go to bed real hungry."
Other things were said I cannot share. I can tell you though I felt this deeply.

Ok. The point is, and after telling this to my father, he rapidly said it, "Those children are hungry." And added that he sees the "changes" and "reforms" in education making it harder and harder for a poor child, like he once was, to raise themselves up. Tested into a permanent underclass. Fixed there . A good topic for another blog. And mind you this is my father speaking he said, "No child should have to attend school feeling hunger." But wisely adding, "You don't hear that out of these politicians much." No Dad, we don't.
We are hearing that taxing the 1% is unfathomable.

Our school nurse expressed- with a kind of affront at the temerity of my partner teacher raising the issue, "We feed them two meals." It just doesn't appear her to be our "job" to see some of the children's realities as an area we can affect.

It turns out that my children, in my class, know a lot about paychecks, when they come, not being able to buy milk at certain times of the month and they know about how Wilbur needed a friend as well.
Because they, too, need a friend.
I wonder about Maslow. And how we've voided his meanings.
Or decided to reduce stories like Charlotte's Web, and the arts, to less than a term as brave and real as self actualization but rather want to call it the drive to get the best mate and reproduce. If that is the underlying point of our arts and poetry, and all our activity how sad.
I started reading this and am still considering it in the context of this class I am teaching.

I wonder about how the testing we do takes into account if one child was raised in a violent home, a hungry one, or if we really are taking into the fuller picture of that child how much effort they are indeed expending doing work with us at school. And I wonder if I get right down to reading those links if they aren't implying that this scenario of who gets to have and to use, do, enjoy aren't biologically more fit. I'm wondering if I'm not hearing something with an ugly face rising. Because that WASN'T Maslow' s pyramid. A thought that lighted as I looked at this.

I wonder about why clean clothes, getting them, isn't better figured out at our school. Like a process we already solved. Just as I wonder why we always seem so bollixed at a child in violence. Or one that's unclean. I wonder about why we are going to be tomorrow inducted into a rigid behavioral management program called CHAMPS by Randy Sprick, without really dealing with the reality reading Charlotte's Web revealed.
They need to eat more, healthier and feel the assurance food will be there.
We don't ever do that training.
How can I get to that?
Because the impact on the behavior, learning is profound.

Not to mention of course what effect larger class sizes and the collapse around us in ed is really doing.

Charlotte's Web was a wonderful way to start third grade this year. I am thinking about the fact that all these years later the children so keenly hear the news about friendship, hunger, loyalty, the humor and find it to be fresh and true. What an amazing read.
A beautiful read.

I liked these quotes, but they are from the movie:

Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: Salu-what?
Charlotte: Salutations.
Wilbur: What are they? And where are you?
Charlotte: Salutations is my fancy way of saying hello.

Avery Arable: Can I have a pig too, Pop?
Arable: I only distribute pigs to early risers, and Fern was up at daylight trying to rid the world of injustice.

Charlotte:
Humble. Humble has two meanings: it means "not proud" and and it also means "near the ground." That's Wilbur all over.

Wilbur: Are you writers?
Charlotte's daughters: No, but we will be when we grow up.
Wilbur: Then write this in your webs, when you learn: This hallowed doorway was once the home of Charlotte. She was brilliant, beautiful, and loyal to the end. Her memory will be treasured forever.
Charlotte's daughters: Ooh, that would take us a lifetime.
Wilbur: A lifetime. That's what we have.

Narrator: Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

Charlotte: Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.

Wilbur: I think you're beautiful.
Charlotte: Well, I am pretty. Nearly all spiders are good looking. I'm not as flashy as some, but I'll do.

[Templeton returns from a night of overeating]
Templeton: [hiccups] I'm back.
[Charlotte and Wilbur glare at him]
Templeton: What a night! Never have I seen such leavings! Everything well ripened, seasoned with the passage of time and the heat of the day. Oh, it was rich, my friends. Rich!
[hiccups]
Charlotte: You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Templeton. It would serve you right if you had an acute attack of indigestion.
[Templeton hiccups agains and pats his stomach]
Templeton: My stomach can handle anything
Wilbur: Templeton, if you weren't so dopey, you'd notice that Charlotte has made an egg sac.
[Templeton gazes toward the ceiling and sees Charlotte's egg sac]
Templeton: [hiccups] Hooray for Charlotte.
Wilbur: She's going to become a mother. For your information, there are 514 eggs in that peachy, little sac.
Templeton: This has been a night.
[Templeton crawls over to Wilbur's pen and hiccups again]

[a fly lands in Charlotte's web]
Charlotte: Just a minute, Wilbur.
[she climbs up and wraps the fly]
Charlotte: He'll make a perfect breakfast for me.
Wilbur: [shuddering] Ooooh. You mean you eat flies?
Charlotte: Why, certainly. I eat anything that gets caught in my web. I have to live, don't I?
Wilbur: [nervously] Why, yes, of course. Do they taste good?
Charlotte: Delicious.
Wilbur: LECCH!
Charlotte: Course, I don't really *eat* them, I drink their blood. I love blood.
Wilbur: [gasps] Oh, please don't say things like that.
Charlotte: Why not? It's true.
Wilbur: But it's *cruel*.
Charlotte: Well, you can't talk. You have your meals brought to you in a pail. Nobody feeds me. I live by my wits.
Wilbur: It just seems an odd sort of diet.
Charlotte: Do you realize that if I didn't eat them, bugs would get so numerous, they'd destroy the earth? Spiders are really very useful creatures.

Narrator: And so Wilbur came home to his beloved manure pile in the barn cellar. Around his neck, he wore a medal of honor. In his mouth, he held a sack of spider's eggs.
[Mr. Zuckerman takes Wilbur's medal, polishes it, and hangs it over the cellar doorway]
Narrator:
Wilbur no longer worried about being killed, for he know that Mr. Zuckerman would keep him as long as he lived.

Narrator: The autumn days grew short. One evening, just before Christmas, snow began falling, and cold settled on the world.

Narrator: Once she had promised Wilbur she was going to save his life, Charlotte was determined to keep her promise. Day after day, she hung from her web and waited patiently for an idea to come to her.

Narrator: People had come to see Wilbur when he was "Some Pig", and came back again now that he was "Terrific".

Fair M. C.: Ladies and gentlemen, we now present Mr. Homer L. Zuckerman and his distinguished pig!
[audience cheers and applauds]
Fair M. C.: The fame of this unique animal has spread to the far corners of the earth, attracting many vaulable tourists to our great state. You will all recall that day last summer when the writing appeared mysteriously on the spider's web in Mr. Zuckerman's barn. This miracle has never been explained. All we know is that we are dealing with supernatural forces here, and we should all be proud and grateful. In the words of the spider's web, this is "Soooome Pig".
[audience applauds and cheers]

Goose: You have a good home home here. Why aren't you happy happy happy?
Wilbur:
I miss Fern.

And this amused me:

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

We all shine on......

2011-10-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened.
I got my presentation ready for back to school night. And developed that same day and night (and for a week the worst neck pain), worst pain in my life, so far anyway. And strangely I've had blood in my urine which must thrill everyone reading. In fact I'm still so weak. I've been sent to a physical therapist. We met and one session I think helped, but it was weird to get the different things I've never had a massage so this was like laying your head and neck that severely hurt into someones hands you never met ( we all have different levels of what we can handle), especially this electrical stimulation stuff, that seemed particularly odd.
He thinks everything shifted in my neck vertebrae and can't get back in line. He hopes it isn't a fracture. Would be nice if my Dr. ordered MRI's but she didn't. I know if my patient had a syrinx starting at that location I'd fail to order the tests too-throw caution to the wind and save the insurance. From my point of view it's been a bath in pure pain. Nothing rivaled this, definitely not childbirth or kidney stones, and I'm weary.
A real pain in the neck.

That said, I met a wonderful group of parents on Back to School Night, and I love my class. Parent night is a haze of that pain though. I practically ran out. There was nothing else I could do.
I don't know- it brought me a real reminder that I live on borrowed time.
We all do.
I especially do.

I read and responded to a sad article tonight. To change the subject because I find I can't stay with anything too long at the moment. About a high school that decided to reward test takers with gold level and platinum "cards" and play out something I once saw in a Frasier sitcom. That episode showed the psychiatrist brothers totally disarmed after finding their exclusive inclusion in a health spa gold level meant little learning of a platinum. Wonderful satire. It doesn't fit here to even go to this article, but, it was something my mind meandered to. You'd expect to see it in a sitcom. Isn't this sad to read? The article was one written by Anthony Cody. It's about a CA high school motivating students to perform "for them." These are the sad legacies of political intrusion in our schools that are going to corrupt our kids.
Who would send a child into that?
No one, that could chose something else.

I don't know if I'll be at school tomorrow or wait a day more. I may need to wait. I think I'm pushing it to go in, because this was quite a physical lapse. I honestly lost time. Seriously so. I meditated today for hours, and suddenly it was 3 and I had lost the day.Sadly I find pain again the center of my thought. Heard from my father about the time I came to, and he's got swollen ventricles in his head and the worst pain of his life-and I know he hasn't got long. And I'm terribly sad.
In this same time I started to think about karma. That's on my mind as I watch the world.
Karma.
Do you think it odd I see it in play very often as I walk through life?

Today a picture was balanced in a mailing tube at my door.

A drawing I made in red of tulips inside. I sent it in 2006 to someone who had asked me to get them a quote from a book I reviewed for their wedding, I sent the picture as a gift for that event after a couple of exchanges with this person. A kind of hope that things went well for them.
The tube came back in five years looking the same.
It was marked unknown address and return.
Five years ago I sent this-from a time that has recently been calling to me karmically. Yes, it is complicated. I read Steve Jobs said you connect the dots backwards. That's in play here.
So I wrote an email to the person I sent it to today, to ask why the return?
He hadn't sent it to me, he said, but stated that he had put it on his porch to give away or pitch, ha ha ha ha, and wasn't it great, marvelous even, that it got to me without anyone paying to return it?
The possibility of his callousness at the gift return, or in my feelings hearing that, so directly, not even a remote capability of his thoughts to step inside of or feel. I realized that immediately would e the case. In 2006 I encountered that in several forms. It wasn't something he wanted. And now anyway he's separated. I doubt this ever came out of the tube. All I could think about was how I sent it at a time when I thought it might be valued and as a wedding present actually. And I really was ill. And realizing some important things about living fully.
In a way my own karma brought it back.
And of this recipient's karma in this, I see him differently now than I once did.
Just as very much like a buzzing I can tune down.
I thought I was giving them something they'd value.
It doesn't hurt though. They just don't find any value in what I can/could offer. And I listened to a very judgmental email thinking his view of me was really insightful, as he managed to trod all over my feelings.
Place this happening against running into a friend from 31 years ago, a month or so ago, that took the time to take me to lunch and tell me that a picture I slid under his door 31 years ago transformed him.
I cannot be so blind not to understand the messages in these two events.
In what has cycled back to me.

I'm going to be glad to slide it back under my bed with a host of other things I've made, drawn and done. You reach out. You reach out. You reach out.
Somehow you absorb the losses. It's part of karma really. Well to me it is.
Your arms embrace space and time.
But not all of our actions bring back to us our own actions as they were meant.
Sometimes.
How this is seems to me to represent the role of a teacher.
What I hear in play lately.

I sat and looked at that tube and thought.
A random universe?
A web of meaning?

And by the way if you read Charlotte's Web aloud to children you will find one of the most beautiful treatises on friendship ever written. Wilbur cries out for a friend. I've never seen anything written so true.

And what I'm talking about here, I don't know so much. My heads still swimming in residual pain and in my weakness so I'm just placing a song that came to mind today. A karmic hello to those listening.

The Waterfall, through the lens of 3rd Graders

2011-09-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

We made a book in class today.
Every week we make books, and I bind them copies-I wish I had a color copier, and paper.
Not a child in my room has ever walked in a forest.
No one has seen a waterfall in person.
But we were reading a story about one.
This was my trying to recreate and summarize the text in a visual form.
And they did lovely work.
How they solved the pictorial issues amazed me.

Waterfall

Rainbow rock pretty

beautiful

Will be fun to go to

Waterfall

I would like to go to this waterfall

And see a rainbow.

Juan

Waterwall

Beautiful wet liquid roaring dream

It is beautiful cliff, dream, then blue danger

You tumultuous aqua dreaming crash.

Fatima

Waterfall

I rush to the water,

It is beauty, blue rainbow.

You dream the noise roaring.

Jocelyn

Waterfall

Wet beautiful slippery high cliffs

It is a big waterfall, one that is pretty

You would like it, so much.

Gabriel

Waterfall

Liquid magnificent rainbow singing rocky

It will be full, to swim here wild

You will be happy again.

Esthela

Waterfall

The beautiful rainbow is color

It is a huge powerful wet river’s face

You see a waterfall emerge alive.

Antonio

Waterfall

Giant, loud, powerful, beautiful

It is huge, massive, wet

You will see it’s true beauty.

Janet

Waterfall

Wet , noisy, fast, cliff, aqua

It is beautiful in the woods today

You are going home again.

Bryan C.

Waterfall

The blue wet water rushing

The rainbow dream on an indigo cliff

Fast water danger aquamarine.

Daniela

Waterfall

Beautiful wet noisy fast roaring

It is so wet and powerful rushing,

You can get wet so fast.

Carlos

Waterfall

Beautiful deep noisy relaxing fasterfall

It is very fast and relaxing peaceful

You can see your reflection

Maria

Waterfall

The rocks are so wet

It is a huge place with rocks

You can get so wet so fast.

Freddy

Waterfall

Big relaxing liquid of water it is

A magnificent adventure that is a

Beautiful, falling water over the rocks.

Mark

Waterfall

The water is dreamy to me

It’s scary if you go down it.

You can take showers in it

Beautiful, wet , roaring, noisy.

Bryan

Waterfall

Blue water fast rocky wet

It is washing the fast cliff

You rush to the rainbow

Younan (Joe)

Waterfall

Wet, liquid, rushing, big, mist

It is a huge waterfall, a lot of water,

You can have fun outside.

Jesus

Waterfall

Wet, beautiful, rainbow , colorful

There rises a cliff full of danger,

You mist in the noisy water.

Brando

Waterfall

Wet beautiful slippery high

It is a big waterfall, all that is pretty

A Peony and a World View

2011-09-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

My class is in a theme in their readers called "Off To Adventure."
Many Districts in CA in the last year or so adopted the new reading series; I do not know if it is a good thing or not to use the new ones out there, but we decided we "couldn't afford to do it now."
So we were waivered, an option that sprung out of crisis, and are using this series for, well, maybe going into ten or so years now. With four or five to go, until another series gets adopted from "big publishing" and yet a newer version of what we are mandated to do appears. Now we are probably trying to use material that doesn't fit the current school "desire" to have everyone every minute doing the same thing, on the same page, in every room at the same time, calling that collaboration-and today, in fact I threw out pages altogether.
Because I know that we are terribly dated in these "interpretations"-and that what we did will soon be labeled an ineffective standardization that narrowed and cost students opportunities to think in complex and creative ways and from different points of view. I know that the strength of what we do was never in it being adhered to and followed like a chanted ritualized mantra, but....ok. Some have to come to naming, understanding and must hear it from others. But, for now I wait.

I'm new to third grade though, by the way, though I've taught it two years in 30, having transferred from first, so it's an adventure to me. Truly! Everything is alive.
I've been in first grade a long time. My sheltered immersion kids in my CA school aren't savvy. They cry with me when reading Charlotte's Web at poor Wilbur who wants a friend so badly. They wait with anticipation and joy when someone donates Soft Soap to our sink. And they raise so many hands when I ask if like Wilbur they know an empty tummy and a full mind. Today ten shared just how real that is for them. I'm teaching hungry children. Children that know illness without real medical care, know the cruelty of going to bed in dirty stinking socks. (A subject that yoga brought to my awareness.)
So everyday is a venture into making connections, constructing a web of meaning, finding effort and achievement, reaching beyond word into something that allows them to approximate what peers might be doing elsewhere with this "standardized" material. Ones that probably don't have a rigid adherence to a code to worry them all day- as they feel they don't fit just a little deeper. I often wonder why we further dis-empower our students with such rigid training they literally cannot cope with open-end thinking.
So I ask you are we all the same or all we all different?
It's the question education is trying to answer one way for one set of students, and another way for another.
And is the crux of many things troubling us all right now.
At an almost biological level.

Anyway just thinking, I read the first story in the basal reader called "The Lost and Found" with them. It's a strange story where a lost and found bin becomes a trip (on something unpleasant in my opinion)-really an odd story for me- into an underground stream, strange land, and I think implying two boys in trouble are creating lies and making this all up. But, we went on that "adventure" and made books called "What Have You Lost?" In those paragraphs students told about something important they "lost." Having students write in Word almost did me in. But we got a book kicked out of it. Then we illustrated.

Then we read Mulan. Not the Disney one. This was by Son Zhang Han. My students enjoyed the complex images in the story, the tale was really of gender identification and gender roles within another society-one they don't know remotely about and in a different time as well. We are uncomfortable enough about these female/male issues that the book and comprehension pieces skirt the issues. Should she serve in the army? Is it ethical to decieve for a "good reason" as she does to save her father. What is honor? These were questions embedded within this story. If you cannot teach in a Socratic way, in a critical way, I'm not sure that you should read this one. But if you can- it leads to lots of things to introduce, entertain, posit. Even in children first learning to talk about what they read.

One thing I decided to tackle aside from gender roles was the purpose of the artist.
Just in general-why do we create?
On You Tube- that thankfully is open at my site- I was able to search ten or so videos out including one where a Chinese artist, a woman, talked to the students about art in China.

In her training the artist was tasked to be virtuous, healthy, in balance. The more she spoke the more I thought about the difference in the western artist. In the purpose of the art. In what it served to do. The artist was not, as the children saw in Van Gogh's work, growing insane. Their art was about a healthful relationship to nature.

That said, I also showed a Reading Rainbow about a book called Llaing and the Magic paintbrush and Big Bird In China. The Reading Rainbow contained an artist demonstrating calligraphy. And we certainly want to learn something about that.

(Despite considerable home disapproval for my spending) I went out and bought twenty five bamboo calligraphic brushes. And today we set to making art. Noting many children said they "haven't ever painted "like this" at school before, I decided we would see if better materials lead us to better images. First thing today I showed this You tube:

It's pretty lovely. And the students could see children involved in the study of art painting peonies. I bought these lovely dishes to hold paints and water and we discussed a "way to think" in experimenting today and then we were off. My partner teacher and I split our two classes in half and while she does yoga with half I do art with the other half. In Yoga they are working on the poses, on balance, concentration and stretching. In the experience of trading for this art and PE experience we are trying to expand the reading units.
To stretch.

I really enjoyed what they made today, each student was so different.
And yet all were interpreting something from "another world." with a different cultural perspective and a different sensibility they can expand to consider and take into their frames.

I've copied here a set of Chinese Proverbs. These are ones I'm sharing with children so they can perhaps consider writing a few of their own. On the morrow.

A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. Chinese Proverb -

A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers. Chinese Proverb

A book holds a house of gold. Chinese Proverb

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. Chinese Proverb

A book tightly shut is but a block of paper. Chinese Proverb

h

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark. Chinese Proverb

A diamond with a flaw is worth more than a pebble without imperfections. Chinese Proverb

A fool judges people by the presents they give him. Chinese Proverb

A gem is not polished without rubbing, nor a man perfected without trials. Chinese Proverb

A nation's treasure is in its scholars. Chinese Proverb

A rat who gnaws at a cat's tail invites destruction. Chinese Proverb

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still. Chinese Proverb -

Be the first to the field and the last to the couch. Chinese Proverb

Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom. Chinese Proverb

Dig the well before you are thirsty. Chinese Proverb

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. Chinese Proverb

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

I know you are thinking what will the "Power Point" for Back to School Night look like.

2011-09-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that too.
And if I EVER get this to work I will be fully in joy. Sylvia, mydaughter took a crack at it.
Boring though it may be. I'm going with it.

My Class Newsletter and other things presently killing me...

2011-09-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Right now, I'm exhausted. And I need to get away from work.

A child that just friended me on Facebook wants a math test and criticized my punctuation. Maybe that's why we block people. And he means well. So I'm working as many teachers are, too much. I just created a Power Point for my class Back To School Night. The only problem I see in that is how to get it so I can see it at school. I had no idea how hard THAT was going to be. I've got it in Google Docs, on my children's blog in a link that works, and in a file in my gmail. But I'm going out to get a zip drive and I hope one of those works Thursday Night.

Then I attempted to update my children's blog. Collect links to some fantastic math. Which I hope to get in place next week at the computer times. And then I tried to write the following Newsletter in English and Spanish. I just cannot tell you how frustrating that is. I can't get my blog to play at school or I'd show this to families. Ok. I can't get the pictures to copy from the Word Document to place it here. You get the idea.

And someone will squawk about editing, that will by the way be poor.

And I'll be spending 30 hours of my time doing it all. But I am doing it none the less.

Room 9 Newsletter September/October

Mrs. Puglisi’s Classroom

Welcome

Welcome families and children to room 9. It is the end of September and the class had a good first month of school. In this first month we have learned rules and routines to make our class a safe and productive place. Children are doing a great job returning homework, folders and trying to follow room and school expectations. Simply put they are doing GREAT!

This Newsletter brings you insight into what we are doing/will be doing in the near future-not everything but some highlights.

Reading
Our first theme is Off To Adventure, this theme ends in early October. In the theme we have read three stories, The Lost and Found, Mulan and The waterfall. For each story students were tested to see if they attained the skills of the unit. Just ask to come in to see their test folder. So far most students are doing well. With each story we made a book and tried to do an art connection. For Mulan we have worked with Chinese brush Painting. Look for these on display in the classroom.

Spelling
Each week we take a spelling test. We use 14 or so words from the reading story PLUS ten words from the 100 to 300 sight word list. Students are doing well. I am going to make a Super Spellers Club in October and add the vocabulary words for these really excellent spellers onto the test. Of course the children will be glad for the challenge.

Writing

We make journals in our room. But we also try each week to make some kind of class book. It’s a great way to hear each other’s ideas and work on editing and other things that we will cover this year. By year’s end we will be writing effective paragraphs and reports. So far we have created The Lost Adventures of Mulan and What Have You Lost?

AR Reading

All students check out books from the school and soon the Public Library ( we go to both on Wednesday). After students read they log onto the Hueneme school District website and test on the books. You can test on these books from home, I think, which is great because students earn points. When they earn 20 points they receive a free book. http://www.huensd.k12.ca.us/hueneme/site/default.asp

ALL of my students need to take the test on both their reading story, like Mulan as well as on the books they check out. They have time for this every morning and after lunch but starting this week students may stay until 3 to be in the After School AR Reading Club. Please have your child stay to read, at least two days a week.

Field Trips

We had a wonderful time going to the FireStation. All of the children behaved wonderfully and learned so much. On our website you can see their trip. It is at http://sarahpuglisi.wordpress.com/

The blog is called How Beautiful You Are.

I know we have one fieldtrip with a bus but I am thinking about seeing the price if we got a trip to a Pumpkin Farm. More to come-to do this might require donations of $20, which might be too much-but is SOOO worth it. Each week we will be walking to the Public Library on Bard Road. This is a great way to increase our love of books.

Art/Yoga

Our class is participating in an art and exercise program. Each week our class will trade with Ms. Wolfson’s class to learn Yoga and Art. This is strictly for exercise, not teaching the practices of Yoga beyond the balance. All children were very excited to start the program. In art they created Foo Dogs to support the Mulan theme. In Yoga they learned several poses like the Standing Tree.

Students are looking forward to parents coming on Thursday to share our Back to School night display of what we have made.

Mathematics

Please look for more assignments to be coming home in the practice pages. I hesitated at first to send these until I was sure the children could be responsible. Our first unit reviewed saying and writing numbers to 10,000, using clocks, number grids, the purposes of math, and the routines for our program. I have found an EXCELLENT on-line resource for them in Everyday Math at:

http://www1.kent.k12.wa.us/ksd/ms/math/3.html

If you will use this if you have a computer at home you will be amazed at the results.

I do really like the Kahn Academy website for math.

That link is:

http://www.khanacademy.org/

For Practice go to:

http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard?k

How Beautiful You Are/ Classblog

I have built a class blog for our class. It is actually recognized and awarded nationally. I think you’ll enjoy it. Everyone gave me such thanks and permission to do this in our families, thank you as well.

The link is http://sarahpuglisi.wordpress.com

Science

One of the first things we study in science is Environments. So we are going to read about owls in October and try to write a book about them. Owls live in many different environments so we will experience the habitats through the owl as well as in our Science books. We did a lovely art project with the owls-beautiful results we are looking forward to sharing with you.

Ok I figured out another way to do this:

Perhaps they never will-our first artist in 3rd grade-Vincent Van Gogh

2011-09-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

"I could have told you Vincent this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you."
Don McLean

Ah...to art, are they listening in our world?
Do we understand what it teaches?
Can it assume a place again within our classrooms?
Recently a teacher gave me an interesting compliment, she said, "These people don't know how smart you are-they think all you do is art all day." I take this as proof many don't know how much art teaches vocabulary, words in contexts, how it develops skills in observation, the way it refines one's decision making. It is an exploration in creative thinking. Frankly it is how to improve our schools. But, perhaps they are not listening.
In zen you wait until you can be heard.

I want to tell you about the Van Gogh project. I want to suggest and enchant, describe it, and pull you into my new classroom in third grade. But I'm so darn tired after three weeks, and have a fever, just got a crown and filing, and am frankly, beat up.
I love third grade. But it takes work.
In September I teach Van Gogh. In moments when I can- we read several books I have on the artist, look at his art, and begin to learn about this idea "artist."
At some point I'll also bring in some big sunflower heads to talk about spirals, and heliotropism, as well as the Fibonacci series and the natural logarithm. Then we draw pinecones. I go in at 6:30 , come home at 5PM and work in the evenings-not enough ever, and I have quizzes to grade tonight. But I wanted you to see these lovely paintings. This post will be short.

The students used oil pastels on 18 by 12 inch poster board-a very thin board-and I'm so delighted my daughter Sylvia led them through this picture making. It was her lesson. She was really the teacher. Each child did not attempt a "copy," they tried an interpretation of Van Gogh through their own interpretive eyes.
It seemed to me to allow them the freedom to "see" and boy, they are lovely.
They "see."
Enjoy!

r

Or in a slideshow:

A favorite tune to share this artist:

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

..if a school's mission is to teach, then to speak to 9-11 is imperative, we hold the memory of what was

2011-09-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

On September 11

Ten years ago I had worked exactly what I have worked now, three weeks, we'd just celebrated my daughter's 12th birthday on September 9th. I was teaching in a kindergarten, at Bard School. I'd just transferred there- so basically was getting used to a new grade, new school, new partner teacher. It was a school my husband had Principaled, so it felt familiar and like home, and there was great will with the staff-for me they remain among the dearest teachers and staff I've known. The only thing slightly odd was that the Principal replacing him made it feel wrong, and her actions were fairly toxic somehow. Or so I saw it at the time, I realized later I looked through judging eyes. But my health was tenuous. That escalated somehow those tendencies.
I didn't know any whys then, not the why of cancer in my intestine, not the name of the syrinx in my spine, not the personal growth and decline a decade would bring. I don't know whys now either of a different kind. I know less. But I did see I couldn't stop bleeding, and I guess there was a real symbol in that. I'd just had a D and C four weeks prior and my iron level was 6. So on September 11th I went in by myself, early to work. I'd worked summer school. I'd moved a room. I was exhausted, already. I've always been nervous about arriving late, to anything, so always go at least an hour early. If you are meeting me for lunch and you arrive an hour late then I'll have been waiting three. It's just a problem I've always had. My husband was going to drop off my two youngest and then drop off my oldest daughter at his Junior High (but my 5th grade daughter got ill that morning and I didn't even know). They knew about 9-11 because my young daughter had cartoons interrupted. She kept changing channels looking I think. She was home with allergies. She absorbed my mother all day, the woman who knew Pearl Harbor, who lived to see another day-one that will never leave our collective memory. And, of course, her memory, our Sophia's, is the memory of her grandmom reliving another time through this.
Jack claims he heard the news actually over the car radio driving in.

My school then serviced the Port Hueneme base and a neighborhood. Quite a number of my kinders were base children. The morning kinder teacher ran in to me, saying, "They have attacked us." She looked frantic. And I remember I kept asking her who attacked. I had no idea at what level she spoke, attacked her family, our school, something national, world wide?
All I could think of really was terrorists and maybe then the base. I went to turn on our TV. At that time the District still maintained cable to the rooms, sadly, no more. But I could see pretty quickly this wasn't appropriate for tiny children to watch so I gathered mentally up the gist and it was off before the kids came in, few children came to her class, just a handful. She turned down my offer to co-teach, because I was worried about her. I wasn't the AM kinder teacher, so I decided to go over to the EMC, a tiny trailer attached to the parking lot that provides films and laminating, to see their TV. The two ladies that ran it indeed were firmly attached to the TV- in as much a daze as everyone else. I arrived there about the time the first building actually collapsed. And heard about the Pentagon somehow within a minute or so. I knew watching the building literally disintegrate of the enormity of the event, as I'd ridden an elevator in that first tower, when the second was being constructed. I'd gone with my friend Peter, when I was 17 or so. But I knew from my father's having lived in an apartment very close to the Pentagon on Joyce Street that if the pentagon was also under attack, it was unlikely we'd ever hear exactly how big or how bad.

I wondered if the President was in a bunker in West Virginia, or in the air or how they'd be handling that. Other than that mostly I was looking into the faces of sometimes severely panicked base mothers, others coming in with Kinder kids. I remember singing the America songs in sign language with the 12 of my 20 kids that came that day, with parents watching that, many stayed the whole time-which they hadn't been doing. That was the fear. I remember leading America the Beautiful and crying. I led a school assembly doing this same thing in a week or so. I still remember doing that. It was very important for me, and I have a ghost of a memory of going through those motions. Children are in joy in song. I still remember putting that first.

That night, September 11th, we watched TV like everyone else that could, to see a plane crash into that tower over and over and over again until I said something like, "I don't think this is appropriate to those that died or have family there." It took that long for me to realize this was not a spectator event, it was a horror. And the networks obviously arrived at the same conclusion because somewhere in there it stopped being replayed. And I watched worried for my sister in law, although we had pretty quick word she was at least physically safe in New York. We certainly worried for family in Washington DC and back east. In fact as the skies went plane dead, and everything was turned to watch George Bush, it felt like family, friends and the security of one another was the only thing we could do besides carry on. So I just went to work and carried on.

That night, September 11th, my husband came home talking of being a Principal to a junior high, Blackstock, during that day. I was proud of him. He had to talk to the teachers, he knew they had the TV's on in the room. Eventually he nudged them off those. He announced to the children they were safe. But it was my daughter Sylvia that made me understand what he did. And not even that night. Eventually she wrote several pieces about that day. Her memory is impeccable. It was picture day. She remembers wearing her uniform. Her father talking to them. She said very little happened and her bio teacher talked about it quite a bit.
But I was proud of him.
Over the years since we've worked in a San Diego School, Warner Springs and I recall the memorials there and I remember the anniversaries at the schools I've worked in, now returning to Hathaway- where on Friday ten years later before this anniversary, not a word was spoken of this, by a Principal so new to the job her mind could not see itself connected to the job of leadership around creating a memory in the mind of children born after these days, but aware just the same that "something happened" once in America.
The past. Our past.

My daughter a few years ago was over working on 9-11 taking a day or so to help me before college started for her at CalTech. Sylvia laughed a little at another Principal of mine reading a poem over our none too effective Room 10 intercom, a poem my class couldn't hear too well, a lovely poem, after a moment of silence, and as 6 year olds seemed unconcerned to stop to really hear-but we tried. It's early in the year, three weeks in, it can take a bit longer to instill that when, "the intercom is on" then NO ONE is talking- in any size voices. She penned a poem because both of us were crying, maybe, and both of us were recalling in our own way I had her at the computer taking pen names from the kids and she made an entry for our classblog. Just the other day someone wrote to ask me if this poem could be used in a Memorial Service in a New York service.
Sylvia is embarrassed by this, but it is a beautiful work.
And though my new Principal missed her opportunity to use her Friday to recall this event and honor the passing of both time and lives, and missed the opportunity to hold America to heart with those that do remember what rang through us all-in our halls-I do remember.
I know this is just one of the millions of memories that when shared describe the horror and hurt of that day. But I've been lucky because in the ten years after I spent my time with children.
And come to center on the hope that lies with them.
So many are lost to what matters, and what doesn't.

You might want to know I went on to hysterectomy, peritonitis, infections, moves,peritonitis again and again, gastro bleeds, transfusions, infusions, diagnosis of GIST cancer, back issues, surgeries and fights for my life as well as teaching a 3-6th grade, 1st grade, 6th, 3rd, more 1sts and now a 3rd. It's been quite a ten years-personally- as if in a struggle just to regain being able to look around outside myself in a fight with pain, illness, doing good work, and being in the moment. But arriving at September 11, ten years after, I still think first of how I spent the day embedded in young lives, largely immigrant children, who were so frightened that day, so dear, so full of courage and kindness. At public school, a place offering to them the possibility of better futures...and now here is Sylvia's poem.

september 11th, by Sylvia Puglisi, sitting in for her Mom

A depressing sort of poem. But there could hardly be a happy one today, I suppose.

* * *

september 11
17 first-graders
moment of silence skipped
for the immediacy of fresh strawberries
and the novelty of pencil sharpeners
(which may never wear off in this lifetime)

invisible principal over the intercom
(like in the old cartoons that reliably reproduced so many aspects of school particularly the cliched plots and precocious love lives)
reading bad poetry in a
flat lifeless voice
like shakespeare in junior high
with unenthused classmates
esoteric
and meaningless.
stephen asks me to sharp his pencil
and wonders why i
teacher stands there for several moments
staring blankly ahead
looking like she's about to cry
and then laughing quietly
at how absurd it all is.

come to the rug, children.
i want to tell you a story
of something that happened before you were born
to people you will never get to know
in a place you've never been.
(next will be a story of a
giant blue-green ball hurtling through space
and a giant yellow ball
they hold like lovers
el sol y la tierra
we love story time
especially doctor seuss!)

in the story it is a tuesday
just like today.
here is the sign for tuesday, make a t with your fingers and circle
tuesday
a cold bright tuesday just like today
it was september 11 that day
just like today.
september is a long word that starts with an s
and let's count to eleven
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven
and in spanish
uno dos tres quatro cinco seis siete ocho nueve diez once
once upon a time
in the year 2001
before most of you were
born or when you were the tiniest infant
gnawing your fist and smiling to the delight of your parents.
on a day just like today
when little children just like you were counting the date
a bad thing happened.
a very bad thing.

bad people
very angry, nasty people
who perhaps did not have enough
people to love them
hurt our country
the United States of America
you know America in sign language, children
it is like a hug in a circle
show me, children.

our country was attacked
some airplanes were flown into buildings
important buildings
two tall ones in New York
which fell down
also a military building called the Pentagon
which has five sides
show me five fingers, children.
very good.
and the last plane
the good people took from the bad people
and flew into the ground instead of a building.
many, many people died.
the people in the planes and the buildings
and some of the firefighters who tried to save them
they were heros, do you know that word?
it means brave, brave people who did something amazing
like going into a building that is on fire and falling down
and rescuing people.
are you listening, children?
isaac, put your head down.

this was the biggest attack on American soil ever
which means
that it was really scary for us
really scary for your parents
who probably grabbed you
their babies
from the cradles
and held you close
and whispered soft comforting words to themselves
as they watched pictures on the tv
and cried or
just sat
watching.

the world is different now
you don't know because you don't remember
how it was before
you can't ever know the time when parents
worried about teething rings and toes
and not fiery explosions.
you weren't sitting there like i was
in a classroom on tuesday
(which was picture day and everyone
was dressed to the nines
it was two days after my birthday
and i had new clothes
i was looking sharp)
a whisper went around
that something terrible had happened
a disaster
an earthquake
a bomb
people were dying
where? new york
new york which was more magical and mystical to us than disneyland
new york with the giant apple and the statue of liberty
with the buildings that scraped the sky.

there was a moment of silence

kids fidgeted a little just like
you fidget today just like
we fidgeted when old men with gravelly voices told us of pearl harbor.
they speak of it like an old scar
the memory is still fresh.
september 11 is for me a cut
that it took a long time for me to realize was bleeding
like the scrape on the leg that i got from band
which i didn't feel at the time any more than a poke
but later my band teacher gasped and
pointed at when the blood was dripping to the floor.
i have a scar now, too.

but you children have no scars
you are young and
tiny and unblemished and i
truly hope no history is made in your lifetime
because it is a messy business
or so i have found.
we with memory scars will age and fade
recounting stories for
our childrens' school reports on historical events.
you will grow and replace us and get your own scars
falling off your bicycle.
you will remember the date as a
sad story and me
teacher crying a little when you're not looking
and so will move past me
into the future
without my fears and doubts.

this consoles me, children
on this big blue ball going around the big yellow ball
you have danced around six times
keep dancing, children
the slow beautiful waltz of time.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Our Classroom Blog

2011-08-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

Just took three hours to post the first student blog entry on "How Beautiful You Are" the class blog for my room. It took forever to uploads the pics. Beastly. But I'm sure it'll be fun tomorrow for my third graders. You can find it here.
I'm so busy setting up rotines, grading systems, launching themes and basically getting the house in order. I'll be sure to check in later in the week and update here about what I'm doing. I want to go to bed before midnight at least one day in fifteen. The lack of rest is taking a toll.

See my Mrs. Puglisi's 100 National Standards

Happy Birthday Jack

2011-08-27T00:19:00.000-07:00

Honestly he doesn't read my blog.
And I doubt I could find him wanting to see himself on it.
But my husband is 50 today.
It's funny but hard to figure out
what to say....we've known one another over 25 years.
Spent a lifetime in education.
Looked one another in the face for so long.
It's as if 50 years flew by.

So I wrote him this tonight.

50 years young

0 a baby is born

1 he looks around

2 walks

3 talks

4 rides his big wheel

5 conquers the abc’s

6 sets off to school

7 adds and subtracts

8 multiplies

9 learns there are 50 states

10 reaches a decade

11 gets a girlfriend

12 enters middle school

13 becomes a teen

14 all-star

15 begins again

16 sweet sixteen

17 is cool

18 votes

19 chooses a college

20 probably boozes

21 is called an adult

22 works

23 loves

24 loses a Dad

25 takes on a wife

26 buys a car

27 rents a house

28 mows a lawn

29 holds his child

30 pushes a stroller

31 goes trick or treating

32 gathers another baby in his arms

33 goes back to school

34 walks a daughter to a first day

35 drives

36 works and promotes

37 has a son

38 moves on up

39 buys a home

40 rushes a wife to help

41 cares, copes, strives

42 EKG

43 trades in a car

44 gets a phd

45 loses a mother

46 celebrates surviving

47 sends a child to college

48 pays the bills

49 watches a graduation

50 contemplates life

in 50 years

he has built

a house, family,

been a rock

What can I tell you. When we were young he liked the color red. He has green eyes, really green. He loves Springsteen, Dylan, making pots, kids, math, lowercase, cereal, music, god he loves his kids, work, me, his family and all things he designates.
I've dreaded this milestone because his dad died at 51 and I worry, frankly.

I'd rather a thousand times a billion never know anything to befall him.
He makes the best meatballs.
And I've really never known him to do less than 100%.

Here's to 50 years. Oh, yeah. I was walking and talking and reading while he was a youngster. I'm older...yes, I've always had a thing for younger men. True.
Please give him 50 more on this day a hurricane rocks our world.
And watch over all our back east family and friends, what I love so dear is there, in part in these memories of our beginnings.

Happy Birthday Jack!

A Day In the Life

Just fed up

I'm The "last thing that is their's"

The Raw Deal

Sleeping in cars

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Beautiful Pencil Illustrations of MLK

The Many Faces Of Martin Luther King Jr., in Acrostic Poem

"Only When it is Dark Enough, Can You See The Stars"

The Heart Shaped Box

Epiphany Comes To A Teacher In A Poverty School

The Ten Resolutions (Happy New Year)

Turns Out It's the Anti Zen Again

Guilty Pleasure

God's Eyes-an experiment in three days

A young blogger i know...

"Winter" Show 2011

God's Eye

A Movie I Like More Than Blogging

I'm Not "Allowed"

Archives

Gardner, Common Standards, Gifts

Multiple Intelligences Definition, Kid Friendly Elegy

Baby I love You, Ah Ah ah....Janet's song For Her Teacher-ME!

My Teacher, To Whom I Will be Ever Grateful

Earth day , Beautiful Stuff! and why ART is Everything in a Classroom (Edited and edited on Sunday morning after a re-read made me think...edit this)

A Blessing

Thanksgiving Turkeys 2011

Sweet Syl

How my Brother Spent 15 years....or....The Doors Sing "Reading Rainbow" Theme - Show Clips - Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Said The Raven

Word Problems

No. 2, Pencils Ready Ohio?

Elementary school in Oxnard briefly locked down during arrest nearby » Ventura County Star

Parade of Books, Happy Halloween, And Merry Day of the Dead

I'm honored, PLEASE Read: If Only the Billionaire Reformers Cared about THIS Data

Salutations

We all shine on......

The Waterfall, through the lens of 3rd Graders

A Peony and a World View

I know you are thinking what will the "Power Point" for Back to School Night look like.

My Class Newsletter and other things presently killing me...

Perhaps they never will-our first artist in 3rd grade-Vincent Van Gogh

..if a school's mission is to teach, then to speak to 9-11 is imperative, we hold the memory of what was

On September 11

september 11th, by Sylvia Puglisi, sitting in for her Mom

Our Classroom Blog

Happy Birthday Jack