Building? The kindergarten is ready

Found in the kindergarten classroom yesterday – the hard hats lined up in the block building area ready for the work to begin

Construction? No problem.

And for kicking back after a tough day of hard work, or maybe taking on another kind of job – some softer alternatives lined up near the reading corner.

Transformation

Last week I found this huge moth attached to my back screen door. It was several inches across and a beautiful fluorescent green. It’s a luna moth (luna actius) and quite common in deciduous wooded areas of north America. I had never seen one before. And by morning it was gone.

Last Monday – in the orientation for new faculty – we had the chance to think about the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. The parallels with the transformation of aspects of PDS are inescapable. As I write, the construction project – while on schedule – is still in process and the building is being readied for opening day. Like the life cycle of moths and butterflies there are a number of less appealing stages along the way of growth and transformation. Although – who are we to say this caterpillar is a just a gooey unappealing mess?

Nature Deficit Disorder

I’ve written on this topic before but this is a wonderful blog post from New Zealand by Bruce Hammonds’ Leading and Learning – one of my favorite education sites.
Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder
Fortunately, here in the mid-Hudson valley and at PDS, we have abundant opportunities to experience the natural world under the skies and in the classroom.

A useful tool

If you don’t know about Google Reader here is a CommonCraft video that explains what it is and how to use it.

"Problem solving is what you do when…"

Problem solving is what you do when you don’t know what to do. – Alinda.

That’s just one of the things we learned yesterday at the new teachers orientation in Kenyon. Each teacher had five minutes to present a lesson to the group. These were videotaped and the playback classes used as a starting point for the discussion of learning, teaching and the mission of the school.

And great lessons they were too. I learned about:

• the life cycle of the monarch butterfly
• multi-track digital recording
• statistical presentation of classroom generated data
• how to calculate the milk and the chocolate – turning an everyday problem into algebra
• density and do rocks sink and feathers float
• drawing from concept versus drawing from observation
• etymology and the true meaning of a word and
• how to speak French

We have some wonderful new teachers at PDS and I hope that they soon feel right at home.We have a lot to learn from all of them. Here are a few more pics of the day.

Who is John Palfrey?

And what will he be doing at Poughkeepsie Day School?

PDS is the home for a NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) workshop on Novemeber 4th.

Digital Divides, Digital Opportunities: the Challenge of teaching a Generation of Digital Natives

Here is John Palfrey’s short bio from the NYSAIS website.

John Palfrey is Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. John teaches courses on Internet law, e-commerce, and digital democracy. He is a lead researcher on the Digital Media Project, which studies the transition from analog to digital entertainment, and the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative project with the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Toronto to enumerate the ways that countries block their citizens’ access to the Internet. He has published a number of scholarly papers related to the Internet’s relationship to Intellectual Property, international governance, and democracy. He writes a blog at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/ . Prior to joining the Berkman Center, he practiced intellectual property and corporate law at the law firm of Ropes & Gray. John worked as a White House-appointed special assistant at the US EPA during the Clinton Administration. He is a former founder and officer of a venture-backed software company. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School.

John has spoken to enthusiastic NYSAIS audiences. Last year’s hands-on workshop sold out early.

Click for a description of the workshop.

Turning learning right side up

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught.

— Oscar Wilde

Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track – is the title of a book Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg

Read this extract

The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching

and see what you think:

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant. more….

Moving

I’ve done a deal of packing and moving and unpacking in the last couple of years. And amid all the pains is the pleasure of the unexpected find. Unearthed this week is this school report from the 1950′s.

I remember Miss Kempster well, although I cannot say with fondness my chief memory being that of a generalized fear and the specific shame of not being able to do “joined-up” writing. That and her bright red lipstick. Until middle of that second grade year my school setting had been idyllic. Somehow teaching script had taken second place to reading and writing stories, running the school shop, visits to Rumming’s farm at lambing time, identifying wildflowers and country dancing. Clarence Street Primary Junior School was a very different educational order – red brick Victorian built with great civic pride and resembling a fortress- desks screwed to the classroom floor, high ceilings with tall windows high on the wall to allow light but no distractions (but oh the excitement when we could see snow flakes falling up there!) and outside toilets at the bottom of a very steep asphalt playground. We were the lucky ones. The bottom two classes in these overspill post-war years were housed in a makeshift annex. We had free milk every morning and a hot lunch every day. There was a map of the world on the wall with the empire in red. (This empire was a good thing as it meant we had an Empire Day holiday every May.) I remember wondering whether Nigeria was in any way connected with Nigel who sat two desks behind me and was too squeamish to eat his apple cores.

This was a place of serious learning. We were being prepared for the big tests of the 11plus – the test that would sort us into the sheep and goats and determine our educational destiny.

This was a generally favorable report. My progressive early years had obviously prepared me well for the traditional system and in that rigidly stratified system I ranked well in that top class of six such classes scoring 130 and a half points out of 145. Such pleasing exactitude. I was excellent in Spelling, careless in Arithmetic and not so good in Needlework and Scripture (it was a very full curriculum). My punctuality and conduct were excellent. I had not yet learned to deal with the misery of school by disruptive means.

Two things stand out for me. First the number in that class – 45. All arrayed in rows with those scoring top at the front of the first row and all the way to the bottom child in the back corner. Forty eight small children, one room, one teacher. No wonder Miss Kemspster ruled with the blackboard pointer.

And the second is to be reminded that at age 8 at least I had not yet learned what I could not do. Seems to me that the years that followed were all about finding out that I was not good at one thing after another- music, art, mathematics, Latin, French, physics, chemistry, biology and all the rest. I was an avid reader so that go me through English and as history mostly consisted of memorization and copying down dictation as the teacher read from the textbook I continued to do well.

There’s a saying that teachers are guided by either a desire to replicate their own school experiences or a determination to do quite the reverse.

Time to think

What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare
- WH Davies

“The most important thing you need to do… is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
(Barack Obama in conversation with British conservative party leader David Cameron.)

But how do you do that? Some ideas to be found here.

And, if we can’t do it for ourselves can we at least help out with the over scheduled child? According to this article in yesterday’s NYTimes even summer camp leaves no time unfilled.

That familiar couplet on time to think comes from Welsh poet WH Davies – the original supertramp. He lost a leg jumping a train in Canada and regarded arrests for vagrancy as an occupational hazard and an opportunity to take a break. He nevertheless managed to get himself no less than seven portraits in the London’s National Portrait Gallery, Maybe it was all that standing still that made the artists’ job easier.

Who knew…?

Who knew that behind the east bookshelf in the back of the Kenyon library there was another lovely window? And that underneath the mustard colored carpet was a parquet floor just waiting to be cleaned and polished?

They will certainly be lovely features for the new faculty-student center for the high school.