My Little Misfit Con't

So I've spent the past few days researching and sorting out what to do about my little misfit when I'm worried that school isn't going quite the way that I had planned. I started first by panicking and calling everyone I knew for advice.

The first was a homeschooling friend, who told me that she had never sent a kid to school who didn't want to go. Then I researched the web to find out all about the types of programs that they were using in my school...handily available in the Three Year Plan they had given me as well as the website. Anne Davies and Carol Ann Tomlinson were two of the authors that I was able to research somewhat online. (I would have needed to spend a few dollars to get my hands on anything in depth.) So then I called my friend, the expert in all things education. After talking with her we agreed that the school was on the right track from a theoretical stand point but the practical applications needed to be explored.

Then I called my mother. She worried about whether I was being firm enough with my little misfit, although she did agree that under no circumstances should the creative, inquisitive light that yearns to learn be compromised. I explored the educational options available and then went to see the teacher.

We had a wonderful meeting and I learned that the teacher really is interested in my little misfit's education. After an hour conversation I realized that we still had a lot of possibilities for engaging my little misfit and her teacher was very open to exploring them. The next day she was back in school and we are sorting it all out...not without a few bumps along the way.

The one thing that I learned through all of this is that what happens here in the home is the most important aspect of my little misfit's education. And while part of me wanted to rip her out of a place that was making her unhappy, another part of me realizes that she needs to grow comfortable with being a misfit. She knows now that I listen and that when things aren't going great I will do whatever I can to make them better. She also learned that even though things aren't as exciting as she'd like all the time, she has been learning a lot. She's also given me some extra responsibilities in her education. The feedback loop has been established and will be utilized over the next few months...years!

My Little Misfit

I used to think that I was a pretty good teacher, but my little girl has helped me uncover all the assumptions that I still have about education. Even though I know that grades don't paint a really good picture of all the things she knows, I still want her to get good grades. Even though I am happy that she is such an independent little soul, I still want her to fit in. Even though I know that children learn at different speeds, I don't want her to fall behind. All of these things fall into the category of a "good student". But what is a "good student"? I've really had to think about this.

For example, she really doesn't like to be told what to do. As a parent, I had a certain amount of expectation that she would do things because I am the parent and I asked. I have spent a lot of time dreaming up fantastic projects for students over the years that have been very successful. But my child doesn't like to be told what to do. She likes coming up with ideas herself. She likes feeling like she has something important to share, and the minute that she loses ownership, she loses interest. So there have been a few things planned at my house that haven't gotten anywhere near completion, mostly because they haven't been her idea.

After more than 20 years in school, I know that the things that were most gratifying for me as a learner were when I had the opportunity to express my own ideas rather than regurgitate information. It was exciting to let people know that my head was full of thoughtful and original ideas. I had so many great ideas of things that she and I were going to do in the name of education and I have had to learn how to let go of many of them and support her in exploring her own ideas. Teaching is about helping her explore the options she has in developing her ideas, and supporting her when she runs into difficulties and dead ends so she doesn't give up. Teaching is about helping her live with her choices, and recognize the opportunities that she might not see present in them. Teaching is about putting myself and my expectations aside to just love her as she is. My little misfit.

Embracing the Misfits: Practical Applications

Every once in a while in a person's lifetime, there are those moments when something shifts and everything comes clear. I've been lucky enough to have a few of those moments. Sometimes it will be something I read or something someone says. It's happened when I've been sitting at a table playing with children or in the middle of writing a song. Now I won't claim that things stay clear...but I know they matter because I remember them, even when life goes on and I forget to do them, the memory is still there, ready to knock me between the eyes...again.

I'm pretty sure that it was David Jardine at the University of Calgary who said, "What if the problem kid isn't the problem, but your classroom that's creating a problem kid?" Suddenly there were a dozen kids flashing through my mind and I knew the truth of the statement. We spend so much time in the education system pathologizing and labeling "problem" kids. New labels are emerging every single year. I firmly believe that it is the limitations of the system (and often the classroom) that create so many misfits. The only problem is, instead of seeing them as creative emergent possibilities and re-examine what we are doing, we pathologize them until they leave the system: psychologically, socially, academically and finally physically. And everyone suffers for it.

In the past years we have discovered much information about brain development, how some learning can't take place until the brain reaches a certain threshold. We know that the clock in each student's body means that these changes don't take place on a specific timetable, yet our curriculum still works on a lock step system, governed by age and monitored by exams that have shackled our students and teachers to expectations that are often unrealistic. I know this because I have read the most recent School Progress Report published at my daughter's school. It reads somewhat like a quarterly report, 81% of students achieving at an acceptable level, the goal to improve on that number for next year. What will have to happen for the results to satisfy the accountants and share...I mean stakeholders? If we can achieve 81% certainly we can manage 82% or even 85%? A study in the Teacher Record Weekly last year concluded that the standardized tests used in the US for certain university programs have eliminated all the talent. What are we prepared to do to make our results look good?

I know that grouping our students by age is probably the most logical way to do it. It's probably the most likely way to get a good grouping of students at a similar stage of development. It's the most efficient way to organize our students to educate them. But what about the misfits? The ones who might not learn well in groups. The ones who might be auditory or kinesthetic learners instead of visual learners? The ones whose numeracy skills might be three levels ahead or behind their verbal skills? The ones who might have far too much happening at home to worry about what is happening at school? The next thing you know, you have a classroom of misfits. Maybe efficiency isn't the right approach. But then again who's to say that another approach, not dependent on numerical outcomes wouldn't be just as or more efficient? How do you teach a misfit let alone a classroom full of them?

Embracing Your Inner Misfit

One of the really interesting things that I have discovered about patterns, particularly those that seem to relate to how people and institutions organize themselves, is that I don't seem to fit into them very well. Perhaps that is why I am so conscious of them. Whatever the case, it seems that despite the fact that I get frustrated with so many aspects of the way things are organized, I can still be hurt when I feel excluded. I think there is a distinct longing to feel like we are a part of something. I believe educating for sustainability is inclusive although some may find it ironic that I would feel better exchanging one pattern for another, which would undoubtedly leave others to feel excluded.

But here is where we need to embrace our inner misfit. While some espouse that human evolution and survival is the result of the "survival of the fittest", others believe that "survival of the anomaly" makes far more sense. It was small adaptations that allowed us to evolve over time and these adaptations were more like the result of "difference" as opposed to strength. Even the largest, most powerful dinosaur could not survive without being able to adapt to a changing environment. In "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond in his chapter entitled "How to Make an Almond" he suggests that the reason that the modern day cultivated almond tastes so sweet compared to its poisonous ancestor is due to careful selection from the occasional appearance of the sweet anomaly for cultivation over many centuries.

But let's get back to feeling like an anomaly in the present. In his article "Creativity and Leadership" Fritjof Capra addresses the importance of emergence which is the creativity that appears when existing structures become unstable. What I learned through the Utopia exercise with my grade nine class is that any system designed by individuals is eventually going to reach its limitations. That is the point at which emergent structures will appear to enable change. Our success as a species has been the result of finding systems that we have put in place that work. Our survival as a species depends on the "misfits" with creative ideas who can point out the instabilities. Either way, misfit or not, we are all an essential part of the equation.

Horton Hears A Who

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss. It's a wonderful story poem about an elephant that discovers an entire community of "whos" living on a speck of dust. Though I don't remember reading it as a child, as an adult it brought back a memory of childhood when I finally read it. I distinctly remember staring at my arm as a young child wondering if there was a whole world present on the surface of my skin, and in turn wondering if perhaps I was a flea on the surface of some enormous creature, so enormous I couldn't even see it. When I was introduced to the Gaia Hypothesis, it echoed something that I had sensed all my life: that perhaps the earth itself was an organism. And then it was wonderful to imagine what it might mean if this organism had a consciousness. It was so exciting to think there were worlds within worlds and my "world" was only one of many and that maybe one of the creatures on my skin pondered over the possibility of me having a consciousness. Fractal geometry added to the intrigue and I fell in love with the search for repeating patterns all around me.

I suppose that most children wonder about these things. There was a time that school subjects like chemistry and biology reduced my body to carbon, hydrogen and oxygen or organs, cells and organelles until I could barely remember or recognize the mystique of those worlds around me. But eventually, as time passed and I learned to keep asking questions, until the mystique returned until I couldn't look at a tree without feeling a kinship to the one that not only shares this enormous body we are living on, but is in fact an extension of my own body, my lungs incomplete without its presence. I am not an isolated entity. I belong to something much greater than myself. I am part of an amazing, intricate beautiful evolving pattern and as such a shift in me will shift the entire pattern.

Where to begin Educating for Sustainability

I used to lead a unit in Grade Nine social studies entitled "Utopia" and I asked the students to design their own Utopia. There were some pretty diverse visions of Utopia that were shared with the class, but in the end when I asked the students how they would go about "changing the world" they said it would have to happen in the schools. Apparently adults are too set in their ways, children can still learn. I remember them getting a little annoyed with me when I asked them what they thought I was trying to do as an educator in the system. While I have dreams of how the educational system we have could work differently, I don't believe that sustainability can be taught.

The other day in my Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable Future book, I read the chapter entitled Indian Pedagogy. In that chapter Malcolm Margolin writes that to teach someone something robs them of the experience of learning it for themselves. Sustainability must first be experienced, recognized and then celebrated. Pretty simple don't you think? All we have to do is find ways to experience the gifts of the earth in a way that will make us want to cherish them forever.

Sustaining the Notes

I hear songs. I suppose that I write songs since I do write them down, but generally I hear them first. Not sure why although I have noticed that my kids hear them too. I have lots of songs, not sure of the actual number but it's probably well over 100 by now. At first I thought that hearing songs meant that I was supposed to sing them, preferably in front of large audiences for large amounts of money. But over time I've realized that that's not really what they're for.

I was listening to Simon Schneidermann on CBC the other day and I heard him say that we need the arts to make sense of the chaos that we are living in. They're a necessary part of understanding ourselves. I suppose one could extrapolate that having written more than 100 songs, I must have a really good understanding of myself. I suppose I do. Or it means that there is an awful lot of chaos in my life.

In the book, The Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, the authors John Briggs and David Peat illuminate the patterns that exist in the chaos, the chaos that for so many years, has been beaten into submission by numbers and mathematical equations. I like to think that the songs I hear lead me to the patterns that anchor me in this world, even when it appears I am floating free or out of control.

Sustainability is about acknowledging and honoring the patterns, and songs help me find them. A pretty good fit I think. And so the songs instead of leading me to enormous audiences and concert stages, have taken me on a journey of heartache, hell raising and healing, a masters degree and several community development projects. That is why I believe that arts are integral in educating for sustainability. They help us see the world in completely different ways.