Personally Literate

There are moments we think we have things figured out. I intentionally use the term “things” to keep it vague. The “stuff” of life and the “things” we deal with are personal and often prophetic as we face our inner struggles to be more and less at the same time.

I was certain I was going to home school my daughter. I was certain I was the best for this job. I was certain I could do more with her at my house than any teacher could do with her in a classroom. I would not even entertain any other option.

Then my health came into question. The family hit survival mode. My unwavering stance began to…well..waiver. Not because I wanted to waiver. I had to waiver.

If life was perfect, I would be in control of everything. But life is not perfect. I must wave my little wrinkled white flag of surrender and admit my limits, the limits my heart wants to ignore.

We all reach that place where out of nowhere an obstacle appears in our path. I am learning that being a grown-up is often about assessing the obstacle, counting costs, and using discernment to move your feet sometimes over the obstacle and sometimes away.

My husband and I decided to put Sweet Amelia in school and actively work with the teacher and school community to encourage her growth as a person, learner, thinker, and doer. I haven’t taken a back seat, just a different one than I planned. I am just as involved, but I am involved in a different capacity.

I won’t lie. This is hard.

What’s the literacy lesson to be learned?

We must be literate of our needs as individuals and as participants in our families, friendships, and communities. I need to do what is best for Sweet Amelia, not my ego. We must learn to be literate of who we are and what we can and cannot do in the different seasons of life. This is growing up.

The sociocultural perspective of my doctorate work attempts to see each learner as fully embedded in personal, familial, societal, cultural, religious, social, and economic situations ( just to name a few). I wanted, somehow, to operate outside of this and figure out how to create the perfect opportunity for Sweet Amelia to be awesome in everything with me as her guide.

My research grows more personal today, as I reach to understand myself and my daughter as individuals in a personal, familial, societal, cultural, religious, social, and economic context. The context of life. The context teachers and students must embrace and not try to erase in the process of learning, growing, changing.

But for now, being personally literate is not about understanding every inch of myself or my daughter.

Being personally literate is accepting I haven’t read every book, and I don’t know everything.

How about you? What personal literacies are you learning today?

Child’s Concept of Story, Chapter 5 Summary and Application

Fantasy and Distancing

This chapter deals with the use of story for purposes of fantasy and distancing. The basic idea is that with stories children can work through situations. Gradually, many of the children who shared their stories in the research reviewed shifted away from the personal center. Meaning they developed the ability to tell a story set outside of their immediate lived-in world involving characters outside of their own family, friends, and toys. Interestingly enough, a connection was made about boy versus girls. Boys tended to venture out while girls tended to stay close to home. Boys dealt with external issues of life or process while girls dealt with more familial and personal issues. I wonder how much this has changed over the years with parental roles shifting greatly within the last thirty years especially.

Children use stories to replay experiences and also play out possible outcomes. This problem solving helps them as “they can see what happens to ‘bad people’ without doing anything which would conflict with their expectations about what they, as ‘good people,’ do” (83). Primarily “the data demonstrates that as children mature, they are able to explore in their stories patterns of behavior which are further and further removed from their immediate experience.”

Application: I don’t see much of an immediate application to learning. This is just information that helps us understand children as they work through all kinds of situations and problems. It is important to note that just because a child talks of violence it does not mean he or she is looking to act out. We must take children’s stories for what they are, stories.

Personal Application: A few months ago, Sweet Amelia was not obeying and refused to listen to me and my husband. It was sudden and distinct, so I decided to have a conversation with her. She told me how she and her friends had played a superhero game the weekend before. She was named Superwoman, the “bad guy”. I am not sure if she was being a masterful manipulator or truly honest when she explained how she had to be bad in real life because Superwoman was bad. I really struggled with how to explain the difference between pretend and real life. I want her to have fun and pretend, but I also don’t want her to be the bad guy. I also struggled with my momness. She and her friends were playing out various roles of good and bad. She had not distanced herself from it, but Sweet Amelia had immersed herself into it. After our talk, she immediate resumed listening and responding to us. I hope Sweet Amelia will choose to work through these goods and bads in her own world of story instead of the real world. Maybe that will keep her out of the time out chair.

Download My Daughter’s Genius

I was looking for apps the other day on my iPad for Sweet Amelia to play. I was searching for literacy and mathematic types of apps. Games that will teach.

I was looking for curriculum the other day online. Searching for activities and lesson plans by someone who thought through it all in age appropriate fashion. Curriculums that will teach.

All of the sudden, I realized something. I was looking for apps and activities with the work done for me. Here I am trying teach my Sweet Amelia. Here I am trying to find resources that will do it, so I don’t have to?

What?

Schools are guilty of the same crime. They buy boxes and boxes of very expensive curriculum. Administrators hold departmental meetings/sales pitches. Teachers waddle back to their classes loaded down with gigantic boxes and ginormous promises of success for every student at every level in every classroom. I have been both the teacher and administrator (or salesman). In both roles, I longed for the purchase to follow through on the promise.

I found some neat apps.I taught and sold some neat curriculum. But the apps and curriculum don’t teach. We do. Teachers do. I do.

This is where we missed it, folks. There was a fork in the road, and we followed the consumerism path so characteristic of our culture. We traded in time, energy, and persistence for flashy games and pretty printed pages. We sold out. We cashed in. We lost ourselves.

Literacy is learning how to manage new unknown territories. I am constantly shocked at how having a child as the learner and being a mom as the teacher is upsetting my concept of the educational process.

I am standing at a fork in the road. If I am being honest with you, total stranger, I want to take the easy road. I want someone else to do the work for me.

With a click, I want to download genius for my daughter.

We mistake the problem for the solution. We seek product over process. We want genius, no strings attached.

This post is my formal admittance that this is harder than I planned, and some days I want to quit. However, this post is also about accepting a new challenge: to create and not consume.

What do you think? 

Listen to What Sweet Amelia’s Story Reveals

Child’s Concept of Story by Applebee, Chapter 4 Summary and Application

Narrative Form

Sweet Amelia tells a story (her voice is raspy from being sick).

What is the narrative form? By studying children and their developing ability to communicate through story, we find elements moving from basic (events, names) to complex (character development, thematic content).

There are some connections between Vygotsky’s findings in conceptual development research and Applebee’s findings in his review of literacy research. As the child matures he or she has an ability to merge form and content in an increasingly organized way. Young minds move from least to most complex much like a child moves from stacking all blocks he can find to stacking blocks with relationships to stacking blocks to create structures. Our stories contain blocks. We organize, stack, and build our stories with increasing complexity.

We learn how to use these blocks or story parts by playing verbally with associations and connections between and among our story blocks. We heap our blocks. We stack our blocks. We organize our blocks. We utilize various types of block to build structures. We build increasingly complex structures with our blocks. (The metaphor ends when we destroy the structure just to see it crash to the floor to pieces. This is my favorite part of playing with blocks.)

The six major narrative forms moving from least to most complex are heaps -> sequences-> primitive narratives ->unfocused chains-> focused chains-> true narrative (see picture for visual representations). Each of these represents combinations of chaining and/or centering. Chaining is joining elements based on how they compliment or are similar to one another (images, ideas, sounds). Centering is linking elements together to one central aspect (character, theme, setting). We gather and order (chain) then we link and enrich (center) our story blocks to build a narrative structure. The structure then stands for us move around and through based on its complexity.

Application: We can practice story telling with young learners by asking them to tell us a story. We can help learners move from one stage to the next by being aware of how complex their stories are and then adding components to support maturity in the story telling process. Don’t read into the story too much but do take note of what and why events are happening and characters are developing. These stories show us what young readers are processing about their world. Consider where he or she is developmentally by consulting the diagram in the picture to the right.

Example for young readers–Allow readers to tell you stories and just listen. Provide verbal cues to encourage the story. Enjoy the story as it builds. You can do this with or without a book to help. Have the child “read” his or her favorite book to you. Make changes to the story, invert reality, to help them understand the norms of life. Retell familiar stories  to young readers and make adjustments. Ask them to identify changes. Add alternate endings to stories. Talk about the lessons of the story. At any age, we can encourage story telling. As readers of all ages practice telling stories, they become more engaged in the story process and often better understand and analyze stories by other authors.

Personal Application: Sweet Amelia’s story (listen by clicking on youtube clip above) represents her awareness of a story’s introduction, “Once upon a time….” She also shows an awareness of verb conjugation rules when she changes”went” to “was.” Sweet Amelia tells the story by connecting events. She signals the conclusion with “…and that’s the end.” Initially, I thought she was using a focused chain to narrate her story (focused chain is a story of events link by commonality, no message or theme is present, and characters are not developed) . This means she made connections based on the concrete perceptual associations among the characters and events of the story (chicky has friends, chicky travels, etc.) (65). The chicky is the center of the story around whom the events are linked. Then I looked at the primitive narrative structure and listened to the story again. I think the story falls somewhere between a focused chain and a primitive narrative. The nature of a primitive narrative involves movement. It has a sense of going forward as does Sweet Amelia’s story. The characters are named and their adventure ensues with hopping around the circus, going into the jungle, and finally venturing into a tree where “they hided and then that’s the end.” There is not a lesson that I can gather from the story, so it does not encompass all of the primitive narrative components.

Watch how the two children in the video below interact differently with the blocks. There are many factors as to how and why an individual connects concepts. However, it is interesting to see in a tactile way young minds interacting with objects like they might interact with story components.

How can we incorporate more story telling into our lives and/or lesson plans?

We Lost

I just spent a few minutes trying to find an inspirational, witty, or thought provoking quote about losing. I am sad to report I was unable to find one. They were all stupid. I realize I may sound childish when I write “stupid,” but when I lose I feel like an angry little kid. I want to stomp and scream because I think somehow it will help or rid me of the icky feelings accompanying the experience of loss, injustice, and flat out not fairness. It’s not about me, or maybe it is.

Judging from the unanswered emails and unanswered voicemails, we are not part of the lucky few who were accepted to our local charter schools through the lottery. This makes me sad. The sadness is for my daughter who is so smart and sweet and deserves a chance to have a great experience in school.

The schools we attend play a large role in the direction we take in life, not the only role but a large one. At this young age, Sweet Amelia is forming her educational identity. Our formative years are crucial when it comes to education. It is not about socialization for me. It’s about the delicate identity she has as learner. An identity I want her experiences to strengthen and not destroy. She is gentle and submissive to authority. In all honesty, she is the type of student I would have overlooked in my classroom. I can’t speak for all teachers but the needs of the disrespectful and rowdy students can consume much of a teacher’s time and energy in preparation, execution, and follow-up to a day’s lesson. She might earn her grade quietly or be given it for being sweet. She might be a favorite without being given the time and attention I selfishly want for her. But life is not about getting time and attention from others. Going to school is as much if not more about learning how to manage relationships and yourself as it is about learning information and gathering knowledge. So here we are back where we started. Why should I expect so much from school?

The sadness is also from a bizarre feeling of failure. As a parent, I fight so hard from my daughter. I know I have no control over the lottery, but I still have this thought I could have done more or should have done this, that, or the other. The helpless feeling is frustrating and takes me back to the playground of fifth grade. We are playing soccer for recess. The grass is green beneath my feet. The field is wide open and begging for me to run, but I am one of the last kids to be picked for a team. Again I’m frustrated from the icky feelings, so I walk instead of run.

I am not sure if we will do public school this fall. Our family is moving this summer into the district of a failing school. Before I had kids, I was very supportive of sending kids to public school, even the failing ones. I encouraged families to jump into the system with arms opened wide and hearts eager for a great adventure. Now, I am hesitant and am even a little worried about sending my daughter into the wild world of public school education. Things change when it’s your own flesh and blood.

I am seriously considering keeping my daughter home for another year. It will not be easy with my graduate studies, our nonprofit work, and an infant who is now mobile. I am challenged though to make the sacrifices necessary to having such a high value of education. The other day my husband told me to be careful not to turn our daughter into a project. He, very lovingly, wants to ensure we enjoy our mom and daughter relationship. Parenting is hard enough without bringing in the dynamics of structured learning. However, as I reflect on parenting, it seems we can all be guilty of turning our kids into projects, proving to others we are great people and wonderful parents. So, I will continue to do my best to be mom first and the other roles second. I hope I can balance this.

My role as mom must come before the others, but ironically my momness is backing me into a role changing corner. Mom as kindergarden teacher. Gasp. I ran from early childhood education in college when I assumed elementary teachers where those with excellent skills of speaking in a sustained pleasant tone and cutting out intricate images for really creative classroom decorations. I was wrong then, and maybe I am wrong now.

But loss and being wrong is what makes us strong and smart, at least that is what I want to believe today.

So, I am back inside a confusing web of Google searches. Looking and looking for the easiest and best way to be mom as teacher and learner for and with my daughter.

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” -Emerson

Share your thoughts. What advantages are there to public schooling? What advantages are there to home schooling?

The Child’s Concept of Story, Chapter 1

Below is a my own personal summary of the first chapter of Arthur N. Applebee’s The Child’s Concept of Story: Ages Two to Seventeen. I encourage you to read it for yourself. The summary is merely my understanding upon reading it, and my attempt to make it plain for myself.

Introduction

Social structures provide information and experiences through which and in which we develop our constructs of the world. Verbal and nonverbal communication build our concepts of ourselves, others, and the world around us. Along with this language development comes the rules by which we govern them. However, we learn this language and the rules through reciprocity, mutual understanding accompanied with enriching and extending communication experiences. James Britton (1970) calls our first language forms the “expressive mode.” In efforts to better understand one another, we move through various modes of communication. Moving from expressive talk to more specialized forms of language begs us to define and analyze the purpose and use of language.

My thoughts as I read: I am suddenly transported to my last classroom. I watch myself from a desk in the classroom, from the students’ perspective. If a foundational principal to communication is reciprocity, a give and take/back and forth/you and me type of experience, then does our current grading system honor a foundational component to effective communication? If we aren’t respecting our innate human communication process can we expect a learning experience from those we are trying to teach, whether its our own children or students?

Circumference of Learning

Around each one of us is an invisible circle.

The circle is different sizes based our age, time of day, mood, past, and even possible futures (just to name a few). When I was teaching, I imagined these invisible circles snugly encircling each student and his or her desk. You see, it’s easier that way. Manageable. Imagining it small gives me a chance and makes a space just big enough for the student, his or her work, and myself when I stroll by and invade the little circle just long enough to support the learning taking place. Now, I imagine it much differently.

A few nights ago my husband had our baby boy, my daughter, and a book about fish all snuggled together on my daughter’s bed. Books are a part of my daughter’s nighttime routine and this night was no exception. The three shared this very special and very brief moment huddled around a book, talking and laughing. My daughter wasn’t just learning about fish. She was creating a memory with her brother and father, and books were a part of that experience. This is one of the many moments she will carry with her throughout her learning. She might not remember the jokes or the fish facts, but she will compile all of these types of experiences and learn through the colored glasses she’s painting now at four years old. These memories along with many others will crowd in and around her desk as she attempts to learn inside of and outside of structured learning activities. Her teachers and mentors will have to share the circle with me, her dad, and her brother. It’s crowded in here, but I am not going anywhere.

We must honor this wide untouchable space  people inhabit.

There are positive and negative moments and memories we all carry. These moments define us and our concept of self in relationship to others, academics, and even possibility. Assuming all of the messiness of being human can be left at the door of a classroom and set aside as we encounter new learning challenges is ignorant at best. My daughter is trying to merge the past experiences of cuddles and books and fun trips to the library with the challenge of learning to read and write as a skill to perform and not just a way to connect with mom, dad, and brother.  She is learning how to learn.

I remember a no bullying sign I used to hang in my classroom (school policy required it). As if somehow the little red line through the word “bullying” could wipe clean the past and comfort the hurts caused in the halls just outside of my room. Silly me.

The circumference of learning invisibly stretches around our perception of self and the external world.

It encompasses the good and bad moments defining us on surface and significant levels. It involves our sense of self and the place we inhabit in relationship to others. It has a shifting center and sliding sides. The formulas we used in high school math to calculate the circle’s area and circumference using the radius and diameter don’t work here because our circles are constantly moving, with a shifting center and sliding sides.  They are real but remain unseen. The moment sweet Amelia was born she became a part of my circumference of learning and change me for the better. I am doing my best to remain inside her circle and help for the better as new challenges keep crowding in and affecting us all.

Whose inside your circumference of learning?

She’s Reading Me

People have been learning to read for countless years. Before words, people were reading images, gestures, and voices. We are made to communicate, share our own experience, and be curious about the experiences of others. We long for sincere interactions with others. When working with Sweet Amelia, I am trying all kinds of materials. We have workbooks, the IPad, videos, and activities on the fly. She is bombarded by colors, sounds, electronics, kinesthetic activities, flashcards, clay, crayons, and paints as I try to help her develop the skills needed to read, the words on the page. Documenting our experiences has unearthed an unspoken obsession I have to find the perfect way to help her efficiently learn letters and their corresponding sounds guided by rules thus creating words. I have a background in education, but I am an immediate sucker for a gold sticker stamped on a DVD claiming parents and teachers love a particular resource and credit it with their child or students educational success. Even PBS, with its nonprofit lure, has “supporters” selling products promising to make my child healthy in mind and body. If PBS says it’s good then it must be. I keep coming to my sweet daughter with a cornucopia of activities, but she keeps looking at me and, I feel, through me.

While teaching high school English at two very prestigious public high schools, I went to over fifteen different training events wrapped with promises and gold medal stamps of approval. Districts spent tens of thousands of dollars sending me all over the country to learn the latest and greatest discoveries in education. Some of the strategies were accompanied by researched statistics and personal testimonials from other teachers, principals, and curriculum gurus. All of the trainings looked great and came in beautifully shrink-wrapped bundles. Initially, I returned to the classroom and tried them out. To my surprise, the students were never impressed with the spoils I returned with. They refused to follow the script and never responded like student A or B or even C in the model handouts. I was always interested in the strategies and hopeful they would live up to their promises, but interest and promise does not go far with teenagers. Strategies often fell flat but sincerity never did. Like sweet Amelia, they saw me, heard my tone, and analyzed my body language with precision. They read me and through this lens, read the text, classroom activity, and the assessment. When I let my students teach me, I learned what no conference could teach. My students taught me education was not the text. Being a successful educator required more of me than passing out a workbook and following five easy steps. Showing up, expecting more, relentlessly encouraging, providing consistent feedback, and being myself seemed to be the best handout I could give. I gave them me, even when they gave nothing in return. Amelia is reminding me of this lesson, one I must not forget.

I often ask people to tell me about their favorite class in elementary, high school, or college. Without an exception the story begins with, “I had this teacher…” I have never listened to a story about diagramming sentences or technical facts or an assessment. I am always attacked with a sensory overloaded retelling of the teacher who stood on his desk, expected excellence from her students, used personal stories from his life for examples, invited discussions and share her opinions, fiddled with the seam on his sweater he wore every day, or who listened and encouraged. Sincerity is the common thread weaving these stories together. Our humanity and not our materials are our most powerful teaching credentials.

Sweet Amelia doesn’t see the workbook or the clay. She sees me, hears my voice’s tone, and analyzes my body language with precision. She’s trying to learn to read by reading me. Am I the activity?

For sweet Amelia, it’s not an IPad or a trip to the library teaching her. The sum total of our experiences together are educating my daughter. Sweet Amelia wants me. Her letters and the corresponding sounds are resounding within the relationship we are creating each day with each other and in every experience, structured and unstructured.

She’s already reading.

Since when is speaking horse not enough?

If we place literacy within the human context of self-awareness, relationships, and navigating the landscape of our daily lives then I am bookended in a new literacy. Compliments of Amelia’s birthday, our family is suddenly ushered into the world of school as a source of more formalized education. Piaget would term this process my assimilation and accommodation experience. I neither assimilate nor accommodate well to a broken over-complicated system. I am just now enjoying mastery of the last literacy skills Amelia taught me. These skills include speaking a horse language well enough to save the unicorn and Pegasus from their evil stepmother and a doctor jargon fit for the surgery and recovery process of various illnesses and diseases animals contract in Amelia’s room.

However, it appears I missed the bus or in current very advance educational terms lost the lottery (a term that should not be within 100 miles of education). I keep trying to say a magic word or make a special hand gesture to let the school staff and faculty know that I am not a regular mom. I am one of you. I want to say, “I am hidden in the public shuffle, but I was once standing where you are and thinking what you are thinking: How cute, she brought her papers to the office in person thinking it might help, and she even put on some lipstick before she came in. And let me guess (just like all of the other moms), you think your child is special and different and needs more time and attention than all of the others. Thank you, please leave so we can carry on with our important business, oh and I guess have a nice day.” 

If they would just give me a second, a moment to explain, then maybe I could get somewhere. It’s hard being just another family, just another mom.

There is no place on the paperwork to explain I am a doctoral student in education and Amelia is precious and amazing. I cannot find any room in this broken system for me or my daughter. How do I assimilate my present experiences of humiliation and frustration into my pre-established fabric of love for learning and passion for fair and expressive education for all? Do I change or walk? What’s my ethical obligation? In desperation, I turned to my homeschool mom friends and was dejected again with a questioning of my sanity, “What kindergarten curriculum? That’s just letters and numbers. Print some stuff off of the internet. It’s not a big deal.”  Not a big deal? Well Piaget, how do I accommodate this?

These humiliating and frustrating experiences challenge me to develop new literacy skills involving a new language, set of behaviors, and massive adjustments. Unknowingly, Amelia is teaching me a new literacy. And I laugh when realizing in this shuffle I dysfunctionally translated my love into a pursuit of the  greatest possible learning experience for my daughter. For me love and education are knotted together. Instead of challenging my love maybe I need to challenge my expectations of education, myself, and my daughter as we both fumble around in our new literacies. I laugh to think how all along the Pegasus and unicorn travel with us as we voyage to and from various inaccessible educational opportunities, ever calling us to come, relax, enjoy life, and simply play for a while. Good thing I speak horse, thanks Amelia.