My Service Learning Birthday Present

I never considered myself spoiled as a child but my parents did everything under the sun to make sure that my siblings and I never wanted for a thing. Birthdays and Christmas were designed specifically so dreams came true. Every year. Without fail. And this is probably why on my 15th birthday they gave me a gift that forever changed my life.

My birthday just so happens to fall on April 25, and on this particular day in 1992 Berkeley, CA was celebrating Christmas in April. But this celebration turned out not to be about presents. On the morning I turned 15 we got up at the crack of dawn, dropped my siblings off at Grammy’s, and drove to a falling-apart house in a falling-apart neighborhood. There were swarms of people all around the house with shovels and paint and saws and brushes. For 9 hours that day I worked alongside my Mom and Dad fixing up this place for a poor, wheel-chair-bound, old lady.

I will never forget discovering how to measure and cut wood for a ramp, learning about lead-poisoning as I scraped away old paint, imagining the stories behind the unfamiliar pictures that hung on rusty nails throughout the house, feeling shocked that someone had to live this way… but mostly I remember the beautiful cacophony of all these strangers working joyfully together to do something kind for a woman none of us knew. What a gift to witness such a thing at the ripe old age of 15.

I can honestly say that this single day transformed my understanding of what it meant to be a human among other human beings. I had always been taught to be kind to others, but I had never really thought about the heights to which this lesson could be taken. This was more than sharing with my siblings, or inviting the unpopular girl to a party. This was more than being polite or waiting my turn. This was truly giving of my time, energy, and thought to another person –without any expectation of anything in return. And it felt really good.

Nearly twenty years later I find myself working as an educator, on behalf of educators – and I know the life choices that led me to this vocation began with the simple seed of that experience. When I consider the long-term effects of that single day - I often wonder what would be different in our country if every child started his or her 15th year this way.

A Request to be Radical

"I know that this is exactly what my students need but..."

• "I can’t do that."
• "I’m not allowed to."
• "That’s not how it’s done at my school."
• "My lesson plans are already written by someone else."

Over the past few years I’m hearing things like this more and more when I do workshops with teachers around Inspired Teaching strategies.

What strikes me most in their resistance to applying these methods is the up-front acknowledgment that this is in fact what would be good for their students. Teachers are a smart bunch. As keepers of the developing intellect of our population they kind of have to be. They didn’t go into the profession to do what’s “wrong” for kids. But several times a month I hear from teachers who say that they find themselves spending a lot of time going against their beliefs in the classroom.

They battle the difficult fight between doing what keeps the people in charge of their jobs happy and doing what they believe is in the best interests of the young people in their charge.

This is not a fight teachers should be waging. With so many tiny potentials at stake their full energy should be focused on nurturing the flames of curiosity and knowledge into bonfires of possibility.

But they know, and I know, that you can’t make school what it should be for children if you’re fired from your job in the process.

So this is what I tell my doubtful colleagues:

Yes, you must teach the standards you are given and by and large they are not bad standards if we view them as guideposts on the journey of intellectual discovery.

Yes, you must turn in your lesson plans and plug them into that cumbersome grid and format so that your principal can take one quick look and be reassured that you’re teaching those standards she’s required to have you teach.

Yes, you must keep these textbooks in your classroom and find pieces of them that are relevant when people want to see that the money they invested in textbooks isn’t going to waste.

But,

No, these requirements are not excuses for denying your students the education you know they deserve. If you must become guerrilla Inspired Teachers – grow the trees of knowledge up around your classroom so true learning can go on.

What are these trees exactly?

Student work: that you post in the hall, on the wall, in the principals’ mailbox, in classroom performances you invite others to see. If you dazzle them with what your students are capable of doing they will spend less time questioning your technique.

Research: Document your own strategies and successes and share what you find. Also, pull in outside resources for back-up. For instance, if you’re using a lot of movement in a school, where movement is frowned upon. Share an article that makes the case for this approach to raising student achievement. Your instincts aren’t alone – there are teachers and researchers like you all across the country who are similarly aware that this stuff works!

Strategic Alliances: It’s much easier to do something brave when you’re not doing it alone. Find a colleague who also wants to think outside the box and partner in your efforts. Plan together, observe each other, give and receive feedback, then when the questions come flying you have someone by your side who can help fire back.

We have to remember that even though the powers-that-be often seem to be working at cross purposes to our own goals for our students, they also didn’t enter into this profession to do what is wrong for children. Given evidence, research, and support to back an innovative approach to learning –I think we as teachers would be hard pressed to find a principal who would shoot our efforts down. Of course this takes more work than simply being compliant to the whims of the head office, but if it makes us sleep better at night (and not just out of exhaustion) because we know students are benefiting, then extra work is worth it.

Fostering Imagination May be the Key to Real School Reform

This is a response written by Aleta Margolis to the October 20, 2009 New York Times Op-Ed entitled "The New Untouchables."

In Thomas Friedman’s ‘The New Untouchables’ he points out the changes we’ll need to make in our education system in order to rebuild an economy that can thrive into the future.

Friedman dares to list ‘imagination’ among the skills schoolchildren need to develop in order to succeed in the workforce.

In today’s climate where accountability rules and high test scores have become the goal of schooling, assigning a value to imagination seems radical.

Here in Washington, DC where one in four children live in poverty (according to 2009 US Census data), there are those of us working to boost student achievement—make sure students can read, write, add, and subtract—while simultaneously sharpening students’ creativity and intellectual imaginations.

But it’s an uphill battle. Creativity, imagination, and even the ability to think are hard to measure. And some believe that these so-called ‘soft’ skills are a luxury for kids who are struggling to master the basics of reading and writing and math. However these critical thinking skills are what make a good education stick – ensuring that students remember what they learn beyond the day of the tests.

If the goal of schooling is indeed to educate children and young adults, then we need to see standardized test scores for what they are—an indicator of progress, not an end in themselves. And we need to abandon teaching strategies that focus solely on test preparation and leave little time for students to inquire into areas of the curriculum that interest them.

It’s time for a radical reevaluation of the way we think about schooling in America. It’s time to ask ourselves some tough questions about the path forward. Are we okay with the notion that creativity and imagination are a luxury? Should the development of those skills be reserved for those students who first master ‘the basics’? Or might the development of creativity and imagination actually enhance students’ ability to read, write, add, and subtract—not just on the day of the test, but for the long term?