We’re walking in the Wissahickon yesterday and we start playing what we call the Ninja game, where one person closes their eyes and the others see if they can touch them without being heard. We play for a bit and C. declares the following

I can hear everyone except myself!

I thought this was a perfect metaphor for what we’re trying to do in education. It’s easy enough to hear others and identify their false steps. How do we learn to hear the twigs we break, the sand that we rub off the back of our shoes, or the stones that we dislodge?

As Townes put it:

We all got holes to fill
them holes are all that’s real.
Some fall on you like a storm,
sometimes you dig your own.

Hard to say it better although I think Rocky does pretty well.

(Re) reading book four of the Harry Potter series with the kids (book-on-tape in car and out loud to KC). I was poking around in the garden this afternoon and I wanted Mad Eye to stand behind me and bark “Constant Vigilance !” I try and get to the garden some every day but even in a 15’x15′ space there’s amazing stuff and damaging stuff happening in every corner. If you’re eternally vigilant, you’re ahead, but as an amateur, it’s more of a series of new questions to ponder:

why does parsley, when it comes back, arrive with long, thick sprigs and many fewer leaves?
why are squirrels so impossibly evil?
how did I miss the perfect moment to wind the cucumbers up the trellis? how do I move the thicker shoots into position without breaking them?

It’s not just gardening, I think. How much of the everyday would be better if I were constantly watching each action and decision…

Like all teachers in PA, I have to earn 180 hours of Act 48 credits to keep my certification active. (Active, not valid, because my level two cert is permanent but it can become inactive if I don’t do these hours).

I sat down with the SAS system and signed up for a number of on-line courses. I started one — Teaching in the 21st Century: The Need for Change — with my usual drinking from an ashtray face on — but with each day and each assignment, I’m liking the work more and more. It’s not that questions or assignments are particularly novel. Some are good and some are mundane. It’s that I’m being forced to think deeply about what I’m doing (and what we’re doing) in our school. And I’m being forced to write about it, even for a teacher/professor I’ve never met and will likely never meet. It’s surprisingly (and shockingly) helpful.

“The more that higher authorities impose standardized procedures and demand that school-level people adhere to them, especially when these procedures have demonstrably limited merit in their particular situations, the greater is the likelihood that strong people will not join the profession, or if already in it, stay in the work but a short time — Peace Corps volunteer-like — even when the allure of working with children is an extraordinarily powerful one.”

Theodore R Sizer, The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, 2005)87.

Back from vacation and spent forty minutes early this morning working on the front gardens. I figured that I need to add a third category: landscaping. While I pulled a bunch of weeds and took care of the various plants in the front yard, it was less about tending my garden as it was making it look great for passers by. I may be gardening when I tend to our three street trees but when I’m pulling weeds, I’m actually working the landscape.

I don’t know. Another category to ponder.