A Case Of and For the Sillies

Today was going to be one of those “lost” days.  I was without a car, navigating a meeting on campus, a conference at Audrey’s school, and trying to get both girls home via the train after Niamh’s nap and before the rain came pouring down.  With that in mind, I knew I had a couple of hours to spend with Audrey before picking up Niamh, but I decided that I wouldn’t lug any of my bags of tricks with me on the train.

 

You see, from the beginning of the year I created numerous bags of tricks.  I have the art bag complete with sketch pads, pastels, portable easels, etc.  I have the reading bag with literacy manipulatives and early readers.  I also have the math bag with dice, cuisenaire rods, and other activities.  Early on I envisioned using these bags with Audrey as we sat in coffee shops, gardens, etc.  To some extent, we have done that – just not to the degree I’d hoped. 

 

So, when I went to pick Audrey up after the parent conference, I was “bagless.”  Nevertheless, we went to Ruby Tuesdays for lunch and for a comfortable way to kill some time while Niamh slept merely yards away at “Horsey School.”  Audrey immediately became engaged with the children’s menu. It had cute little activities, some of which were designed for older kids.  Nevertheless, she dived into them – asking for help but insisting on ultimately doing it herself.  One of the activities was particularly challenging.  The sheet had musical notes symbolizing numbers (e.g. a quarter note equaled 4 while two eighth notes equaled 8).  The picture then had four notes joined together with addition signs.  Audrey had to first translate the notes into the values and then add the four numbers together.  In spite of her typical tenacity, I figured the activity would get the best of her – it didn’t.  While it required a lot of scratch paper and a lot of “dots” being drawn, she figured them out. 

 

This victory led to a barrage of math silliness.  She started counting by tens, and then by twenties; then together we played with counting by 200s.  All the while I was secretly bemoaning the fact that I didn’t have my Cuisenaire manipulatives to let her literally embrace hundreds, tens, and ones.  It didn’t matter to her – just adding the zeros to the ends of numbers that were more familiar to her was fun enough.  We added 6 + 6, and then we added 600 + 600.  She squealed with delight to see how BIG 1200 was. 

 

Throughout our mathematical play Audrey was her typical over-the-top silly self – making noises, playing with rhyming words, bouncing up and down on the restaurant booth (thank goodness there were very few customers at this point).  Granted, I have more tolerance for this silliness at some times versus others.  There are times – particularly at dinner or when we are getting ready for bed – when I tend to chastise her for such loud and silly behavior.  After all, those are times where other agendas (completing dinner in a civil manner or preparing for sleep) are more important than being silly.  Yet, I know that this silliness is so much of who my daughter is right now.  She revels in silliness from the moment she walks in the door in the afternoons until bedtime.  The only time she is lulled into some calmer state is when she is anesthetized by television. 

 

So, when given the space to be herself, Audrey is happy, laughing, and above all silly.  When she is “contained” for pragmatic purposes (dinner, bedtime) or when she is lulled into a less active state by something like television, she is subdued and quiet.  What does that say about formal schooling?  Don’t get me wrong.  I was a teacher for many years.  I know that most of the instructional day must be spent in a subdued mode.  There is a time and a place for silliness, and even back in those pre-NCLB days, those times were sparse.  But I can’t help but wonder – if this is, in fact, a natural mode for children, what are we doing when we subdue it – and do we, in fact, eradicate it by virtue of the amount of time in which we subdue it?  In other words, at what point do children learn that it is not o.k. to be silly?  After all, we’ve certainly learned it as adults.  On the whole, most adults are not silly.  We may crack a joke on occasion, or if you are like my brother, uncle, or late grandfather, you may exhibit wit and more elaborate jokes around those who are close – most of which are calculated and appropriate for your age and circumstances.  However, on the whole we have become subdued.  I am so thankful that the girls have a silly father.  Those of you who know Rick may be surprised with that assessment, but at home, he dives headlong into the silliness with them.  It is because of his openness to silliness that our house if filled with laughter most of the time. 

 

So, how do schools create spaces for silliness?  In this era of performance-based measures for children, how do we ensure that children continue to perform this zest for life, this uninhibited embrace of fun and laughter?  And how do we use that incredibly excited energy as the impetus for learning for the sake of learning?  At this point, I have no idea how we do this, but watching Audrey’s antics at the Ruby Tuesday today helped me to realize how essential it is that we try.

Differentiation in the Garden

It has been a while since I’ve posted an entry.  Life and allergies have been getting in the way.  I decided it was time to get back on track, so when I picked Audrey up from school I let her choose whether she wanted to go to the Botanical Gardens or the High Museum of Art and try to reengage in our afternoon learning experiences.  She chose the garden.

On our way there, Audrey protested that she did not want to go without her sister.  While I enjoy spending time with both girls, bringing Niamh would mean interrupting her nap time – a very, very important time of the day for her and for the rest of the family that must endure her disposition should she miss it.  Nevertheless, we made a detour to “horsey school” and picked Niamh up.

The trip began as most trips to the garden do.  They had fun running up and down the paths.  They quickly made their way to the children’s garden, and once there they quickly made their way to the large slide and clubhouse at the back of the garden.  We managed to get in a few “learning” moments en route – looking at the beehive and looking for frogs in the pond.  The playground frolic was cut short by a large group of boisterous boys running around.  

By this time Audrey was protesting that she wanted to go do art.  Niamh, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with art.  She managed to convince her sister to delay the art activities and join her on the outdoor stage for a reenactment of Disney on Ice.  For a girl who is so pensive around strangers, Niamh lights up on stage.  She loves to dance – so much so that her whole body seems to beam as she glides across the stage.  After each performance, she hides behind the log column and hurries through her pretend costume changes so that she can perform her next number.  Audrey enjoys being silly on the stage and doing a pliè or two, but her response is nothing like her sister’s.   

After numerous encores, we make it to a secluded area of the garden where there is a small fountain and flowers.  We pull out the art pads and the pastels.  Audrey is in her official mode: she is ready to do art.  Niamh, on the other hand, continues her protests regarding the objective and dances around the fountain.  She then explores the area and returns to the fountain to throw leaves into the water and watch them.  Eventually Niamh decides to join us – of course, it had to be her idea.  She draws a series of flowers on her paper and excitedly points out that they are sunflowers.  She goes off again to explore and soon returns to add round objects below the flowers.  She later explains that they are the seeds that the flowers came from.  After more exploring she returns and adds grass below the seeds.  Later, upon Audrey’s suggestion, she adds a blue stripe at the top for the sky.  When she is done she looks at me excitedly and notes, “Mommy, I did the whole thing – the flower, the grass, and the sky!”  Meanwhile Audrey has been drawing the whole time – working diligently to create flowers similar to those she has drawn in the past.  When she talks about her pictures she notes the colors and the lines she has used. 

The whole time we are in the garden I try desperately to look beyond my “Mom” eyes to see my two girls.  If I was back in my educational psychology class at Oglethorpe and was conducting a case study on each of these girls, what would I notice?  It was much harder than I thought it would be.  In addition to being their mom and absolutely adoring them, I struggle with not seeing one in relation to the other – particularly Niamh.  Perhaps it was because they were born so close together that Rick and I are the most thrown by our youngest daughter.  It shouldn’t surprise us that she is not Audrey.  Other than in her appearance, she is really nothing like her sister.  Perhaps too it was because Audrey is predictable in many ways.  She responds to things in life much like I did when I was young, so I know what to expect from her.  Niamh, on the other hand, is only predictable in her unpredictability.  The same situation could bring belly laughs or full-blown melt-downs, so we just have to brace ourselves for both.  As challenging as her mood swings are, Niamh’s sensitivity to details in life and for people is amazing and her smiles and her sense of humor our uniquely her own.  She really does exemplify her name: “brightness illuminating from within.” 

The one minor “aha” I took away from our brief trip to the garden was how differently my girls encounter their worlds.  Audrey finds comfort in rules, and she practices to get things “right.”  If the flower she is drawing is not perfect, she gets very frustrated and often shuts down.  It’s as if the rules and the habits regulate her behavior and provide a predictable foundation for her learning.  Niamh, on the other hand, encounters the world in constructs.  Relationships between phenomenon animate her learning.  She makes connections – albeit often idiosyncratic ones – in order to understand her world, and as such the “outcomes” of her learning are not so easy to predict.  Audrey loves to memorize things.  She rattles off words that begin with specific sounds.  She learns foreign language easily, and she remembers series of notes in her piano book with little effort.  Niamh struggles with some of her letters and numbers, but she can pick sounds out of the middle of words quickly.  She remembers so many little details from stories we tell, movies, and books, and she often brings up these details at times when they connect with something else going on around her. 

This relatively minor observation made me realize how superficial most of our “talk” of differentiation in classrooms really is.  When we encourage teachers to “differentiate” in their classes, we typically assume they are going to pre-assess their students and group them according to how well they do on whatever outcomes they achieved.  Some teachers may assess students according to their “multiple intelligences” and occasionally differentiate according to their strengths, but I have a feeling this doesn’t happen often.  Even when it does, this still doesn’t address the beautiful complexity of the children in our classrooms.  It makes me think of the Huebner quote I enjoy so much.  I used to keep in next to my desk when I taught:

Think of it – there standing before the educator is a being partially hidden in a cloud of unknowing. For centuries the poet has sung of his near infinitudes; the theologian has preached of his depravity and hinted of his participation in the divine; the philosopher has struggled to encompass him in his systems, only to have him repeatedly escape; the novelist and dramatist have captured his fleeting moments of pain and purity in never-to-be-forgotten esthetic form; and the man (sic.) engaged in curriculum has the temerity to reduce this being to a single term – “learner.”

While Niamh may seem a lot more like the "cloud" of unknowing on many days, I love the fact that she is actually a beautiful ray of sunlight - sometimes peaking through and sometimes bursting forth with warmth and brilliance.