AUSSIE

Blog entry posted January 19th, 2010 by Dale Worsley

I was able to get back to Tom McMurrer’s second grade classroom this week, at last, and catch up on progress there. They did it! The little folks wrote letters to each other and took a walk to the post office. Because it was the chaotic holiday season, the workers couldn’t show them around, but the young correspondents did post their letters, and not a single hand lost to those alligator-jawed post boxes. Even better, as foretold, the letters arrived at their homes, full of kind seven-year-old messages of appreciation and concern: “You know that you have beautiful clothing and nice hair.” “How is your family doing? I hope they are okay.” Tom said they were “extremely excited” when they brought the letters back to school, with post-marked envelopes, to grace the bulletin board in the hallway.

Compare this outcome of extreme excitement to merely writing form letters and never sending them. Certainly it proves, if nothing else, that second graders are young empiricists and line up behind John Locke, who claims, along with Aristotle (I’ve seen this quote attributed to both), that “What is in the intellect comes first through the senses.”

That they would get excited about the letters was predictable. What I didn’t fully expect was the level of meaning in some of them. Though they hadn’t been explicitly instructed to include deeper narratives in their letters, some found the genre an irresistible outlet for important personal feelings and themes. One student included, unprompted, a heart-wrenching story about how much she enjoyed playing with her little puppy, “…but now I don’t because my landlored (sic) took him away to another house.” Another, recently arrived from Mexico, had a paragraph that mentioned the word Mexico three times and the word family five times. The prose pulsed with pride for his home country, and love for his family.

Aside from writing’s well-researched therapeutic values, I sensed a moral dimension to it. These youngsters cared for themselves and for each other, and were being encouraged by Tom, and the culture of the school, to develop and articulate this caring. As Robert Coles has taught us in his works The Moral Life of Children and The Moral Intelligence of Children, “Moral intelligence isn’t acquired by memorization of rules and regulations, by dint of abstract classroom discussion or kitchen compliance. We grow morally as a consequence of learning how to be with others, how to behave in this world, a learning prompted by taking to heart what we have seen and heard."

What the students in Tom’s class saw and heard (there we go again with the senses) was surely something to take to heart.
Which brings me back to my promise from my last blog to describe the Zeigarnik effect (first revealed to me by my friend and ex-waitress Kay Rothman at the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies): You hold something in your mind only as long as you need it. If you’re waiting on a table at a restaurant, you remember the order only as long as it takes to deliver it. Then, poof, the two cheese omelettes and three eggs benedict, one with a side of toasted rye hold the butter, vanish into the ionosphere. Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik (coincidentally building on Aristotelian notions of suspense in narrative literature) studied this. She discovered that the same holds true for learning. You memorize the consecutive interior angles converse theorem, use it on your geometry Regents exam and it’s gone. Outta sight, outta mind!

Which is why we should go to the trouble of taking kids to the post office, so to speak, in any important learning situation, so the knowledge is taken beyond short term memory and into the heart, where we it can be recalled and enjoyed for a lifetime, or at least a couple of years past the exam.