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Paragraph Six - Pelicans
I’m asking myself two questions in this last blog of the school year. How many students are celebrating the ideas that have inspired them throughout the year, along with the skills they’ve developed? Conversely, how many are feeling the sting or the exhilaration (or, worse, the indifference) of their standardized test scores?
I suspect the latter number is far higher. John Dewey, who I mentioned in an earlier post for his concern about...
Paragraph Six - On Buying Hyenas and the Limits of Perfection
I meant to break away from the topic of freewriting this week, but I came across a new one that I can’t ignore.
I was facilitating a Curriculum Design Team workshop for the New York City Department of Education District 25 and 28 Magnet School Program. We always open our workshops with a freewrite. After the two minute silent writing session, teachers were sharing their ...
Paragraph Six - Let Us Now Continue to Praise Freewriting
Last week I was politely interrupted by my word monitor Gina while giving evidence for the benefits of freewriting. I promised to move beyond the dry research to hear the more liquid anecdotes this week. And so I will deliver.
First a spanking fresh one, from a workshop last week. I had planned a session to introduce the International Baccalaureate’s Primary Years Programme to the staff of PS 201 in Queens. My task was to promote questioning, inquiry, connections – all hallmarks of the...
Paragraph Six - Let Us Now Praise Freewriting
Pardon me while I pause to praise freewriting.
The topic has come up several times in past posts: as a way to respond to essential questions, as a phenomenon that liberated a middle schooler named José when he wrote, “Seeing is not believing,” as a vehicle for the unique poetry of her ninth grade mind when Jasmine wrote, “…a quiet, spacious room, reaching and stretching and acting….” It was Jasmine who went on to...
Paragraph Six - An Art and A Talent
I was facilitating a session at a retreat for the staff and a sprinkling of students from a Bronx high school. I was modeling the process of “open freewriting.” A teacher timed me while I wrote, for one minute, what came to my mind:
Go. What will I write? Blackbird. I saw one this morning. Blackbird, fly! And how many ways are...
Paragraph Six - On Making First the Scholar Speak
Here’s a quote on our recent theme of seeing, which I stumbled on since my last blog post: “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” It was uttered by impressionist impresario Paul Cezanne. One of his methods was to look with both eyes, as it were. Instead of painting objects as resolved by the brain into one picture, he superimposed the two slightly varying perspectives of each eye, thus kicking off his own carotene revolution. Picasso and Matisse agreed with his innovator’s stature when they...
Elmore in the Bronx
“The best indicator of how strong a new teacher will be in 5 years is determined by what the other teachers in the building” said Dr. Elmore, when stressing how important professionalism, consistency and collaboration are to school culture and quality teachers. On May 20th, over 60 principals and assistant principals gathered at Manhattan College to see Richard Elmore speak on school improvement and his...
Paragraph Six - Beefy Neurons, Branching Dendrites and Snappy Synapses
I ended my last post promising to quote physicist Leo Kadanoff on the theme of close observation. Here he is, from James Gleick’s remarkable book Chaos:
It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It's startling every time it occurs. One is surprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock, and a great, great joy.
Now that’s seeing, isn’t it – to have the...
