Honoring how we got here...

I have recently re-entered a yoga phase. I love yoga. It's like mind and body therapy all in one. I also think it's highly applicable to oh, say, everything, and I am constantly finding connections with yoga and work or yoga and relationships or yoga and the world.

Another reason I have started doing yoga lately is to help heal a knee injury. The physical therapist said part of the reason the knee was hurting was due to very tight hip flexors, so I have been doing yoga like a madwoman in order to try and open them up. I am a very goal-oriented person and I can do yoga with great enthusiasm in pursuit of a goal (my knee getting better). In the middle of one of the poses, the instructor remarked that it was very important to honor where your body was at that moment. She said that it took a long time to build up all that tension and it wasn't going to go away just over night. I had worked hard for that tension-- hours of sitting, stress, unbalanced exercise-- it didn't just happen.

This struck me for some reason. I tend to see where I want to be much easier than appreciating how what I have done has gotten me where I am. I could be much kinder to myself (and to my body) while moving forward on the stretching plan. I'm not saying I don't want to keep working on opening my hip flexors-- I do--but perhaps I could appreciate the stress I have been through or the adverse conditions that my body has had to endure to create this tension.

Then I thought of the classroom. Some of the students whose behavior is the worst come in with metaphorically "tight" hip flexors. Through lots of different experiences, they have learned a certain way of acting in the world, just as my hips have learned a certain way of being tight. Generally, we focus on how to immediately change the student, but we don't honor all the things that have happened (whether we know them or not) to lead to the student acting out. We see how we want students to be much easier than we usually find it to honor them where they are in this moment, but if we don't do this, we don't see the tremendous amount of work it took the student to get to wherever they are. And it did take a tremendous amount of work and struggle for any student to get to where they are-- it's a struggle to be a human being, a fact that we all too often lose sight of in the classroom (and probably in the rest of the world as well).

I am not suggesting that students are not encouraged and supported to learn different ways of acting in the classroom, just as I would not want my hips to stay tight. Tight hips lead to injuries, and students acting out usually ends up emotionally injuring someone-- often him or herself. It has to do with how we frame the behavior of the student in front of us-- do we focus only on how the student needs to change or do we see him or her as a person who has worked very hard to get to this point and appreciate all that effort, even if it didn't help in this situation?

Too many ideas....

Unbelievable. I finally get myself to the point of setting this up, and then I'm totally stuck because I have so many ideas, I don't know where to start. Do I start with a more fluffy post? A diatribe? A research-based query?

Well, perhaps I shall start with things that are On My Mind as of late, thanks to my program. One of the best books out there on education and learning is the National Research Council's How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. You can read the entire book online for free by following the link.

The chapter we read for homework this week was Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments. The chapter says first that learning environments must be learner-centered, knowledge-centered and assessment-centered (assessment used in support of learning, not as the punitive standardized test commonly associated with the word assessment), but that the classroom and learning are always situated in the larger community, and that students' learning should relate to their experience in the larger community.

A related question that has come up several times in another class is how school benefits or relates to students' lives right NOW. I talked to a teacher recently who said their school was having a major problem with truancy. Threats of grade lowering, etc., made no difference-- students were not interested in being in school. I was a "good student" (i.e., a student the system was made for) and I have many memories of sitting completely bored in class, writing notes to friends as often as I could. Was I engaged with school all the time? No, but I was programmed enough to stay in class because the thought of getting in trouble outweighed the temptation to walk out of class. What if students are not so programmed?

If schools were run like businesses and did not have captive audiences (i.e., students could choose to stay or leave), many schools would fail immediately. I am not advocating creating a three-ring circus every day in the class, or classrooms that are purely entertainment for students, but what responsibility do schools have to create learning opportunities for students that they can use NOW? If students came to school and felt every day that being at school enriched their lives, or taught them something they could take and use that afternoon, how much more motivation might they have to attend school regularly?

Stepping back one level, how do we then balance the juxtaposition of state mandated learning outcomes with student needs and interests?

Wherefore yet another blog?

Why start yet another blog? I already write a trailrunning blog-- what need have I (or the world) for another?

I have thought about starting this blog for a while. I am currently in a doctorate program at UC Davis, and I discovered last year when I started my trailrunning blog (one year ago today, to be precise!) that I do much more writing and I sharpen my talents more if I think someone besides myself might read what I have written. (Even if no one else reads it, I will craft the sentences with slightly more care, thinking a reader--any reader--is paying attention.)

I am passionate about many things-- education, justice, kindness, personal growth-- the list goes on. I will use this space to explore the connections between all these ideas, and if it becomes a space for others to connect on the same topics, so much the better. I am also interested in exploring different tools to explore these areas, and I know if I don't "have" to publish something, I won't.

So welcome, gentle reader, whomever you might be. May these writings (mine and anyone who feels inspired to comment) create more connection in our world.