Sharing Education for Life

          This first week back at school I had the opportunity of sharing the Education for Life program with my colleagues.  It gave me the opportunity of reflecting on what I have learned from EFL so far this school year.  Having to tell others about it made me think deeply about the difference in my teaching since my exposure to this program.
     


          When I started using EFL back in September I told our school principal what I was attempting to do in my classroom.  He, in turn, asked me to share it with the staff.  At our first staff meeting of 2013 I gave a short presentation about this new approach.  I also wanted to inform them of the upcoming free talk by Nitai Deranja that is happening in a couple of weeks on January 26 in Palo Alto.  If you live in the San Francisco bay area I highly recommend going to this event! 
http://www.anandapaloalto.org/joy/Consciousness_workshop_with%20Nitai.pdf
   
As I looked back at what I had done so far this school year I noticed that I had been using EFL in my classroom on the four distinct levels that made sense to me.

1.      I’m constantly checking to see if what I’m doing is experiential.  Are the students learning through their own experience?  In planning my lessons I try to make sure that what they experience allows them to use all the ‘tools of maturity’: physical, feeling, will, intellect.  This allows everyone to learn through their dominant tool.
2.     Now more than ever I focus on the positive, I follow the joy.  I notice when the students are the most engaged, enthusiastic, interested.  I’ve learned that one of the things that points us to our highest potential is our passion or our level of engagement and joy in a subject.  This includes, me, the teacher!
3.     I’ve also been basing my teaching on expansiveness.  There is a way to measure an individual’s expansiveness by using what EFL calls Progressive Development or a person’s Specific Gravity.  With the model of Specific Gravity I can gauge the level of energy behind a student’s actions, this gives me clues as to how to motivate and teach that student.  I learned that other words for energy in this context might be “consciousness or intention”.
4.     Of course this is all student centered or a better phrase is “child oriented”.  In other words, the student is more important than the curriculum.  I cannot just throw the curriculum at them.  As the teacher, I need to constantly discern my students’ abilities and what is appropriate and expansive for each of them to bring them to a higher level. 

A Festival of Light

   We have wonderful diversity of cultures and traditions represented at our school.  Our students’ families are from all over the world every continent is represented except Antarctica.  Therefore, the holiday season means different things to different students.  We honor these different traditions in many ways at our school, specially in this last week before our Winter Break.  In my classroom I wanted to focus on the shared tradition of “Light” during this time of the year.  So many cultures and traditions have Light as a theme in their holidays.  Most even have some sort of “Festival of Light”.  Well, in Social Studies we are still in ancient Egypt so I was curious.  Did the Egyptians have a Festival of Light?  To my great surprise they did.  Herodotus, a Greek historian in BC tells of the festival of Lychnocaia, “the lighting of lamps”.  Lamps were lit in rows on the outside of houses around this time of the year to help Osiris find his way back from the underworld.

    I shared this information with my students.  I also found some wonderful pictures of the different expressions of light in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, as well as the story of Egypt and light in the natural world.  We brainstormed to understand what Light symbolized.  The students thought it symbolized: peace, happiness, life, power, energy - these were their words.  I told them that I wanted us to experience some type of celebration of Light but that I knew we could not have lit candles in school since it would be a fire hazard.  We could, however,  have a string of lights.  Thanks to help from Erika Glazzard, a fellow EFL teacher, I had come up with a lovely plan.  We would make a walking spiral of light that would lead the students to its center where they could pick up a glass stone that would symbolize a personal excellence quality that they wanted to nurture in themselves in the coming year.  I needed a focal point of light at the center so I brought in an angel that I had from my daughters' childhood.

 
     The visual experience of having the lights on the floor was beautiful.  It was like walking inside our Milky Way Galaxy.  I played Pachelbel’s Canon in D for music in the background as each student made their own way into the heart of the lights.  After every one had a turn we sat around and had a few minutes of silence as we all tried to expand our own heart’s light.  I’ve asked the students to keep their glass stone to remind them of that special quality that they want to nurture in themselves.
   

Plants Have Feelings Too.

Food made from wheat.

   Lately I feel like I am in a time warp.  Even though the winter holidays are upon us in present time in my Social Studies class we are in ancient Egypt 3000-2000 BC.  We have been studying agriculture as we left Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent to visit Egypt and the Nile Valley.  Both cultures boasted advances in agriculture in ancient times.  Since I’m always looking for ways to have my students experience what they are learning I decided that we needed to spend more time in the garden.  One teacher had already planted wheat so that the students could watch the wheat cycle through out the year.  After we went out to observe the five inch tall wheat the students said a bit surprised, "It looks like grass!"  Following this, we had a pot luck where students could only bring foods that were made out of wheat.  We ate as we watched a video on wheat production from planting to bread on the table.

    We waited for the seasonal heavy rains to stop before we went out to the garden to see what else we could find.  The students had a focus; they needed to observe plants and take notes.  I find that they concentrate and calm down if they have a purpose to focus their energy.  Some of the boys still were excited by the dirt, mud, and water, especially since someone in the past months had dug a tantalizing moat complete with water as they were trying to reproduce an example of irrigation.  One student was intrigued by the mushrooms growing and wanted to show us how mushroom caps once put on paper and left to dry will unburden themselves of spores leaving a magical dusty ring.  I love it when the students are the teachers.  We also found many other cool things growing like strawberries, broccoli, cabbage as well as the remains of the summer tomato plants.  We also found empty soil beds crying to be used.

    I chose fava beans for the students to plant because they can be a cover crop feeding nitrogen to the soil or we can let them propagate and have fava beans to eat- hopefully right around the time we study Greece and Rome.  Also, each bean is big and each student can plant one bean and have their own plant.  I explained to the students that plants have feelings and that they need to be treated with kindness, respect, and gratitude.  This was a new concept to some of them but their hearts naturally responded.  I asked them to talk to their bean seed while they were waiting their turn to plant it.  To encourage their little baby to grow.  It was so enjoyable to see what they did with this suggestion.  One student named her bean “Stewart” so then many others named their beans.  One boy planted his bean, stayed to talk to it some more, and ended up 'teaching' his bean math and singing!  A group of girls got carried away and decided that their beans would marry and adopt some of the other beans.  I tried to get them to wait until their plants were fruit bearing age before they married them off but they did not want to wait.  After school apparently they got together to make invitation cards for the wedding and went out at lunch the next day for the ceremony.  This is all making us learn, smile, and laugh big time!
    I’ve also suggested to the students that they bring a present to their plant like a dry leaf, a handful of compost, a worm for its soil.  We will be going out and visiting our plants and watching them grow.  How wonderful to live in mild California climate and be able to do this in December.  Thank you Mother Nature.

Grammar, Symbolism, and EFL

    I’ve always loved teaching. What’s amazing is how much more I’m enjoying my job now that I’m trying an EFL approach in my classroom.  I find myself chortling at some of the teaching ideas and situations that come up with EFL.

    Take grammar for instance.  I’ve been plugging allow with my students teaching the required grammar lessons.  However, I’ve been trying different experiential ways of having the students practice the grammar concepts they are learning.  My goal is to engage all the students and their different tools of maturity to make sure that all are learning through their natural inclinations - physical, feeling, will, or intellect.  After trying several activities for our grammar lessons the most popular one involved skits.   They needed to learn/review the specifics of pronouns.  I found an activity that got them up out of their seats, engaged, and taught them to label and identify 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns.  They were divided into groups of 6 to put on a short skit. 
There were limitations:
2 people could only speak using 1st person pronouns such as I, me mine, we, us, etc.
2 of them could only speak in 2nd person pronouns, you, your, yours. 
Of course, the last 2 needed to speak in 3rd person using he, she, it, they etc. 
They loved it! They thoroughly enjoyed performing and coming up with very silly skits which also helped them learn to identify pronouns.


    It also turns out that symbolism keeps coming up.  Ever since the students worked on finding their own personal animal symbol (see Nov. 12 posting) the concept of symbolism keeps working its way into our lessons.  As we studied ancient Mesopotamia and the beginning of writing in pictographs and the ancient writing of cuneiform the students began to realized the importance and prevalence of symbolism.  Mental ideas from the realm of thoughts were brought into this material world through symbolic pictures that evolved into cuneiform writing on clay tablets in Sumer long ago.  Thanks to watching a fellow teacher, David Riordan, I was reminded of this experiential  project that I hadn’t done in a long time.  The students needed to make their own pictographs or picture symbols and write a message on a clay tablet.  I gave the students the recipe for Salt and Flour Clay and the option of extra credit.  About two thirds of my students had fun over their week long Thanksgiving break creating a message in their own invented pictographs.  One student came to school and told me that he had left his tablet to cool after taking it out of the oven and his dog ate it!  His dog really did eat his homework!

    The last helpful activity I want to mention is the reading of a popular picture book to my classes.   Unfortunately, like many other public middle schools we have problems with students being inappropriate and mean to each other.  I decided to share with my students the book, Have You Filled a Bucket Today?, which I had seen at the EFL family summer camp in Laurelwood, OR.  I’m finding that picture books are a fine literary medium even for middle school students.  My sixth graders love having a picture book read to them and this book engaged their heart qualities of caring and kindness.  I told them that they could understand and enjoy the concepts in picture books on a deeper and more mature level.  They now know that “filling someone’s bucket” is using symbolism and metaphor for making others feel good through acts of compassion.  Their homework was to go out and fill others' “buckets” through kind acts.  The next day they wrote about their experiences in their journals and came back with stories to share that reminded us of all the meaningful ways that we can reach out to others and make their day more joyful.

Smiles and Education for Life

       I know this is the holiday time of year and we are making changes to our journal writing because of it.  The students each have a composition book where they keep all important language arts information like Reading Concepts, Grammar, Response to Literature.  Interspersed with these is a section labeled “Things That Make Me Smile”.  This section has replaced the Joy board with all the sticky notes (see Sept. 9th posting). Why not?  With EFL I’m reminding the students to 1. do your homework 2. follow school rules and don’t forget 3. find your bliss or joy.  In honor of Thanksgiving, of course, it was easy to have them add the list of things they are grateful for.  It really is becoming a habit for the students to notice when they are happy.  If we get too busy and I forget to have them write in this section they are the ones to remind me now.  The day one of my student leaders raised her hand and asked, “Can we please write our three things that make me smile?” I knew I was actually getting through to them. Yes!

        It’s an attitude shift for both teacher and students. It is focusing on the positive, the light, the joy.  Even when things don’t go right.  An opportunity came up when the students were working on their ABC books of Mesopotamia.  These books are a 6th grade tradition at our school.   All the social studies teachers use this project because among other things it is a fun project.  The students get into groups and make a page for every letter of the alphabet.  For example, A is for Assyrians.  Each page includes a sentence with the definition of the word, a sentence that explains what that has to do with Mesopotamia, and a picture in color to go with the definition.  This year I let the students pick their groups (yes, because of EFL) and they worked together to produce their group project.  One group ran into trouble as they were finishing up their book.  There was a disagreement about who was suppose to do the Y page which is one of the difficult letters for this project.  Most of the actual work is done at home and as the final due date drew near they had realized that the person that should have done it hadn’t.  As all the groups were putting their books together I noticed the whole energy of one of the groups getting very negative.  I sat down with them and they were quick to tell me whose fault it was that their book was not finished but of course they could not even agree on that part.  I helped them acknowledge that yes there had been a problem in communication, that communication was always hard, but that a solution was needed.  I told them that they could feel bad because there had been a mistake or they could focus on solving the problem.  I left them with the question,  “How are you going to solve this problem?”  As I walked away from the group I glanced back and they were all in a group hug (it was an all girl group).  It was so cute and heartwarming.  The Y page was the last to show up minutes away from the deadline, but they handed in a finished product.  I’ll add that to my list of things that make me smile.

End of 1st Quarter with EFL

     The first quarter ended at our school with a flurry of tests, report cards, and parent/teacher conferences.  Academically, parents can access their child’s grades on line at any time.  All assignments, test scores and overall grades are accessible 24/7.  There is a great deal of pressure for academic performance as you can imagine.  How do I get the students to relax, look inside themselves for the creativity and strength that they need to live in this demanding present day world?  My students try so hard to do well.  They want to succeed at all the challenges presented to them by their parents, the school, their peers.  In talking to the parents at the parent/teacher conferences I learned much more about my students including some of the hardships and misfortunes they face outside of school.  My heart goes out to our struggling families.  I know from past experience, however, that even in the midst of severe trials there really is a silver lining that students can tap into but they need to know how to find it within themselves.  I continue to find that one way is by focusing on being their own unique personal best and being willing to go on the journey to discover what their best or excellence might be.  One way I can help is by reminding them to look for their ‘personal excellence’, hence all the activities we do on this important theme.  I can also identify it for them when I catch them being ‘excellent’. For example, when they are being generous and sharing their things with other classmates, standing up for each other if someone is getting teased, or even being brave and raising their hand when they are not sure of the answer.  The silver lining is also in those things, small and large, that bring us joy, that we are passionate about. My students need help in identifying their joy, passion, bliss.  They sometimes don’t register when something up-lifts them because in today’s world we are all so overstimulated, stressed, and going 100 miles an hour.  My job is to help them slow down, tune in, and register where ‘they are at’ so that when that joy comes they can enjoy it, expand it, and share it.
    One example of practicing this presented itself in art class.  I had the students work on simple paper and marker ‘mandalas’ after watching a great youtube video.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g16B64myG-E&feature=related  We watched the video without the music and I read the subtitles.  I told the students that this was a silent activity so I was turning the class period into SSD (sustained silent drawing).  I explained that we are usually listening and looking at things around us but that great artists have to turn their focus inward, listen, and look at what was inside them, inside their imagination. Since, I had personally tried this exercise and knew that it was harder than it looked, I directed them to do two mandalas each, the first to get use to it and the second to expand their practice.  They took it seriously, worked in silence for two 45 minute periods on two consecutive days and produced some beautiful patterns.
     As for dealing with academic life, how are my students doing so far? If I look at my students through the Tools of Maturity prism I see my intellectual students, of course, are the most comfortable with the emphasis on academics.  My physical students need lots of breaks and time out of their seats in order to survive.  My feeling students can handle the academics as long as their feelings are engaged.  As for my will students, they get impatient if things are too easy or slow.  They thrive on the extra credit activities.  I also have to keep in mind that 6th grade and middle school is that transition between an individual's feeling years and the entrance of the will years - they are all headed in that direction.
    To keep up with their changing views I read the journals that they have been keeping all quarter and I started to see a pattern to what the students were thinking.  In the midst of all this academic activity, I continue to ask them to write about “personal excellence” qualities (a minimum of three) that they want to work on this school year.  I have two blocks of students that I work with (not including my art class).  It was interesting to see that in my morning class a majority of the students elected to work on “patience” and in my afternoon block most are working on “courage or bravery” as their overall quality.  Note to self: I need to incorporate this into future activities.  For now, I find it very appropriate to keep going back to this personal excellence theme even while we work in our typical school literature book, an anthology of stories and poems, complete with standardized benchmark tests, two tests per unit.  I am able to change the stories I use as long as the students learn all the reading concepts and do well on the computerized benchmark tests.  I change the program when I can.  For example, while we tackled the last of our fiction/nonfiction unit, one of our key reading concepts was “symbolism”.  Instead of using our literature book, I found a great symbolism story in the book, Keepers of the Animals, Native American Stories and Wildlife Activities for Children by Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac.  The story I picked was about Grandmother Spider who helped the God of the Sky name all the animals in the world.  First, we stopped and named as many animals as we could in preparation for our next experience.  We read a story about a chief going to look for the animal symbol for his clan.  He was intent on tracking a  deer so that his clan could become the “deer clan”.  However, while looking down at the deer tracks he got caught in a spider web and realized after talking to Grandma Spider that it was the spider symbol that he was meant to find for his clan.  One of the great qualities of the spider is patience and his clan could become the “spider clan” and learn patience from their symbol.  One of the activities suggested after this story in the book was a visualization for finding one’s own personal animal symbol.  Here’s a very brief description: I had the students close their eyes and picture the world as a giant web where they are at the center and all things in creation are connected.   They were to ask for help in taking care of this world from their own individual animal symbol, then they were to picture that animal.  All the students were able to do this.  It came naturally to them.  The only problem for a couple of the students was having seen more than one animal.  For homework, they had to print out or draw a picture of that animal, write the quality it symbolized, and explain why that animal symbolized that quality.  We keep these pictures on our bulletin board to remind us of the qualities that we want to work on in order to help ourselves and the world around us.

Archaeology and EFL

     I am learning so much as I try EFL principles in my classroom.  Using the “Personal Excellence” qualities translates well into the public school environment.  I continue to use this as my central theme.  As the students explore what it means to be at their highest it can be very exciting.  Just how high can one go?  What is one’s personal best?  To try and be at one’s best and keep one’s heart open is very hard to do in a public middle school but it can be full of rewards. I can see that some students are starting to try as we deal with some deep topics.

Gobekli Tepe/Smithsonian.com

    For example, in social studies we have been studying archaeology in our textbook and the students watched a couple of short youtube videos about what it means to be an archaeologist.  They pondered how we know what we know and how the different theories of early man continue to be pieced together.  The students wrote about the “Personal Excellence” qualities one needs in order to be a successful archaeologist and why.  They came up with a list that included curiosity, perseverance, cooperation, patience, clear thinking, etc.  We talked about how all these are needed to decipher the past as different artifacts and evidence is constantly being discovered and reinterpreted.  We noted how people try to make sense of places like Catal Huyuk (in our textbook) and Gobekli Tepe (c. 9500 BC see web site http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html) which are both in present day Turkey that do not fit the mold of hunter-gatherer theories.
    All month I have been looking for a way for students to experience archaeology by doing some activities that they could enjoy and that would encompass all the Tools of Maturity: physical, feeling, will, and intellect. To me that means not just books, paper, and pencil but going from academic desk work to direct experience.  As we finished our unit on early man and the theories of hunter-gatherer societies that lived  200,000 years ago or more, one of my small Asian girl students surprised me by showing me a small spear she had made at home on her own initiative.  She must have read my mind because I had always secretly wanted to have the students make their own stone age tools and make a “pretend” archaeological site.  I saw this as a sign that indeed I better get a move on before we finished the unit. 
    The students were given a week to come up with a stone age artifact made at home from natural materials or found in nature but used by the early people.  We had made a chart in school of the different parts that make up any given culture and talked about the different tools that the early peoples had needed for their society.  Also, we finished reading the novel based on that society, Maroo of the Winter Caves, (required reading in 6th grade at our school).  Once the whole class had brought in their homemade artifacts and found objects, we borrowed some land from our school garden and I had the morning class bury their artifacts and objects for the afternoon class to dig up and vis a versa. (See photo, unfortunately, I can not show students because of the complications of getting parent permission).   One interesting learning moment came up when a student shared his confusion at not being able to find any materials in his home to make a stone age tool.  The class helped him realize that he had to actually go outside, out in nature to get his materials because the early people only lived in nature.  That was an aha! moment as he was able to perceive a view point outside his own modern world of remote controls, ipods, cell phones - which is his reality. 

    After the dig, as we sat around in a circle surveying our find we discussed the difference between our pretend excavation and real life artifacts that would have still survived after thousands of years.  The students realized that probably only the stone objects would have survived disintegration.  We looked at the abundance of hunting tools.  There were many spears, sharp rocks or choppers, bows and arrows.  But some students had brought in different items.  A smooth rock with picture symbols carved into it, shell necklaces, a decorated rattle.  One student made a woven basket from palm fronds in her yard.  There were also pretty shells with no known purpose.  I had also snuck in and buried a softball size open amethyst rock or geode when they weren’t looking.   One student surmised that the pretty shell might have been used as an offering to the nature gods. As we looked at the objects that were excavated we discussed the natural environment of early man.
    Before we finished the unit and went on to study our next culture, Mesopotamia, I felt I had to go back to that pretty shell and the reverence that early man had for their natural environment.  We discussed how nature was sacred to people who lived so close to the earth, how their idea of gods and goddesses reflected that close relationship.  We gratefully have many good examples of that close attunement in the many Native American stories, myths, and traditions.  I read them the picture book Brother Eagle, Sister Sky by Susan Jeffers, a reinterpretation of Chief Seattle’s message.  I find that the students focus better when they know they will have to write after their activity, even if it’s in their class journal.  They simply answered the question, “What was Chief Seattle’s message?”  It was an easy assignment for them with a typical answer being.  “He said we are all connected and that the Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”  I explained to them that often I have to go out and seek that connection with nature in order to recharge.  That many times I will go to the beach, the woods, or a park and pick up a small keep sake to remind me of that special experience of our natural world.  (This will provide so many good future writing opportunities.)
    I brought in many of the nature object that I’ve collected and used them for a quiet meditative activity. I turned off the lights, had them close their eyes, and I put one of the nature objects I brought like a shell, rock, driftwood, feather in each of their hands.  In silence, they had to feel the object, and try and picture it in their mind’s eye.  Of course, they had to guess what it was, what color, and where I had found it.   They were thoroughly intrigued by the difference between their perception and the reality of the object.  As an on going activity for the rest of the year, I asked them to bring in something beautiful from our natural world to add to our tray of nature objects that I started. As they go out in nature they will bring something back and share their connection with our natural world.