Cooking

 Yesterday I was cooking in our local soup kitchen, which is a privilege I enjoy once a week.  We had thawed out beef, and I was trying to mix things up a little bit by serving it Oriental style with rice and vegetables.  We never, of course, have all the ingredients we want or need, but therein lies the challenge.  Garlic powder replaced fresh garlic, sugar replaced honey, and whole sesame seeds replaced sesame oil.  Make do, find a way, and serve 50 hungry patrons.

My supervisor watched me for a moment whipping up an improvised Husain sauce and asked “Where did you learn to do that?”  I had to think.  I guess I learned something of Chinese cooking from a string of Chinese roommates in college.  They never taught me, but I paid attention when they were in the kitchen.  I learned to improvise through the simple act of cooking for myself and my friends and realizing that we were out of something.  It sort of helped that perfection was never a viable goal in cooking.

I am no Gordon Ramsay, nor do I aspire to be.  My point is that I have invested mo formal training in this skill of cooking, yet somehow I manage to turn out many meals of perfectly acceptable quality.  I draw on the simple experience of having paid attention in life and of accepting my mistakes, learning from them, and moving on.  My entire training in cooking has been experiential.  Watch what’s going on around me, pay attention, and try.  It has made my life very rich.

Questions

An interesting thing happens when an adult does things with kids.  They ask questions.  Sometimes the questions have to do with what we’re actually doing at the time.  But sometimes, because we’re human, the conversation builds to deeper questions.  Why are Great White Sharks coming north?  Why are there only two candidates for President?  Who are you voting for?  Why?  What makes the earth turn?  Why is lead heavier than aluminum?  What makes the clouds do that?

I rejoice at these questions.  What’s important is that they asked the question and that they are genuinely listening, curious of the answer.  These are teachable moments.  I’m sure, for instance, that somewhere, sometime, in some science class in school I was taught the difference between brass and bronze.  Still, it was not until the subject came up in conversation years later  was I able to actually learn.  In my science class I was most likely day dreaming while my teacher or text book spewed important factoids at me.  In conversation this all suddenly became very interesting and relevant.

Clearly not every adult can answer every question posed by kids.  That’s not the important part.  The marvels of Google allow us to look up the answer.  If you remember to look it up.  The moment might be lost for that particular factoid, but interest is renewed where genuine curiosity is shared.  And it will be remembered.  Learning is a natural part of life.  If we blow on those little embers of curiosity they will fan out and grow into a really interesting human being who, because you valued these random questions, will not be afraid to keep learning.

Hope

 It is breaking my heart to write this quarter’s newsletter.  I’m scrolling through old photos and old newsletters remembering the vitality that filled and surrounded Station Maine only a year ago.  I know that I am in the company of thousands of teachers and coaches and youth program staff who all love our jobs, love our kids, and want it all back.

But looking into the young faces in these photographs I cannot allow myself to be discouraged.  We owe this next generation the tools and the education they will need to face the task ahead, the task of rebuilding this planet.  We ( I ) do not have the right to rest on the laurels of years of work already accomplished.  Now, amidst a virus, climate change, and a certain political unrest, the young need to look up to a calm, if slightly lined and wrinkled, face and see the resolve to keep going forward.  They deserve to live out loud, to be safe, to learn, and to prepare to take their place in their community.

I know that I am not alone when I dig deep into my imagination and draw on my waning reserves of strength and courage to provide that education.  We are all struggling.  And because what is at stake is, literally, the future, I believe we will all find a way to educate this next generation, to give them light, to give them hope.  I believe this because to sacrifice that future is too high a price to pay for our lack of imagination.

So, I am going back to write my newsletter with new courage, buoyed up with the certain knowledge that in every town and village in the world there are teachers and coaches and youth program directors facing and solving these same problems.  Failure is not an option, and so we will succeed.

Deschooling Society

My friend Bill Ebert posted this on Facebook a while back.  I find it very much on-point for today.

"In 1971, the social critic Ivan Illich published “Deschooling Society,” a critique of institutional education. He argued that the oppressive structure of the school system must be abandoned because it contributes to a type of learned helplessness. We depend on institutions so completely that many of us can’t perform basic human tasks — delivering babies, educating children, cooking our own food. The virus has exposed this helplessness, what Mr. Illich would call a form of poverty.

Deschooling’s core principles — that education should be self-directed rather than compulsory, that human growth and curiosity cannot be quantified and that children learn best in natural environments and mixed-age groups — have gained some recognition in recent years. But the idea of truly communitarian, noncompulsory, family-centered approaches to education were largely limited to the radical fringe of pedagogy. A lot has changed in six months."

Finding your inner Sherlock

It is entirely possible to wander blindly through life and see or learn almost nothing of true value.  I have taken whole classes through walks and woods teaming with learning opportunities and had them tell me they had learned nothing.  So, we to learn to evoke our inner Sherlock.

Look at something.  Anything that strikes your fancy.  The seaweed washed up around the hauled up tugboat.  Wait, that’s not the same seaweed I mulched my garden with in June.  It’s sea grass.  The sea bottom here must be different than the south end of the harbor.  Mental note to come back with buckets, and to remember it for next year’s garden.

Sand, so much fine sand around the boat.  They must have sand blasted.  Sand is good for garden soil, but not mixed with the chemicals of boat paint.  The hull can’t be wood if they sand blasted.  No, it’s steel.  Not in great shape.  It can’t belong to the yard whose name it carries.  They maintain their boats better than that.  I’ll bet they sold it to the Vietnamese men who were working on it.

I can hear my roommate coming home from work.  He didn’t have a good day.  His posture is melting and he can barely pick up his feet.

There are no bird calls on the air.  All I hear is the buzzing of grasshoppers.  They have entirely different mating cycles.  But the air is filled with fledgling seagulls and osprey.  Most of them won’t live through the winter.  It truly is the survival of the fittest on the coast.  OK, sometimes it’s survival of the luckiest.  Bad storms or mild winters tip the scales.

Sometimes my inner Sherlock tweaks me to research something I have seen.  Sometimes it encourages me to act.  Mostly, though, I go home and carry on with my day.  I don’t want to be so hyper-vigilant all the time.  My mind needs time to rest and process.  But I learned a few interesting things today that will serve me.  All I needed to do was observe and think.

Ospreys

 I walked through North End Shipyard this morning.  I’ve decided to walk every morning and observe.  I’ve decided to spend my summer learning new things as much from experience and observation as I can manage.  Which, admittedly, isn’t much different from my life as it’s always been, but this time I want to share.

I found an osprey’s nest.  It was built on a high platform, obviously man made, which dominated the surrounding area.  So why, in the middle of North End Shipyard, am I seeing a deliberate action to attract ospreys to roost?  Well, as I thought about it, I began to see it differently.  See those tall masts in the background?  There is no way to avoid ospreys.  They have been in Rockland Harbor long before any of us.  They are instinct driven to build their nests on high spots.  The clever boatyard managers decided to reframe the problem from “How can we get the ospreys out of our rigging?” to “What can we do to encourage ospreys to nest elsewhere?”  They worked with, not against nature and built the osprey pole.  They watched the ospreys.  They learned.  Just by paying attention to what was around them.

                                       

Come to Oars

 If you are interested in experiential education in all its forms may we recommend to you Come to Oars by Muriel Curtis.  Filled with ideas, dreams, and the reality of starting a youth program on the coast of Maine, Come to Oars will inspire you to see the potential in any student and in yourself.  It will make you believe that anything is possible.  Then it will show you how it's done.  Available through Amazon.

You do NOT have to go to college

 

The Art of Living

I sat with a young friend today.  He had almost lost the opportunity of a job, a good job, a job that he really wanted, because he had filled out the application badly.  Because life in a small town is often filled with second chances I was given the chance to help him.  I learned, in our brief conversation, that it was not just about carelessness and messy handwriting.  He didn’t know how to fill out the application.  He didn’t know the importance of references, three references.  He didn’t know that he was meant to get permission from references before using their name and giving out their phone number.  He told me he’d never been taught to fill out a job application.  High school taught him none of the basic life skills that would make it possible to live comfortably in the 21st century.

My question is, why not?  Why is it possible to graduate high school and college in this country and still not know the basics of living?  How to balance a checkbook.  How to shop and cook.  How to make a budget and stick to it.  How to write a resume.  How to change a tire.  What is compound interest and how does it work?

So, while we are re-thinking education for the 21st century, while we are adding experiential education to the very important lessons of arithmetic and reading, can we not take some time out to teach our children the basics of living in this increasingly complicated society that we have created?  Can we not stack the cards so that a good solid kid can get a proper job and be able to hold his head up as a contributing member of that society?  I think this next generation deserves no less.

Outdoor Classes

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-california-collective-makes-the-case-for-outdoor-schooling?fbclid=IwAR0m0w5nMkO-F5Ye_jtSdI4DJTHp26jDos_cK3Ps1gPSOlr47cIWyvkTAIc

I wandered on this terribly interesting news story today.  Outdoor organizations are coming together to help schools utilize their outdoor space.  This clearly expands the physical plant of the classroom making social distancing possible, making air flow possible, and in general making a safer environment for our kids.  But, beyond that, taking classes outside expands the scope of education.  Even if a young child’s mind wanders, and of course it will, it can jump to yet another aspect of learning such as the way grass sends up seeds or how that bird just interacted to that squirrel.  Weather is manageable.  Though this is obviously not a perfect solution I strongly recommend listening to this article.

Down time

I saw a troubling article in the Boston Globe this morning on the subject of Covid19.  The author noted, not unfairly, “this isn’t an emergency anymore - it’s the long term reality”.  A deadly virus has infected our population, and it’s going to be with us for a very long time.  So, facing that depressing fact squarely, can we not take a solid look at education and make a plan that centers not on the convenience of the system but on the needs of the child?

Our children may be finding themselves at home, with or without parents, with the luxury of massive amounts of time on their hands.  Remember the child development articles decrying how kids had too much of their time regulated?  Remember how they need to be bored to force their brains to create learning opportunities and foster their imaginations?  Once the “core academics” of today’s lesson, at school or at home, are learned and dealt with can the child not be encouraged to study and explore their own interests?  Can they not be left alone and “unentertained” long enough to be able to seek out those interests within themselves?

Most of us grab on to an interest by accident.  I developed a very active interest in birds as a child through a chance encounter with a cereal box.  My skill in training animals came through long, solo afternoon walks through our neighborhood meeting and greeting my neighbor’s pets.  My love of music and storytelling through rainy days in the Kelp Shed, the local community hall on the island.  My love of plants through taking seeds apart and looking, just looking, at the not quite formed seedling within.  None of these interests which have informed and enriched my life were taught to me at school.  They all sprung from chance encounters and were nurtured by free time.

Academics are important.  None of the self-directed research that has guide my life would have been possible had not patient teachers taught me to read.  We certainly cannot raise worthy citizens if they don’t know the history of this country and the world.  Nor can critical thinking be taught in a vacuum.  But as long as this virus haunts us, as long as schooling and public assemblies of any kind are riddled with an unease that forbids consistency, let us at least give our children, and ourselves, the freedom to be bored, and with it the play time, the books, the computer, the encouragement, the whatever it takes to fill that boredom with self-directed learning.  

Lobsters

I was young, maybe seven years old, when we visited the Lobster Pound.  It wasn’t a big deal.  Just a walk meant as recreation rather than study,  Interesting, isn’t it, that the more new things one is exposed to the more learning happens, whether you mean for it to or not.

There was a lobster boat unloading the morning’s catch.  The smell of the salt bait, the sea, the fog was imposing.  They used wooden crates back then, and an ancient lead weight scale that was probably older than my grandmother.  The lobsterman loaded a full crate onto the scale.  The pound manager wrote down the weight with a stubby pencil on a pocket sized pad.  They dumped the lobsters out of the crate, weighed the crate separately, and wrote those figures down.  

Why, my little seven year old mind pondered, did they need to weigh an empty crate?  I watched for a while, quiet, taking in everything.  The answer came to me in a flash.

Subtraction.

These actual grown-ups were using subtraction.  Arithmetic up until that moment was a school thing.  We added and subtracted figures on our work sheets, colored in between the figures if we happened to be done before the allotted time, turned in our sheets and were rewarded in due time with a gold star at the top of the page.  But this was different.  These big working men with their stubby pencil were doing subtraction for real.  And if they got it right then the proper amount of money was exchanged and the lobster trade would carry on.

I gained a proper respect for arithmetic on that day.  It wasn’t a grand flash or life changing experience.  It was just another piece in the puzzle of life, put in place by a simple experience.

Animals

The guidance counselor/psychologist type person at a school I worked at told me once that animals don’t have emotions the same way we do.  She said that we are simply projecting our emotions onto them.  She was an educated woman, good at her job, and sincere in this new psychological “truth” she was describing to me.  I was polite.  It’s better not to contradict people.  But I have worked with animals all my life and I knew she was dead wrong.

Maybe this is why experiential education is so important.  She had never seen the relief of the cows after milking or watched them kick up their heels when they escaped to munch on the apple tree in the front yard.  She had never returned to a dog bouncing with limitless joy at her return.  Nor had she ever been snubbed by a dog because you broke one of the “rules.  

Emotion and understanding, even sentience in general, are not things you can measure even in humans.  You need to develop an understanding within yourself that you simply can’t find in a book.  You’ve got to spend time in the field, just watching, observing, and learning.  Book study is important because it can give you a short cut to the learning and experience of those who have gone before you.  But nothing can replace personal experience.

Reopening Schools

The author makes a series of very good points about how school, as much as we want it to, cannot be the same school we left behind.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/07/28/reopening-schools-covid-19-wrong-conversation-coronavius-column/5520523002/?fbclid=IwAR0xa3zWp5uevkKezJS5YW7yTGxE7nOohO6ecFvSm8sTFurveu6f189QeDw

Bazooka Joe

When I was a kid I was a big fan of Bazooka Joe.  Bubble gum was a great treat in summers on the island.  Besides the obvious sugar rush and the entertainment value of countless pink bubbles big enough to tangle in my hair, there were the comic strips curled inside the wrapper.  They came with a comic, a “fun fact” and a fortune or bit of philosophy.  Not a bad return on a few pennies.

One fortune I remember that stuck with me for years was “Learn something every day.  It will amount to much in a year.” At the age of ten I wasn’t much of a philosopher, but I remember seeing the wisdom even then in that particular idea.  I began that summer to puzzle every night in bed what I had learned that day.

That summer I learned easily many things that I took delight in remembering.  Maria, my friend who spoke only French, taught me the French word for beach was la plage and that’s where she would meet me.  When I examined the sand at that beach I found that it was made predominately of quartz with tiny garnets mixed in.  Climbing the anchor in bare feet was made easier if you wiped your feet on the grass and spit on the soles first.  I read interesting books just because it was a rainy day and they happened to be there.  I learned that people from different parts of the country talk with different accents.  Blueberries grew in the places where the soil was rocky.  If you sit quietly with a peanut butter sandwich the red squirrel will come to you and eat it right out of your hand.  Pine pitch makes a poor glue for a broken balsa wood plane but it’s still better than nothing.  And seagulls are so bold that they will take not only the fish guts you throw to them but the cleaned fish as well if you don’t protect it.  I learned songs and games.  I learned skills.  These were odd facts, but exactly as Bazooka Joe predicted, they added up to a wealth of knowledge of life and the physical world.  A knowledge base from which I still draw. 

After a summer of being so invested in my education I looked forward to school with less loathing than in previous years.  I would learn.  Someone would teach me something every day and it would amount to a lot because that was the whole point of being there.  But, as much as I tried to remember to learn, as much as I wanted to make it work this year, I distinctly remember laying in bed trying to remember what I had learned that day and drawing a blank.  I knew I had learned.  I must have learned.  I had been to school that day, hadn’t I?  Yet I could draw to mind nothing of real worth that I felt I could add to my list of knowledge.

I had a proper American education.  I learned to read, I learned some modicum of math and history and geography.  But the things I really learned, the things that stuck with me, were the things I learned either on my own or with the help of someone who I had chosen to teach me.  My friends who would teach me French words, the books that taught me the names of birds and trees, the old man who played chess with me taught me at least as much in my short summer holidays as I learned cramped in a classroom taking tests through the dreary winter.

I do not damn schools or teachers or our education system.  I support them as one of the many tools important for education.  But it is as important for children to have time to learn on their own.  Children need to feel the sand in their fingers or see the clouds.  They need to be alone and bored so that they will fill in that boredom with a different kind of learning.  They need to play with other children without the constant supervision of an adult so they will learn the social skills that will guide them through life.  Children need the tools of learning, time, space, occasional guidance, and the use of a few good books or maybe, God forbid, internet access.  Children need friends.  

I don’t want to re-run Lord of the Flies here.  Of course children need guidance.  They might need to be reminded occasionally that there is a big world out there and some day they will need to find their place in it.  Children need to be exposed to hundreds of experiences from which they can discover their interests.  Then they need to be trusted to learn in their own way at their own pace of the things that interest them the most.  

Maybe, occasionally, they need a few pennies to see what they can learn from Bazooka Joe.