Ethical Architecture by Judy Lyden

When Mr. Knightly steps up to Emma and says, "That was poorly done; shame on you," Mr. Knightly is stepping out of the door of his ethical architecture and offering Emma a big bowl of correction and admonition. It's a gift to Emma that he hopes will allow her to see more clearly good and evil. It is the charity of "keeping one another on the road towards good." Can you imagine a line like that written today?

Not only does a great portion of the world seem to have lost the ideals of correction and admonition, we seem also to have dispensed with ethical architecture altogether. We build a little pyre of sticks when someone does something horrendous to us or to someone we know, or even to society, and then we burn those sticks pretending the ashes are not ours.

Charles Krauthhammer is one of the exceptions to the modern world. Every time the President moves, Charles builds an ethical structure not unlike a Gothic Cathedral. He has the wisdom and knowledge that allow him to fully understand flaws and errors and the character to name it. In response, his critics busily build a series of little pyres and burn them down in secret, but they don't dare step up to Charles's door for a big bowl of correction and admonition.

But this wonderful development of character does not start from whim. I had an editor once who said, "Never admit you're wrong." Whoa. I thought at the time, "If I'm never wrong, then I'm never right." If it's about never being able to admit to wrong, then I can't be a fully developed adult, because a fully developed adult admits to their wrongs.

The problem with being able to admit to wrong, and publicly, when the world all around is failing to ever admit to wrong, puts the admitting adult into a perpetual position of being the bad guy. Admit once, and you are always suspect to those who have never made a mistake. It's almost laughable, but at the same time, it's not funny, because this is the example we are giving to our children. Those who are willing and able to admit errors are deemed weak and hateful.

Children watch parents for examples of behavior. If parents never admit to their mistakes, children will learn they can't make a mistake either. How often have we cried because we did something awful and then blamed it on everything and anything but ourselves. We love to make excuses, smooth over the incident with silence, and lash out at anyone offering correction and admonition.

And worse, try to be a Mr. Knightly in today's world, and not only will you be ostracized, you will be spit on by anyone listening. If you said to someone, "That was poorly done; shame on you," most retorts would attack you. "Weeeellll, you did this or that or you're not perfect; I've seen you..." This kind of retort burns the pyre of the architecture of ethics.

Building an ethical architecture means exploring wisdom, gathering wisdom's tools and being able to understand the lessons wisdom teaches. But one can't explore wisdom without knowledge because you would have no path to wisdom. You can't hope to approach wisdom without trying to understand what is good and what is not as two clearly defined paths. Also, understanding that gray areas pertain to that which is not important like material goods is a part of wisdom. Black and white areas apply to what is important like the intangibles of character, attributes of good habits like reliability, strength of purpose, determination, and the hatred of those things that pull man down.

In teaching children, building an ethical architecture begins with being able to winnow good from lesser behaviors. It is hard for someone unfamiliar with the two paths of good and not so good to direct the innocent. When there is no ethical architecture, or the idea of ethical architecture is thrown out the window, the situation reverts back to primitive man - out in a field without protection and without the shelter of thousands of years of ethical structures and lessons. There is no platform for instruction. There is no shelter of answers, no reason, no personal cost.

On the other hand, it is easy for the fully developed builder to stop lesser behaviors and teach because the adult knows that lesser behaviors will lead down the path away from knowledge and therefore wisdom. Simply not allowing impulsive, selfish, lazy and naughty behaviors EVER in the classroom will create a respect that by a well formed adult's very presence will stop. When the goal is to show the child that good is good and lesser is lesser, the lesson is taught and the hope is that the child will begin to gather tools and supplies for his own ethical architecture so that he can escape the primitive field and live in a well ordered house.

The next step in teaching ethical architecture is in choosing. One chooses all day long. We choose our behavior with ourselves, our friends, with our employers and employees, with our families and with the strangers we meet. The goal here is in the habit of good choices so that we can store up more tools and more supplies. When the choice amounts to "what do I get from this behavior," the architecture becomes flat line. The answer is nothing. The ethics of building stop. A diversion from self to others is the goal of instructing children. Think outside yourself, is the lesson to be taught by a wise and knowledgeable teacher.

"Judge, and you shall be judged." With the ethical architect, that statement is not frightening. The ability to judge for oneself, because of the work of gaining knowledge and wisdom, what is good and what is not is simply not a frightening ideal. For the enlightened, the very idea of not being able to judge that which is good and that which is not is more frightening. For the developed not being allowed, by non builders and field dwellers, to call out in a loud and clear voice, what is good and what is not is even more frightening. To be trapped by a family or group of any kind from being able to offer correction and admonition is the modern prison of serfdom.

Judging behaviors is more difficult because there is something called intent. We are not always sure of someone's intent, and even with children, the behavior can be poor, but the intent was not, and ferreting out just exactly what the child meant is not always easy. Again knowledge plays a great part here. Knowing a child well and being able to climb inside his youthful and delightful ethical architecture is part of the teaching job, but along with this one needs to be able to communicate well and have a desire to let go of self and become the nameless faceless advocate of the child. This too is part of wisdom.

Ethical architecture is the crown of the adult. The acquisition of tools and supplies - namely wisdom and knowledge, understanding, prudence, patience, humility, courage, and charity are the attributes of the developed man. Without these things, we might as well just go live in the open.

Just some pondering for a winter's day.

Monday's Tattler

This week is Valentine's Week and this is what you should know:

Monday is a regular school day.

Tuesday is a perchance snow day. If Warrick or Vanderburgh Counties close school, we will be closed that day too. Pleas watch your weather channels.

Wednesday is not Miss Dayna's Birthday. It is Friday, February 12.

Thursday is a regular school Day.

Friday is our Valentine Day Card Exchange. Children will need to bring at least 45 Valentines to school that are signed but not addressed. Children will spend the morning passing these out. It is a very fun time.

Friday is the party. The party begins at 3:00. All children need an attending adult. It is the children's first dance. Children are welcome to dress up that day. Please bring a treat to share. School will dismiss about 4:00.

Please help your child identify countries on the big world map sent home three weeks ago. This is a contest. The child who can identify the most countries will win a prize.

This month is reading for real. Please help your child with letter sounds and word recognition. When working with children and handwriting please use one upper case letter for the child's first letter of his name, and every letter after should be a lower case letter. Example: Judy, not JUDY.

Have a marvelous week.

Sunday's Plate

So many parents have asked me over the years about feeding children in the evening. "I just don't know what to feed him. Last night I gave him a Lean Cuisine and he vomited it up an hour later." This is not a child friendly food. It's a weight loss food, and not for kids.

But what do kids need after a long day? Well, like farmers, kids should have their biggest meals early because they will use a lot of calories playing. By noon, a child should have eaten most of what he is going to eat during the day. That's why we insist on a big breakfast and a big lunch. Dinner is a social time, but many very young children simply can't keep up with another big meal. So for the lighter eater, and that's many many children, a dinner of fruit and veggies, good whole grain crackers of bread and a protein like a hard boiled egg or peanut butter or good cheese is all a child needs. Most children will eat more calories in a dinner like this than a big heavy adult dinner.

The one thing NOT to do is to give a child a mono meal. A mono meal is an egg on a dish; a hot dog on a dish; a slice of pizza on a dish; a sandwich on a dish in front of TV. This is a snack and not a meal. Snacking for dinner will encourage children to eat all evening. This kind of grazing will put on the pounds. A meal consists of at least three food components. Even if you serve a child in a six cup cupcake tin with every cup half filled with different things, the child is getting a little dinner - a variety of food.

Children are often tired at the end of a long napless day. They need to rest, and that includes their bodies digestion.

By serving children a cracker and cheese and fruit dinner, the bank won't break. They don't need a lot. Half a banana, half an apple, a half dozen crackers and two ounces of cheese is a meal. The alternates can be carrots, celery, raisins, melon, grapes and any canned fruit or vegetables a child likes. Toast a good piece of whole grain bread and make four little open face sandwiches with the cheese or peanut butter or cream cheese. Boston Brown Bread in a can is a wonder to some children. Slather it with cream cheese and add some fresh pineapple and grapes, and you have a nutritious little meal children can handle and will eat. The cost is nominal.

Enjoy dinner with something lighter. You'll be glad you did.

Friday's Tattler

Friday was a great and busy day. Normally, Friday is a very slow day, but Friday's are picking up because kids know that Friday is Fun Day. In the morning, we had our theatre class. We told the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and then after the teachers had acted out the story, the children got their turns. It was very funny and very cute. We had a couple of props which made it lots of fun.

We had eggs and cheesy potatoes and fruit and vegetables for lunch. It was well received. Then in the afternoon, Mrs. St. Louis told a Bible Story - Daniel and the Lion's Den, and then we drew lions. They were very cute.

At last we had our first weekly spelling bee. I was stunned by how well the children did. Miss Leigh only had to coach a little and the spelling came out like little songs. The winners were Jill Hawkes and Emily Juhl. They got big prizes and a big clapping ovation. When kindergartners can
spell three to five letter words and do it quickly and with consonant blends, you know you have a bulls-eye teacher. We are so proud of our little guys and so proud of Miss Leigh.

The day ended with a new treat the children liked very much - pizzelles. They are a thin, homemade cookie. The flavor was ground orange with orange icing. Next week: Chocolate for the party!

Thursday's Teacher by Judy Lyden

There are a lot of articles these days on the undoing, reforming, turning around, rethinking of schools across the nation. We are not satisfied with what we have done or are doing. But at the same time, we don't seem able to learn from our mistakes. There is an overwhelming desire to control, control, control that classroom and have uniformity, uniformity, uniformity as we teach children we encourage to be different, different, different.

I remember when the best schools in the nation were the one room school houses in the far outback of the western Midwest. These schools produced the highest test scores and their students found their way into more good colleges than any other schools in the nation.

The big moneyed "to do" schools of the east produced conflict. The big fancy schools in the west produced a love for nihilism while the Midwestern kids to the center stage of learning and produced our thinkers, our movers and our shakers.

So as we look into the future, what are we looking forward to? One political position is to increase government and therefore the size of unmanageable schools. Another political position is to reduce the size of government without plan.

As a grass roots person, I believe if you want to do it right, do it yourself. If you wait for government, you are waiting for a pipe dream. Government is good for one thing - arbitration. In the rest of the world, it's like a giant oaf. If government was a person, he or she would be locked up either in jail or a home for the deranged.

So, not wanting to wait for government, we started with six students and $160.00 and went off to build our own school. Our primary question was "What CAN children do?" Second question was "What WILL they do?"

What we discovered, and why we are so successful, is simple. We built a small school for the children. We did not build with any other thing in mind. We did not draw from other schools. Other schools drew from us. We did not copy curriculum from books; we used our own skills to teach. We did not plan our days according to "developmentally appropriate" practices because this theory retards growth.

Here's what we discovered:

Three year old children simply want to experience learning without actually making a commitment. They want to be around learning. They want to dabble, try for a time, and take home something wonderful that they made or half made. Their skills are developing slowly, and they want to do a lot of play. But they don't really know how to play, so being around older children during play reaps a positive reward. No three year old likes to nap. And we found that threes will memorize a lot.

Four year old children are usually ready for a lot of the usual kindergarten work. They love the paper work and think they are big when they can do it. They think fast, do things quickly, and absorb with an alacrity most college kids would envy. They are spunky, and energetic and take great pride in being included in the play. This is the time when handwriting, letter learning and pre-reading skills dominate a child's life, because they simply WANT to know. Reading is a little like that rock climb. They are ready and willing.

At five, children are ready for ideas. They tire easily of paperwork, sitting and the same old same old day after day. So sprinkling their lives with stories, play acting, science, foreign language, geography, fine arts fits better than anything else. With the reading and writing under their belts, they can begin to explore in independent study. This is the real foundation builder for their adult lives. At five, the child's answer to nearly everything is "more, more, more, please!"

Now how do you translate this into big government schools?

If I were to rebuild what needs to be rebuilt, it would be this: I would design schools to have a pool of fours, fives and sixes who I would call "poly wogs" in every public grammar school. I would divide these into small groups of about twelve children. Some children excel quickly, and some do not, so as a child learns and develops reading and writing skills to a point he or she is proficient, I would launch him or her into the mainstream school any time of the year that it happens - to first grade. This allows for the individual approach to caring for our children. It also allows for the brighter child to advance. It allows for the struggling child to get some time to understand. During the school year, some children would advance out of one class and into another across the school. Age is not a determinant for ability. Some children reach out and learn and some don't. By having fluid learning, the curriculum could fly. Every child in every room would be up to the learning bar by his own choice and work. This way, there is no disgrace in remaining in one class for a second year because the fluidity of movement is at the discretion of the teacher.

At the other end of the spectrum, the early birds who may only be fifteen or sixteen at the end of their high school years and are emotionally too young to go off to college would have a year or two of independent study. These children could either work half a day or begin to learn what it means to pull knowledge together into a real project. Internships of one kind or another would be an option. Attending bussed classes in near by colleges would be an interesting idea.

From an administrative point of view, there is no increase in anything including building space or teaching staff. There are no test scores that would not be good because the children learn at their own pace, and the curriculum is more interesting because every child is on target.

Just a thought for a Thursday...

Wonderful Wednesday

If people of faith really understood the full extent of the power we have available through prayer, we might be speechless. Did you know that during WWII there was an adviser to Churchill who organized a group of people who dropped what they were doing every day at a prescribed hour for one minute to collectively pray for the safety of England, its people and peace?

There is now a group of people organizing the same thing here in America If you would like to participate: Every evening at 9:00 PM Eastern Time (8:00 PM Central) (7:00 PM Mountain) (6:00 PM Pacific), stop whatever you are doing and spend one minute praying for the safety of the United States, our troops, our citizens, and for a return to a Godly nation. If you know anyone else who would like to participate, please pass this along. Our prayers are the most powerful asset we have. Please forward this to your praying friends.

Talking to the Lazy Child by Judy Lyden

Engaging in a conversation with a lazy or selfish child is about as interesting as slogging through wet concrete and about as easy. Younger, lesser conversant children will often ignore the adult who is trying to make conversation. Letting go of his or her "own time" is a real pain. Older children will silently or inaudibly respond or answer in a single word answer simply to be free of the invader of his or her space. Drawing this child out is many times simply not possible.

When the lazy child finally allows conversation, it is nearly always about them, their needs, their wants, and their minutia. They report a full gamut of information to be sucked in by the listener, and then when they are done, they promptly end the conversation. The listener, who is looking for a time to respond is defrauded of his personhood in the dupe of the selfish lazy child who can't, for the life of him or her, return a question or be interested in the listener to any extent.

Lazy, selfish children often have few friends because the conversational exchange is nil. What pleasure is it to be used as a sounding board if the response is a no interest dead pan look?

Re-training a selfish child is not easy. What is easy is to become irritated early in the conversation. When the adult becomes angry and punishes the lazy child, this only tightens the grip on self. The point is to demonstrate that the child will gain something by engaging the listener in a whole other perspective. He will gain information he can use. He will get to laugh. He will know someone better.

When listening to the selfish child, the adult needs to ask questions that bring second and third people into what the selfish child is talking about. "What did Roberta think when you...?" "What do you think Roberta thought when you...?" "Don't you wonder what Roberta thought when you...?" "Is there something wrong with what Roberta might have thought when you...?

By bringing to the selfish lazy child's attention that there are other points of view, and that those points of view are indeed interesting, and do this over and over and over again, the hope is that this conversational training will produce a more outgoing less selfish child.

Bringing to the selfish lazy child's attention that he or she is responsible in the "care" of the conversation, and not just the "use" of the conversation for his or her own needs is tantamount in training someone who can communicate well.

When you hear an adult who is a "babbler" speak, it's a mile a minute about self, and there is little if any need for a listener. You get the impression that if you suddenly turned into a life sized poster it would be OK. This is what we want to avoid with our children. This motor mouth is really quite dull and grasping, and we could all name a few adults who were allowed to be lazy about others and selfish about self.

The child who rattles on and on without a break needs to be told quite abruptly that this is not allowed. "Stop," says the loving parent. "Rachel, who are you speaking to?" This question is often met with confusion. "Are you speaking WITH me or are you using me to rattle off your stream of consciousness? I am a person and it is now MY turn!"

Teaching conversational skills means turning off all the audios in the room and sitting down with a child and really engaging him in conversation. It doesn't have to be long. Parents need to expect a decent response that should grow in time. Expect him to exchange ideas with you. He can go first, but he is expected to ask about the listeners. It's called taking turns. It's called conversation. The rattle is called monologue.

Selfishness is all about me. And in a world as small and filled as we find ours, we need to lesson the selfishness and the laziness in our children for their sakes.

Monday's Tattler

Good Evening, on this Monday. This morning I left the house at 5:30 to pick up Edith in Chandler because she was leaving her car for an oil change. So, consequently, I didn't get this on the hopper this morning.

This week we are focusing on reading. Some children will read letters, some words, some sentences, and some will read books. We are hoping that the children will step up one level each, and those who are reading letters will go to words and those who are reading words will go to sentences, etc.

We are trying a few new lunches this week. Today we had a taco bread. It was homemade whole wheat bread that we rolled out thin, stuffed with taco meat and cheese and baked. We sliced it and served it with black bean chili which the children really liked. Two new favorites.

Motivation is also a theme word for this week. Too many of the children are "floating" through the school without a project at hand. Every child needs to be employed at all times. That can be as simple as looking out the window. It cannot be annoying another child or being destructive.

As the weather begins to improve this week, we will start to go outside again.

Please read your calendar. It was sent home today. It tells you all you need to know about this months activities.

Please keep ill children home. We will send a reminder of what it means to be ill. Please read this Indiana State Health Code for early childhood. It will mean so much that your child is not exposed and does not expose other children to what is going around.

Judy