The Garden School Tattler

One of the best things about working in a small school is the sense that you are not alone in your desire to help a child move out of a poor behavior, or achieve a certain proficiency, or excel in a talent. We all talk about the children and where they are and what they need. Unlike a giant school, where the talk has to be guarded, labeled, and recorded, our teachers work in an atmosphere of immediate exchange and get instant back up needed to make a difference in a child's life.

Because we see parents every day, the opportunity to discuss a child's difficulties or achievements is also immediate, and the desire to meet with parents is part of offering a child a very special place.

The Garden School is looking for a teacher who is interested in the work we do from top to bottom. The plant or building - inside and out - is a faculty responsibility. We have no cleaning staff and obviously no professional decorating staff. Individual classrooms and teaching areas are a joint problem and activity. Sometimes we need help. It never just falls to one person.

At the same time, ideas about play, play stations, playroom order, materials, equipment do not come from "on high" but from the faculty. Ideas need to be supported and take shape by faculty interested in a particular avenue of children's learning. New idea about play? Implement it - now. I'll help - now. It's called a working relationship.

Curriculum is not cut in stone and does not come from outside demands, or some board standard we never have a voice in. Our curriculum comes from us. We design it, but we don't design it from what someone else says. We design it by trial and effort. When there is lack of effort and a lack of trial, there is a stymie in the curriculum. That's why our faculty maintains a constant interest in what we do and why it's important through group discussions and faculty meetings, and then we contribute to that. That's what we have always expected, and have enjoyed.

Our main objective is in understanding how every child as an individual learns. If that's the case, then every classroom should demonstrate the differences among our children and cooperate with the individual plan.

Art is a primary tool in ferreting out a child's particular needs. When a four year old can't draw, it is either that he has not had the opportunity, or he has some emotional problems. Art is the window to what is going on in a child's mind. It's his only way to communicate simply because his language skills are not developed enough, and he is not writing. So art is the number one identifying tool we have to communicate. We, as a faculty, are not interested in turning non drawers over to the shrink. We are interested in letting a child work out his problems in a peaceful and often transitional art through teaching, through encouragement, through love and the kind of affection that will offer every child a respite from his little suffering or a warm smile for his joy.

I'm not an artist. I'm a writer by training, so writing in school is important to me. I think reading for sense and writing are the second most important parts of a child's curriculum because through the thought processes in working out "thought" on paper, a child comes to realize how important his ideas are. I love the picture plus story paper available at teacher's stores because it's easy, immediate, and the product is something a child can be proud of - now. Worksheets are never memorable and never a tribute to the individual child. They are a necessary part of practice, but practice has to go someplace.

I write novels outside of school. I am finishing the third book of a 1600 page trilogy. When I think about the tools to write, they are fairly simple. Children are able, through a personal and guided effort, to create a character and have that character do simple things. Every child should have a character they take around with them trying stuff out and then be able to put a few sentences to a drawing of the character. The character can be anything - a knight, a bug, a princess, a frog - even a clam on the bottom of an ocean can be a great character.

One child told me in circle time that he wanted pictures because he could not imagine the story in the book I was reading published in 1922 - sans pictures. "You can't picture in your mind what a white footed mouse might look like sitting on a stump?" The child said no.

This is a whole other target area - TV. But TVs are not going to be turned off, and children are not going to be encouraged to sit longer hours to write words they have trouble imagining. So that's our role as teachers - to instill a love of imagination where very little exists and to show a child how to draw - because truly anything can be drawn with a simple line or a circle - and then create a life or world from the imagination and offer it to the drawing at hand.

If I were dictator of the world, and there are a lot of people out there this week who think I am, I would insist that at least part of every classroom curriculum be strictly learn by drawing and story including math because I think understanding comes from inside not outside.

And last but not least, when an adult in a child's life encourages imagination his/her life shows it. His/her surroundings show it, his/her interests show it. The world closes down on the marketplace and becomes the studio and the creation is limitless.