Friday's Tattler

Friday was a tired day at school. The kids all seemed tired and ready for a break. We even had a couple fall asleep.

We are working very hard in the K-1 to catch up. We were delighted with our little guys approach to learning. Children are always keen to learn, and when a teacher just doesn't teach - especially for selfish reasons - the children miss out. Never before has the Garden School been put into this situation - where a job was simply not done because one of our teachers spent her time texting and playing on the phone at the children's expense. This kind of dishonesty is not what we have ever been about, and we are trying to remedy this as quickly as we can. It puts everyone in a terrible situation.

Teaching very young children is supposed to be like a peaceful ocean. You spend a lot of time enjoying the gentle waves of education. Your boat becomes like a home, your skies are blue, your sun is strong and lively, and then suddenly, the child comes into port, his voyage over, and he knows everything there is to know about his trip. He knows the material presented in the classroom and can report it all to anyone he meets.

There are two things that prevent a child from learning. One thing is certainly a teacher who doesn't know anything, and secondly a teacher who just doesn't teach. There are lots of teachers who claim to be educated, and truly they are not, and many would say it doesn't matter, but it does. Education is not a thing that can be presented to you on a slip of paper because you manage to sit through four years of college. Education is an individual effort to gain knowledge and be able to use it effectively to teach others. You don't need a college education to do that. But if you have that, it's not a pretty bauble to be put on a shelf. It's a tool for life.

The real question about being educated is: "Do you read books?" Answer reveals a lot. A book is not a magazine. A teacher who does not read does not progress past college. College is only a start in one's education - it's an invitation to learn, that's why they call graduation "commencement" because it's only a beginning. If you quit at the starting gate, then what's the point of the race?

Fully engaging the world begins with a knowledge about the world, and that knowledge is ever increasing and also something that can be passed down to the children. If teachers don't care enough to know the basics, they fail to be able to teach effectively. So what is the bank of knowledge that is the basic requirement for teaching in my opinion?

I think teachers should have a basic knowledge of grammar. Speaking well means you have the dignity of at least paying attention to our own language and understanding the structure and the sense of words. Learning the right way of using the past tense, comparatives and superlatives and understanding words is something that children should expect in daily speech because that is their example. Speech patterns and patois immediately places a person.

Teachers should have a basic knowledge of history so that there is a sense of what happened when when children ask. Being somewhat sure of the last thirty years of history is not really enough history to know. An ignorance of history kind of leaves a person without a sense of place in the world. If you look at history as a story about man, you come to understand that we have become what we have become because of what has gone before. In the Common Era, we have Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Science and the Modern Period and they are not all the same lengths. Each age has given man something. Government, language, religion, economics, architecture, medicine, agricultural techniques did not suddenly develop in the late 1950s.

Reference to the arts is dying among education bound students. The ability to draw a reference to characters from the great classics is no longer possible and that's a shame. To call someone a Shylock or Tom Sawyer or a Tess is about as lost today as referring to Steve Reeves as Superman. To know nothing about fine art is startling. To compare Precious Moments to a Chagall window is disheartening.

Science is another part of the teaching puzzle, and so is geography. To be completely ignorant about the world is a shocking revelation about what a $60,000.00 education is really giving our young teachers. Not to be able to pick out China, India, the continent of Africa or know that the Antarctic is south and the Arctic is north is a tragic flaw of education. Not to know why we have not run out of water yet is pathetic.

So now I've given my rude opinion about education and what I expect at the Garden School. I expect teachers to know about the world they live in. It's important because the children want to know and you can't tell them if you don't know. It's a kind of a duh.

This past weekend some of the faculty met to discuss summer and next year's calendar. This will be a learning summer from start to finish. Everything we do will be aimed at learning and speaking. If you can't talk about what you know, and do it with good grammar, you don't know it. We expect a lot and children love it, and that's the goal.