[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you
grow up, can you then have another who is, like you, a marvel?
You must work we must all work to make the world worthy of its
children.
Pablo Casals
All I Ever Really Needed To Know I Learned In
Kindergarten
Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do
and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of
the graduate mountain, but there in the sandbox at nursery school.
These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit
people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own
mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt
somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and
cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think
some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every
day some.
Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch for
traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember
the little seed in the plastic cup. The roots go down and the plant goes
up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the
plastic cup they all die. So do we.
And then remember the book about Dick and Jane and the first word
you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK. Everything you need to
know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic
sanitation. Ecology and politics and sane living.
Think of what a better world it would be if we all the whole world
had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down
with our blankets for a nap. Or if we had a basic policy in our nations to
always put things back where we found them and clean up our own
messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out
into the world, it is better to hold hands and stick together.
Robert Fulghum
We Learn By Doing
Not many years ago I began to play the cello. Most people would say
that what I am doing is "learning to play" the cello. But these words
carry into our minds the strange idea that there exists two very different
processes: (1) learning to play the cello; and (2) playing the cello. They
imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I
will stop the first process and begin the second. In short, I will go on
"learning to play" until I have 'learned to play" and then I will begin to
play. Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one.
We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.
John Holt
The Hand
A Thanksgiving Day editorial in the newspaper told of a school teacher
who asked her class of first graders to draw a picture of something they
were thankful for. She thought of how little these children from poor
neighborhoods actually had to be thankful for. But she knew that most
of them would draw pictures of turkeys or tables with food. The teacher
was taken aback with the picture Douglas handed in.... a simple
childishly drawn hand.
But whose hand? The class was captivated by the abstract image. "I
think it must be the hand of God that brings us food," said one child. "A
farmer," said another, "because he grows the turkeys." Finally when the
others were at work, the teacher bent over Douglas's desk and asked
whose hand it was. "It's your hand, Teacher," he mumbled.
She recalled that frequently at recess she had taken Douglas, a scrubby
forlorn child by the hand. She often did that with the children. But it
meant so much to Douglas. Perhaps this was everyone's Thanksgiving,
not for the material things given to us but for the chance, in whatever
small way, to give to others.
Source Unknown
The Royal Knights Of Harlem
Within walking distance of my Manhattan apartment, but also light-
years away, there is a part of New York called Spanish Harlem. In many
ways it is a Third World country. Infant and maternal mortality rates are
about the same as in say, Bangladesh, and average male life expectancy
is even shorter. These facts it shares with the rest of Harlem, yet here
many people are also separated from the more affluent parts of the city
by language. When all this is combined with invisibility in the media,
the condescension of many teachers and police who work in this Third
World country but wouldn't dream of living there, and textbooks that
have little to do with their lives, the lesson for kids is clear: They are
"less than" people who live only a few blocks away.
At a junior high that rises from a barren patch of concrete playgrounds
and metal fences on East 101st Street, Bill Hall teaches the usual
English courses, plus English as a second language to students who
arrive directly from Puerto Rico, Central and South America, even
Pakistan and Hong Kong. Those kids are faced with a new culture,
strange rules, a tough neighborhood and parents who may be feeling just
as lost as they are. Bill Hall is faced with them.
While looking for an interest to bind one such group together and help
them to learn English at the same time, Bill noticed someone in the
neighborhood carrying a chessboard. As a chess player himself, he
knew this game crossed many cultural boundaries, so he got permission
from a very skeptical principal to start a chess club after school.
Few of the girls came. Never having seen women playing chess, they
assumed this game wasn't for them, and without even a female teacher
as a role model, those few who did come gradually dropped out. Some
of the boys stayed away, too chess wasn't the kind of game that made
you popular in this neighborhood but about a dozen remained to learn
the basics. Their friends made fun of them for staying after school, and
some parents felt that chess was a waste of time since it wouldn't help
them get a job, but still, they kept coming. Bill was giving these boys
something rare in their lives: the wholehearted attention of someone
who believed in them.
Gradually, their skills at both chess and English improved. As they got
more expert at the game, Bill took them to chess matches in schools
outside Spanish Harlem. Because he paid for their subway fares and
pizza dinners, no small thing on his teacher's salary, the boys knew he
cared. They began to trust this middle-aged white man a little more.
To help them become more independent, Bill asked each boy to captain
one event, and to handle all travel and preparation for it. Gradually,
even when Bill wasn't around, the boys began to assume responsibility
for each other: to coach those who were lagging behind, to share
personal problems and to explain to each other's parents why chess
wasn't such a waste of time after all. Gradually, too, this new sense of
competence carried over into their classrooms and their grades began to
improve.
As they became better students and chess players, Bill Hall's dreams for
them grew. With a little money supplied by the Manhattan Chess Club,
he took them to the State Finals in Syracuse.
What had been twelve disparate, isolated, often passive, shutdown kids
had now become a team with their own chosen name: The Royal
Knights. After finishing third in their own state, they were eligible for
the Junior High School Finals in California.
By now, however, even Bill's own colleagues were giving him reasons
why he shouldn't be spending so much time and effort. In real life, these
ghetto kids would never "get past New Jersey," as one teacher put it.
Why raise funds to fly them across the country and make them more
dissatisfied with their lives? Nonetheless, Bill raised money for tickets
to California. In that national competition, they finished seventeenth out
of 109 teams.
By now chess had become a subject of school interest if only because
it led to trips. On one of their days at a New York chess club, the team
members met a young girl from the Soviet Union who was the Women's
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]