Think Like a Teacher

I am far behind at checking out all the good things in my Google Reader. This one is weeks old, but as I read it I hear myself let out a satisfied “Mmmmm” as if I were eating a chocolate truffle:  “Schools Adopt Art as a Building Block of Education.” I especially like picturing a little girl explaining that her class is outside learning about lines from the artworks built into their school: ““We’re looking for a slanted or diagonal line.” Life does not imitate art, nor art imitate life. Art is life.

Wait. Adopt it? Isn’t art a building block of learning already?

I think visually. I make visual analogies in my head for any new concept. I have secretly done this as long as I can remember. I just never told my third grade friends how I “pictured” things. A new idea is visual art to me. So sad that the verbal world of school forgets this. I have a decent mastery of words, but chose to use them — whenever possible — to create pictures to help others see what I “see.”  It frightens me that we must ask for extra funds or special initiatives or “differentiate our curriculum for visual learners” just to keep visual stimuli, the chocolate truffles of the eye, in our learning environments.  We would never think to have schools without words everywhere…and a lot of numbers, too. How, then, is it necessary to “adopt” art into schools?

One thing the web has done is spread visual ways of seeing new ideas. YouTube, Flash, Flickr, all the Flickr toys, even  comic creators have made the visual a preferred vocabulary for so many. But we seem to forget that when we go to school. Art is a “special,” a frill, a poor, distant cousin who comes to visit during holidays.

Not everyone needs to be able to speak or study art (though I hope they will). Art is not a foreign language with its own grammar. Images and texture and lines should just be there at every turn like the neatly printed signs for “door” and “Mrs. Smithson” in a first grade classroom.

Please, don’t forget to share the art, even if you do not like it or understand it. Your students will.

Relationships. Chad Sansing writes a great post about the value of relationships in the classroom. Even the links are a good read. Isn’t that the point: the links are as important as what is said. The links are person to person, person to thoughts, person to words. Chad underscores the importance of relationships with some great articles — connecting in my mind to what I was trying to say about  teachers “worrying deep,”  i.e. CARING deeply and at an intuitive level: forming relationships. His words link to my thoughts and my words as I read. That is what good readers do,  they say. But more importantly, that is what good thinkers do. They keep on linking. Chad has links about linking, too:

relevant content fits right into comforting and enjoyable patterns and connections of prior knowledge

But, Chad asks, how do we define the role of “teacher” in this fully-linked, relationship-oriented, new classroom?  He draws an analogy to a learning republic. I gravitate to something that removes the hint of bureaucracy entirely. My analogy:  microwaving hot marshmallows.

Hot marshmallows, fresh from the microwave, stretch and stretch. They are enticingly sweet and smell of vaguely of cotton candy. The stickiness is the connection, the linking, that we experience during those warm moments of connection and understanding. The sweetness is the taste of  “aha” moments. It may be cliche, but it does feel good to “get it,”  to form a new connection. As saliva floods into your surprised mouth when it senses the sweetness, so do you savor moments when you taste a connection of your own: person to thoughts.  The smell lingers even after the taste, and the smell of other hot marshmallows lures you back, looking for more.

The “teacher” is simply a microwave to the molecules of lumpy, white marshmallow blobs, stirring them into hot stickiness.  And the teacher is not the only microwave. Everyone in (or connected to) the room is capable of pushing “Start. ” The “teacher” simply pushes it over and over, then steps out of the way to be sure everyone has access to the microwave.

Yes, it’s messy. Once you touch a hot marshmallow, your fingers stay sticky. You cannot resist the urge to lick your fingers and repeat the rush. And 25-30 stretching, hot marshmallows quickly spread stickiness on the desks and every surface in the room. Faces get sticky. Hair gets sticky. Minds get sticky.

And just think: With enough hot marshmallows, we could go for s’more…

Have you ever found pieces from two different jigsaw puzzles that actually fit together, one a blue piece of a geometric design and one a scrap of sky from an entirely different puzzle box, yet surprisingly an appropriate “match”?  Two posts from separate feeds in my Google Reader today interlock for me into a new idea. One was from the New York Times, a post about today’s young parents and the need for them to turn off their cell phones, iPods,  and Blackberries and just talk to the stroller set. Nothing in that post was new to me, but it got me thinking about thinking out loud and its importance for learning. The other post was elementary teacher Brian Crosby’s post about allowing students time to process what they have done and learned, even (especially?) when the learning is project-based. Whether toddlers, elementary kids, or even adults,  we need time to think out loud about what we have done. Those around us understand us better and learn from us when we do. Young ones grasp our language to build their own language of understanding. Peers and elders appreciate what we have done when we can stop and explain it.We find our own meaning better when we do it out loud.

But the world does not like to grant time for thinking aloud. Brian Crosby bemoans the fact that  end-of-day recap time has slipped away in his classroom. Most of us who take the world with us via iPhone or Blackberry use that once-precious think-back time to check email now.

Maybe we need an app for that. I’d like a “thinking aloud allowed” app that lets me record my thoughts aloud at the same time that it blocks email with autoreplies telling others that this is my time for thinking, so go away.  The same app would turn OFF young parents’ iPhones, etc. until they had conversed about red stop signs, sidewalk cracks, and at least twenty-five other topics with their stroller-bound munchkins. How could the app help Brian’s students? Maybe it could ask them to record their reflections, prompting and saving their comments so they could store them up like Bandaid box treasures (do you remember metal Band-Aid boxes and their treasure-holding capacity?).

No one would make money on this app, but they would make learners and thinkers. Thinking aloud allowed. There’s an app for that.