Principal Outreach

World Learner School

Principal Outreach

A Newsletter from Bob Ruud, WLS Teaching Principal, to WLS Families

December 22, 2009

Dear WLS Families,

There's too much going on, and here I am adding another bit to it: writing an extra newsletter in the month of December. But hey: this is one of those things you really can choose to do (read) or not. That relieves my conscience, so here goes...

A Montessori Point- Working  (on) Ourselves:

An excellent teacher I had hired to work at The Language Institute of Japan many years ago completed his contract and returned to California. I got a postcard from him a couple of months later. It said, "I haven't been able to find a job yet, so I'm working on myself....."

Maria Montessori said:

...Children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent. Sweetness, severity, medicine, do not help if the child is mentally hungry. If a man is starving for lack of food, we do not call him a fool, nor give him a beating, nor do we appeal to his better feelings. He needs a meal, and nothing else will do. The same thing applies here. Neither severity nor kindness will solve the problem. Man is an intelligent being, and needs mental food almost more than physical food. ... If the child is placed upon a path in which he can organize his conduct and construct his mental life, all will be well. His troubles will disappear, his nightmares vanish, his digestion will become normal, and his greediness subside. His health is restored because his mind is normalized.

So these are ... problems of ... character formation. Lack of character, or defects in character, disappear themselves, without any need for preaching by grown-ups or for grown-up examples. One does not need to threaten or cajole, but only to normalize the conditions under which the child lives.

                                                                                        The Absorbent Mind, pp 248-9

So, there's hope because there's something to work on, and whatever we're working on, ultimately it's ourselves we're working on. Usually we feel hopeful when we sense that there's something we can do to contribute to some sort of solution. Earl Stevick said it had to do with our being able to see ourselves as "objects of primacy in a world of meaningful action." We teachers and administrators at World Learner School have worked to make an obvious commitment to a way of education that is bedrock hopeful, and you parents have worked to come looking for us, and found us, and joined in, because this way of educating fits with you, too. All pulling together, we can move a heavy load. We hope.

Especially in this season, which is so full of meaningful experience, so likely to give us pleasant memories that will last a lifetime, and to be a thrill for children. But also likely to be stressful for adults, and potentially hard on kids, too. Too many places to be in too little time. Too much time spent in cars on our way somewhere. Too many plastic toys. Too much noise. Too much paper, too much plastic wrap, too many packages in too many garbage cans. Too many scoldings overheard, issued by exhausted parents to over-stimulated children. Too much cheesy music. Too few long walks. Too few cups of hot cider sipped while listening to someone read aloud (maybe Dylan Thomas's Memories of Christmas?). Too little time spent reading. Too little time in rest mode, ourselves and our computers. Too little time making our own music. Too little meaningful work to do. Too little time listening to Tony Rice play the guitar (by the way: he's the best; I wonder if he works at it??).

That's starting to sound like grumbling, so I'm going to switch gears now, and let some giants wax hopeful ......

Let's tell them that the victory to be won .... mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity. For it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and of mistrust which do not fall before the trumpets' blast or the politicians' imprecations or even a general's baton. They are, my friends, walls that must be directly stormed by the hosts of courage, of morality, and of vision, unafraid of ugly truth, contemptuous of lies, half truths, circuses, and demagoguery.

- Adlai E. Stevenson, Acceptance Speech, July 26, 1952

That means we have to work together, because we can't do it alone, and good things don't just happen, and they don't happen miraculously, for the most part. They happen because we work on them and overcome the fierce opposition, calmly and resolutely.

And this:

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

FDR couldn't know what it's like not to be in the "mere possession of money", but that being said, it's starting to sound like everybody went to a Montessori school.

And this, which we were just working with in middle school LA this past week:

Let us all hope that the dark clouds ... will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

                                                        Martin Luther King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

And this, one of my favorite songs of the season, but not usually associated with it. Could be pitiful, and full of longing, and hypothetical. But most of us have these things, so amply, so I look at it as a reminder to be grateful:

All I want is a room somewhere

Far away from the cold night air

With one enormous chair

Oh, wouldn't it be loverly?

Lots of choc'lates for me to eat

Lots of coal makin' lots of 'eat

Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet

Oh, wouldn't it be loverly?

                                                Lerner and Loewe, 1956

And let's let Maria have another go (italics retained from the original):

The field thus opened to the free activity of the child will enable him to exercise himself and to form himself as an adult. It is not movement for its own sake that he will derive from these exercises, but a powerful co-efficient in the complex formation of his personality. His social sentiments in the relations he forms with other free and active children, his collaborators in a kind of household designed to protect and aid their development; the sense of dignity acquired by the child who learns to satisfy himself in surroundings he himself preserves and dominates-these are the co-efficients of humanity which accompany "liberty of movement." From his consciousness of this development of his personality the child derives the impulse to persist in these tasks, the industry to perform them, the intelligent joy he shows in their completion. In such an environment he undoubtedly works himself, and fortifies his spiritual being, just as when his body is bathed in fresh air and his limbs move freely in the meadows, he works at the growth of his physical organism and strengthens it.

            Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education - The Advanced Montessori Method, 1917

Okay, I think we've read enough. Let's go outside and play (I mean work) in the snow....

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!! See you in '10.......

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat these two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: `Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, 1896