Welcome to this new blog about dreaming our future schools and taking practical steps towards manifesting them.
The first question is do we need to transform our schools? I have lots of stories from my teaching career where I worked primarily with kids and teens in danger to themselves others that answer this question. However I choose to beginning this with a story as a grandmother.
I have a beautiful grand daughter. She was born a lovely little spontaneous dancer. But at six she stopped dancing. She developed dark circles under her eyes and when I asked her if she wanted to go to the park, she said she was too old to play.
What had happened to her? I asked my daughter to talk to her teacher. Her teacher actually told my daughter, "I don't have time to be nice." This was first shock.
The second shock was that this was just accepted my daughter as normal, because everyone know that teachers are under stress. But is good for our children? Look up "stress in children" in your browsers. Research is showing that long-term stress in children damages health, negatively impacts the brain and contributes to the every increasing suicide rate in children. Long term stress in the classroom is dangerous and should not be considered normal in our school. It should not be acceptable that teachers don't have time to be nice and this goes for teenagers as much as children.
Back to the story, after first grade my husband and I took our grand daughter on a long vacation with the purpose of getting back the child in her and it wasn't easy. I wish I could say that this was the end of this story; that this was just one teacher so overwhelmed that she couldn't be nice to 20 little six year olds; but the next year, when my grand daughter was in second grade, I asked how she liked school.
She said, "My teacher says that I am in the smart group and we have to work very hard all the time so that our class won't fail," not that she can learn, but so that her class won't fail.
What! two years in row and my grand daughter doesn't like school and she is above average in all academic areas. This is wrong! And what about the children who are not meeting the standards being set for six and seven-year-olds.? What kind of stress are they experiencing every single day? And long term stress in schools is just part of the problems in our educational system.
We can't wait. We have to take the steps necessary to transform schools. Let's unit, let's reach out. Let's make the changes we need to make to help students find their strengths and give them the tools for better thinking, better learning and better living. If we focus on dreaming about our ideal schools and the steps to bringing them forward we will be filled with positive thoughts and visions. It is exciting and imparative.
Let's use Social Media Networking. Join 1 World Education and reach out to join other educational visionary internet groups and then reach back to 1 World and connect again and again until we have millions of people understanding that we own the schools and that we can transform them, that we can build a better future for all through this movement towards creating the ideal schools.
I'd like to end with share a song from one of my children's musical, "Out in Outer Space." The song is sung by and little alien girl to a rat, who is scared of everything. It is called, "If You Want To Make A Change, Then You've Got to Make a Chain." Let's make a chain connecting together to transform our schools.
