Growth & Dignity is a Right for Each of Us

Building ourselves up by tearing others down isn't just an act committed by teenagers and adolescents.

Adults can also act as if they have all of the answers, ability, and right to strip a colleague of his/her growth and dignity.

Movement in a Classroom

This sketch from November of 2018 is a an example of how my thinking and reading can influence how I am see students. Specifically, the more I watch and listen to students move in the classroom the deeper my wondering about why/how/if the allowances for free and social movement in a classroom is more stimulating on the adolescent brain...or more of an opportunity to be distracted...or both. And...to what might that mean or say about my decisions as a teacher?

Much continues to be chronicled regarding why/how walking, movement, and collaboration generates gains in physical health and gains as a creative thinker.

For example, Twyla Tharp posits in The Creative Habit that movement benefits our brains more than we understand. And I read that Steve Jobs was a walker. Virginia Woolf, walker. Ditto for Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Tchiakovsky, Mary Oliver, Nietschke, Annie Dillard, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth....

Perhaps the history of and current reality of walking outside of the classroom influences the limitations of movement inside of the classroom.

For that, I need to know more about the functional and aesthetic functions of where people have walked, walk today, and will walk in the future. I have to consider gender and race--is everyone afforded the same freedoms to walk where and when they please? (Clearly not).

And the reality of clearly not extends into public education. Of course, this is only one of many deep-rooted realities remaining in our classrooms, and while it is not at the top of the list of changes that must come in education, I do suspect that our Spartan diet of minimal adolescent movement in schools is connected to some of the more disagreeable realities present in the system.

A First Step

This sketch represents one step for a football player. (Specifically, the first step of a defensive lineman.)

At least ten components (marked on the sketch) have to be executed correctly together to have a chance at success on the second and third steps--all of which takes about a second or two in real time.

Each component is coachable.

Each individual component can be taught separately through many different drills. We can walk through the paces inside, or practice the isolated pieces with some tempo in a t-shirt and shorts on the field by ourselves, or we can go full-speed against teammates in full equipment--and everything in between.

Learning how to teach a football player to improve takes breaking down something as basic as one first step into many mutually dependent parts.

I imagined this sketch last night and drew it this morning because I have been thinking about all of the pieces a young writer must practice in order to take one successful step forward. Our experiences reading, conversing, walking and moving, drawing --freely grappling with our thinking--alongside of the guidance of a coach or mentor impacts who we become next. If any of these pieces are not in place for an adolescent (among many others) then a young writer's first step resembles a scuffle and a then a stumble. Second and third steps may seem out of reach.

But like my football player example above, each component of becoming a better writer is coachable. Young writers need models--you and the books they are exposed to.