JAN’ 21

23

What a beautiful Colorado morning we're having. The sun is shining and the bird chatter has picked up quite considerably these last few weeks. Temps have been ranging in the 40s. It's hard not to feel like spring is just around the corner, which, technically, it's not (but in a warming world...).

I made tostadas for breakfast. I might make them a permanent addition to our weekly breakfast roster. Fry up some corn tortillas. Scramble some eggs. Grate some cheese. Make a quick slaw with red cabbage, cilantro, lime juice, and olive oil. Doused with Cholula, it makes for a very cheering plate. This week, I had some cut-up pineapple and a bag of avocados to use up. So, I diced the pineapple and added it to the slaw. I made guacamole with the avocados.

There was time to tidy up the kitchen and brown some butter for a new chocolate chip cookie recipe before Davis went out with Willa- she's having an outdoor playdate. We've organized a kid-swap with two families. And, so far, it's working out quite nicely. Willa is somewhat apprehensive about being away from us apart from going to school. But, once she starts having fun, she is quite willing to be left in the care of her friends' parents. We're gentle and respectful about it. We acknowledge her feelings but insist that she give it a go. We never leave without her knowledge and consent. I remember being tricked into my kindergarten classroom on the first day and it was traumatic enough that I remember it to this day!

I've been thinking a lot about schooling, unschooling, feminist/ gentle/ respectful/ liberation parenting styles and pedagogies lately. I have almost finished reading Learning by Heart: An Unconventional Education. Tony Wagner charts out an unconventional path from being schooled to working in schools.

As a young person, he struggled with the rigidity, dullness, and asininity of schooling. There were brighter moments, a few encouraging and interested teachers, a nascent passion for writing, and summer camps. But, after being expelled from several private/boarding high schools and dropping out of college twice, he was left to his own devices and had to forge his own way in the world (his parents, disappointed and unsympathetic, had given up hope).

Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, he flipped burgers, applied for and was granted a conscientious objector exemption, engaged in activism, and worked for a Civil Rights lawyer in DC. Eventually, he found a Quaker college program that seemed to offer a very different kind of education- focused on real-world problems, exposure to different parts of the world through travel, and service-oriented. He graduated, worked briefly as a tree farmer, went back to school for a Master's of Education at Harvard and became a teacher- a very successful one. But, his career path as a passionate educator was hardly a smooth one and he is unabashed and very candid about the mistakes he'd made in his career.

His is the story par excellence of what it means to have a growth mindset, before it became a fancy, information-age, buzz word. After being told, time and again, that he was a failure, he had stepped off the beaten path of the upper middle class in the 60s. Directionless, with only his growing sense of self, his strengths and interests, and the causes that mattered to him for a compass, he found a way forward to an impressive career in education. I am both inspired and terrified but I cannot imagine a better crucible for becoming an engaged citizen of the world, a passionate life-long learner, a person whose head, heart and hands work together in harmony.

All of this, in conjunction with several other parallel threads of thought that I've been following, have me wondering how I can take my interest in education/parenting, in practice and theory, to change how we think and talk about education in this country so that we might see some real changes to our education system. BLM and social justice are also significant motivations for me.

For me, it's not just a question of decolonizing and de-centering whiteness in education. We must also find problematic the ways in which schooling teaches our children to submit to power-over dynamics and prepares our children for a capitalist-consumerist lifestyle in which we're all expected to carry on in our jobs as though we weren't also living through a pandemic, an attempted coup, the corruption of our democracy, the state-sanctioned murders of POC, etc. Inures us to the very real challenges facing us e.g. climate change, economic inequality, etc. Renders us feeble in the face of them. I feel so guilty and deeply implicated in our current system. I want a better way for Willa, for our children.