Only Connect

Our school is an International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme school. One of the things that distinguishes the MYP from the PYP (Primary Years Programme) or the Degree Programme is the organizing principal of the Areas of Interactions: five perspectives or "lenses" that help the students uncover the connections between the disciplines, so that they will learn to see knowledge as an interrelated, coherent whole. The IB MYP AoI are approaches to learning, health and social education, human ingenuity, environment, and community and service.

This afternoon when I picked up Treat and Josh from their photography class, I asked them what they had learned today.

"We learned you can't stare into the eyes of a giant python without blinking," answered Treat, by way of blowing off my genuine interest.

"Did you try looking through your camera lens, Colin Creevy?" I asked with a bit of irritation, at which point Treat, who is a regular reader of this blog, accused me of being obsessed with Harry Potter. "Well," I confessed, "the series is definitely on my mind at the moment, what with the movie marathon and all, and I am good at making connections."

We were stopped at a traffic light on the way to Treat's house and Josh glanced out the window. "How about street lights?" he challenged me. "Connect those to Harry Potter."

Treat and I laughed. "Easy," I said. "In the first book, Dumbledore uses that thing--"

"The deluminator," Treat supplied.

"Yeah, that," I continued, "to put out the street lights on Privet Drive, and then... doesn't Ron get it, or something?"

"Yes," Treat said. "Ron inherits it in the seventh book and it becomes pretty important."

"Yeah," I said. "So there!"

Josh was impressed, and I turned to Treat, who is a graduate of our school and quite well-versed in things IB MYP. "See? Harry Potter could totally be the sixth area of interaction!"

For My Own Good

So today we woke up to a power outage. The second thing I noticed, after the blank face of my clock-radio staring at me, was the silence. No ceiling fan, no a/c, no hum from the chorus of heat pumps outside. Fortunately, we woke up in time to get Josh off to his first day of photography class. Also, it was a beautiful morning, and with windows open for a cross-breeze, the house stayed airy and cool. There were lots of power trucks out in the parking lot all morning, and any of my neighbors who paused to inquire about progress, received the same answer: We don't know how it happened. It'll be fixed in about an hour. From my chair by the open window in the living room, I overheard the workman say this three times over the course of 2 1/2 hours. Once I'd read the newspaper and done all the puzzles, I spent the rest of the morning thinking of things I could do with all this quiet time, and then remembering that I couldn't do them because there was no power. I particularly missed my laptop and wifi connection.

When it still wasn't on at noon, we picked Josh and Treat up from class, went out to lunch at a new place, where we ran into 4 friends from school, and then went to the pool for the afternoon. It was a nice day.

One of the things we're doing while Josh is here this time is a Harry Potter film festival. We plan to re-watch the first five movies in order to prepare for the sixth, Half-Blood Prince, which will be released on July 15th. It's silly, but it's fun. I've noticed that my knowledge of magical things (not to mention important plot points of the series) has faded considerably over the last two years since Deathly Hallows was released. I remember things in broad strokes, and it's odd what has stayed with me. It's interesting, too, what resonates now that didn't really register before. When we watched Sorceror's Stone this time, it was the Mirror of Erised. The image of Harry spending hours gazing into the mirror, watching the false reflection of his heart's desire, reminded me a little bit of the time I sit in front of my computer screen on the internet, reading and writing, searching for important information, and checking my messages and comments: I expend a lot of mental and emotional energy maintaining these virtual bonds, and there are times when it's hard to shut down and go out in the real world to do real things.

Sometimes I think if Dumbledore lived here, he might have to take my laptop and move it to a new location. Hey! Maybe that's what happened this morning.

Food for Thought

Last Sunday, we saw the documentary Food, Inc. The movie examines America's industrialized food system and its impact on the environment, our health, the economy, workers' rights, and animal mistreatment. In our case, the producers were preaching to the choir; I can honestly say that there was nothing I didn't already know in the film, but I thought they did a great job providing an intro and overview to this important issue. We resolved to take our four nephews, aged 13-17 to see it also, not because we had any prescription for them to change their eating and food buying habits, but more because we wanted them to make informed choices as they become adults.

The boys were interested and a little bit horrified by what they saw (it's hard to come away from the movie without a little bit of shock and disgust: that's what they're shooting for), and each of them has brought it up again since seeing it, which is good-- it show's that they're thinking. Most notably, Treat posted to his blog about it, and Josh, who is staying with us, is full of questions about every meal we serve him. "Is this mayonnaise organic?" he asked yesterday. "Do you know where this chicken came from?"

Josh has spent 3-4 weeks with us every summer since he was 6. We don't have any children of our own, and his visit is our turn at parenting on a small scale. It's also his vacation, so we take him on a trip, sign him up for a camp or class, and plan a lot of fun stuff to do while he's here. One of our summer traditions is making every meal Josh-friendly. He can be kind of a picky eater, and that's not a battle we choose in the time we have with him, so this can involve a considerable change to our pantry and fridge-- chocolate milk, sugared cereals, frozen pizza, hot dogs, and instant mac and cheese all become staples for one month a year. (Don't worry-- he eats vegetables, too.)

This morning we went to the farmer's market, and Josh snacked on watermelon sorbet and browsed the stalls with great interest as we chose free-range pork chops, buffalo sausage, cherries, peaches, blueberries, cucumbers and summer squash. Looks like the summer menus might be changing a bit around here.

Been There

The other day I was talking with a friend about holiday plans, and she asked whether we were planning to attend the huge fireworks display downtown. "They're just not worth it to me," I complained. "It's so crowded and uncomfortable waiting, they last twenty minutes, and then when they're over you're stuck in traffic and it takes forever to get home. I don't think I'll ever go out of my way to see fireworks again."

Flash forward a few days. My best friend from high school flew in from Colorado today with her six-year-old daughter to visit her dad who lives here. When we were in boarding school in Switzerland, he was the commander of the US Air Force in Europe. He'd earned his fourth star shortly before I met him. These days he battles Alzheimer's. He looks good, but his short term memory is pretty shot. "I know what we should do," my friend told me on the phone a couple days before she arrived. "Let's take Dad to the fireworks!"

My friend and I are direct opposites in many ways. She is an extreme extrovert and I am... so not. Once when I was living at the beach, she came down to visit me for the weekend. She wanted to go out, but I was waiting tables and didn't get off until midnight. "I'll meet you at the club," I told her. This was way before cell phones, and it occurred to me later that it might not be so easy to find her. I shouldn't have worried. Starting with the bouncer and continuing until I found her, everyone I saw asked me if I were Tracey, because Karen was looking for me.

Tonight I packed a picnic supper, and we drove her dad to the Pentagon. Karen looked around for a police cruiser. She hopped out of the car and explained the situation, showing his ID, pointing out those four stars. It wasn't long before we had a prime parking spot and a space on the lawn right outside the river entrance. There were quite a few people there, but it wasn't crowded, and the light breeze and overcast sky combined to produce an unusually pleasant July evening. The Washington Monument stood tall in the East as children festooned with glow sticks chased each other around and about blankets and lawn chairs pausing only to ask their parents when the fireworks would ever start. We ate our dinner, and the general relaxed in his chair and waited for the show to begin, too.

At the first explosion, swallows darted over our heads, startled by the noise and light, and the concussion from each shell echoed back toward the river, bouncing off the wall of the Pentagon, even as the golden streamers and glittering colors were reflected in the windows there, too. Surrounded by light and dark and wind and roar, I was overcome by how wrong I had been.

A Well-deserved Holiday

Happy Independence Day weekend! I read today that Sylvia Brown, the famous psychic, says that Thomas Jefferson never reincarnated after his death on July 4, 1826. According to her, that was his last life, although he continues to offer spiritual and political guidance to the leadership of America. That came as a surprise to me.

Back when I was in college, I had a job one summer selling chipwiches on the boardwalk. The zoning laws in this particular beach town were kind of picky at the time, and even though my cart was quite mobile, I had to stay put on the private property of the hotel that my boss had made a deal with. Even so, the chipwich cart and the blond girl in the straw pith helmet who sat beside it eight hours a day became a reliable boardwalk amenity, and I had both steady beach-goer business and some regular customers, too.

This particular seaside town is also well-known to a certain segment of the population as the home of Edgar Cayce, the "Sleeping Prophet." There has been an active new-age community there for well over 50 years. It is such a fixture, that most year-round residents of the oceanfront are surprisingly well-versed in such topics as reincarnation, dream interpretation and holistic health. Be careful, or they will startle you.

My chipwich gig was a one-woman operation, and as much as I liked the solitude and independence, I was also a captive audience for anyone who knew where to find me. There were a few people who stopped by regularly, not so much to buy some ice cream, as to spend a little time chatting. That's how I found out that Thomas Jefferson had indeed reincarnated-- one of my regulars told me. "See that bum down there?" he asked me one afternoon. "Everyone calls him TJ, because he used to be Thomas Jefferson."

I'm sure my eyebrows did a little dance, but I was right there with him. "Really?" I said, examining the lean, strawberry blond man with shaggy, chin-length hair and full goatee, as he picked carefully through a mesh litter basket. "It seems like kind of a big change of scene for him."

"Oh, that's exactly what he wanted," he answered. "After all that democracy stuff in his last life, he needed a break."

Look Forward

Today is the midpoint of the year, the fulcrum of 2009. So, is the year half over, or is there half a year to go?

I spent part of this day with the sixth grade counselor and the team leader of the other sixth grade team. We had 200 placement cards, one for each student we expect next year. They had been filled out by twenty or so fifth grade teachers from eleven elementary schools and on them there was information about math and language arts placement, study habits and social skills, native language and special education needs. In addition, there is room on each card for the teacher to write a comment. Every year, it is these we enjoy most.

It was our task to divide them fairly into two even, heterogeneous teams, and so we spent the afternoon sorting and resorting by elementary school, achievement level, gender and race, keeping count and keeping tallies. This is an annual event, and when we make the teams, the cards are just cards to us; we don't know the kids, yet, so at times the process takes on the feeling of a game or a backroom draft, with questions like, "Do you want the boy who uses his intelligence for the wrong reasons or the one who can be disrespectful at times?" or "I have a couple of smart girls here, why don't you take one each?"

Eventually, the cards ended up in two piles, and the teams were pretty well set for next year. I can't wait to see how we did.

Never the Same Place Twice

I spent the afternoon at Mt. Vernon yesterday. I was looking for something fun to do on my birthday, and it occurred to me that it's been several years since I've been there without having to supervise a group of students. One of the candidates that we interviewed on Monday asked about field trips. The other sixth grade teacher on the committee and I looked at each other and frowned. Neither team had taken many field trips last year. There were a couple of main reasons why: cross-teaming and cross-grading for math made the logistics of any trip challenging; it was also the first year that sixth graders took the state standardized test in social studies, and there was general hesitancy on the part of teachers to trade class time for field trips.

The teacher we were interviewing looked surprised. "But, this area has so much!" she exclaimed. We nodded, and then my colleague explained that because that's true, by the time they get to sixth grade, many kids have already taken a lot of the trips we might plan for them. I shrugged in agreement, because I've heard that excuse a lot over the years when we talk about taking field trips. The truth is that, as with any other learning opportunity, field trips are only as valuable as the meaning that students take from them, but they have much more potential than most classroom experiences.

My nephew went with me to Mt. Vernon yesterday. As it turned out, the last time that he had been there was when he was in sixth grade, and the adult in charge of his group was... me. "Did we see the sixteen-sided barn?" I asked him. He didn't think so. "Whaaat!?" I said. "Are you sure?" He was pretty sure. "Well," I said, "you can't miss it this time." And off we headed in a light drizzle to the lower fields of the estate. Past the cow pasture, and right before the trail entered the woods, we found a patch of wild raspberries. The fruit was dark red and fell from the vine with no more than a nudge. Birds had already gotten some of the warm, sweet berries, but we picked what we could reach and ate them out of hand.

He liked the barn well enough, but much more interesting to me this time were the tiny pear tomatoes and red-skinned new potatoes almost ready in the kitchen garden at the slave cabin, and the mother duck with her three hatchlings on the bank of the Potomac. Back up the hill, we saw a little boy petting a young goat through the split rail fence, and I remembered a visit a few years back when a small group of students and I saw a lamb born here. We were just passing by the barnyard on our way to the mansion when out it dropped, wet and sticky, from the sheep to the frozen February ground. Astonished we stood rapt as the mother turned calmly around and nudged her newborn to a stand.

Next year, I want to take more field trips.