Welcome Back to School…with Cornelius Minor

If you’re anything like me, you’re bracing yourself for a year that will be as incredible and amazing as it is challenging.

This summer, we were delighted to witness our own kids, along with so many others all throughout the country, enjoy themselves outside of school. We saw a playful-yet-focused grittiness show up when an opportunity to join a stone-skipping competition presented itself on Lake Michigan. Our kids, their cousins, (and kids who just happened to be standing alongside their Uncle), gathered stones, tossed stones, built multiple cairns (with deep artistic integrity), and practiced skipping stones, for hours. A multi-aged cohort focused with unmatched fervor on watching their Uncle, over and over, teach them, “It’s all in the wrist!”.

The two of us are always thinking about how humans learn, and this summer young people kept showing us that learning does not end when school does. Many times, powerful learning does not even look like what we think “school” should be.

We came back from Lake Michigan and our kids went to local camps. We saw our eldest engage with a gaggle of other 12 and 13 year old Brooklynites study the bioluminescence of Jellyfish DNA.  They used real centrifuges, fancy pipettes, and fragile glass beakers. They created sophisticated infographics and taught us how this kind of glowing DNA can be used to to study the nervous systems of various organisms. And the kids also made Pokémon art with said glowing DNA.  

Our youngest participated in a month long drama program where the teachers, Public school educators for most of the year, but playwrights, directors, acting coaches, and actors for the summer–  write and/or recreate the plays. We felt the triumph generated across generations at their production of Robinhood. They learned archery with real bows and arrows, they learned their lines, and perhaps most memorable, the cross-age cohort started their own Whatsapp group to keep in touch with one another. The love, from a mere 25 days of rehearsal spent together, was palpable.

Summer days went on, and we watched the tension from the hyper-scheduled school year wear off. We went to work, took our kids with us, and let their boredom be okay. We spent some time teaching at our local version of Freedom School, where all kids are welcome and no one pays a camp fee. There’s a lot of outside time, a lot of community volunteers, a lot of down time. Rarely have we seen kids happier.

The power embedded in these learning experiences was not made manifest by a specific program or curriculum or idea; it was shaped by the complexities of young people partnering with various grown ups to shape their knowledge-making journey.

As we close out our summer, and start our first days of school, we have learned so much. We are wondering–how can we bring the brightness of these summer learning experiences into school spaces, where things like skipping stones and bioluminescent DNA are hard to come by? Where things like behavior management are at the forefront of so many educators minds…

In other words, what would it mean for us to lean towards learning that is less scripted, more co-constructed by the data derived from children’s experiences and expressions?

We invite you to think alongside us this year as we generate ideas to manifest this reality. Here are a few understandings that we are starting the year with:

• Oftentimes, systems and institutions push us to be basic. It’s easier, more cost-effective, and requires far less labor and accountability to just follow the script! Really thinking about what students need requires effort, and we don’t always get it right. There’s a lot of trial and error, and that can be uncomfortable because school culture does not always regard making mistakes as part of a creative process.
• Making mistakes is part of the creative process. There is no such thing as mistake-free learning, mistake free-innovation, or mistake-free progress. It is all brilliantly messy work, and being a powerful educator requires us to be comfortable with situations and experiences that are messy — especially if we were orderly people before we came to teaching. We can learn to be different.
• This year, we must learn to be different. We can change. We are starting this school year in a world that feels very different than the one that we were in when we adjourned for the summer. We can’t show up the same. One small shift that’s easy to make at the start of the year is changing how we talk about our practice. We can make inquiry a norm. “Here is a thing that I’m working toward in my teaching… So here’s what I’m trying… And here are the results I keep getting… Consequently, these are the adjustments that I think I can make…” So many times, conversations that should be instructional feel supervisory or even judgmental. They don’t have to be. We can change the culture.