Papa Bear Portions
What we encounter, recognize or discover, depends on the quality of our approach. An approach of reverence invites revelation. To pause and reflect on this can make all the difference between living in a cold, detached world, populated primarily by judgements and cynicism, and living in a world riddled with intimacy and offers of communion. When our approach is one of reverence, we find ourselves falling into a deeper embrace with all that is open to encounter, both internally and in the surrounding, breathing world... When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.
— John O'Donohue
Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,
While visiting White Rose Kindergarten on Monday, we ate porridge. On the wood table were fresh bouquets, candles, and sprigs of rosemary. "I lighted the candle all by myself today!" a boy all but shouted when we entered the room. As we ate the porridge (tasty with raisins, cranberries, milk, fruit, and honey as condiments), Mr. Aaron and Ms. Katie reminded the children to say please and to keep napkins on laps. Eventually, Mr. Aaron said: "Last call for more porridge!" The still hungry clamored for a final helping. "I want a Papa Bear portion!" one young voice said. "Me, too!" another piped. After the children finished eating and cleaning their plates, Mr. Arron murmured toward the table: "Candle, candle, burning bright, thank you for your lovely light." And then blew out the flame.
After snack the kindergarteners played in the classroom: some building houses with blocks; some pretending to be milk-giving cows; some bowling; some making a pond with a single blue silk; some receiving one-on-one finger-knitting instruction. (The current class project is a living Easter basket. A coconut fiber bowl will soon be filled with soil and then planted with barley seeds. The seeds will sprout, grass will grow, and come Easter the children will be able to put eggs found during Easter egg hunts atop the living barley in the basket. The children are finger-knitting the handles for the basket, hence the finger-knitting instruction.)
Being with Mr. Aaron and Ms. Katie of White Rose Kindergarten reminded us that to be with children lovingly and skillfully we adults must be able to step out of the frantic, blurry pace that dominates much of our days; reminded us to be aware of our gestures, our tones, our facial expressions, and, in general, to resist a state of dispersion. To be with Mr. Aaron and Ms. Katie reminded us to nurture what John O'Donohue calls our "quality of approach."
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We would like to congratulate Rima Villarreal, who works in our office, for being asked to contribute her art to an exhibit called "Árbol De La Vida" (Tree of Life) at the Mexican Consulate in Oxnard. Ms. Rima tells us, "The art is displayed in a waiting room, where adults, children, and families await assistance and decisions on myriad issues, some grave and life-changing. The Consulate indicated that they serve an approximation of 400 individuals daily. It touches me that the art showcased will mirror and empower those being served. The first artist I met during the hanging of the works showed me her painting of a woman in traditional Purepecha dress. It was a beautiful synchrony as that is one of the two primary indigenous tribes I descend from. The pieces I have in the gallery are portrait
drawings that explore motherhood, nature, and divinity." Please see a picture of Ms. Rima and her art above. Congratulations, Ms. Rima!
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Last Saturday, guided by the vision and work of parents Jillian Provan and Jamie Davin, WSSB's Castle and Grounds Committee beautified our campus (see action photo above). It was not only a fun workday but transformative (as one can see walking around campus). Jillian and Jamie would like to share this note:
Thank you to all who came Saturday for our school beautification day. Juliet and Corey, Lindsay and Charlie, Teddy and Brittany, Annelise, Lisha, Stephanie, Chris, Sarah and Miles, Ben, Conor, Lily, Eva and Thomas! Your strength, creativity, and knowledge were so appreciated. We made amazing headway at the front of school and bleacher area! We also finished two picnic benches.
Our next event will be April 20th, from 9 a.m. to 3p.m. Please come anytime. We could use more volunteers, so mark your calendars. We will focus on the bleacher area and finish the planters within the school. If you're not able to join our hands in the dirt and would like to contribute, please consider donating!
OUR WISH LIST:
*2-4 wine barrel planters and archway for Ms. Liz's garden;
*1-2 mature wisteria plants;
*1-2 passion fruit vines;
Other donations and ideas welcome! Thanks again for a successful day. We are so grateful for this community.
-- Jillian and Jamie
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With heart,
The Admin Team
PS The Thought of the Day is from bell hooks:
“If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love…To commit to love is fundamentally to commit to a life beyond dualism. That’s why love is so sacred in a culture of domination, because it simply begins to erode your dualisms: dualisms of black and white, male and female, right and wrong.”
PPS The Article of the Day is by John R MacArthur. It was first published in The Guardian; then re-broadcast by the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.
A Groundbreaking Study Shows Kids Learn Better on Paper, Not Screens. Now What?
For ‘deeper reading’ among children aged 10-12, paper trumps screens. What does it mean when schools are going digital?
The nationwide collapse in reading scores among American youth has lately captured the attention – if not the concern – of headline writers, educators and government bureaucrats.
The Department of Education’s most recent survey, released in June, was certainly sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had declined an average of four points since the Covid-affected school year of 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.
Unsurprisingly, the blame for this dismal news has been assigned by politicians to the easiest, more obvious targets – Covid-19 and the resultant lockdown. Remote learning was bad for students, according to Biden administration officials, so the pandemic must be the chief villain.
Conservatives don’t disagree, but they prefer to blame the teachers’ unions for encouraging their members to teach remotely – for them a greater villain than Covid is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, a powerful Democrat who lobbied successfully to prolong school shutdowns.
Neither the bureaucrats nor the critics of the teachers’ union are wrong, of course. Common sense tells us that a child alone in her bedroom, staring at the image of a teacher on a computer screen (with a smartphone close at hand but hidden from the teacher’s view), is not fully focused on learning.
But while everyone bemoans the lockdown, there’s been curiously little discussion in this debate about the physical object most children use to read, which, starting long before the arrival of Covid, has increasingly been an illuminated screen displaying pixelated type instead of a printed or photocopied text. What if the principal culprit behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor “remote learning”?
Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University’s Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for “deeper reading” there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where “shallow reading was observed”.
Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses.
Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been peer reviewed – used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.
Vital to the usefulness of the study was the age of the participants – a three-year period that is “critical in reading development” – since fourth grade is when a crucial shift occurs from what another researcher describes as “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.
Froud and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: “We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices … in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print.”
I would go even further than Froud in delineating what’s at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud’s team says in its article: “Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning” across the full range of social scientific literature.
But the work of Mangen and others hasn’t influenced local school boards, such as Houston’s, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the “digital revolution”, school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.
Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn’t all bad for public-school education: “As much as the pandemic was an awful time period,” says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, “one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports.” Newsday enthusiastically reports: “Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers.”
Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.
If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation’s leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: “I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues,” he told the New York audience.
“How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? … It’s like people just say, ‘Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we’ll make a bunch of money.’ And that’s OK; that’s our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students … It’s all been product and not purpose.”
I’ll only take issue with the notion that it’s “OK” to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales – before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.
This article was amended on 19 January 2024 to indicate that the Teachers College study has not yet been peer reviewed.
John R MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of several books. He participated in the fundraising necessary for Karen Froud’s research study.