Month: February 2024

Terri

Snow!

New York City recently had a two year stretch where we had no measurable snow. This is unusual. Thankfully, recent snowfalls have given us all a chance to get outside and play. There wasn’t much snow, but children (and their grown ups) don’t need much to have fun. When I was running in the park, I saw villages of snow people, broken sleds, snowball fights, and sledding. Some sledding was happening on snowy hills (the NYC Parks Department puts hay bales by trees to protect trees and sledders from collision). Some sledding was happening on muddy hills that used to be snowy. There was a lot of laughter and joy. I loved it!

Awesome snow person!
Sledding in Central Park
Snow person village

A snowy day is a reminder of the importance of play.

When our school opened in the 2009-2010 school year, we were in the throes of the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top policy initiatives. We had 50 kindergarteners that first year and a commitment to developmentally appropriate practice. For the first staff book club, we read Vivian Paley’s book, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (2005). As a school leader, I quickly realized that it would be hard work to hold on to the idea of play in kindergarten in this particular era. My metaphor of choice was that we were on a sailboat headed towards the island of developmentally appropriate practice but we kept getting blown off course towards the island of “academic rigor” in kindergarten. It took continuous effort to keep our boat on course!

Every year, when I spoke to prospective parents about our school and our program, I emphasized the importance of play. I frequently referenced Dr. Stuart Brown’s book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2010). I felt like I needed to convince the parents that play in school is a good thing. Heck, if the Google engineers get a Lego room to play in and the Jet Propulsion Lab recognizes the importance of rich play lives and histories for their teams, why don’t we want our kids to engage with it? Play builds social skills, problem solving, and out of the box thinking. It lets us tap into our strengths and gives us joy supporting our mental health. Play invigorates our lives and helps us be better humans.

I chanced upon a book last spring, Cultivating Imagination in Leadership, by Gillian Judson and Meaghan Dougherty (2023). They begin the introduction by clarifying that engaging in imagination is not solely the work of childhood fantasy play. We have to be able to “imagine a future that is different – just and equitable – before we create it.” And they “invite readers to think about imagination as like fertile soil out of which leadership practices grow” as a tool we use to create and articulate our vision for the work and with which we navigate the needs of our communities and the structures and road blocks we encounter as we strive to provide programs and create a culture that will improve the lives of our families and communities. Play, as children and as adults, feeds our ability to imagine.

Terri

Nurturing a “quiet eye”

This year, I have transitioned from my (more than) full time position as a school leader of a public preK to 8 school. That hasn’t meant that I have given up my connections to schools. I still believe that education — particularly public education — is the single most important tool we have to achieve a more just, kind and equitable world. I volunteer weekly at the school where I used to work. I lead a sewing lunch club on Mondays and Fridays where I work with second to eighth graders in the FabLab. I also am a good listener to help out my former colleagues when they face challenges. 

That said, I am grateful to have time and the mental space necessary to nurture my attention. Being a school leader is intense work. Being a school leader during a pandemic and the aftermath, is extra intense. By the time this past September rolled around, my brain was tired. Four months later, I am recuperated and still interested in my life’s work of learning. 

Recently, I have been reading Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader, Come Home. There is a lot to unpack in this book. The first lesson I am taking away is the importance of attention in reading deeply. Maryanne Wolf uses the poetic phrase “a quiet eye” to describe the antidote to the constant movement of our eyes and attention as we navigate a highly distracting world (p 69-70). 

These past few years, my reading has been fairly shallow given all the demands on my time and emotions. Now that I am rested, Dr. Wolf has “prescribed” that I work on reading more thoughtfully and deeply — that I come home to the place of getting lost in a book’s story and ideas and the connections I make and insights I gain from reading the ideas of others. That is hard work. I am doing it on paper with a pen or pencil in hand and a pack of sticky notes at my side. 

The posts from 2023 and earlier on this blog are from my time as a school leader. From this point on, I am going to be using this space to ponder the books I am reading. Hopefully, the reading and writing I do will help me gain important insights into challenges faced by schools and learners and deeper empathy for the experiences of others.