The Conversation

The Conversation

We were at reading group. We had been writing letters to our partner school in Namibia, Africa. We had looked at maps and photos of the learners there and were now writing thank you notes for some gifts they had sent us. One of my students had actually been to South Africa, the country directly south of Namibia, and he and some of the others were discussing the pictures of our African friends. I was editing another student’s letter when I overheard the following:

“They wear uniforms in their school.”

“Yeah, and they don’t have shoes.”

 “Their skin is really dark.  Are they black?” 

“Some people in South Africa call them colored.” 

“Do they like that?” 

 “I don’t know. But if it were me, I think I’d like to be called by my name.” 

There’s an old song from the musical “South Pacific” called “You Have to Be Carefully Taught.” The song states that parents teach children prejudice. Hour after hour, day after day, children are taught to judge others by the color of their skin, their disabilities, their nationalities, and the language they speak -- not by the content of their characters as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed.   

My students, as children often do, had struck right to the heart of the matter. All people have the right to be recognized for their individual humanness. People don’t want to be labeled; they want to be called by name. And isn’t it wonderful to hear someone call your name in love?

This conversation impressed me.  My students are only seven and eight years old. They don’t have much life experience. A trip to Africa is a rarity for young children. But somehow, thanks to their parents’ teaching, they realized this great truth. Calling people by name not only honors them, but also communicates the respect we must have for each other if we are to get along in this diverse but wonderful world.

         

Our sister school in Namibia has over seven hundred students and, although the official language is English, most people still speak their village language. We don’t know which of these many learners will be able to read our letters. We don’t know their names.

But my kids do know one very important thing. When I asked them how we should address our letters, every one of them confidently called out, “Dear Friend.”

I'm Sorry

We were excited about our brand new washer and dryer. We put in our wash for a “virgin” run. The washer filled and stopped. We called the store where we had purchased the machines and they told us to call the manufacturer. We called them and they said that this was the store’s problem. We called back and the manager told us to return the machines to the store within 48 hours if we wanted a refund.  How do you return a washer and dryer? We couldn’t just throw them in the trunk!

After several more phone calls, the store agreed to send a repairman. He came and “fixed” the machine. The very next wash, the machine stopped again. This repair-crash pattern was repeated three times, each time with me calling the store again to ask for help. I talked to the sales department and the manager. I even called the corporate office.

After three weeks with no repair and much frustration, I was sitting at the laundromat watching my clothes going around in the dryer when my mother called me. Now, I called my parents every week, so Mom knew all about my washer troubles. She heard the frustration in my voice. After hearing my sad tale of woe, she said, “I am so sorry that this is happening.”

This is what you want to hear when you have troubles.  Not one of the people I had talked to at the store or at the manufacturer had offered any apologies for my trouble. Why is it so hard to say, “I’m sorry”? 

These two words seem to have been removed from the American vocabulary. Politicians who make mistakes don’t apologize, they “spin.” Business people who fail make excuses. Health care providers defend themselves or blame their patients instead of admitting errors. No one wants to admit culpability for fear of repercussions. Maybe they’ll be sued. Maybe they’ll lose business. Maybe their reputations will be sullied.

My mother, who had no responsibility for my frustrations, knew that I needed to hear that someone shared my concerns. Someone cared. Someone was sorry that I was suffering. A broken washer is a minor problem. A society which cannot say “I’m sorry” is in major crisis.

I learned a lot of lessons from this experience. First and foremost, I learned that big business does not care about my minor problems. I learned that the attendants at the laundromat are saints. They took time to listen to my troubles and offered to help me with my wash. I was also reminded that you can always count on your mother to take your side and offer sympathy for your troubles. God bless them all.

Most of all, I learned how important it is to say “I’m sorry” even when you have not been part of the problem. “I am so sorry that this is happening to you. You do not deserve these troubles. I am happy to listen. I will support you.”

           

My washing machine was eventually fixed and, about six months after my washer woes, I got a call from the upper management of the store. I told her what had happened. She listened and said, “I’m sorry.” 

That’s all I needed to hear.

Not There Anymore

Not There Anymore

In 1968, my Aunt Nina, an indomitable woman, loaded her seven children into her Volkswagen bus and set out to travel from California across the country with a friend – who had four children of her own. These two ladies and their eleven children arrived at our house in Pennsylvania for a week-long visit. There were six kids in our house and both my grandmothers were staying with us. When the bus arrived, the population of our house rose to twenty-three – seventeen children, ages eight months to 13 years, and six adults.

We loved it.

We didn’t just stay home either. All seventeen kids climbed into the bus (no seat belts, no car seats) with the five ladies (my father having escaped to work) to go sightseeing. We toured Independence Hall, sticking our fingers into the Liberty Bell and sitting in Congress Hall. We went to the zoo and fed the monkeys and pet the llamas. We all loaded up into the bus to head to Hershey, AKA Chocolate Town.

         

The Hershey’s factory tour was the highlight of the trip. First we saw the raw materials that went into the chocolate – the cocoa beans, the cream, and the sugar. Hershey’s had its own cows to provide the rich cream needed to make the milk chocolate. We joked that the cows ate chocolate so that they would give chocolate milk. Next was the mixing room. Huge vats of liquid chocolate sloshed back and forth as giant mixers endlessly circulated. I can still smell the overwhelming richness of it.

We watched as the chocolate was poured into giant molds which formed the chocolate bars. After cooling, the chocolate was knocked out onto conveyor belts. Much of it fell on the floor. Bright red-lettered signs posted everywhere warned: Don’t eat the chocolate from the floor. At the end of the tour, we each got a chocolate bar and a container of cocoa. It was an unforgettable tour.

Today the Hershey’s factory is closed to the public. Now visitors travel through Chocolate World, an amusement park ride, as they watch re-creations of what happens in the real factory. A peppy little song plays as they glide along watching video screens and plastic chocolate pieces run along miniature conveyor belts. It’s fun, but not memorable.

There are many places that you can’t go anymore. The Liberty Bell is now housed in a special building. It’s surrounded by rails, guards and surveillance cameras. No fingers allowed in the cracks. Fences ring Independence Hall and tickets are needed for entrance. Reservations are required to climb to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Tourists no longer wander the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Some of my friends remember picnicking on the megaliths at Stonehenge. In 1589, Galileo climbed to the top of the Tower of Pisa to drop two balls of different masses from the top to prove his theory that acceleration is independent of mass. Today, he would have had to make reservations a month in advance and pay about $25 to climb the almost 300 steps to the top.

Recently, the nation was shocked when a man ran across the White House lawn and into a side door which wasn’t locked. The media moaned about lax security. The door was often used for White House tours. How long will it be before the public is no longer welcome?

It is sad that time and circumstances have limited our access to what once were public places. Of course, no one wants germy little kids sneezing into the chocolate vats. Current world tensions have made it necessary to safeguard our national treasures. What other personal experiences will be replaced by re-creations and video screens?

         

Luckily, there are still many of us around to share our childhood experiences. My aunt Nina still amazes us with her audacity. She and my mother have some great stories to tell. My cousins and siblings reminisce about our childhood adventures. We remember the stories our grandmothers told. The physical places, and people, may be lost to us, but the memories remain.

Fill your lives with experiences you can share. Spend time with your family. Be as real as you can in everything you do. I still feel the squirming of my younger cousins piled onto my lap in that bus. I can hear the songs we belted out as we rolled along the country roads. The memories of that time, and many other family times, remain with me still. No ropes keep me out, no doors are locked.

I can still taste the chocolate.

         

         

Kids Can Do Math. Can You?

Kids can do math. Can you?

In a famous experiment, preschoolers were tested to see if they could conserve number – that is recognize a quantity if the configuration is changed. Kids were shown two rows of marbles and asked “Which row has more marbles?” The marbles were lined up in matching rows, each having six marbles. Almost all of the children said that the rows were equal.

Then one row was stretched into a longer line (again each row had six marbles) and the children were asked again, “Which row has more marbles?” This time, the children pointed to the longer row. The researcher concluded that the children failed to conserve number.

         

When other researchers recreated the tests, this time using candy instead of marbles, most of the children got the answer right! What had changed? Motivation. Candy is much more interesting than marbles.

Yet further tests proved that even with marbles, children can get the answer right if the question is rephrased. When the researcher asked the same question twice (Which row has more marbles?) the children assumed that the first answer was wrong and changed their answer. If the question was asked differently (Does one row have more marbles?), most got it right.

Teachers know these phenomena. Students who know a concept inside-out-and-upside-down balk or recant when asked to verify their response. They waver, thinking “If she’s asking me again, I must have been wrong.” Sometimes they can’t answer the same question when it was asked by someone or something else (let’s say the standardized test) again.

         

People personalize learning. We learn by association. That is, we take new ideas or concepts into our learning banks by attaching them to concepts we already know -- unlike a computer who stores each bit of information as a separate unit. For example, we associate water with wet so we know that a bath, a puddle, a rainfall and the ocean are connected and wet. One person might remember that April has 30 days because of a silly rhyme while another might remember because April 30^th is her birthday. Our brains interact with the world to make meaning.

The same is true with math. Most children are eager to explore math concepts, but many adults insist that children rely on “accepted” connections rather than constructing their own. The children in the experiment had a sense of number even if they couldn’t count in the conventional sense. The counting system adults understand comes after the sense children apply to numbers.

Stanislaus Dehaene, author of Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, wrote that adult’s “insistence on mathematical computation at the expense of meaning” actually handicaps young children when they are learning math concepts. When “arithmetic is purely [a] scholastic affair, with no practical goal and no obvious meaning” children may develop a math phobia. Children come to math ready to make associations. They should not be forced to assume ours.

Children love candy and they love math – when it is presented to them in the right way. Adults can fan the “flickering flame’ of math in a child’s mind, fortifying and sustaining it by allowing them time to explore and reason things out for themselves.

         

So what do experiments and experience prove? Kids can do math, and you can too. Give children time, show enthusiasm, make it fun, and let them explore. They’ll make meaningful math connections and connections are like candy – the more the better.

Coming soon: Innumeracy or “Why can’t I understand my first grader’s math homework?