Hello Humans? This is your teacher speaking.....

Hello all.

When I last blogged, we were in Seoul,  delightfully confused, overheated and full to bursting with incredible food.

I am happy to say that we made it back to Kyoto with nary a scratch, and have plodded our way back into the start of another autumn...not that you'd know it from the weather, which remains steaming hot with  sudden torrential downpours that appear and disappear with neither warning, rhyme nor reason.

I have spent the last few weeks shaking my head back and forth over the world's largely horrible hijinks...specifically the hijinks of my native land, but also the hijinks of other places on this weird planet of ours.  And I have come to the conclusion that adult humans, for the most part, seem to have completely forgotten the lessons they learned way back in elementary school.

Yes, I know this topic has been dragged out  ad infinitum, written and blogged about so many times and in so many varying ways that it is quite cliche for me to be writing about it now.

But it's true.

The lessons we teachers give our youngest students are meant to be the foundations for a life time of learning how to live among our fellow creatures.  These lessons take on different tones depending on the  philosophies and political beliefs of the community, school and individual teacher--sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  But the intention is the same:  to help young people successfully grow  into adults.

For me--a self-confessed liberal Californian--I try to imbue my lessons with a sense of the big picture.  Even preschoolers and kindergarteners can grasp a bigger picture if it's presented just right....and nothing delights me more than giving a lesson and letting the kids discover the bigger ideas all by themselves.

Which they do, and often in very eloquent ways.

And of course, the backbone of the best lessons are positive messages.  People respond better to positive messages  rather than negatives.  "Do's" rather than"Don'ts".  "Do's" provide a path, a set of instructions to follow.  "Don'ts" leave you hanging, stranded--you've been told what NOT to do, but then left to figure out what TO do in confused isolation.

But for me it's more than just spouting off rules to live by.  I try to teach the rules that I live by.  How can I believably teach something that I don't believe for myself?  I can't.  So whether I'm teaching 1+1=2 or helping a student discover how amazing  a bug can be, I better believe that 1+1=2, and I better be willing to pick that bug up in my own hands  and share in that amazement.

What, you may ask, are my "big"lessons?  I'm glad you asked...


Christina's "Big" Lessons


1. Skin color is just pigment, beneath which we all have the same needs, and often very similar desires.

2. Respect=accepting that  each person is different, and being different is good.

3. Help others.  Always.

4. Humans do not own the planet earth.  This planet belongs to everything and everyone upon it, from the earthworm to the redwood, from the human to the elephant.

5. Even things you think are icky  deserve the chance to live.  (I can't tell you how many spiders/beetles/flies/moths/ants I have rescued in cups and toted out of my classrooms.  It got to the point that whenever any kid saw a bug in a classroom, I'd be called upon to rescue it)

6. If you have to say "I'm sorry", it's already too late.  You've already done the deed.  Instead try to make "thinking choices" so that the "sorry moment" never has to happen.

7. Live gently.

8. Hands of friendship.

9.  Always share (unless, that is, you have a peanut butter sandwich and your friend has a peanut allergy.)

10. True fun surpasses all differences. (Hey, try throwing a bunch of balloons into a group of kids who don't share the same language.  I've done it many times and after a minute or so, my friends, you've got magic.  And a lot of running, laughing, yelling and quite a few popped balloons)

11. Individually we can do great things.  Together we can do unbelievable things.

12. ASK QUESTIONS. There is no such thing as a silly question.

13. Use your words.

14. Learning happens for our entire lives.  Even teachers don't have all the answers. (The kids loved it when I wouldn't know the answer to some obscure science question because they got to watch me drag out a book or my ipad to look up the answer.  As a bonus lesson, they got to learn the words "Index"  "Appendix"  "Glossary" and "Wikipedia")

15. Try.  Try.  Try.  If you fail, try again.


I promise you that if you were a fly on the wall of my classroom at any point in the past 21 years, you would've heard me say these things, and would have seen  me teaching these things.

And I hope you would have seen me living these things.
As I still try to do.

Until next time...