never look back. School had felt increasingly irrelevant and superficial to me in 1964, and I was straining to escape, burning to dive head first into the real world to end a war and upend the system (this was a time before I’d discovered that all worlds can be real if you’ll let them be, even the world of your imagination). Revolutionaries want to change the world, of course, and teachers, it turns out, want to change the world too—typically one child at a time. It wasn’t as much of a reach as you might imagine: day to day, I had more adrenaline pumping through my veins as a teacher than at any other time in my life.
In any case, Bank Street quickly won me over and affirmed my basic instincts as a teacher: the learning child is an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a journey of discovery and surprise, not a passive receptacle waiting for instructions; every kid is a whole human being with a mind and a heart, a body and a spirit, experiences and aspirations that must somehow be accounted for by an engaged teacher. But from this base my professors at Bank Street went deeper, showing me again and again that the work of teaching is infinitely complex and excruciatingly difficult—becoming a good-enough teacher (like becoming a good-enough parent) was a life project and not some easy fix or formula.
I learned to practice observing and recording, kid-watching, as a central activity—thick description and time-sampling, artifact analysis and tone-monitoring, and so on. I read Jean Piaget’s stage theory and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s philosophy.
Doing some errands one Saturday morning, I said casually to five-year-old Zayd, “There’s a guy named Piaget who says that kids like you think that people think with their mouths.”
“What?” he said indignantly. “That’s so stupid.”
“Well, what do people think with?” I asked.
“People think with their brains, and people talk with their mouths,” he said definitively.
I decided to interview Zayd for my class project, imitating the format that Piaget used with his own kids.
Piaget’s insight was that young children are concrete operational thinkers, lacking the capacity for abstraction and inference, relying instead on the visible, the tangible, and the material. I was impressed that Zayd was as clear and confident as he was, and I figured as a modern kid his sophistication was way beyond what Piaget’s kids had access to or knew.
“So,” I said when we sat down a few days later, “you think with your brain?”
“Right,” he said.
“And right now what are you thinking about?
“A TV,” he replied.
“And where is the TV you’re thinking about?”
“There’s a tiny TV inside my brain,” he explained.
Holy shit, I thought, concrete operational, as Piaget predicted. But onward: “Have you ever forgotten anything?”
“Sure, like when I forgot to tell Mom the joke from school.”
“OK, where did that joke go?”
Without missing a beat Zayd said, “It went right out my mouth.”
Wow! Piaget rocks!
From then on any assignment that came my way—child development, literacy, curriculum, teaching—drove me to my own little hands-on laboratory at home: snapshots of toddlers in motion, sketches of family life, representations of young children reaching deep within themselves and clamoring to learn and to grow.
For a class on art in the early childhood curriculum, I collected a portfolio of paintings and drawings by our guys, usually accompanied by dictated commentary transcribed by me. One morning I said to Malik, “Tell me about this painting”—a colorful set of big swirls and fat lines—and he replied, “That’s me swimming with Zayd, and the river is cold.” I wrote it down and added it to the file.
And for a course on teaching reading, I kept a diary of our kids’ early language acquisition, writing about how Malik learned to read seemingly in one big gulp without much experimentation or trial and error. He grew up in
In any case, Bank Street quickly won me over and affirmed my basic instincts as a teacher: the learning child is an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a journey of discovery and surprise, not a passive receptacle waiting for instructions; every kid is a whole human being with a mind and a heart, a body and a spirit, experiences and aspirations that must somehow be accounted for by an engaged teacher. But from this base my professors at Bank Street went deeper, showing me again and again that the work of teaching is infinitely complex and excruciatingly difficult—becoming a good-enough teacher (like becoming a good-enough parent) was a life project and not some easy fix or formula.
I learned to practice observing and recording, kid-watching, as a central activity—thick description and time-sampling, artifact analysis and tone-monitoring, and so on. I read Jean Piaget’s stage theory and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s philosophy.
Doing some errands one Saturday morning, I said casually to five-year-old Zayd, “There’s a guy named Piaget who says that kids like you think that people think with their mouths.”
“What?” he said indignantly. “That’s so stupid.”
“Well, what do people think with?” I asked.
“People think with their brains, and people talk with their mouths,” he said definitively.
I decided to interview Zayd for my class project, imitating the format that Piaget used with his own kids.
Piaget’s insight was that young children are concrete operational thinkers, lacking the capacity for abstraction and inference, relying instead on the visible, the tangible, and the material. I was impressed that Zayd was as clear and confident as he was, and I figured as a modern kid his sophistication was way beyond what Piaget’s kids had access to or knew.
“So,” I said when we sat down a few days later, “you think with your brain?”
“Right,” he said.
“And right now what are you thinking about?
“A TV,” he replied.
“And where is the TV you’re thinking about?”
“There’s a tiny TV inside my brain,” he explained.
Holy shit, I thought, concrete operational, as Piaget predicted. But onward: “Have you ever forgotten anything?”
“Sure, like when I forgot to tell Mom the joke from school.”
“OK, where did that joke go?”
Without missing a beat Zayd said, “It went right out my mouth.”
Wow! Piaget rocks!
From then on any assignment that came my way—child development, literacy, curriculum, teaching—drove me to my own little hands-on laboratory at home: snapshots of toddlers in motion, sketches of family life, representations of young children reaching deep within themselves and clamoring to learn and to grow.
For a class on art in the early childhood curriculum, I collected a portfolio of paintings and drawings by our guys, usually accompanied by dictated commentary transcribed by me. One morning I said to Malik, “Tell me about this painting”—a colorful set of big swirls and fat lines—and he replied, “That’s me swimming with Zayd, and the river is cold.” I wrote it down and added it to the file.
And for a course on teaching reading, I kept a diary of our kids’ early language acquisition, writing about how Malik learned to read seemingly in one big gulp without much experimentation or trial and error. He grew up in
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