Just the Beginning

-----Original Message----- 
From: Patricia de Cerqueira Leite 
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 2:06 AM 
To: Ticha 
Subject: First day!

Hi All,

I am really sorry about the MASS email, but you are getting this because you are either a dear friend or family that has inspired me, supported me, and helped me get to where I am now... IN THE CLASSROOM!! ... and I have only one question... Why the h#$& did you let me do it?!

Ok, just kidding!

My first day of teaching at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School (formerly known as Somerville Charter School) was challenging to say the least.  Although I am not a homeroom teacher, I teach 5 classes with about 24 students in each for 50 minutes at a time. I don't have my own room, so I float from classroom to classroom and my desk is housed in 1A - a first grade homeroom (happy to have a desk!)

The day today was off to a great start as I had many fun activities planned to build relationships w/ my students. However, I learned that my first graders like pictures better than word search puzzles. My second graders loved the word puzzle but wanted to color instead of searching for every word. My third graders were all about testing my boundaries... my more patient attitude was REALLY not working well w/ them today. Fourth graders were a breath of fresh air and finished their word search faster than the sleepy but sweet fifth graders.

After 2 beers, a good talk w/ my colleague (who is also new, teaches Spanish and left almost in tears) and a LONG nap, I am able to take comfort in the few positive minutes of my first day of teaching just as a child that is scared of the dark finds comfort in a night light.... Does that make any sense at all?! LOL!

Today was all that I expected... EXTREMELY frustrating, exciting, scary, and full of surprises... and while I am not bursting with fruit flavors saying "I LOVE MY JOB" ... I see it all in the horizon. In the meantime, I am taking notes... for a lot of policy work awaits me as does my elementary education certification classes!

I miss all of you and thank you sooooo much for all of your support. This is not easy, but if I wanted that I wouldn't be here.

Love you all tons and miss you like crazy! - Tricia (aka: Ms. Cerqueira)

This is just the beginning ...

Creativating

Creativating /krēˈātəˌvāt ING/: 
verb 
1. Apply oneself or dedicate one's energies to bringing something into existence. 
2. Intentionally preparing and acting towards birthing, raising, and/or growing new ideas, art forms, ways of being. 

Creation is the highest form of cognitive, affective, and sensorial ability of a human being. In Bloom's Taxonomy  (1) Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues originally had "Evaluate" as the highest order of thinking. However, "Create" has since risen to the highest ranking of our ability to think and reason. "Create" is defined as "produce new or original work" which includes design, assemble, construct, conjecture, formulate, author, investigate.

As an educator and firm believer that we learn best through experience and doing, its seems to me that "create" is indeed the highest form of thinking and being in which we could possibly engage. Having been in the classroom and an instructional specialist for over 15 years now, I often find myself wondering what would happen if every school was a design school. Not only at the high school or middle school level, but what if the United States of America decided to engage its youth in radical creating from a very young age within the public school setting?

What I am proposing is nothing new, there are countless programs, program evaluations, and research showing that children who engage in play and creative play from a very young age develop a stronger sense of self and often fare better in the academic realm in general. However, a lot of these programs are not public and if they are it is rare that they are embedded in public preschools and elementary schools across a range of communities of all social economic levels.

What I do know from my years teaching, learning, and coaching students (young and adult alike) is that at our core we long to be seen and feel like we matter so that we can exert positive influence within our community (school, classroom, neighborhood, etc). At our core, we want to know that we are seen for who we are and that we belong within the spaces where we live and learn. When we do not feel seen or like we matter, we often exert negative influence within our spaces and rupture the bridges extended to us by well-meaning albeit single-serving community members who are not able to see us or create spaces where we matter. 

This core concept of community building is at the core of my classroom community and relationship with my teachers. I realized this morning that this way of being originating from Responsive Classroom and Tribes is in and of itself a creation of spaces where people can then create positive actions which in turn allows them to exert positive influence within the classroom community. This link between community building strategies and education as a means of creation invites us to rethink school structures and curriculum. 

Our schools are complex systems and capable of housing authentic growth mindset spaces. Many teachers and administrators already support such structures. These spaces often look like studios where students are in charge of their bodies and learning. This is not to say that some do not struggle to focus nor do these spaces come without challenges. However, these spaces embody the growth mindset and flexible thinking that we want of all learners in this day and age. These spaces allow for neurodiversity to exist and thrive.

My musing today is to ponder the following: what would happen if the content that we were delivering to students was done in a way in which the end result was to demonstrate mastery through creating something? What would standards of education and proof of mastery look like in an education system that valued the growth mindset with creation at its highest rank? How can we cultivate more creation in our public schools and learning spaces?

Happy creativating!

(1)  Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

Unfathomable

Erect a statue of Adolph Hitler, unfathomable.

Thomas Jefferson

Glorified and immortalized in marble

White Imperial marble 

In a most presidential circular colonnade 

26 Ionic columns

12 additional columns supporting the north "portico" because calling it a porch is not fancy enough

Four more columns at each of the four openings

54 white columns commemorating his greatness in the eyes of all who comfortably swallow the colonialist narrative of his greatness, still.

Erect a statue of Dolores Huerta, Tenskwatawa, Harriet Tubman, Cesar Chavez, or Malcom X around the Tidal Basin, unfathomable.

El colibrí

My brain holds a hummingbird
      Hum hum
               humming
                      humming
Hummingbird

Drinking the nectar of my deepest thoughts,
succulent desires, and fiery dreams

   Hum hum
               humming
                      humming
Hummingbird

Tasting my elaborate ideas scheming to dismantle craddle-to-prison pipelines, supremacist education systems, and the longest terrorist organization of this country with its operatives in high places from wall street to police forces, governments, and courtrooms no longer visibly in white hoods.

    Hum hum
               humming
                      humming
Hummingbird

Untangling the fly-by-poems, love letters, and policy papers I hope to write in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Portuñol, and Spanglish sprinkled with a pinch of Chingona.

Beija beija
   flor
       flor
Beija flor

Sipping some sample words too delicious to translate into plain Jane English... saudade, futevôlei, farofa, rede, and cafuné ... Words too savory and luscious to resist saying... gostoso, xodó, chuveiro, abraço, Djavan, caju, goiabada, Bahia, doce, lua de mel, jinga, enxerga, beijo

Beija beija
   flor
       flor
Beija flor

Slowing only to taste the sting of Columbine and Sandy Hook, unlike the sweet Columbine flower it much would rather savor, each time I bare witness to yet another school shooting... loucura... madness

Colibrí
       Colibrí
            Colibrí

Fluttering around the courageous conversations and advocacy I yearn to have even when it means sitting in a pile of discomfort while people show their limitations and projections pushing me to dig deep for compasión

Humming
   Bird
      Beija
          Flor
Colibrí

AP

Assistant Principal's voice over the loud speaker signaling and directing the lockdown drills.

Assistant Principal's hand on the limp pulse of the second-grade girl who had a seizure on a scorching fun-filled field day.

Assistant Principal's heart torn to shreds by police brutality  signaling a never-ending police department hunting season.

Is it a season if there is only one?

Assistant Principal's distressed soles walking the halls after the last shots when the first responders arrive to secure the building and take the wounded and escort the traumatized youth who never thought it would be in their school that the Second Amendment would rear its assassin head in the name of a colonial white privilege.

Assistant Principal's ears ringing from a marathon of phone calls to parents, grandmothers, aunts, and mentors providing referrals that will never materialize in this vast healthcare and food desert. Calls that transmit as cries to doctors and therapists to once and for all set up practice in a school building where 2300 students share one therapist present only one day each week. Begging for a practice of routine empathy, care, and health because who can learn without it?

Assistant Principal's eyes witnessing the state's neglect of children who were never greeted with boot straps upon arriving on dry land unlike Columbus and their counterparts on the Northside of the city. Children whose parents want the same things as my parents and your parents for their children, our children. Parents relegated to the "we need them but we don't want them" cohort caught in the undercurrents of the supremacist othering of all people South of the interstate or the border. Anyone with the melanin they so much envy and emulate by all means necessary.

Assistant Principals assisting principals

Assist in principles

Assist and

Assistant