Grandma's Wisdom

Thanks again, everyone, for your posts on the cycle one themes. I enjoyed reading them!

Before I share with you my own thoughts, let me first introduce you a bit to the incredible diversity of our class!

We have two full time grad students in our class, sixteen secondary teachers, eight elementary teachers, and one person working for a state department of education. It’s fun to have a class that work across the full range of ages!

In terms of subject matter specialization, we are also very diverse, with teachers in language arts/English, social studies, science, math, music, Spanish, linguistics, counseling, and special education. Each of those subjects provides a window on the world that is so important!

Finally, we are geographically diverse. We have a fair share from Michigan (and in particular,  the Detroit metropolitan area), but we also have folks from California, Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, and South Dakota. Three of us are currently abroad, living and working in Germany, Thailand and Egypt. We also have a colleague who grew up in France. 

What an incredible diversity of experience we are bringing to this class! I encourage you to seek out and read posts of those both similar and very different to you in what they bring to the class!

Last February, I lost my last grandparent. Driving back to Minnesota for the funeral and then speaking at the funeral, I was really led to reflect on what grandparents bring to the world. 

Some of you wrote about your own grandparents and how they provided some of the free, unsupervised play that your parents didn’t always know yet how to give. 

I’ve read a couple of books in the past few years that resonate with the idea that the wisdom of grandparents is so important and yet, increasingly, under attack.

One is Michael Pollan’s book on the eating habits of Americans. Pollan argues that the big shift in how we came to eat came when we no longer trusted our grandparents’ advice on food and instead started to look to “experts” to guide us. “Common sense” gave way to science. 

This is all fine, except that science operates on a level that can’t always address the finer details of individual lives. I can read a hundred books on nutrition, but it was my grandmother who taught me what a real family meal looks like. I can also read a hundred books on how to get my infant to sleep, but it was my grandmother who taught me that sleepy infants just need to be put down and left to fall asleep. (With our first child, I somehow thought I had to rock him to sleep all the time--a losing proposition to be sure!)

Many of us no longer live so close to our parents and grandparents. So we turn to books and social media. Parenting is no longer a part of life, but a competition about who is the most caring, the most attentive, the most devoted . . .  (Another losing proposition, I can assure you!)

As I’ve told several of you, I think one of the best things teachers of children of all ages can do is reassure parents that their children are going to be just fine!

Another book that really touched me was Richard Louv’s book on children and nature. Louv talks about the importance of playing in spaces that have “loose parts”--lots of materials that can be used with minimal instruction and guidance. Materials that can be easily repurposed for multiple uses. That stick we find in the forest can be a sword or a magic wand, part of an enchanted castle or part of a maximum security prison.

My grandmother never had any toys for me to play with when I visited her. But she was good at finding little things around the house that I could play with. She was also good at letting me wonder around her big vegetable and flower garden. 

When we baked cookies together, half the fun was messing around with the implements she had--the hand sifter for the flour, the hand beater for the eggs, and the measuring cups for the dry and wet ingredients. 

I’m not sure how alone I am in this, but it seems like most of these types of unplanned and labor-intensive interactions are rarer in the world today. It now seems that there is a procedure for everything. A recipe. A script. An  expert. A science, if you will.

Procedures and rules and safety regulations are all good, but they are also a way of saying you don’t trust the person in charge to make informed decisions based upon their knowledge of the situation at hand.  They are a way of saying that there is always, for every situation, a wrong and a right way of doing things. 

Sometimes there is a wrong way of doing things, but we also have to remember that in many situations in life, there is no wrong way. There is just coping, adapting and getting by!

Essentially, elaborate procedures and guidelines teach us to fear experimentation and free play. They teach us to fear making a mess of things--of failure. 

Some of the most beloved family stories that I have are ones where my grandparents or parents tried to fix a snowmobile or bake a cake and had the whole thing go terribly wrong. Yet these were incredibly competent people who learned from whatever mistakes they made along the way. 

I wonder what family stories my kids will have. What will I pass along to them? These are questions that your writings and these readings have led me to ponder.

I look forward to reading  your posts for cycle two!