We are so fortunate. Here in our region, and in Maine as a whole, our public schools are amazing.
Brunswick resident Heather D. Martin wants to know what’s on your mind; email her at heather@heatherdmartin.com.
The curricula is strong, the teachers are both dedicated and skilled, and the entire learning environment is focused on meeting the needs of each individual learner. This spring, just as everyone was really hitting their stride (late spring is often when the most amazing stuff happens in school: the students really click with what they’ve been working on all year and start making gigantic leaps in comprehension and application), the virus hit.
Teachers were suddenly faced with retooling their lessons, their communications, their entire way of being on a digital platform. And they did it. And they did it overnight. Literally.
Teachers across our state are theoretically on summer break now. In reality, everyone is bending their mind to what the fall might look like, even though we know we don’t know.
I find myself once again circling the words of Paul Romer, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” We have a crisis. Let’s not waste it.
This crisis facing public school – the reality that “how we have done it” might not be possible in the fall – affords us the golden opportunity to reimagine everything and teach through play.
Children are natural born learners. They can’t help it. They are born taking in information from the world around them and making sense of it. They learn language, motor control and sophisticated emotional manipulation (I mean this as a compliment) early and without direct instruction. They are amazing. The book “The Scientist in the Crib” by Alison Gopnick explores this idea in depth.
That’s the reality of kids. They are learners.
The thing I think we sometimes forget in our well-intentioned drive to support them, is that the means of their scholarship is play. That is literally how they learn. Our grown-up brains tend to think of play as the reward, the break, the thing that is allowed when not working, not learning. We think of learning as a “task” – and we are just so wrong.
This isn’t my wild idea. A vast sea of educators have written extensively about the value of play in learning. Piaget (my hero) showed us this truth with actual, measured research. He took what was intuitively known and proved it is so. Kids do their learning through the act of imagination and play. To slightly misuse Shakespeare, “The play’s the thing.”
As our “new normal” takes shape, there are many calling for us to seize the moment, including William Doyle and Parsi Sahlberg, authors of a commentary for CNN entitled “Reopen schools with a ‘golden age of play’.”
We don’t know yet what the fall will bring. Will we be in school? Alternating schedules for small classes? Schooling at home? Some strange combination? We just don’t know. That is a lot of uncertainty for anyone to manage.
What we do know is that kids are amazingly resilient and even more so when the grown-ups in the room are mindful of their needs. Let’s not waste this crisis. Let’s take advantage of the moment to toss out the things that won’t serve us well and recalibrate to what we know feeds the soul and the mind. Let’s play.
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