Oh, the Weeks You Will Have!

 

Dear Brandeis community,

 

In the kitchen here at the Glass household we have a memento hanging on a bulletin board, of a visit I made to Sonia’s second grade class last year. The photograph is of Sonia and me, and it includes the text of my responses to questions about my career choices—why I chose education (to repair the world!), what I hope to do when I retire (read and write), etc. One of the questions was about working in schools, and I shared that I love school because I love to learn, and because every day is different. This week both of those have been especially present. I thought I’d share three vignettes from the first three days of school this week, by way of illustration.

 

Monday afternoons are our standing faculty meetings, which can range from curricular work to prep for school events. This week we had eighth grade parent Anda Kuo in for a professional development program around the Myers-Briggs personality inventory, a program that she offers to her residents and her colleagues at UCSF to aid them in effective collaboration and communication. My favorite moment of the session, which was thought-provoking throughout, was when we split into groups based on whether we were Ts (thinking) or Fs (feeling) and wrote an email to a group regarding a hypothetical situation. It was fascinating to see how we all communicated, and the questions we asked of ourselves and each other in navigating potential conflict. I had never zoomed in on that particular split (it’s one where I often flip-flop in the tests) and found it both hilarious and informative to think it through with my colleagues.

 

Tuesday morning, I had the opportunity to take a break from my normal suite of meetings to be a guest teacher in Ms. Lostetter’s fifth grade music class. She invited me to teach them a bit about rap music, which is the unit they’re working on right now, and help them in writing their own raps. So, I spent two hours with the students, sharing a little bit of my own story with them—how the first album I ever bought was Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, how I worked for a while as a music journalist covering indie-label rap music, how I wrote my dissertation on rap music and experimental poetry in the 1970s and 1980s. We learned about the structure of rhyme—internal rhymes vs. end rhymes, and how consonant and vowel sounds act differently in the similarities we hear in words—and listened to A Tribe Called Quest’s classic “Can I Kick It?” to unpack how polysyllabic rhyme relies heavily on meter. Then we workshopped their raps for a bit, which are on topics ranging from fashion and piano to the president and kugel. If nothing else, I hope they left knowing that if someone ever asks, “Can I kick it?” the only correct answer is “Yes you can!”

 

Wednesday, I took part for the third year in a row in the Stanford/IDEO Shadow-a-Student Challenge—and for the second year in a row, our entire leadership team took part as well. I have been a seventh grader and a fourth grader; this year I was a second grader, following Zuri through his day. As is true every year with this challenge, I was blown away by the amount of thinking and playing and learning that our students do—it is humbling and exhausting to try to follow along. We sang our hellos in morning meeting in five different languages; worked on ongoing writing projects; studied the geography of India; ran ourselves ragged in PE playing banana tag (a new game for me) and then during recess, playing double touch (another new game for me); used “bear claw beats” to experiment with rhythm in music; then talked about the ethics of idolatry in Judaic studies class. And that was all in the first half of the day! Zuri’s family packed me a lunch to enjoy with Zuri—which was pretty special, and completely delicious. It was a joyful morning full of learning for me—and I must say, the students of 2 Blue made me feel particularly welcome as a peer. I look forward to year four of the project next year!

And of course, today is Purim—and the Glass household is just stirring, with some mumblings and rumblings about costumes just starting to be audible. Off I go—what a week!

 

Wishing you all weekends full of learning and new experiences, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan