Process, not product.
One of my many impediments as a teacher is that I grew up in a Cartesian world. Back in the day we learned FACTS, at the business end of a ruler or an earpull. I learned my facts separately, too; that is, one kind of fact at a time. Addition in first grade, subtraction in second, multiplication in third, long division in fourth.
A remedial math teacher from a local community college helped my teaching colleague in setting up our adolescent math program a number of years ago. One afternoon after class he showed me how to teach the operations so that they ended up in the same place in the brain; he drew a little triangle showing how addition and subtraction were the same operation but the inverse of each other:
3 áè 8
ë + - æ
è í
5
And another to show how multiplication and division were also inverses of one operation:
3 áè 15
ë x ÷ æ
è í
5
This may seem obvious to the rest of you, but it was an epiphany to me. I felt like upper-class twit Bertie Wooster suddenly realizing that there were "wheels within wheels."[1] The whole universe began to look different. No wonder that math has been such a struggle! Addition has been sequestered with far more important memories of my sixth year. Like moving from northern British Columbia in winter to the equatorial rainforest. Or watching in horror as a good friend in front of me wet his pants during a particularly rigorous spelling test. Or being forced by my mother to be "Wee Willie Winkie" for Halloween. Or getting my part in the Christmas play word-perfect but all backwards during the sole performance. Subtraction, at seven, came as an irritating distraction from my strong attraction to my teacher, Miss Marshall. Multiplication at eight was totally obliterated by the news that Miss Marshall, who had serendipitously graduated to third grade along with the rest of us, was getting married and changing her name to Mrs. Snyder. Long division paled beside the glory-dreams sparked by Miss Savoya reading a Bible Heroes story each morning at the start of my fourth grade year. Because of how I learned numbers, there are just too many opportunities for rudderless digression when it comes to balancing the family checkbook. So my wife, who has a gift for subtraction, does it.
A few years after this arithmetical revelation, my brother David introduced me to the work of theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra, who is a Montessori parent as it turns out. In his book, The Web of Life, he describes the paradigm shift that has taken place in the scientific community over the course of the last century but has yet to have much of an impact on the bureaucracies of our major cultural institutions—education and the Church among them. It is a shift "from the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton to a holistic, ecological view." [2] This is systems thinking, where "the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of a network."[3] What caught my eye was the illustration in the book that went with the following paragraph:
In the mechanistic view, the world is a collection of objects. These, of course, interact with one another, and hence there are relationships between them. But the relationships are secondary... In the systems view, we realize that the objects themselves are networks of relationships, embedded in larger networks. For the systems thinker the relationships are primary. The boundaries of [...] discernible patterns ('objects') are secondary...[4]
I can't reproduce the diagram here, but I can describe it. Imagine a number of separate ellipses, boldly outlined, laid out on a blank background and all interconnected with fine dotted lines. This is the mechanistic view. Now compare this to a second diagram where the bold outlines of the ellipses have faded to fine dots surrounding a smaller hexagonal shape, each of whose angle points now connects to a network of bold lines replacing the fine dotted lines. Can we apply this image to the current discussion as a way of suggesting that the processes of children's spirituality are primary, and its products secondary?
For those of us more susceptible to narrative than a visual schematic, there is a movie, Mindwalk,[5] by Capra's brother Bernt, with screenplay by Fritjof, that shows us the magnitude of this paradigm shift in human terms. It takes place on Mt. St. Michel, a tidal island off the coast of Normandy, and follows an unfolding conversation between three people: an American politician (Sam Waterston), his former speech-writer (John Heard), now a poet living in Paris, and a theoretical physicist (Liv Ullman). Over the course of the movie, the politician, representing a mechanistic, institutional worldview, is opened to the holistic systems view. If a filmed conversation can be said to have a climax it is the moment when the three are out on the shifting tidal sands away from the island, where the writer, representing the artistic viewpoint, builds a bridge of words to undergird the emerging understanding between scientist and politician. That bridge of words is a recited poem, "Enigmas," by Pablo Neruda, here translated by Robert Bly:
You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.[6]
Maria Montessori thought of her method as "scientific" education, but she was ahead of her time in that her approach was holistic and ecological. Her body of observations led her to understand the importance and effects of appropriate physical, emotional and social environments on the optimal development of the child. She developed her theory of absorbent mind and sensitive periods and planes of development into a great—what she termed a "cosmic"—spiral curriculum. What is fascinating for those following her work today is that current neuroscience with all its brain-scanning technology has begun to corroborate what she had observed: children self-construct.[7] Children build their own brains. Or rather, a child's brain develops by means of her interaction with her environment.
And so, if we choose to go down or up or around and around this path, we have our priorities established for us: How we parents and teachers set up the learning environment matters. How and when we engage with the child in bringing the content-in-context that we have for them matters. Montessori suggested that there are sensitive periods, times during development when children, particularly young children from birth to six, are more focused on particular modes of learning. And so we need to know how, in Robert Kegan's phrase, "to attend."[8] To realize and then to anticipate that a six-year old may need to be attended to differently than his former five-year old self that we just spent a year getting to know. In other words, to realize that development matters. And until we have gained some experience as attendants, we may not see how finger-knitting builds the capacity for writing, or climbing a ladder or learning how to walk a line builds social confidence, or how mastering the use of the sensorial materials precedes any abstract comprehension of the concepts they embody. Movement precedes knowledge. And so we need to move ourselves radically out of our anxious, content-based adult preconceptions into the place of the open-minded observer: it is indeed the silent, the intent and focused child, who teaches us how we need to be attending. Paying attention matters.
One of my favorite illustrations of this gift for paying attention comes from John Boorman's film, The Emerald Forest. A fairly romanticized coming-of-age story based on a true occurrence—the kidnapping of an American boy by an Amerindian tribe in Brazil and his father's subsequent attempts to find him—it contains the following scene: Older children are playing in a shallow jungle pool. At one point the young hero dives underwater and grabs a girl by the ankle--a first playful flirtation. But when he resurfaces he is surrounded by the adult men who have been watching the game. One of the men says to him something like, "Boy, today is your day to die," and he is whisked off to his initiation. Now that's attending. Because I work with adolescents from late elevens through early sixteens, I see these overnight "cooties to crushes" U-turns from time to time, but, to my chagrin, I have no recourse to sudden evacuation and ritual ordeal. The most I can do is reference our classroom rule—no exclusive relationships. "If you can't slip a piece of paper between you, you're too close." Often towards the beginning of spring, as we meet our colleagues in upper elementary over the copier, they will roll their eyes and say, of one of their 6th year students, "Oh boy, adolescence just hit so-and-so!" On the other end, I also begin to see our 9th and 10th graders coming out of the hormonal fog and using their newly-forming pre-frontal cortexes to actually reflect and make more mature decisions. At these moments, attending means pretending not to notice the shift, as though all along they were in full command of their faculties of better judgment. We have to notice what we notice, and adapt, without betraying that we have noticed.
Montessori saw the work of following the child as a long and delicate process of weaving a cohesive collective will, strand by strand.[9] The goal was not just independence, but a willed interdependence. Crushing a child's will was, she said, the work of a moment, whereas the building up of a healthy will was the work of a lifetime. And so, we need to approach these moments of transition between planes and periods with as much sensitivity as we can muster.
Before moving to some poems that have brought me some of the poets' wisdom on transitions and development and particularly the precious moments and crucial environments of early childhood, I'd like to return to some points made by Krishna Kumar in the NAMTA talk that I referenced in an earlier post.[10] First, this on teaching as a "relational" or "revelatory" act, and on the benefits of focusing on process rather than product:
It's not the most predictable outcomes which make teaching a worthwhile activity. This is the trouble with behaviorism in that it reduces us to predictable outcomes, whereas we know that in education the most worthwhile outcomes are the ones which we had not predicted. It's the unpredictable outcomes that matter, that bring out the unique individuality of children, who then get inducted into a community of independent learners, people who are capable of managing the world themselves in ways the teacher wouldn't have imagined or thought possible.[11]
What needs to be said here is that there is a crucial difference between the adult's sense of order (the need for predictable outcomes) and the child's need for order. Montessorians set the sensitive period for order, this period where the child's brain most gracefully absorbs the structure of its environment, fairly early, between the ages of one and three, approximately. This suggests that we need to be thinking very carefully about how we prepare our toddlers for the Godly Play experience. It may be that the next great "undiscovered country" in our field of work is the church nursery. When I look from Godly Play classroom to nursery in many of the churches I visit, I'm alarmed at the great day-glo color chaos of consumerist crapola (aka toys) that litter the floor. This past spring and summer, as Cindy Spencer and I were working in monthly installments to train at a very large urban church, one of the most repeated queries coming from teachers entering the new Godly Play environment, often inflected with a soupçon of criticism, was, "Where are the toys?"
In many ways, toys as currently deployed are icons for the absence of relationship between adults and children. So as we talk of process, and especially in the context of Montessori's emphasis on the child's self-construction process, let's not forget the way brain development networks with environment, the way Process and Space are integral parts of the same SPIRIT. Montessori saw four aspects of order that the very young were sensitive to: spatial, sensory, temporal, and social, or relational.[12] In other words, it's not just about how we as guides introduce the physical environment to the child, but also about our presence with the child in that process of discovery and connection. We attend, which means not only that we are present but that we are willing to wait.
The new absence of the adult in the life of the very young child in our "first world" is cause for alarm. Just rent the DVD of the recent documentary Babies[13] and observe especially the constant physical connection to the mother in the first months of life of the little girl Ponijao, from Namibia. This summer in Colorado Springs, Jerome spoke to us of "attachment" and our American predilection for "detachment." Here's Canadian physician Gabor Maté's take on the current state of the parent-child relationship in North America:
[...] the human brain does not develop on its own. It does not develop according to the genetic program. It depends very much on the environment. The essential condition for the physiological development of these brain circuits that regulate human behavior, that give us empathy, that give us a social sense, that give us connection with other people, that give us a connection with ourselves, that allow us to mature - the essential condition for these circuits, for this physiological development, is the presence of emotionally available, consistently available, non-stressed, attuned, parenting caregivers. Now, what do you have in a country where the average maternity leave is six weeks? These kids don’t have emotional caregivers available to them. What do you have in a country where poor women - nearly 50% of them - suffer from postpartum depression? When a woman has postpartum depression, she can’t be attuned to the child.[14]
Let's return to Krishna Kumar:
It's in the nursery that teaching is losing its greatest dignity at the greatest possible speed, and this is where, I think, the profession has become most vulnerable. And even as we cast our glance higher and wider, we mustn't let this frontier become even more vulnerable. Teaching the young has to be seen as the most sensitive of all teaching-related research, activities, and struggles. It would be my first agenda for reforming systems around the world.[15]
What has struck me this Advent as I also ponder the stuff of this blog are the echoes of our prophetic literature in Montessori's vision of the young child, particularly from Isaiah 11. Here are some samples of what I heard or sang at church last Sunday:
1 And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:
2 And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD;
3 And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the LORD: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears:
4 But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. [...]
6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. (KJV)
And this:
My child, as prophet of the Lord,
you will prepare the way,
to tell God's people they are saved
from sin's eternal sway.
Then shall God's mercy from on high
shine forth and never cease
to drive away the gloom of death
and lead us into peace.[16]
Now let us in good Godly Play fashion lay this passage from Maria Montessori's Education for a New World down alongside the two above:
Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiment upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New [Human Being] who will not be the victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society.[17]
At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the One who comes to change everything, the Prophetic Child. As parents and teachers we don't want to fall into the kind of rabid messianic delusion that that child is our child, or one of our children. But there is a quality of existential hope that we need to bring to the work, or that some might say the children bring to us, inspire in us, when we are really attending to their learning process. In the fractal particular of each child we sense the great eternal movement of life, are attuned to the kind of waiting Neruda tells us the Ocean and its creatures know, and are willing to cast the nets of our wonder out into the darkness, where the unexpected outcomes wait for us.
I'll conclude this bit of wandering with the second verse of my favorite waiting song, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel:"
O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.[18]
Next week, I promise, much, much less of me and a whole garland of poets looking at the process of development.
Blessed attending to you.
[1] cf. any number of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster novels: Bertie's only claim to academic fame is a school prize in Scripture Knowledge, hence the Ezekiel allusion.
[2] Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. p. 5.
[3] Ibid., p. 39.
[4] Ibid., p.37
[5] Bernt Amadeus Capra © 1991. Paramount Studies. VHS only. A clip on Descartes at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO9HDvWt0dU
The video available here: http://www.amazon.com/Mindwalk-VHS-Liv-Ullmann/dp/6302670306
[6] Find at: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/enigmas/
[7] See Angeline Stoll Lillard's Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
[8] I have misplaced my copy of a talk Kegan, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, delivered at a February 2003 conference in Chicago titled, "Will Our Faith Have Children?" When I can track it down again, I will provide more information.
[9] Montessori, Maria. Education for a New World. Oxford: Clio Press, 1996. pp. 61-66. See the
chapter titled "The Bugbear of Discipline."
[10] "The Art and the Craft of It." 11/13/2010.
[11] Kumar, Krishna. "Montessori's Role in Educational Reform." NAMTA conference, Seattle, WA. 2009. In
this selection, Kumar is referencing the educational thought of Lawrence Stenhouse.
[12] See Ch. 8, "Order," in Montessori's The Secret of Childhood. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.
[13] © 2010, Thomas Balmès. Focus Features. The film looks at the first year of life of four children. Ponijao is joined by Mari in Japan, Bayar in Mongolia, and Hattie in San Francisco.
[14] From an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on 11/24/2010. Find at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/24/dr_gabor_mat_on_adhd_bullying
[15] Kumar, Krishna. "Montessori's Role in Educational Reform." NAMTA conference, Seattle, WA. 2009.
[16] Carl P. Daw. Jr. © 1989 by Hope Publishing Co., Carol Stream, IL 60188. Sung to "Forest Green,"
Adapter and Harmonist: Ralph Vaughan Williams from The English Hymnal, © 1906 Oxford
University Press.
[17] Montessori, Maria. Education for a New World. Oxford: Clio Press, 1996. pp. 2-3.
[18] Verse 2, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." Translated from 12th Century Latin into English by John M.
Neale, Mediaeval Hymns, 1851.
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