After lunch in the Grade Two classroom I was in today, children have a choice of silent reading or drawing. Several help themselves to large sheets of white paper from a drawer. When folded in half the paper perfectly mimics the dimensions of a laptop computer, with its fold-up screen and keyboard. At circle time some of the children show their products. Julius has a Toshiba. His keyboard has the letters in rows in alphabetical order, rather than qwerty, but he does have up-down and right-left arrows to one side. He demonstrates how his laptop folds up. I ask him if his Toshiba costs a lot. He thinks about it for a minute and decides to come clean: “A real one would be about $500. This one? Nothing.”
Thursday morning: a Grade One French Immersion class. The children have spent part of the previous day doing a collage on space. A sheet of shiny silver paper is suspended over one of the blackboards and their cutout drawings of space creatures and planets are taped on top. When it comes to journal-writing time the children suggest two topics: Les animaux and l’espace. But what about “Les animaux dans l’espace”? This idea elicits a few chuckles as the children imagine horses in astronaut suits, or cows browsing on the moon. Then Ashton, sitting in the front row, reverses the combination and comes up with “L’espace dans les animaux.”
Every day at Sir James Douglas, an elementary school in Victoria, the principal repeats three phrases after the announcements: “Work hard, learn lots, and do something kind for someone else.” At first, when I heard this gentle admonition coming out of the P.A. for the second or third time, I thought, “Who’s really listening to that message?” Perhaps our parents had similar words of advice or caution for us, which we received on countless occasions and did our best to ignore. It’s easy to tune out the familiar, even when we know it might be helpful. And yet, I think there’s a way that a message like “Do something kind for someone else”, repeated to the point of becoming just a series of sounds, devoid of meaning, actually does carry some latent energy. I don’t know if the principal recognizes the power of her words, but I suspect her intention in repeating the phrases is based on a hunch—an intuition that repetition takes words (and the ideas they represent) into the mind and body, past the conscious aspect of thinking, right into the heart.
Recent Comments