A commonality of these haiku is that they’re often about autumn. It seems I have frequently given this lesson in October or November, and reached for the nature right in front of me to make my example for the students.
One of the lessons I frequently gave children was how to write a haiku. There’s many children (I think maybe many people, but I’m not here to make that vast a sweeping statement) for whom writing is really difficult, and constraints (such as most poetry has) can support them and focus their work. So I give lots of poetry lessons, and you can’t get much lower stakes than seventeen syllables, so I often start there. (If they need something even lower stakes, it’s acrostic poetry, FYI). I explain the rules and then we write.
And every one of the dozens of times I have given this lesson, I have had to write a haiku. Because you model it, right?
I am going to start posting those haiku here when I come across them because why not?
I was thinking of moving to Colombia. So, a couple of years ago, I went to visit Colombia, because I had never been, and it makes sense to go somewhere you might like to move to before moving there.
And it’s lovely, by the way. Highly recommend Colombia. For visiting or living.
Anyway, I am on a tour with this Colombian guide, who among other things said to me “Tourists never usually ask me these questions.” (I was asking about voting and political parties.) And he asks me what I do.
“Oh, I’m a teacher,” I say.
“Wow! Teaching is a very important job. How do you like it?”
“A great deal, actually…it’s super rewarding. Except for the part where I can get shot at my job.”
“That has literally never happened here. I can’t even imagine it,” he tells me.
I was in Medellín. Land of infamous, highly armed drug lords. In Colombia. A country that, technically speaking, still has a skirmishy sort of civil war going with far left guerillas.
So, you know, not a land without guns and gun violence.
#recently had a conversation with a therapist about how education is (potentially, if you do it right) the front end trauma prevention portion of their work, which is the clean up, post trauma work.
#and that’s why I worked in education #and they said ‘ohhhhhhhh’
#and maybe there’s still a pathway for them to help when they are burned out on the therapy end.
This gem from Maria Montessori’s P͟s͟y͟c͟h͟o͟g͟e͟o͟m͟e͟t͟r͟y͟ :
“I do not want to discuss the argument raised by many regarding interest and effort here, contrasting these two faces of the same coin. In fact, many have said that it is necessary to choose between interest and effort in education – calling interest pleasant execution and effort unpleasant execution. However, effort is implemented actively, using one’s own energy: and this is done when there is interest. Man is not a machine. He acts when his interest, generosity or enthusiasm is aroused. Furthermore this living, active and strong man will know how to make the unpleasant effort.”
The adjective that stood out to me was generosity. I have countless times witnessed in the classroom a child patiently and kindly helping another child with an activity that is nowhere near their favorite out of a straightforward sense of generosity. Not only that, I regularly watch generosity spark the other two adjectives in that sentence: interest and enthusiasm. We are collaborative beings meant to do things together and nowhere is this more clear than in a well-functioning Montessori elementary environment.
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