The Tao nourishes by not forcing.

By not dominating, the Master leads.

From section 81 of the Tao Te Ching

Education cannot be forced.  The minds of children are not empty waiting to be filled.  They come to us already full—full of dreams and imaginations, fears and hopes, wacky inventions and little songs.  They are brimming with wisdom.  The art of teaching consists in drawing out the loveliness of children and weaving it with what you want them to learn.  Trying to stuff in facts, most of which are out of context, is futile.  It might make for people who can play trivia games, but it doesn’t engender citizens of the world who are filled with character, understanding, and compassion.

If we aren’t meant to cram random facts into the heads of children how do we teach them?  The key is in two of the words from this passage from Lao Tsu:  Nourish and lead.  True education nourishes the minds, heart, and bodies of children.  True educators lead, they do not compel. 

Many people have pointed out that the original Latin roots of the word education mean to bring forth, to draw out.  The Latin, educere, is also related to the word, dux, which is where we get the word duke—a leader.  In other words we want to educate children in such a way as to make them leaders instead of followers; leaders of themselves, savvy to the whims of advertising executives and shady politicians. We want to draw out and nourish the fruits of the Divinity within them.  And this takes gentleness, not force.

Watch gardeners work.  They give the keys to good teaching.  See how they tend the soil.  See how they water the crops.  See how they ensure the leaves have adequate light and space.  Never will you see a gardener reach down and pull out a plant in an attempt to make it grow faster. 

We tend the soil of a child’s intellect by using the gifts they already have within them and merge them with activities that help awaken their interests in the world around them and in the things we want them to learn.  When we couch facts in stories, songs, poems, movement games, and dramatizations we are using the gold already within the minds of children.  These activities nourish the child and allows for the things we want them to learn to take root. 

We water their minds with the sweat of our brow and the tears of our love.  Memorizing songs, poems, stories; writing plays, learning and leading in active learning games—all of this takes work.  It is much easier to simply read the scripted teacher’s edition of a textbook.  The cost is grave however to both the soul of the teacher and the student. 

We give children adequate light and space by protecting their need for outdoor time.  We get them outside at least twice a day for at least a half an hour each time.  We begin the day with active learning games that are both fun and invigorating.  Some people object and say that will wind the kids up and make it impossible for them to sit still.  I say you just haven’t gotten them moving long enough and with the proper, age appropriate activities.  How long am I talking about?  For young children 6-8ish, an hour of active, poetic, musical movement will probably do the trick.  An hour?!  I can just hear it now:  “That’s too much time taken away from learning time!  This isn’t Romper Room!”  Fill the acitvites with things you want the children to learn—anything form times tables to grammar rules and make it active and fun, and they will learn far more, and in lasting ways, than if you sat them down and tried to force the knowledge in by a lecture or movie.  Once children get into the rhythm of activity first thing in the morning they will welcome desk work, provided it is appropriate and meaningful and creative.

Sunlight, open windows, outdoor play is crucial to the development of young minds and bodies.  Taking children on nature walks is a lost art in itself, lost amidst fears of lawsuits and too much urban sprawl.  There are ways to bring nature to children and to get children outside.  Do you run the risk of children getting scraped knees?  Yes, but scraped knees are good for the soul (“Remember that time I fell and my leg started bleeding and you picked me up and put that Sponge-Bob band aid on my cut and sang me a song?”—Children remember their wounds, and how we tended them, and how they healed).

Lastly, let the children blossom at their own rate.  Any significant organic learning issues will become apparent with ample time to address them.  In general, every child is different, just as every stalk of corn is different, just as every species of plant is different.  Draw them out with compassion, ease, and understanding.  The moment we get nervous that a student hasn’t learned something in the time we think they should have then that student picks up on our anxiety.  Yes, I realize modern public education builds on itself—layering facts upon facts (largely simply expanding on the same tired facts year after year with bigger and bigger words), and so some teachers worry students will fall behind if they don’t meet the objectives you are required to write on the board.  The task of the teachers is to honor their students not the objectives thought up by someone who doesn’t know your class. 

In short, help your students become leaders by guiding, planting seeds, nourishing them, and tending the gardens of their intellects with active, creative, and imaginative activities.

Over the next few weeks I will be using Lao Tsu’s beguiling and beautiful text: The Tao Te Ching to glean various alternative teaching methods that can be employed in practical ways directly into a classroom, or into the school of your life.  I do not claim to be a scholar of the Tao, nor do I believe everything in the Tao Te Ching applies to education.  In fact, the way I utilize the text should give some indication of my over-arching educational philosophy: there are no cookie-cutter educational systems and the more black and white rules there are the more stressed things are in the classroom and in your life. In other words, I pick and choose what I’ve found works, and leave the rest.  The days of all or nothing are gone…for the most part, that is.

The first lesson comes from Chapter 73*:

The Tao is always at ease.

It overcomes without competing,

answers without speaking a word,

arrives without being summoned,

accomplishes without a plan.

One of the keys to being an effective teacher is to strive to be at ease in the classroom even when things appear to be in chaos.  If you can use tools like deep (belly) breathing, affirmations, and even EFT tapping (“even though things are a bit disorderly right now, I love and accept myself and my students”) then these moments can be strategically utilized to help transform the chaos into order.  After all, Allan Watts once pointed out that even though clouds and surf may appear disorderly there is an indescribable order and beauty in them. 

If you try and compete with the mayhem and yell over the yelling, then more bedlam will ensue.  Lowering the voice, doing mini visualizations (to yourself or with the students) such as imagining mercury dropping in a temperature gauge, will help bring the energy level down in the room.  Really.  Try it.  Beware of contempt prior to investigation.  You do not try to compete with the chaos, you simply transform and channel the energy into productive directions. 

One key thing to do, after the dust has settled, and you’re alone in the classroom or with your own thoughts, is to ask yourself what you need to change in your lesson plans, delivery, or expectations.  Is what you are giving your students really meaningful?  Are you just filling time?  Before asking the students to change, ask yourself what you can do better or differently.  Sometimes when kids are restless it’s because they have a sense that what they’re doing is useless and pointless.  They also sense when you are unattached from your subject matter and/or are unprepared. So love what you teach, make it meaningful to them, and always be prepared.

The use of the body can help break the trance of mayhem in any classroom.  Try using body language, proximity, your eyes, eyebrows, or even physical comedy.  If you are always relying on your voice to direct, teach, discipline, and to praise, students will eventually learn to tune it out.  So become at ease in your body enough to get their attention by doing a little dance if necessary, or by simply walking into the center of the storm and staring intensely at something out the window or on the ceiling.  I guarantee the students will stop and wonder what you’re looking at.  You can also move in close to the loudest students and look them in the eye.  Over the years I have used the one-raised eyebrow trick to great effect.  If you can’t raise your eyebrows then try raising both hands, not in a gesture of surrender, but in a gesture of triumph.  When you do something out of the ordinary the students will stop talking and ask if you’re OK.  To which you answer: “Please turn to page 57 in your textbook.”  Remember the key is to not compete with the disturbance, but to transform it.  Singing works wonders too.  Just start singing a catchy tune and they will soon be singing along.

Physical proximity isn’t just for quelling disturbances either.  It’s also an effective way of sending messages of praise.  Look a student in the eye and give them a gentle nod and smile when they’ve done something well.  They will remember the gesture longer than your words.

In addition to discovering alternative, noncompetitive methods for lowering the noise level of a group of children, you can also preempt outbreaks of commotion by “arriving without being summoned.”  In other words, use your intuition to anticipate where trouble might be brewing and make your presence known in the midst of the cauldron. 

The last part of this passage might appear to be imprudent, and even contradictory to what I just said above about the importance of being prepared, but I do not believe it means to be unprepared or to not have routines and classroom management plans in place.  I think it means to be willing to do something that most curriculum developers discourage teachers from doing nowadays—improvise.  So be prepared, but be prepared to toss the lesson plan out the window if a hornet flies into the room and you end up giving a lesson on insects.  Be willing to move with the flow of the students, and while it may seem like you are succumbing to their whims, in reality you are leading them by dancing with them rather than fighting them.  Honor their sense of curiosity and their wisdom.  Trust them to tell you what they need.  And what they need might not be in your scripted teacher’s edition.  It might have to come from your heart.

*all quotes come from Stephen Mitchell’s translation

I was looking for a blog entry to post when I came across this one that I had written on my last day teaching kindergarten in the inner city.  I wrote it and for some reason it got lost in the shuffle.  So as the new school year begins and I am still laid off from official teaching work, I post this entry about leaving those 26 wonderfully maddening and amazing kindergarteners.

Why am I so surprised at the tears?  I loved my students from day one.  The first time I saw their wide, beautiful faces, shining and radiant, I loved them.  The first time I saw the depth of their pain and suffering, I loved them.  The first time I saw their hunger for food, for positive touch and attention, I loved them.  The first time I had to restrain one of them—on the ground—the child screaming and flailing–my heart burned with love.  When I first saw them flinch to absorb a hit when I simply lifted my hand to pat their shoulder, I loved them.

I think of the ones (5 out the 26) whose fathers are in prison.  I think of one little boy who told me as if he were talking about the weather, “My dad got in a fight last.  Now he’s in jail.  He had a gun.”  I think of the little girl who told me her grandmother was shot and killed a couple months earlier.  I think of the ones whose mothers are 18 years old.  I think of the dad who came in to beat his son right there in the classroom after I had called to tell him his son was acting up (I never called him again).  I think of one little girl who got committed to a mental institution for trying to set her own house on fire and kill her baby brother. I think of the ones who ran around the room throwing punches and chairs.    I think of the ones who told me they had tigers and monsters living in their rooms.  I think of the little girl who came into school every day announcing it was her birthday, and every day I would look surprised and wish her a happy birthday.  

These little ones, whom so many of the other teachers called spoiled, are far from selfish in the usual sense of the word—they are radiant givers of everything they had—they gave it all—wore it all on their sleeves, gave it all in their voices and wide, frightened, excited eyes.

From the depth of their suffering they could be wonderfully kind, tender, and protective of one another.  I think of the ones whose older siblings came to pick them up at the end of the day and how they would hug each other with such relief at the sight of each other.  I think of the ones who wanted to help pass out paper so badly they’d knock down three other kids in the process.  I think of the ones who would fall asleep at the table after we got back from lunch.  I always let them sleep, even when chastised by other teachers.

I know I helped these kids.  I can rejoice in the good I have done.  And I can feel grateful for the love and support I received to help me get through this year.  I remember my mentor Lefty asking when I first started, “Did you ask anyone to pray for you and your students?”  I hadn’t.  So I did, and things got better in terms of my ability to hold these children, have patience with them, and meet their needs.  I even taught them EFT, calling the meridian points Magic Buttons.  I will remember always how these children called me daddy and even sometimes, grandpa.

Now the classroom is empty.  And their voices echo in the woodwork, the ceiling,  the hum of the lights, my heart.  And I need to let them go.  I did the best I could for eight months, and now they are gone.  I can’t save them from their suffering.  I know I shared their suffering these last few months, I helped comfort them, I helped them to bear it, but yet, they need to carry it on their own little, bird-like hearts, and my own heart aches at the thought.  My heart seethes with a fire to protect them, to hold them tightly against the storm, to gather them in and sing to them, wipe their tears with my tears.  And yet, I need to let them go.  But then my heart rails at the thought and whispers, “Why?  Why do you need to let them go?”  “It hurts too much,” I say.  “That’s why you need to hold on to them,” my heart says, “remember this as you go out into the world.  There is unspeakable suffering in the world, and there is also a myriad of ways to love and sooth the broken hearted.”

I want to leave you with a little story that captures the spirit of our classroom by the end of the year.  A little boy had come up to me first thing in the morning asking if I thought there was more than one God.  As we discussed our various ideas on the subject (we agreed there was only one but that It had lots of different names) another student shouted out from the back of the room: “God is everywhere!  Right Teacher?  God’s everywhere, right?”  I turned and walked towards him.  “Yes,” I said, “I think God is everywhere.  Even here.”  And I pointed to his heart.  His face turned upwards towards the sky and slowly spread with a huge smile.  “That’s right,” he beamed, nodding his head, “that’s right.  In here.”  And he began strutting around the room, telling the other kids, “God’s in here.  God’s in here.” And as he thumped himself in the chest, another student started singing “This Little Light of Mine (our morning song).”  And then they all started singing and dancing, with this little boy right in the center, spinning until he fell down laughing, still thumping his tender, racing, and glorious heart.

One of the biggest little hellions that I teach came up to me today and asked how to spell my name.  My heart leapt a little as I wrote it on a piece of paper and gave it to him.  He ambled back to his seat and sat down and laboriously began copying what I wrote.  Writing is a real chore for this young man.