Teach like Finland?

Okay, I admit it. I am a fan of Nordic noir. I am, therefore, intrigued by all things Nordic.

So you can imagine my interest as an educator in the book Teach Like Finland: 33 Strategies for Joyful Classrooms. How can one capture the joy described as being present in more Finnish classrooms, to make education meaningful for students?

Author Tim Walker, an American primary school teacher,  has taught in Finnish schools for several years. His observations on simple changes that any educator could make in their own learning space, regardless of the systemic educational regime that may be in place, are simple. Most of the them are examples of what good educators already do here in Australia.

The foundation of the book is that educators in Finland seek to promote joyful teaching and learning. Walker builds the book on five principles of happiness that, once basic needs are met, encourage joyfilled and meaningful learning. The five principles are:

Belonging 

Autonomy

Mastery

Mind-set

Well-being

Now, anyone who works in early childhood education and care, or outside school hours education and care, will recognise many of these principles as being present in the learning frameworks and quality areas mandated by regulatory bodies.

So, why don’t we take these principles and apply them to our classrooms as we do to in our education and care settings? Some schools do. And, as Walker notes, many teachers can do so in simple ways within their own classrooms.

Take the 15 minute breaks every hour, for example. Finnish schools break every hour to give children a leisure and outside break.  Research supports such breaks for optimum performance and wellbeing for both adults and children. In outside school hours education and care we encourage autonomy so that children themselves take a break from one activity or move to another, naturally.

But it seems to me that even in more conventional classrooms, and in our homeschooling and unschooling experiences,  educators can allow small breaks between sessions, times when children take a break from more formal work to select an activity or simply read and talk or play a game before moving on. I used to do the same in my classroom in a community school in which I used to teach, with positive results in learning and in relationship building.

While the books itself is well-researched, with both qualitative and quantitative research, its tone is a little smug. In fact, it is not a joy to read.

The irony of this amuses me.

I still recommend this book for educators and parents, and encourage us all to look at how we teach, not only look at what it is we do teach.

 

Divergent…and other stories

“We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.” …

This quote, from the novel Divergent, highlights why some of what I read is Young Adult fiction.

I read for truth. Truth and hope. 

Young adult novels, regardless of genre, reflect the virtue of hope. They are not afraid to honestly portray hope as a human desire. The worlds of YA novels are not tainted by unnervng, unforgiving, unending cyncicism. For, while cynicism, exists, as in Quicksilver by R. J. Anderson, the cynicism of  a girl who is different and who learns to mistrust others, there also exists a parallel of hope . Maybe things can be different. Maybe “… two people who care deeply about something bigger than each other,……drawn together by a shared commitment to that common ideal or goal” can describe both friendship – and love.

It is this hope that marks the call to action one encounters in YA fiction. YA fiction has a strong voice. It is often written in first person. It bends genres – think of Eleanor and Park – romance fiction but also realistic fiction, with some humour and the marks of pop culture. The novel, of despair tinged with hope and love, with a celebration of  different, is also, in its way, a coming of age and school story , with overtones of philosphical fiction (What does it mean to be us? What  is love? Who and what are we?).

Young adult fiction forms and informs the reader (And for those of us who are no longer young adults, it reminds us of this formation and youth).

Who can forget the strength, resilience and search for roots in Dicey, from Homecoming and Dicey’s Song?

Or the advice given to Opal, in Because of Winn Dixie, to hold those we love loosely, in the palms of our hands.

Young adult fiction encourages new writers. The writing is often superb. Articulate voices craft these stories. They invite us into the narrative, into the minds and souls of the characters. We become a different person after immersion in the lives of others.

We remember. And we look to the future.

We, like the young adults for whom YA fiction is written, begin to understand more of our complex world and more of the complexity of others.

YA fiction pushes us towards positive change.

The energy of travelling-to-a-place.

In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert notes that ‘Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies’.

That bullet journal thing.

On my monthly trips to Canberra (Australia’s capital city) , on the Greyhound bus or Murrays coach, I have noticed the ebbs in energy. The day starts with promise. On the bus at 8 or 9, depending on which coach service I use. Books, snacks,  a drink, laptop, phone, bullet journal, all accompany me. I am set for the day. The energy level is high, full of portent, for who knows what the day will bring?

My lunch time forage in Canberra is always at the National Gallery. Sometimes I find thirty minutes for art. Sometimes I spend twenty minutes in the gallery bookshop, amid books and journals and awe-inspiring merchandise. Always, I retreat to the coffee shop, with the view of trees and water and the intriguing, tasty menu. I eat. I think. I look. I rest. Before work and seminars.

I imagine that this feeling of thoughtful rest is what it would be like to live here, in Canberra. I imagine that I would visit the gallery regularly. I imagine a life of creativity.

I think imagine is the clear, cinnamon word here. For then I rush. To work. And to grab an uber  back to the bus station that evening (It has been said that you know a city  by its public transport. Or lack thereof. The paucity says something of Canberra, I think).  With dwindling energy for the three and a half hour bus trip home.

Canberra has become a monthly interlude of solitary reading and reflection. A joy.

Canberra has become a monthly sapper of energy, on the long bus trip home, often sitting in the dark.

In this way, Canberra for me  exemplifies the two energies of which Gilbert wrote. The energy of visiting and the energy of living. That contradiction we often feel in our lives, between doing and being, working and living.

Do we live our life in interludes or is there a seamlessness about our life and work and play and love? Can we grab life by its shirt collar, pull it towards us and enjoy, before it passes in energy drained?

Monthly trips to Canberra remind me that life should be grabbed at, lived in, loved in, experienced. It should reflect the creativity and reflection of both our interior and exterior selves.

We should reach out to life..before things snap us up, and tie us down. Before life decides for us how we should live.

We should decide for ourselves. With reflection and energy and others.

Our life then is never cut and dried. We reflect and make change. We enjoy the status quo but know that there is always another road. Another journey. Another adventure to explore.

And getting there, wherever there is, whatever our goals and duties are in life, is half the fun.

Enjoy.

 

 

Travel far enough. You will meet yourself.

(A paraphrase of a thought, from the novel Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell).

21 gun salute, seen from the Melbourne War Memorial.

This year I have been to Melbourne twice. I love Melbourne, its theatre and cafes and lane ways . The VGA and Southbank. The museum. The little bars across the city.

I love its warmth in summer but remain ambivalent about its cold-to-me winters.

My recent trip allowed exploration of the wintry Botanic Gardens and War Memorial, followed by a leisurely trek down Brunswick St. in Fitzroy.

It’s those leisurely treks in travelling, those long escapades of wandering without specific intent, that allow us to find ourselves when we travel. Our day to day lives seem to prohibit such meandering but travel? Travel enlarges it, downright demands it.

And in that meandering we discover a little more about who we are and what we want and the life that we wish to live.

Climbing the trails of the Botanic Gardens, autumn coloured leaves scattering with each of my steps, arriving to eat a spicy Indo-Chinese inspired breakfast at Jardin Tan, gave me active pause.

Active pause? Yes, the meditation and reflection that accompanies walking or other physical exercise, and is stimulated by conversation with others over food and drink. Sparkling is best, you know, at breakfast.

I thought about my life and study. Where do I see myself in three years or five years?

Now, I never really plan the future, apart from superannuation. I like to go with the flow. I have a fear of goals. I think my life might collapse (and in the past I have had this creeping fear of life, that when things go good hey must immediately be followed  by bad).

I know now that life just is. It is not to be feared.

I know now that the future will come whether I dream of it or not. So better to add some future dreams to my mindful present.

This I discovered on my Melbourne meanderings. To an outsider I was eating and walking and attending a twenty-one gun salute for the Queen’s Birthday and ransacking bookshops and secondhand shops in Brunswick St. While eating frozen custard.

But inside I was scavenging thoughts and emotions. Fossicking to find the me that sometimes gets lost in the busyness of life.

I realise that it is too tempting to live two lives instead of one. Too necessary for me. I cannot give up one interest or life for the other. This is me. The scanner.

I think it’s just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it’s more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn’t beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel. Elizabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents.

 

Why do you go away? So you can come back.

I am a big fan of Terry Pratchett’s books – especially the Bromeliad series. 

But the quote in the title above comes from A Hat Full of Sky, from Discworld . 

As I sit here in Adelaide, preparing to go home to Sydney, I reflect on my 2017 travels yet again. Last week, it was thoughts of Virginia. Today, it is thoughts of Adelaide.

I used to live in Adelaide. Twice, in different parts of my history. In the last year or so, I have visited it frequently. Family, you know.

Adelaide, however, is at its best in autumn and winter. Now, I am not a winter person, but the grey clouds interspersed with blue wash the city with watercolours. The starkness of the war memorial is edged against the wintry light. The brick detail of the older bluestone buildings and homes (especially those California bungalows) hints at some of the early city, with its need to promote itself  economically and its wise use of both natural resources and inexpensive labour.

People come to South Australia for its wineries. Who am I to question that?

I hold, however, that a trip to Adelaide should encompass a visit to both the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the South Australian Museum.

The art gallery has an extensive collection, occasionally  categorised by themes, so that you can immerse yourself in works from ancient Rome to the current day. Works from Australia and indigenous Australia, from Asia, and from Europe. All housed in an historic building, along the path of Adelaide’s cultural boulevard on North Terrace.

My recent trip had me enveloped in the Ramsay Art Prize, so that I took home with me images of political commentary, of social and personal angst.

We have a common home but what is our social imagination, that relationship between self and the wider society? How do we imagine our collective social life?

In part, these questions are why we travel.

For our souls and hearts and minds to be smashed with beauty.

War memorial, Adelaide, South Australia.

 

 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness….

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Mark Twain

This year has been a kind of a travelling year for me. To Virginia, in the U.S and far from my Sydney home, for a conference (and a meet-up with friends). To Melbourne. Twice so far. To Adelaide and to Canberra, many times each.

And, as Twain wrote in his book about travels {The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It) , travel allows you to see people, in all their humanness, in a different way. You see the architectural choices that differ from region to region. You participate in the natural landscape, both developed and undeveloped. Your sense of the seasons changes. The understanding of other places and ways to live grows.

I find that travel leaves me pleasantly haunted for light-drenched other worlds – the places I have visited and the home to which I return.

Take Virginia, for example. Not my first visit to the States but my first visit post the November election and results, and my first trip to a Southern-ish (southeastern) state. I flew from Sydney to LA; from LA to Charlotte, North Carolina; from Charlotte to Newport News, VA.

I would call Newport News a small city, a planned city. Somewhat reminiscent of my trips to Canberra (but that description will come later). Except for the chain stores and chain restaurants. Barnes & Noble. Chilli’s. Olive Garden. Red Lobster.

I walked. A lot. The almost-spring weather was colder than I am used to but burst into gloriously warming sunshine mid-day. I walked from the university to the Mariner’s Museum ( a 30 minute walk, whose length shocked my co-presenters and the lecturers from the university. ‘We use cars’ one told me. Indeed, the only other walkers I saw the whole week were fitness walkers , on specially designated nature and walking trails. displaying eerily beautiful lakes with forests of a kind you just don’t see in Australia. Deer even).

The history sold me. I uber-ed to a plantation home, one that had been used by the Confederates to shore up supplies and to shoot at Yankees from redoubts. I trailed along the famous area of the Monitor and Merrimac battle. Gracious, generous friends (I would say internet friends but we met that day in person and they are more than passerbys on social media) drove me to historic Williamsburg.  Living museums reenacting Colonial and Revolutionary-era life.

I was there, rooted in the smells and air and memories of   a part of America’s history.

I was there, talking to friendly strangers and taxi and uber drivers, of their lives, of the minimum wage, of health care and the military and opportunities and education costs.

We may differ in our understanding of government but there was no difference in our humanity. They were a friendly bunch, especially to weird Aussie women who travel alone and speak  fast and funny. I hope that we Australians are as friendly to those who travel here.

At the conference, I met people from Kenya, Cameroon, the Philippines, Ireland, Turkey, in addition to those from the States. I was the only Australian. Our sharing of stories of lives around the world highlighted for me, not our differences, but our similarities. We all longed for many of the same things, for meaning, connection, intention, ‘the good life’ (and what that  means was a discussion in itself. An unfinished discussion.).

In our diversity there also existed some homogeneity. There was open welcoming: “Come”, one said. “Come and stay with me in New York for a few days. Extend your trip.” But that will have to wait for another time. next conference, perhaps?

Because every time I travel I rekindle the urge to travel more. Big trips and small trips. Local and afar. My travel appetite is never satiated.

I lean forward to “the next crazy venture beneath the skies” (Jack Kerouac, On the Road).

Richard Lee Mansion, VA.

 

Family is our heritage

 The heritage of the family. Or, as Blaise Paschal would say, the heart of the family.

I have often written of this heritage as  ‘strength’. That ability to cope, to keep going, to persevere. The heritage of strength. To never give up and, rightly or wrongly, to stick to being themselves, my family, with their agency and decision-making, both individualistic and collective.

Present, too, in my family, has been the strength to know when to cut your losses and make a change.

So, strength has been a theme, a thread, in the heritage of the family.

But I think there is more. To be honest, when I think of family love and family battles, of parties fading to fights, of solidarity and connectedness, I think of family itself. I realize that the heritage is more than a character trait or a story weaving its way through our lives, a tradition that keeps on being traditional. No, to reduce the family heritage to such simplicity is to do the heritage injustice. Because, ultimately, the heritage of our family is ‘family’ itself.

The ties that wind and bind, with love and sometimes dislike, inexplicably wrap us together as family. We pass on the intensity of the experience to our children. They, too, come to know family as a heritage that one can never quite escape.

And, surprisingly, we come to understand that the heritage of family is something you do not want to escape. It is you, your heritage. It is in all the good and all the bad. It is both the utopia and the dystopia.

It, family,  is there in the books and movies and music and quotes. The shared memories of childhood. The standing together against all odds, even in the busyness of life and the rare opportunity to gather as family.

We know life because of family.

This is our heritage.

The exception, not the rule

I think somehow that those people who are held up as examples are exceptions, not the rule. The ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’ thing. You know, those times when we, and others, point out the exceptions to say – look, it’s possible, if  they can do it so can you.

But we do ourselves a disservice when this happens. For the exceptions are not the rule.

The rule is the rest of us, living messy lives, stringing life and money and events and people together in a sometimes haphazard, sometimes organised, often chaotic fashion

I see it with money. Some people just sock it away, make amazing investments, own three houses, retire early. We can learn from them – but, in our own way.

They, these people,  are exceptions because of the cost, the life cost, the opportunity cost, the experience cost. There is always a cost to our actions, whatever that cost may be. And the cost for others may not be do-able, or even want-able. So we, the others not the exceptions, save and put money away for retirement but, no (sigh?), we don’t always make the best choices.

The same with food and exercise. Some seek perfection (a nebulous word, really, when one speaks in physical terms). They attain their version of this perfection. Yet, there are those of us who work hard, and eat well, but who also know that not all happiness is attained in physical terms. We count the cost of believing in physical beauty.

Homeschoolers do this, too. Some search for and write out the perfect schedule, the orderly classical curriculum, with children on track for early university and scholarships and ‘success’. Others do a bit of this, a bit of that, a great deal of messy learning and discussion while still reaching academic goals. This, indeed, is the norm and not the exception.

So, is it okay not to be exceptional?

Isn’t  this just a version of accepting and promoting mediocrity?

I think not.

I think it is a version of wanting the good, of working towards that which is good, within the complexities of self, others and community.

I think that just keeping on, towards the good, can be a compassionate approach to life.Showing compassion and understanding for oneself and for others, both when we succeed and when we falter. In our messy, non-exceptional lives.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s the small things

Our Lady of Lourdes

This is how I arranged the dining table centrepiece before bed last night..a visual reminder, for all who rise in the early or not so early hours of the morning…and who wander past the dining area to the kitchen for breakfast. A reminder of today’s feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.. Saints book, candles; Fr Lovasik book on Our Lady of Lourdes; dh’s statue of Our Lady, from his childhood home….and our art focus book.

A week or so ago, someone asked me Why I Bother. Their point was I am doing a lot of work outside the home at the moment, a lot of stuff in the home for Kumon and for volunteer stuff, and at midnight, before bed and an early start the next morning for Mass, I do things like arrange a centrepiece for the table.

Don’t bother, I was told. Let others do the chores and don’t worry about the extras.

But I do want to “worry” about the extras.

It is the extras that make the house a home, a refuge, something set apart. That make a life, really.

I said awhile back, to a priest, that women don’t always have time for the great inventions, for the great works, not because we are less inclined to these things but because our days and minds are often filled with little things…little things that never seem to amount to much, that no one may even notice if done or left undone, but which make a mark on the lives of family and friends.

Creating a space, a nook, for quiet reading and sitting. For movies. Putting out flowers and candles. Planning a dessert for a saints day. Plumping up cushions and scattering an interesting book. Texting friends. Having a person who is lonely over for a cuppa..and including the kids in the converation. Sending a smile.

I am not advising mothers and wives and women to be martyrs. I certainly take time for reading, for work, for my study, for workouts. But my mind and days are also full of All Those Small Things ( Blink 182).

And I bother.

‘A man,’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house!’ Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.

And not at all true. But the point is made..a woman often does make a subtle difference. Shouldn’t that difference be calculated, for the good, for beauty, for people?

 Thus the “perfect woman” (cf. Prov 31:10) becomes an irreplaceable support and source of spiritual strength for other people, who perceive the great energies of her spirit. These “perfect women” are owed much by their families, and sometimes by whole nations.
In our own time, the successes of science and technology make it possible to attain material well-being to a degree hitherto unknown. While this favours some, it pushes others to the edges of society. In this way, unilateral progress can also lead to a gradual loss of sensitivity for man, that is, for what is essentially human. In this sense, our time in particular awaits the manifestation of that “genius” which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance: because they are human! – and because “the greatest of these is love” (cf. 1 Cor 13:13).MULIERIS DIGNITATEM Pope John Paul II

Why do I bother? Out of love..not just for family, but for friends, for others, for people I meet, for love of God.

A recent homily on St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, Chapter 13 ( If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal… ) challenged all of us, husbands, wives, women, men, single, married, religious..all of us to serve with love. If we love, we are not jealous; we do not act out of selfishness and concern for ourselves; we act with love and care for others.

I must act with that feminine genius of which the Pope spoke, with that sensitivity for human beings in every, yes, every, circumstance…

A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves. The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace. Mother Theresa

In my very busy life, I remember some of the stories of my childhood and early teen years, those stories that shaped me. The Little House on the Prairie series. The Anne of Green Gables books. The Meet the Austins series. The Dimity boarding school books. All those Pollyanna novels. Jane Austen. Swallows and Amazons. Noel Streatfield. Verily Anderson. Dodie Smith. Bridge to Terabithia. Amongst others.

What was it that attracted me to these books?

 Their vision of family life. Of normality. Of fun. Of dinners and chats and walks and time together.

 I take this vision and try to live it out, in my whirlwind of activity and technology.

 I bother with the little things.

 The extras that are not really extras. For, as we women, seek careers and study, seek good, seek to be truly ourselves it is sad if we also lose sight of what it is that makes a home…us.

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world. Mother Theresa

A happiness project?

‘He took comfort in the rich random patterns of his life.’

So Says Christopher Plummer, in the movie Hector and the Search for Happiness.

Hector, a psychiatrist perturbed by his life and its rhythms and routines, takes off for an adventure. He travels the world, he reconnects with old friends, and he asks people if they are happy and what makes them so. He scribbles their answers in his notebook, amongst sketches and quotes and dreams.

Hector asks, really, what is the nature of happiness.

I was reminded of this film by two things. An excellent blogpost by my friend on The Happiness Advantage, and a discussion with students at work yesterday, on what it means to be happy.

We, the students and I, pondered questions along these lines…..Is it enough to be happy or do we want meaning or flourishing or achievement in our lives? What about the role of pleasure? We compared Epicurus and Aristotle on happiness and eudaemonia. Thus, we discussed the nature of happiness…is it pleasure? Can a truly altruistic life be happy, or do we need some pleasures as well in our lives? Enjoying a cup of coffee, the smile of another, stretching out after a hard day. The ecstasy of prayer.

Ultimately, the students wondered about universal principles of happiness. Aristotle thought there were these principles, principles that lead to eudaemonia or flourishing. These build on what it means to be human and the idea of virtue.

Surprisingly, much of what Hector notes mirrors that of Aristotle. Aristotle points out, for example, that ‘Man is a political creature’, so that ‘man is a rational creature who lives in poleis (societies)’. Hector also notes the role of societies in happiness, writing that ‘It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people’.

This leads me to ponder happiness and human flourishing. Part of this is purpose and that corresponding P word, passion.

It helps to be aware of our purpose. To lead a life on purpose implies intention. For this, it seems to me, we need some time for prayer and reflection, as an ongoing thing and not just once-a-year. We also need to look at what it is that makes us smile, interests us, breeds enthusiasm (our passions).

And some of that is, simply, self-care. It’s hard to be purposive if we are generally tired or unwell or so busy that we don’t have time to just sit and be and pray. That’s the bone-tired that many mothers of young children feel. And yet it is doubly important that they, too, have time for self-care, for reflection, for enjoying nature and the world and their children and life, to help with burnout.

For parents, too, understanding flourishing means we can promote this flourishing in our children. It is a holistic approach.

No-one is always happy, or flourishing, or being intentional and purposive. That’s okay. We know that.

Overall, however, our life should have meaning and growth and pleasure, caring for others and caring for ourselves. Yes, I am talking here of loving God and neighbour.

To quote Cheryl, a character in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, yet-another-movie-about-life-and-happiness: ‘I love mysteries. There’s parts you think can’t connect and then in the end they do.’

I think she is talking about life. And meaning. And purpose. And happiness.