Learning, Healing, and Change: Notes on Teaching in Testing Times

By Rebecca Coolidge

Drawing on illuminating stories from thirteen years as a public school teacher, Ms. Coolidge challenges cultural assumptions about effecting learning and change, making a compelling case for a bigger-picture perspective in the classroom and in society at large. She shares personal insights about learning as an innate gift, similar to healing, which is fed by responsive interactions. Learning is at the core of all human endeavors and is essential for individual well-being, democracy, and social progress. Although rigid separation is our cultural habit, good teaching is embodied, integrated with the arts and play, and engaged with diverse perspectives. Ms. Coolidge offers food for thought on how 21st-century federal education reforms, by elevating the status of words and right answers at the expense of connection and meaning, have played a key role in a reactionary cultural backlash.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645367536

Rebecca Coolidge

Rebecca Coolidge lives in San Francisco with her husband, two children, and dog. She divides her time between parenting, substitute teaching, working as a massage therapist, hiking, and playing jazz piano for fun. Ms. Coolidge taught the primary grades in public schools for 13 years.

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Schools

About the Author

Rebecca Coolidge lives in San Francisco with her husband, two children, and dog. She divides her time between parenting, substitute teaching, working as a massage therapist, hiking, and playing jazz piano for fun. Ms. Coolidge taught the primary grades in public schools for 13 years.

Dedication

To my children who delight and inspire me every day: Madeline Rose (9), and Josephine Miranda (7). You have taught me so much about connection, joy, and what matters in this life. To their father, my husband, whose love and wisdom inspire me daily. To my mother, who has always encouraged creativity and passion. And to my late father, John Stanhope Coolidge (1926 – 2012), who passed on a deep reverence for the infinitely nuanced power of the word.

Copyright Information ©

Rebecca Coolidge (2020)

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Austin Macauley is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In this spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Coolidge,Rebecca

Learning, Healing, and Change: Notes on Teaching in Testing Times

ISBN 9781643783505 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781643783512 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645367536 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020919623

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2020)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 28th Floor

New York, NY 1000

USA

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank, first of all, my loving and wise husband, John, who made this project possible by providing invaluable moral support, kid coverage to allow me time to write, and all sorts of the fine-tuned editing and technical assistance that he is famous for. I thank Jennifer Morgan, Mark Graham, Carolyn Coolidge, Richard Levien, and Sue Blair, who took time from very busy lives to offer detailed feedback as well as advice and encouragement. I thank the good people at Austin Macauley who expressed faith in this project and helped me through the publishing process (after waiting a good six months while I made a few changes.) Last but not least, I thank all of my teachers who have helped shape me through tireless work and devotion.

Preface

While I was working on the final revision of this book in the spring of 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic put a sudden end to routines as we knew them. Our first year in a wonderful new school community ended abruptly, along with my first-year subbing around the city. When the school closures were announced in early March, we had just celebrated Maddie’s birthday a week early in order to accommodate the beginning of what was going to be an extremely busy first soccer season for both girls, and for us as well. Several weeks later, we are still struggling with our need for structure and routine on the one hand, and on the other, simply having too much to manage. With so much incomprehensible suffering going on, we know we are incredibly fortunate to be safe and healthy, and to have been spared many catastrophes.

As other disasters have done, the pandemic has magnified existing problems and conditions, including social inequalities. With all the variation of experience, still there is a sense that we are being called to slow down, somehow—to step back and look at the Big Picture. When we reach out across cyberspace or around the neighborhood to support and connect with each other in our various kinds of suffering, we are dropping into a deeper level of humanity, putting our hearts and our real needs before our heads. It is as though someone accidentally hit the Restart button in the mind of the industrialized human, allowing us to question the sanity of our most stubbornly habitual beliefs. As with our physiological system after a big bodywork session, resetting ourselves involves stepping back and reassessing. What has changed? What was actually going on before (when we were perhaps a little distracted)? What changes should we keep? Are we done making them? All these questions help to make up the bigger one of how we resume normal life from here.

Educators have heroically scrambled to prepare and teach an extensive online curriculum, including regular class meetings, reading groups, office hours, homework assignments (kept very reasonable), recorded video lessons, weekly Parent-Teacher-Child conferences for every student, and a wide assortment of resources. It seems to me that they have been kept plenty busy fulfilling their duty to their supervisors’ supervisors to account for enough instructional minutes in every subject, while simultaneously doing the much more needed work of staying connected, guiding and reassuring students and parents alike (including in their new daunting role as tech support.)¹

At the first weekly Zoom meetings held for us, overwhelmed classroom parents (some with a toddler climbing on their lap) only stared in stunned silence for minutes on end as the teacher gently repeated her invitation for questions. When we have completely forgotten about a call, or when I cannot cajole one or either of my children to join another Zoom meeting, our teachers have been steadfastly understanding and supportive. They keep encouraging us to do the things that work for us and to put the well-being of our children and family first.² They share their own overwhelm with having to reinvent the wheel and their desire to stay connected in this search for a new balance and groove.

Along with health care workers, I think of teachers as being first responders even in the best of times. They reach out a helping hand to people often drowning in all kinds of problems, and this struggle takes its toll. Working as a sub this year was eye-opening and deepened my respect for the daily heroism—patience, grace, devotion, ingenuity and skill—that teachers (and administrators) routinely show in often chaotic situations. Why, in normal times, do we not challenge high-level politicians when they proclaim that there is no excuse for teachers who work in under-performing schools? How did it ever become okay to blame a broken system on the workers trying to function within it? I hope that we will learn to stand up to the institutionalized bullying of teachers and call it out for what it is: a below-the-belt attack on an already beleaguered American public.

The pandemic is revealing many things about our way of life which do not work, though we might want to think they do. We could call them disconnects in our attitudes and modus operandi. The way that Home Schooling has been thrust on parents as a response to shelter in place provides a rich example. I am amazed at the superciliousness of the presumption that parents add a few hours of work onto our day in order to keep our children on track, while still managing to stay on top of everything else. This expectation is not based on the reality of people’s lives, but on a rigid Top Down system of education and governance. It also avoids the question of children’s actual needs—in this case for comfort, reassurance, and quality time with adults who are not going out of their minds.

We can also unpack the directive to find various false notions. One is that parents and teachers are not terribly busy to begin with because working with children is not real work. Another is that teaching young children does not require any particular skill or personal interaction but is merely transmission of information, which can just as easily be done online or through educational videos. And my favorite: that we all can and should plan our day according to a busy schedule which has been decided by some people in high government offices who have their own people to answer to.

It is an interesting coincidence that Earth Week falls during this Pandemic.³ The crisis also comes following the release of two movies and one documentary honoring the teachings of the visionary humanist known as Mr. Rogers. Fred Rogers illuminated the lives of at least a couple of generations. He helped ground us to this Earth, reflecting on what is important and true. (I use the present tense, of course, because his spirit lives on.) His pace is steady and sure. Though he can surely rip on the keys, he shares his music in the same spirit of heartfelt openness and simplicity with which he shares all his thoughts.

I have been hearing the call to slow down and even heeding it, which is a big deal for a speed freak like me. It helps that I can sleep in some in the morning (and my sweet family lets me!) The fact that that there is less reason to do much planning ahead probably doesn’t hurt either. I have been dropping in a little more, learning to take a bit more of the time I need, rather than be tyrannized by the clock—or at least I have been able to notice the insidiousness of the tyranny. I am learning to have more respect for the rhythm of the day itself. Partly because of my age (which is middle), I am finding that this rhythm is much slower than I am accustomed to allowing for.

I have been paying attention to the most pressing needs of my children and myself every day—to eat, to sleep, to read long novels together, to practice music as Einstein recommended, to take a good walk somewhere beautiful.⁴ (We have been asking Maddie’s teacher, a bird enthusiast, about the birds we see at the waterfront near her home.) Maddie also needs to write stories, and Josie needs to climb the monkey bar, which my husband originally installed years ago for doing pull-ups. We are spending a lot of time together having fun however we can. We are getting to know each other more, laughing at each other’s jokes and coming up with a lot more of them together. You could say we are playing, when we can.

We are coming to terms with the fact that we can’t do things, either because they are closed or because we have simply run out of time or energy. It is now considered normal to be stressed out, overwhelmed, and worried about the lack of money coming in. The truth is that, for us and for many of our friends, all of this was already normal—though more stigmatized and marginalized—before the pandemic hit. Thinking back to the school year pre-pandemic, it seems surreal to me now how strong my expectation was that we would all remain on the same course. But the new normal already makes the old normal seem strange: all that running around, all that sense of inadequacy for being too tired and busy to take the kids and ourselves to more places than we were doing.

When shelter in place started, one of my first thoughts, looking at a dizzying array of educational online Pandemic offerings in my email inbox, was to break out the Tai Chi DVD that I found a few years ago at a Yard Sale and spend a little time on it each day. (This was for everyone’s sanity, beginning with my own. I invited my children to watch or join in.) Tai Chi presents a surprising challenge for me with its simplicity: the way it breaks a movement down into steps, and breaks the steps down into slowly controlled shifting of weight. Since I am going slowly enough to be aware of how I am balancing, I keep noticing the need to bring the focus back to how I am grounding in every moment. Over time, little by little, the moves are becoming second nature. I feel the message penetrating slowly and deeply into my nervous system. One thing at a time—imagine that! I can almost do it now! Putting my weight and concentration behind something—well now, that is certainly something! There really is no need to fly by the seat of my pants.

Maybe that partly explains why I have been feeling less guilty about my itchy fingers and more appreciative to have the piano to spread out in (to swing on, actually!) for a few minutes here and there. In fact, I am appreciating more how my joy in creatively digging into something is contagious. Lately, under the wise tutelage of my teacher, I have been inspired to slow down at the piano and do more deep listening. It strikes me how much playing by ear (tuning into the ear, really) is also about connecting deeply to the body and nervous system: tuning into the present. What direction does that note, chord or phrase feel like going in right now? My teacher has been reminding me to notice the beautiful simplicity of the harmony: how the chord tones drive the melody and improvisation, all of it growing more beautifully and uniquely complex as our ear warms to it.

I have been finding insight in the excruciating process of recording and listening to myself at the piano. Mostly it is unnerving to notice how much I get thrown off center by self-consciousness, which pounces on me like a predator. I suddenly catch myself racing. It is an almost instinctive impulse to push the tempo, to speed—to do what we all have been trained to do when the pressure heats up.⁵ Ironically, the thing that sabotages me, scares me out of my skin, is an impulse to prove myself. It has also been an epiphany finally to discover that if I really want to keep it swinging, the main thing I have to do is take it easy. It’s a good rule for living. At any comfortable speed—which could just as well be a fast one, so long as I am in my own skin, not rushing myself—I have something resembling absolute confidence in what I want to say, even if I am making it up as I go along. A playful instinct, a bold freedom, takes the reins. This is what some might call subversive, in the best sense of the word.

It is beginning to feel as though any challenge I have ever faced with my own abilities was actually more about this confidence than anything: my ability to connect with my own rhythm, to connect with others from this place, without reflexive fear and defenses getting in the way. This abstract notion of what I can or cannot do, or how good I am, turns out to be a matter of a stealthy,paralyzing inhibition referred to variously as shyness, insecurity, or stage fright. I imagine it is similar with people who say they are bad at taking tests.

Where exactly does this problem come from, and can we ever address its insidiousness? This thing where we are all trained to step outside of ourselves and look with judgment that is exclusive, cold and mean. This thumbing our nose at the brilliance that comes easily and naturally to children. This way of relating to ourselves, our bodies, each other, and our children as though our value were not inherent. This idea of productivity which pushes us continually past our limit and teaches us to push ourselves in a race against nature and time. This internalized thing which has served the systems of exploitation and repression so well. This learned thing, learned in so many ways whenever we are not honored in the way that Mr. Rogers would have us be for the gift of our unique voice. As if it ever made sense to relate to each other, teach, create, study or do any kind of work without caring most of all about the humanity of the endeavor.

There is clean air and water. Over the years I have been watching the air get worse, seeing a thick layer of brown smog around the Bay Area even on supposedly Green Air days. From Potrero Hill where we walked the other day to pay respects to our school neighborhood, my children and I counted five vehicles on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge at 5 p.m. In some notoriously loud cities, there is talk about hearing birds again with the quiet the pandemic has brought, but this Spring I do not hear birds outside our window in the mornings. And last summer on each of our three traditional camping trips to the Sierras, for the first time we did not hear the chorus at daybreak either. As an auditory learner, the sounds of morning birds represent to me the full joy and glory of spring. I have been worried about a world without that daybreak jubilation, and what else the silence might portend, as I hear reports on alternative media sources about bird and insect populations dropping alarmingly. I hope that we are coming closer to talking about these kinds of existential problems which will continue to affect us all profoundly. They stem from real imbalances which will require a lot of strength and sense of purpose to address.

It occurs to me as I write this that for the first time, we are not talking or being talked to as consumers. The collective focus has been about buying in to the extremely challenging safety measures—not to a political party or candidate, not to this war or that measure to take to clamp down on welfare moms, immigrants, and all of their children’s teachers. When this pandemic passes (as I hope it does), we will be told that Business As Usual—including profound economic disparity, disregard for nature’s balance, and daily infringements of all kinds—is not only sustainable but necessary for our economic recovery.

There is some advantage to having to re-prioritize and reinvent the wheel. We are learning, and we will continue to learn, from this experience. The pandemic is teaching us that in the face of an existential crisis, we can come together with a shared vision of humanity, greater and deeper perhaps than what has been allowed for in the past. In the ninth week of shelter in place, settling somewhat into a new rhythm and structure, I find real hope in how teachers and parents (among others) are extending graceful permission toward each other in our search for things that spark joy. We are all improvising now, keeping our eyes steadily on the essentials of truth, kindness and inspiration. Humanity will prevail.

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Our teachers have been referring to the Digital Divide, which could be seen as almost a shorthand for a great socio-economic disparity which is a part of the diversity we love at our school. Nowadays it seems that what all the students have in common, besides extremely overwhelmed parents, is too much screen time. A great number of people, teachers included, have faced a steep learning curve with technology. It may be a gift, but it is often a cumbersome, confusing, and draining one.

I saw this sweet post on Facebook, addressed to parents with love from All the teachers on Planet Earth:

Don’t stress about schoolwork. In September, I will get your children back on track. I am a teacher and that’s my superpower. What I can’t fix is social-emotional trauma that prevents the brain from learning. So right now I just need you to share your calm, share your strength, and share your laughter with your children. No kids are ahead. No kids are behind. Your children are exactly where they need to be.

Someone has also pointed out that the moon has been in Taurus, signifying a return to our body and the earth, and their natural rhythms. This rings true: my kids have been digging deep into the closet and earring cache to give me a Pandemic Make-over, alternating days being in charge of dressing me and doing my hair with lots more style than my boring habitual manner.

In doing my best to prioritize music practice, I am reminded of what Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to his son:

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal.

(https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/06/14/einstein-letter-to-son/)

Another teacher told me about how Thelonious Monk would challenge students who could play and riff on a tune well at a fast tempo to try doing it equally well at a slow one. Playing slowly exposes a lot more.

I. Introduction: Connecting the Dots

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

Margaret Mead

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

This collection of anecdotes and reflections is about the rich lessons I learned in my earlier life as a public-school teacher. It could have been called Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Teaching Primary School. It is in many ways my answer to our culture’s Pat Answer approach to learning as well as to the twenty-first century federal education reforms, beginning with No Child Left Behind, which have undone so much progress by mirroring, exaggerating, and exploiting misguided social attitudes.⁶ It is meant to be as much a celebration of real learning and real teaching—rich in movement, play, and the arts—as an inside view of actual educational practices both before and after test-based reforms took over. Fundamentally, this piece is not about the schools at all, but about learning as a process of transformative connection: the change that comes from real contact, which is as central to human life as it is deeply misunderstood.

I have long felt (with well-earned humility about my own limitations as a teacher) that good teaching, especially in the public schools, is in part a kind of healing work for society. Beyond knowledge and even good learning habits, what teachers do is teach in a hands-on way the value of learning. In this way they provide solid, supportive ground for handling life’s and society’s challenges. As a part-time bodyworker now, I have been struck by many commonalities between the two fields. I have gained an even greater appreciation for how embodied the learning process is, including our body’s ability to learn and heal as a result of the connection of touch. I have learned how much learning and healing operate, often jointly, on a much deeper, more innate level than our thoughts and expectations. My ongoing study and love of music and becoming a parent have both also informed much of this book.

My experiences with teaching and bodywork have helped me to understand how emotionally and intellectually attached we are in this culture to the idea of the necessity of pain and punishment in order to achieve results. I have come to understand the No Pain, No Gain model as a deeply flawed belief that is rooted in Puritanism. That is to say, it is part of a rigidly hierarchical, white supremacist, and disembodied system of thought which is as stubbornly self-righteous as it is American. (It is also not sustainable: the early colonies had an alarmingly high attrition rate, routinely losing people to nearby Native American villages, probably partly because of the Puritan practice of beating children.)

In our culture, as in our schools under the influence of test-based reforms, we rely heavily on competitive, fear-based thinking which shuts down possibilities for growth. We confine ourselves to the most literal and superficial levels of meaning, in which there is one right answer to any question and one solution to every problem. Our thinking has become rule-driven and disembodied from both ourselves and from the world around us.⁷ We deny the fact that change is part of our nature and try to force it on ourselves and each other. We have become estranged from the natural variety of ideas and from their development, from life and learning as a creative act in progress. While our cultural habit is to dominate and disassociate, real learning—and real change—is holistic, a connective and integrative art which balances all things. It is a product of engaged