Polly Mayer

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Summer School

The summer ended as it began: full of noise. When the summer program started six weeks ago, they were installing a new drainage system outside the clinic offices. Exasperated educational therapists marched up and down the halls, asking me, the Clinic Director, for a room in which to re-locate.

“We need to model resilience and flexibility—the same qualities we are trying to instill in our clients, “ I offered, helplessly listening to a drill breaking up cement, and a backhoe scrape it up into a pile. It was the ultimate attention disrupter, mimicking and exaggerating the classroom experience of many children with ADHD. Our mandate as educational therapists, is after all, to understand the underlying issues that contribute to learning challenges/disabilities, and to help students remediate and learn strategies that help them cope with their learning issues. This did seem an annoying, ironic if apt teachable moment.

Once we became accustomed to the noise, which dissipated as the crew quickly tore stuff up and put it back together (the pouring of the cement sidewalk was a highlight), the days fell into a kind of rhythm: morning greetings and graphs, puzzles, jokes and questions posted on the white board where the students would sign in each day.

I relaxed the “no electronics” rule, in place during the school year, and various devices from PSPs to I-touches, phones etc. appeared in between classes. This, unfortunately, will not be repeated, as it flouted the long-established practices, and consistency is the highlight of success. It also, tended to isolate the students from each other: not worth the mental respite the technology seemed to offer, was my ultimate decision.

As the second session ended yesterday, and parents arrived for their mini-conferences with their child’s educational therapist, there was a celebratory air. I had made the mistake of planning meetings that day, when, in truth, I needed to be in the lobby meeting and greeting the families, and congratulating them on their child’s progress over the summer. Parents of children with academic challenges can’t hear this enough: just as we focus on individual strengths over weaknesses when we work with our students, we also need to remind their parents of these strengths as well.

As classrooms got cleaned out, and shelves emptied in clinic rooms in anticipation of the new paint job before the fall clinic, the noise began once more: this time loud drilling and scraping and blowing and street repairing in the parking lot outside the building. The cacophony offered a perfect bookend to a summer of change, growth, and progress.

As I wake to pick up the windfalls in the back yard on a late August morning,  I hear geese overhead.  Driving to work, I see, and hear, the big yellow school buses trundling their charges to school.
Signs of fall, with schools beginning in late summer, and geese making practice runs for migration, bring with them a bittersweet feeling of ends and beginnings.
At the school where I teach, this time of year brings two back-to-back weekends of work, getting the school ready for the new year.  It’s an independent school, where parents provide a tremendous amount of actual labor to help keep the tuition considerably lower than other schools in our area.  Teachers work all weekend, dusting, painting, planning, while parents arrive in four-hour shifts (each parent gives one shift) to weed, prune, scrub, vacuum, and clean.
The sense of community vibrates as the new families are welcomed into the school, and old friends greet each other after months apart.  A four-square grid gets re-painted.  Outdated books get culled from classroom libraries.  Art room smocks and area rugs get taken to a Laundromat.  A teacher provides snacks of melon and bagels for the shifts, and parents take their time outside, talking to each other and to teachers about news in their lives.
I used to be obsessed about these weekends.  I felt that it was of supreme importance for every task listed on my board to be accomplished with swift efficiency.  I steamed if I saw people ambling around the schoolyard, inattentive to their assigned task of the shift.
“Why aren’t they getting back to work?”  I would mutter under my breath, “Don’t they realize that school begins in a week?”
But yesterday I had an epiphany.  The work weekend is not about work.  It’s about community, people getting together and sharing a common goal, and talking to each other and celebrating a place where children come first, and reaffirming why their child attends our school.  The work that gets done is a bonus, icing on the cake.  The real work is the person-to-person contact that happens, which in this increasingly hurried world, is the most important work of all.

Geese and buses.  Yes, that’s the theme, but people, too.  People joining, not in perfect v-s like the geese, or rows like on a bus, but getting together in groups, with a common purpose and shared hopes.  The school year begins again.

A trip to Pt. Reyes

The middle group just returned from our 3 day, 2- night overnight at the Pt. Reyes Youth Hostel.   Thanks to our wonderful group of parents and children, we had a great time!   After dropping our gear (the children performed the most effective and cooperative unloading I’ve ever seen!) and eating lunch at the hostel, we started with a somewhat damp afternoon exploration at Heart’s Desire Beach.   The children combed the edges of the water in the calm shallows of Tomales Bay.  They found tiny crabs, sea anemones, barnacles and mussels.  They became extremely excited about the beached jellyfish scattered about.
That evening, after dinner, Tupaq’s mom led us in song, with particular favorites of the group, including rousing renditions of “Wade in the Water,” and “Rockin’ Robin.”
The next day we headed off to the Pt. Reyes Lighthouse—a forty-five minute journey by car from the hostel, through rolling hills, and many fields of cows.
The gusting wind (43 mph) had closed the stairs, but the children sketched from the platform above the lighthouse, and admired the amazing wind-surfing birds.  In the afternoon, we headed to Limantour Beach to walk the Spit trail, and look at the shore birds in the estuary.  Back at the hostel, many of the children played a rollicking game of soccer, coached by Myles’ dad and other parents.  After dinner, I read Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson, to sleepy faces and eyes peeking out from behind the pillows of couches.
Friday morning, we cleaned up, and went to Bear Valley, where we visited Kule Loklo, the recreated village of the Coast Miwok people.  The children took out their sketchbooks to draw the dwellings and the meeting  house.  After lunch, and a closing circle we drove back to Walden.
These trips help us bond as a group, and reconnect with the natural world around us.  The memories last lifetimes, and many alumni fondly recalls adventures and events from these encounters with our glorious California environment.

Four photos

On my refrigerator are four photos of my older daughter, found during a marathon closet cleaning event last weekend. Each photos shows her being held, at age two, by family: my parents, her father, me.

Somehow, that seems like a metaphor for childhood: holding our children. Yesterday at school, I watched a father gather up his tired kindergarten daughter in his arms, as he made the 5:00 pm transition from school to home. While in his arms, she listened to his plans for how they would head home, where they would stop off, and why, and somehow it all made sense to her, because it was communicated from the safety of an embrace.

It seems like when our children are little, we hold them in our arms: (“mommy/daddy, carry me!) on hikes or when they need a hug, or have a bump. As they get older, they still need hugs, and may resist them a teeny bit. But we still hold them.

Once, at a “Learning and the Brain” conference, I heard a presenter say that people need 13 hugs a day. With children you get all that and more! I’m a little shy about hugging grown-ups, but as I enter the second half of my personal century, I’m becoming less reluctant.

When our children grow up, and leave home, we still hold them. We hold them in our hearts. Children, even grown up children, need that safety: the knowledge that they continue to be embraced, even from afar—they can only let go when they know they can come back to our arms.

I’ve been attending the “Learning and the Brain” conference in SF the past two days.  Besides the fact that I’ve lost the huge book I got at the conference with the speakers’ bios and their articles and notes from their talks, it’s been a good event.  I’d tell you about yesterday, but my notes are in the book I lost, however, John Medina of Brain Rules fame, was a stellar, invigorating speaker.  Bravo!

I do have notes from today, and Robert Brooks, who was the first keynote speaker on the second day of the conference, spoke about Mindsets, which he defined as “the assumptions and expectations we possess about ourselves and others that guide our behavior.”

He described “motivating environments” which are characterized by people being cooperative, willing to learn from each other, willing to take risks because they feel safe and secure and all parties feel a sense of ownership.

Dr. Brooks emphasized the importance of a “charismatic adult”– studies have shown that people who succeed despite unsupportive backgrounds, usually always have one person who believed in them, and that often that person is a teacher.

His talk was full of anecdotes from his own private practice as a therapist for children, and his descriptions of his interactions with his clients were both touching and funny.  He brought the audience to him through laughter, a technique that all the best speakers at the conference seemed to use.

One point he made that I firmly believe in, is that if something is not working or is ineffective in a teacher’s approach with students, it is important for a the teacher to ask themselves, “what can I do differently?” rather than to wait for the student to change.  Empathy for students, seeing the world throught their eyes, and asking them for feedback, are cornerstones of good teaching.

His website is at www.drrobertbrooks.com, where he has many articles posted for interested readers.  I look forward to learning more from this inspiring man.

I work with children and young adults to help them manage their learning challenges.  As I read about strategies, I realize that it’s high time that I implement a few.  (Full disclosure:  when I was in graduate school, studying the many learning disabilities that people face, and how to remediate and/or help people with them, I felt like I had almost every disability that I studied:  ADD, check, ODD, at times, OCD, not often, but it’s lurking, dyscalcula, sure, maybe that explains my math challenges, etc. etc.  It was like being in med school and feeling like you caught, or might catch, every disease you studied.)

Executive function, and self-regulating, turn out to be two of the most important domains for learning and life.  This always comes home to me around Hannukah, when I search the house for the menorah.  I believe that our family now owns two, and I often find them in mid-July when cleaning out a linen closet, or moving things into the garage, “oh, there’s the menorah,” I’ll say to myself, promising to remember it’s location when December rolls around.

“Wrong, pea-brain,” as my siblings used to say to me when we were young.  It is now December.  I have purchased beautiful beeswax Hannukah candles, at great expense, from the local natural grocery store.  I am trying to dredge up in my mind where I last saw a menorah, any menorah.  I feel like the squirrel in my yard, whom I’m watching tear around and dig up the dirt, looking for a buried apple or pine cone.  I’ve hurt my back crawling around in our 3 ft. high attic, I sidled by the table saw (table saw!!!??!!) in our garage, looking on the book shelf (don’t ask) for the menorah that I could swear I saw last August.

I’m feeling a little desperate.  I may have to resort to our original menorah, the bottle cap one with birthday candles that my younger daughter made when she was in preschool. (She’s now a sophmore in college.) That’s the menorah that started the whole thing. . . reconnected me with the holiday rituals of my father’s ancestors.  Now if I could just remember where I put it. . .

I want to ramble about resilience, and the power of the human spirit and the need to connect.  My fourteen-year-old nephew received a bone marrow transplant yesterday. Since September 2008, after a year of chemotherapy for Acute Biphenotypic Leukemia, including a 56 day stint in the hospital last year, he is now at “day zero.”

Actually, today is “day +1.”  The 11 radiation treatments, and two days of cytoxine –euphemistically referred to as “conditioning” — blasted out all his old bone marrow up to yesterday, day 0.  He received something called IVIG, to which he had an allergic reaction, and something called R-ATG, which is derived from a rabbit.  Apparently the rabbit version is easier on the patient than the horse version (h-ATG).   C. found the rabbit tough going, and commented,   “if I can’t even take on a rabbit what am I going to do with human[stem cells?”  leading to the timeless quote from one of his doctors, “rabbits are different from humans.”

C. enjoys ribbing his nurses, especially the young, pretty ones—but he also thrives on human contact.  He has an acute eye for what he calls “newbies” whether in the form of doctors or nurses.  Yesterday, when the transplant team, the lead doctor and the three duckling-like residents, came in he even threatened to grill them or sautee them.  Last fall in the hospital, a nurse assistant gave him empty syringes to hide in his bed after filling them with water, and he would squirt unsuspecting nurses as they came in to check his vitals.  There was also the memorable lemonade in the urinal moment, and the monster mask event.

C., a weapons aficionado, likes target-shooting and Guns and Ammo Magazine.  A vegetarian since age five, he tells me he would never kill any living thing, but “I’m just interested in guns.”  The paradox confuses me, but seems to make sense to him.

Unfamiliar nurses (fairly few since he’s been in treatment for a year) he interviews to find out how long they’ve been working and on what units.  He has a special favorite nurse, and wept when he found out he might not see her for a few days.  He told me that she wouldn’t mind being an ER nurse, but that she stays on oncology because she likes him.

But we were unprepared for the brutal side effects of this “conditioning” regimen, during which, — here’s the resilience part — my nephew never lost his sense of humor.  He had punishing headaches, where Dilaudid was the only relief.  When the head stem-cell doctor came by and asked him how his headaches were, he said, “it just walked in the room.”  She now refers to herself as “C.’s headache.”

One of the doctors he met last year, who is now on the head of the kidney team, has promised to visit him every day.  These connections mean the world to him, and help to make the ordeal more bearable.  The night before transplant, we talked for hours about family, how he could stand to be in isolation for three months, what projects he might take on in that time.  He wept in anticipation of the loneliness, and for what he calls “my lost childhood,” although we agreed that it was more like two years of teenage-hood, and not, as my husband drily pointed out, always the happiest time of anyone’s life.
This brings me to the miracle that transpired yesterday.  The gift of bone marrow  arrived from a complete stranger (all we are allowed to know is that it is a 39 year old man, and judging from the card, someone who is quite religious), a brave stranger, who endured 50 needle-sticks in each hip under general anesthesia, in order to give a person unknown to him a chance at  life.
I went out to see the cooler in which the two bags arrived.  It was singularly ordinary—a typical ribbed orange plastic with a white top— but it emanated power.  The doctor said that the donor’s marrow was full of stem cells: they like to perform transplants with 2 million cells, but this had 3 million per part.
When the bag was hung on the IV tree and attached to C.’s central line, I wept loudly.  My mask  (those yellow paper ones) got soaked.  C. peeked up from his bed to see me, looking surprised and slightly concerned.  I regained composure, and my sister and I sat holding each other as the marrow started to go in.  The cells will take about 10 days to 2 weeks to “home,” that is find their way to the center of his bones and begin to produce white blood cells, then platelets and finally red blood cells.  Baring complications, of which there are potentially many, my nephew could have a future by day 60.
He won’t, however, be out of danger from the graft versus host disease (GVH) for at least 2 years, according to his doctor.  But when the new cells begin to show up, “engraftment,” he’s off to a better life.
My sister had decorated his room with the framed letter of encouragement from President Obama, the letter wishing him well from the Illinois State Legislature, and signs that said “Happy Birthday.”  His old birthday was September 11.  We are happy to give it up for October 21, 2009.
Brave warrior child: let the weapons you delight in be the power of your own courageous and resilient spirit.

On a cross-country flight a few days ago, a young couple sat in the aisle across from me with their young baby.  I guessed that the child was about 3-4 months old, very young, with sparse blond hair and a cowlick in front that stood straight up.  The dad kind of liked it, and would smooth it upwards every once in a while.  The baby was a teeny bit fussy, but mostly sat and played and drank a bottle or nursed.  The mom and dad took turns sitting next to the baby (who had the window seat).

Towards the end of the flight something unusual happened.  Something I haven’t seen in a long time.  The mother pulled out a book, a hardcover copy of Curious George stories.  It wasn’t a board book, and I thought to myself, “hmmm, I wonder what will happen here.”  I thought the baby might reach for the pages and tear them.   The mom proceeded to read aloud to the baby in a soft voice.  The baby, meanwhile, sat up on the dad’s lap and looked at the pictures.  They were big and colorful, and there wasn’t a lot of text on the page.  Every once in a while, the baby would reach for the pictures.  I watched carefully to see if the baby was attending.  The baby seemed intently focused.

It was clear from the way the baby watched the book, and the mom as she read, that this was a moment of delight and connection for them.  The dad was engaged, too, as the humor of the story unfolded.  In the one she was reading George rearranges the train schedule at a train station, with the inevitable ensuing mix-up.  The man with the yellow hat arrived in time to rescue George and fix the problem.

What struck me was how young the baby was, and how engaged in the book.  It was far more complex than the usual board books read to children of that age.  I know that UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik has recently published a book about the intelligence and capabilities of the very young.  This seemed like a living example of what she has discovered.

But another thing I realized was how rarely I have seen parents reading to their children in public lately.  It used to be in the olden days, before portable dvd players, and Game Boys and DSL units etc. that children read or were read to on long trips, or they listened to books on tape.

What was clear to me from the interaction between the baby and the parents was that reading would always be associated with a pleasurable activity– a close, nurturing and loving experience.  It wasn’t expensive or gimmicky, but it would lay the foundation for comfort with text, in all its forms, for the rest of the baby’s life.

What a gift!

I just finished my summer teaching book, Into Writing: the primary teacher’s guide to writing workshop, by Megan Sloan.  After 25 years in the classroom, I still like to refresh myself with ideas – and this summer I wanted to explore writing, since I was beginning to doubt myself in this area.  The book was a welcome tonic, and affirmed many of my practices, and offered practical solutions for some of the things that have stymied me over the years, such as “non-writers,” “emergent writers,” and “reluctant writers.”  Ms. Sloan describes her classroom in the course of a year, and refers to such luminaries in the teaching writing area as Calkins, Graves and Routman who guide her practice.
I had several favorite parts:  when Sloan talks about the over-emphasis on revision in the primary grades.  I have always found that 2nd-3rd grade kids do not care too much about revising what they’ve spent a long time writing.  Yes, maybe they will go so far as to put in capital letters at the beginning of sentences (if there aren’t too many of them) and possibly they’ll agree to circle words that they think might be misspelled.  But that’s it.    When I have conferences with parents, I often reassure them that editing really is the work of the next grades, and I’m fortunate to have a teacher in the next class who excels at teaching these skills.
Another part I appreciate is where Sloan expands the definition of “publishing” a child’s piece of writing.  To her it can be as simple as the act of sharing the writing by reading it aloud to a teacher and/or peers, or another class—or bringing it home to read to a family member.  I have always felt that the process was more important than the product, although I do try to have one “book” of collected class writings that the children create each year.
There is a whole section where Sloan discusses writing as readers, and shows how she has her students respond to books they are reading, individually or as a class, in writing.   She models a response that she has to a book, and posts helpful prompts, such as “I wonder,” “I noticed,” and “This reminds me of  . . .”
I was delighted to read such a lucid discussion of children’s writing, and the connection between reading and writing.  I will re-enter my classroom this fall with new confidence, and new ideas!

Despite the slightly unfortunate title,  A Nation of Wimps: the High Cost of Invasive Parenting, is a wonderful book.  The author, Hara Estroff Marano, examines the syndrome of “over-parenting” and its deleterious effect on children’s independence.   She synthesizes many studies by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and neuropsychologists, and shares   their research, and shows how it supports her thesis that many parents today are crippling their children by stifling their curiosity, exploration and risk-taking.
She writes about the syndrome of “hothouse” parenting, raising children as if they were exotic flora, who need constant tending and protection.   Children, she posits, need the experiences that parents are eliminating from their lives.   Constant and intensive cultivation, through special classes and choreographed experiences, deny children the opportunity to discover for themselves what interests them, and the myriad gifts that boredom bestows on the mind.
One of my professors in graduate school, a neuropsychologist himself, talked about the concept of “consolidating” knowledge, i.e. the chance to review and digest new material that only occurs with the time to do so.  Children need the “downtime” that seems to be all but eliminated from their busy, screen-filled lives.
Marano also writes about how parents try to protect their children from any emotional distress.  A wise child psychologist, who has spoken at my school, Dr. Sheri Glucoft Wong, talks about it best, “disappointment is a muscle: it needs to be exercised.”  She would seem to agree with Marano’s premise that we should not protect our children from all difficult experiences or discomfort.
Children need to understand that uncomfortable feelings won’t last forever, and that  these experiences build resilience, a crucial quality for a successful adult.
In her conclusion, Marano lists and describes twelve things that parents can do for their children.  These range from “let your children play. . . unstructured time for exploration and free play” to “eat dinner together at least five nights a week” to “stop turning parenting into a profession” to “learn how to criticize your kids” without creating perfectionists.  She also recommends learning how to praise children, and teaching them to tolerate discomfort, frustration and uncertainty, encourage problem-solving, and allow children to experience failure and boredom.
Her book concludes with the words, “none of us knows what the world is going to look like in ten years.  One way to prepare kids of the future is to relax, and let them play now.”  I couldn’t agree more.