What’s Gone Well Today ® at School
What’s Gone Well Today at School is a question, in fact a movement designed to shift our thinking, to bring out the best in our own experiences at school, with the friends and new faces in our classes . We’re encouraging students and teachers to share experiences that have gone well. We hope that people will find more highlights in their day, and share what they are enjoying in their learning and playing at school.
Later my passion shifted primarily into the world of classical music, and homeschooling gave me the flexibility and freedom to devote hours of my life each day to music. I am forever grateful for the opportunity to homeschool; it has fostered my love of learning and given me the space I need to discover who I am.
Ever since my family moved to Delaware back in 2006, we have maintained bird feeders on our back deck. Our little customers formed a large part of my entertainment in my younger days—I would spread my toys out in front of our big windows and watch them while I played. Eventually this developed into a love of birdwatching in the field, which took me all over the country, and outside it twice, in search of birds. My homeschooling allowed me to avidly pursue my interest in the natural world, and nature became a large part of my education.
I am so grateful that I was invited to a school this year now that I am retired to play guitar with a class! Just last week we were asked to perform at an assembly and we chose to play and sing This Little Light of Mine and Yellow Submarine. The kids did a great job and there were many smiles!
There are few nature activities that I enjoy more than looking at rocks around San Francisco. While that may not sound terribly exciting, the variety of patterns, colors, and angles to be found in road cuts and natural rockfaces is fascinating. California is rich in chert, a sedimentary rock formed at the bottom of the ocean out of the shells of microscopic sea creatures called Radiolaria. (A fragment of chert embedded in a trail is pictured here.) The shells collected between 100 and 200 million years ago on the ocean floor, were crushed by the weight of the water, and then raised high above sea level by plate tectonics, where they stand today as high cliffs and outcroppings. I’ve enjoyed examining rocks for my whole life, but I first learned about chert about four years ago on a family vacation. Since then, I look for it every time we visit and marvel at the shapes and shades into which time and its master have molded it.
This is but one example of what I love most about homeschooling—its spontaneity. You never know what you might learn in such an opportunistic, all-inclusive curriculum, and that keeps school—or shall I just say life—fresh and exciting!
So grateful to have had the opportunity this week as a TOC for a day to teach two grade 5/6 band classes, a kindergarten music class and a grade 4 class movement and music. I was also able to participate in a D.A.R.E. class led by a female police officer who focused on teaching the children to become more self confident by looking at people eye to eye and by sharing how they are feeling with their parents and friends. She also shared how shy she was as a child and that made all the difference, the children really listened and heard her message.
I have had many influential moments in my educational life, but only a few remain distinguished in my memory. One of these is a trip I took with my parents to the Farne Islands, a small archipelago off of England which hosts massive breeding colonies of seabirds. We went in June and were surrounded by birds beyond count—puffins, guillemots, gulls, eider ducks, terns. I had seen birds aplenty before, but seldom at close range; here we walked right through the colonies. Terns divebombed our heads, mistaking us for predators, and even alighted on us, as you see here. Puffins entered their burrows only eight or so feet away, while eiders sat camouflaged and utterly motionless even as our tread unknowingly threatened their safety. I learned very few facts on this excursion; those I did swiftly left me. The experience, though, I did internalize, and its memory is far more primal and rare. Perhaps I did not learn much about the birds; but, by walking among them, I came to know them and their lives more intimately than I ever could through academic study. Those kinds of experiences shape the essence of who I am, and hence I consider them the greatest moments of my education.