Original Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash I’m in an Upper Elementary classroom in Illinois. We’re working our way through Romeo and Juliet, acting out scenes and discussing the play’s themes as we go. During a pause in the balcony scene, an 11-year-old female student sighs deeply. Heads turn. “My parents fell in love like that,” she explains. “It was love at first sight.” This family revelation catapults us into an earnest discussion of how one knows whether romantic love is “real,” which spirals into a debate about when—if ever—it’s okay to disobey your parents. One student is shocked by Juliet’s behavior—sneaking out to meet Romeo!—and says she would never go against her parents’ wishes. Ano
Growing up, I recall my mother saying to me, “I just want you to be happy.” While I appreciated her wish for me at the time, I wondered what it meant. I assumed she was hoping for me to experience a perpetual feeling akin to Merriam Webster’s definition—something like “a state of well-being and contentment; joy.” Not only did I have no idea how to achieve such a thing, it just felt like an impossible ideal, and one to which I consistently fell short. This made me feel guilty; after all, didn’t I have a safe environment in which to grow up? Weren’t all of my essential needs met? Didn’t I have good friends? I recently watched Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I’ve been to the Mountaintop” speech with
Parents often remark that Wellan teachers have a magical power for getting children to listen. There may be some “magic” that comes with being in a school community that helps with listening, but teachers also have built up their own toolboxes for communicating with students. At the Primary level, we use some of these tricks for making our messages effective. Make it positive Children hear “no” and “don’t” more times in a day than many of them would like, and probably more times than we adults would be able to handle if we were in their shoes. Instead of telling students what they cannot do, teachers strive to remind them what they can, or should, be doing. We say “Walk” instead of “Don’t ru
Electronic music plays. A hand signal counts down: three, two, one . . . now! “Welcome to The NMS Listener. In this segment we’re going to hold a debate about co-ed sports . . .” With these words students began recording a series of segments for a podcast they created during a recess interest group. The inspiration for the recess interest group came from a team of NMS faculty and staff members dedicated to sharing the NMS experience with a wider community through media. Several of us on the group thought, maybe students would be the best communicators of the way that our school inspires, challenges, and empowers students—and the project could also provide a great opportunity for students to
