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I have been riding madly off in all directions, first to a women’s storytelling retreat in Southern California’s high desert, where I worked on making the story of the Ku Klux Klan raid on my grandparents’ house into a performance piece, then the next weekend to a writers’ and artists’ retreat in the redwoods near the Russian River where I worked on the chapter of the bio that grew out of my blog piece “I Was Born in Omaha” and wrote a tune for some lyrics that had been sitting around for a couple of years, then two days to breathe and do laundry and off to the MusicEdVentures conference in Minneapolis, arriving just ahead of eighteen inches of snow.

The folks in Music EdVentures are mostly music teachers or classroom teachers using singing games to teach music, English as a second language, math, getting along with other kids, listening skills, all sorts of things. I think the ESL part is easiest to describe. Children are singing “You put your right foot in” while they are putting their right foot in, so the words are reinforced visually (by seeing the other kids doing the action) muscularly, musically and orally. And repetition is built into the games so it’s not boring. There were about five English teachers there from Japan who use this method, and Judy Fjell, who got me going to these conferences, was leaving the following month for Japan to do workshops there.

I also heard exciting news on the use of games in socialization. Children who have a hard time relating to others—even some autistic children—can do so within the safe structure of a singing game which not only tells them to take a partner’s hand but cues them by the musical phrasing as to when they should do it and with whom. Naturally, we did a lot of singing games, which helped keep us alert in spite of fluorescent lights, canned air, and other hotel amenities.

The following weekend I went to part of a symposium at Mills College, right next door in Oakland, put on by the Art IS Education office of the Alameda County School District. More neat stuff, including a local parents’ group, Arts Active Parents, which is petitioning for arts for every child in every school, every day. The national group doing this is Keep Arts in Schools.

All this is, of course, in reaction to President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” nonsense which is leaving the arts, sciences and humanities behind for a lot of children, as it only counts test scores for math and reading skills. Best story from that day: Berkeley High has a small school called AHA (Arts and Humanities Academy) which did a month-long project on the First Amendment and the arts. They had guest artists talk about running into censorship problems, and a civil liberties lawyer. The students thought up, on their own, this piece of street theater: they spread out over the whole BHS campus reciting the First Amendment into their cell phones.

Then I picked up the current issue of Mothering magazine for the cover article, “Bring Back Recess: Why Kids Need Play.” A lot of schools are eliminating recess to have more time to drill kids so they will pass those standardized tests. Teachers’ jobs and even the continued existence of the school depend on their passing. Actually, children pay attention better if they do have recess to blow off steam, and folks have even done studies showing this to be true. And in Japan, whose education system is held up as an example, children have recess more often than in most schools here. Alas, only three states -- Missouri, Louisiana and Illinois -- require elementary schools to offer recess, and it is in poverty areas where children have less access to parks and backyards that the schools have the least recess time. So now we have to have a group promoting and protecting recess, and it’s IPA/USA, The American Association for the Child’s Right to Play.

My parents and I grew up in a time when children’s play was unstructured or was structured by the children themselves in games like tag or jump rope or singing games which were not taught by adults but learned from slightly older children. As kids, my mother and I had music lessons and I had ballet, my father had chores, but we had time for street games and fantasy play as well, and no television.

DON’T BOTHER ME

Don't bother me, I have some things to do,

Don't bother me, I have to tie my shoe,

Don't bother me, I'm standing like a tree,

Spin like a top, I can't stop,

Don't bother me.

Don't bother me, I have to hurry by,

Don't bother me, I'm learning how to fly,

Don't bother me, I'm buzzing like a bee,

Roll down the hill, can't keep still,

Don't bother me.

Don't bother me, I'm thinking something nice,

Don't bother me, I'm sliding on the ice,

Don't bother me, I'm singing "Toodle-dee,"

Boat on the bay, sailing away,

Don't bother me.

Music to this song is in Tweedles and Foodles for Young Noodles. (when you get to the site, scroll way down)

Here’s a piece I wrote a good while ago on how we played when I was young:

This
 memory is from the fourth grade, living on Cherry Street in Berkeley, 
in the same neighborhood--but not the same apartment--where we had lived
 since we came to Berkeley when I was a toddler.

Joseph
 Baron was a year older than I. He arrived in our neighborhood with a 
great advantage—he moved into the designated haunted house, a two-story 
white wood classic around the corner and across Stuart Street from the 
four-room apartment we lived in. The house was not rundown, but it was 
of an earlier era and had stood vacant for a while, and that was enough 
for us. Luckily, Joseph was a boy who could rise to the occasion. His 
imagination riddled the house with secret passages and transformed the 
neglected back yard into a place of mystery and fantasy. 

He
 claimed that a man had hanged himself from the huge tree at the back of
 the deep yard, and indeed when we dug holes under the tree we did find 
some bones—who knows what kind. This was a passing interest, however. 
Joseph’s abiding passion was playing Bambi. We acted out every adventure
 in the book and others of his invention. (I had not read Bambi—he was 
in charge of this.) 

We
 also planted a tiny garden by the house. I remember crumbling and 
sifting the dirt to a smooth powder. The seeds we planted were going to 
produce perfectly symmetrical carrots in such soil. If they grew. I 
don’t remember that part.

The
 interior of the house was not neglected at all. The highly polished 
floors were the downfall of Joseph’s mother’s little black-and-white 
dog. He would come tap-tap-tapping quickly into a room, start to turn, 
and go into a skid every time, his little claws scrabbling on the slick 
surface.

Although
 we played endlessly after school, in school Joseph and I hardly spoke 
to each other. He was in the fifth grade and I was in the fourth, and a 
girl besides. When he was with other boys his age talking trash, he 
seemed like a different person from the backyard drama director I knew.

My friend Ginny said that when her kids were young, she noticed that they did fantasy scenarios but their friends didn’t know how, possibly because they weren’t read to. There is a difference between the mostly-narrative picture book and the mostly-dialog television program. Judy and I have been talking about this since we gave a storytelling workshop together at the Music EdVentures conference. I noticed another difference when I had two school residencies in Idaho, one after the other, in upper-middle-class Ketcham and working-class Hailey. When I asked fifth graders to make up a story as a class, the Ketchum kids could do it handily, but the Hailey kids, with more TV and less reading, started off just as inventively but killed off their characters before much of a plot could develop.

Well, even as I was typing that, the phone rang and I thought “That can’t be Judy, she’s on her way to Japan,” and it wasn’t, it was somebody telling me about a pre-approved home loan (watch out for those!) but I saw that I had a message and that was Judy, calling from a sports bar in the Seattle airport to say she was noticing that dialog takes over not just in TV drama but in TV news stories as well--in the form of interviews.

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

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