From the Director’s Chair November 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, November 2008
“Teaching is a personal profession, and good teaching reflects a teacher’s ability to triangulate between deep connections with students and a deep love of a subject.”
As a teacher, I know that a new project is always a major effort. New curriculum requires the same kind of planning as any new venture, and the same careful attention to ensure that major goals are identified, major questions answered. In our case, we ask: what should students learn by the end? What skills should they develop? How much time will they spend on each task? What should the experience entail? And finally, how will the whole endeavor be evaluated?
The more personal and equally important lesson in planning new curriculum is not the logistical work, though. Rather, it is the importance of taking a new idea, making something of it, and sharing this very personal effort - an important professional risk. Teaching is a personal profession, and good teaching reflects a teacher’s ability to triangulate between deep connections with students and a deep love of a subject. With luck, a teacher forges these connections into vital moments of learning, moments in which the experience of a teacher and a class lead to something new, important and memorable.
When teachers take the risk to try new things, they also help students to feel confident taking their own risks as learners. Like teaching, learning is a deeply personal experience. While students’ skill development and content knowledge are important, specific skills and knowledge are sometimes forgotten, and, as all of us who have witnessed the technology revolution can attest, a skill learned today can prove useless tomorrow. In our complicated and challenging world, it’s not only the facts, but also the process of learning – including creative thinking, risk-taking, and problem-solving – which proves to be the focus most valuable for students’ future lives.
In this vein of understanding, I salute our Middle School faculty for taking the best of themselves and sharing it, time and again, in new ventures which represent their own learning and willingness to take risks. We are a vital learning community, and this fall’s new curricular offerings showcase a depth of talent, inquiry, hard work, and personal investment in learning within the Middle School faculty. Please read the In the Classroom section of this newsletter where I highlight a few of these new offerings. The next newsletter will contain more information directly from the creators, themselves.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
From the Director’s Chair September 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, September 2008“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Mother Teresa
This year we explore the theme of peace at Penn Charter. It’s a rich topic, grounded in our Quaker heritage and relevant to our world and our times. It’s also, for better or worse, a topic which lends itself to oversimplification: peace as “the opposite of war,” or “the absence of conflict.” I know I’m guilty of sometimes dismissing peace as a cliché, but there’s more to it: it’s the possibility of listening first, then talking; it’s the feeling of being able to wait, rather than act; it’s the ability to consider another’s perspective before presenting my own. It is remembering, as Mother Teresa said, “if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
As we who live and work with teenagers know, adolescents have a wonderfully keen sense of justice and equity. This sense is a key part of growing up and understanding the world, and it ranges from simple questions such as who gets more pizza, to social and political situations with increasing complexity. When we in Middle School work with young people, we help them to move from the concrete examples of equity to examples that are more complicated and nuanced. This learning matches students’ maturation process, and gives them the tools to begin understanding a complicated world on their own terms, with their own resources.
In our study of peace in Middle School this year, we strive to approach peace – a complicated topic – with the same kind of learning that helps us to define self and other, fair and unfair. Peace is a big idea – an idea we adults, too, can find overwhelming – and it is our job to help one another explore its meaning in ways which can make it relevant in our lives, here and now.
So, where do we start? We will lift up peace each week, in our own words and our own minds, with a simple study of the things happening in the world around us: current events. As they lead our weekly assembly, our eighth graders will choose a story about peace, picked from the news. We can talk, of course, of conflicts around the world; but we can also talk about Fair Hill Burial Ground, the Quaker cemetery in North Philadelphia fringed by a community which took its streets back from a ravaging drug trade. We can talk about world peacemakers like the extraordinary Nelson Mandela, featured in a Newsweek cover story this July celebrating his 90th birthday. We can find stories of our own heroes, people like Penn Charter parent Elsie Caldwell, who spoke movingly of love’s power over hate, even after her son Kenny (OPC ’ 89) was lost on 9/11.
As the year goes on, who knows what we will find? Can peace be about giving free music lessons to neighborhood kids? Can it be about police efforts to know people in their neighborhoods? I can’t wait to see what other questions our young people will think to ask.
The new year always brings renewed energy and imagination, ideas and questions. I welcome you all to Middle School for this 2008-09 school year, and I invite you to consider, along with all of us at Penn Charter, the meaning of peace.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
From the Director’s Chair May 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, May 2008
Abundance
Spring is an abundant time. We have a profusion of nature around us – whether the pollen covering the car in the morning, or the cascade of pink petals from the trees along the varsity baseball field, or simply the green growing all around. We also have an abundance of activities, with what can feel like an ever-increasing pace. Many of these events celebrate our students’ work and accomplishment: lacrosse games, memoirs, Shakespeare, jazz band, field trips. Others engage students in what our program does best: learning in a variety of ways, in a variety of settings, in the arts and in academics, in sports and in social interaction. We are a school of abundance.
The lovely, wonderful thing about all of this abundant life is that it truly offers a kind of learning and growing that seem to be more elusive later in life. Who among us can boast of learning in six subjects, while playing one (or two) sports, practicing an instrument or singing, and simultaneously growing two inches, making new friends, and perhaps even spending a little time with family? I certainly can’t. Our students do this every day, though… and they do it well, and with the good spirits, curiosity, and energy that are the life of Middle School.
As abundant spring leads to summer, let us remember to celebrate our plentiful lives by taking a little time out once in a while. The crunch of exams, final projects, and the rush of year-end events is upon us. It’s during this time that our students most need our support, our calm energy, and our ability to sometimes exchange more for less. Help your son or daughter get organized for exams, and then help him or her stop studying when it’s time to take a break. Plan social events, visit games, and celebrate performances – and then take some time to just hang out at home. Share the family traditions that mark the end of a school year, the rituals which honor your child’s hard work, and which signal when it’s time to take a break. And enjoy the summer. Our abundance isn’t going anywhere. We’ll be here when you get back in the fall.
In this, the end of my first year at Penn Charter, I am blessed to share the energy, commitment, and joy at the heart of life in Middle School. I look forward to our closing celebrations of a full and happy year, and wish for each of us a restful and contented summer.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
From the Director’s Chair March 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, March 2008"In a culture where order is necessary, and where our collective lives are mediated by shared expectations and rules, it’s important to embrace a little chaos."
Schools are places which rely on order. We use a schedule to outline our activity throughout the day. We care about expectations for homework and in the classroom. We use calendars and planners, notebooks and routines.
It’s not that order is a bad thing. The reality is, we all need some structure to get where we’re going on a given day, and we need practice to learn habits which will be a foundation for later relationships, work, and life. Sometimes, though, a little chaos finds its way into our daily routine. During the winter trimester, any visitor to our sixth grade classes would likely find their son or daughter not in a classroom, but in our basement. Doing what? An activity unlike any traditional classroom learning. Students scattered throughout the room, working on a variety of projects which looked like they might belong better in a garage than a classroom. There were teams of artists drawing on large sheets of cloth, kids cleaning spilled paint from the floor, and people moving plywood and screens. This wasn’t order; it was chaos. It was loud, unscripted, and even mildly out-of-control.
But was it learning? In fact, what our sixth graders do during the ‘Museum Project’ models what education researchers wou
ld consider exemplary authentic learning. Authentic learning, as the name implies, simply puts students in charge, not only of solving their own complex challenges, but also of defining for themselves what those challenges should be. In this case, it’s the challenge of creating a set of museum exhibits from a large room that is, well, big, concrete, empty, and basement-like. Students spend several weeks in multiple classes tackling team goals like painting backdrops, setting out exhibits, and choosing the important items with which to represent the culture of the ancient Aztecs, the Greeks, the Chinese, or India. This learning and work involves all of the chaos that one might imagine when sixty minds come together; it would be difficult for any of us to accomplish.
The joy of authentic learning is that the chaos will lead not only to something organized, but more importantly, to real problems solved, real lessons internalized. Want to move something heavy? Get help. Want to paint without messing up the floor? Put down a drop cloth. Want to make your exhibit interesting for your mom or dad, or older brother? Learn to listen to other classmates, to highlight each one’s strengths in creating art, or layout design, or explaining complicated rituals in simple terms. Most importantly, with the guidance and help of teachers, students learn to make these decisions themselves. The museum is the product of their own living with chaos, a lesson as important as any of the historical information digested. For teachers, this kind of learning is a greater challenge than a standard lesson: in addition to the obvious patience and tolerance for chaos, it ironically requires more thought and planning, in order to help students find their own way to their goal.
In a culture where order is necessary, and where our collective lives are mediated by shared expectations and rules, it’s important to embrace a little chaos. The challenge, as many of us might agree, is that chaos can be a little disconcerting. In my own classroom, we spent a recent afternoon on a lab meant to measure lung capacity. Students filled large containers with water, then blew air into the container, displacing the water to later measure the volume of their lungs. We found that our containers weren’t large enough; water soon covered not only the lab tables, but also the floor, and we went through most of a large roll of paper towels scrounged from the janitor’s closet. I have to admit: we had fun, and we learned our lung capacities and learned problem-solving at the same time, as students figured out how to manage multiple containers, how to hold a large multi-gallon pretzel jar upside-down, and then, how to clean up a classroom that had been bathed, literally, in gallons of tap water.
Meeting for Worship was the day following this lab, and by that time I was no longer thinking about the students with long sheets of paper towel, or of the eighth graders who arrived early for the class after ours, helping us to finish mopping the floor. After Meeting, one of my students told me, “Ms. Tatum, we had a bet that you were going to talk about our class in Meeting.” I was surprised. “What was I going to talk about?” I asked. “You know,” he said, “about how we were such a good community, and how we had such a good time cleaning up, and how Mrs. Roberts’ students came and helped us mop the floor.” Students are so much smarter than we adults sometimes. Obviously, the real reason for authentic learning often has nothing to do with the academic objective. It’s about our ability to get out of the way, so that students can have the chance to make their own sense of the lessons that life offers in the moments when we let a little chaos occur.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
From the Director’s Chair January 2008
Posted by msnl in : From the Director's Chair, January 2008 I went to Quaker Meeting recently in New York City, in the meeting I used to attend before moving. It was a lovely, centered meeting, filled with reflection and feeling and a deep silence. 
After some time, a speaker stood up. There’s a specific line that has been stuck in my head these past few days, he said, because it really speaks to me. It goes something like this: Those who wait upon the Lord will be lifted up as on the wings of eagles. He went on to talk about the feeling of waiting. About the wrestling which occurs when we are in between knowing and not knowing, in between feeling a pull and understanding what it means for us; or simply just not feeling right with something in our life.
The message sparked a chain of thoughts and reflections, a lovely, collaborative sermon about the challenge and the blessing of waiting. A woman spoke of the silence in Meeting as a kind of waking up to the inner voice – as a choice not to silence ourselves, but to wait actively for the sound of that voice often muffled by life’s other noises. A young man spoke of his hard experience waiting for something wrong to be set right, and of the fact that his immediate response – to fix this thing, to make it different, to change it – was an easy way to avoid waiting for time to play its part.
What a wonderful meditation. Waiting isn’t something we honor well in our busy lives. I’m guilty of many impatient moments: sitting in traffic, standing in a line at the grocery store, beeping through the automated choices for telephone customer service. I’m not good at waiting.
Even harder is the kind of waiting that life’s small and big changes demand. These changes aren’t measured in minutes: they’re measured in a minimum of days, or weeks, and sometimes years. I’m talking about change in a human way: the change happening all of the time in our lives as we continue to grow. I’m talking about the time it takes to adapt to a new school community and make friends. The time it takes to know and be known. The time it takes to change our habits, to learn new skills, and to grow into the people we are called to be.
In the middle school years, waiting can feel especially difficult. For one thing, middle school students seem often to move at the speed of light. From the urge to run – not walk – from one class to the next, to the energy bubbling over in conversations, in the locker pod, and in the classroom, our students rarely seem to slow down. On a more profound level, of course, there is major change happening in each person at its own, maddeningly unscheduled, pace. Some students seem to arrive in school with a fully-formed sense of organization and planning. Others will struggle to learn new habits for years, blessed (and cursed) with a natural tendency towards spontaneity, rather than planning. Socially, change takes the shape of a shifting landscape of friendships, of conflicts and choices, and of a new and different sense of self. It’s thrilling and tender, maddening and challenging all at once. And along with love, and joy, and structure, and support, what this change most requires… is waiting.
For us, the adults watching and shaping students’ learning and growth, it’s sometimes tough to remember that our waiting is as important a gift as any. Growing truly does take its own time and shape, for our students as well as us. In a Friends’ school community like Penn Charter, though, I like to think that we have a few tools that help us see waiting as an active, rather than a passive, endeavor. At Penn Charter, we practice active waiting all the time. Meeting for Worship is at the center of this practice: whether we share messages or simply sit in silence, we learn the discipline of waiting, and sometimes, with luck, we may listen beyond the external noise enough to hear a deeper, inner voice.
Beyond the meetinghouse, our classrooms, student-teacher relationships, and school community uplift a kind of active waiting in a myriad of subtle, important ways. Teachers signal the start of class with a moment of silence to gather students’ focus. Classroom practices create shared space for many student voices, not only to speak but also to listen. Students come to community events – sports games, concerts, performances – to honor their classmates’ efforts. How is this waiting? Simple. We wait actively when we make space for the still, small voice in ourselves and others. We wait actively when we recognize and honor ‘that of God’ in one another. We wait actively when we act lovingly in response to our conflicts, in honor not only of our strengths, but also our flaws. This waiting isn’t an easy task; it’s the hardest part of growing. But, as the passage quoted in Meeting said, ‘those who wait… are lifted up as on the wings of eagles.’ In this busy day and age, I am honored to participate in the growing that happens only when we wait. May we all be blessed by the challenge of waiting.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School
From the Director’s Chair November 2007
Posted by msnl in : November 2007 Edition, From the Director's Chair“Use your capabilities and your passions not as ends in themselves but as God’s gifts entrusted to you. Share them with others; use them with humility, courtesy and affection… Show loving consideration for all creatures, and cherish the beauty and wonder of God’s creation. Attend to Pure Wisdom and be teachable.” From the Advices in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice
Planting Trees
Autumn is the time of year for trees. Suddenly, our green and lush leaves turn to oranges and reds. Grassy yards still in need of one late-season trim fill with a brown, crunchy blanket as the trees ready themselves for winter. This bright flash of color signals the coming of shorter days and cooler temperatures, as we shift our energy and focus indoors.
Fall hardly seems like a logical time to be planting trees, but our students in middle school have – literally and figuratively – done just that this autumn. 
Sixty sixth-grade students started their school year with an exuberant two days of tree-planting in nearby Fairmount Park. We planted over three hundred trees in a reclaimed pasture adjacent to the Wissahickon Creek, and left a legacy which will help to prevent erosion, create shade, and grow a grove for those students to visit in years to come. Our volunteer coordinator, David Brower, spoke highly of Penn Charter students’ efforts: “Thank you again for bringing such a great group of students to the park. They were quite focused and productive and did a high-quality job."
On campus, students have been planting trees of another sort. Student athletes have learned new skills and new sports throughout many well-played contests. New friendships have formed. The early days of disorganized locker visits, of new schedules, and of learning new subjects have given way to a more comfortable rhythm.
The school year follows a rhythm set within the seasons, but it also has its own internal pace and shape. We start each year anew in the fall, and watch the seeds planted in September grow into new learning, new friendships, and new achievements throughout the year and beyond. Like the sixth graders who learned to plant the roots deep, to cover them carefully with fertile soil, and to water just enough to help the tree begin to grow into the surrounding dirt, we have talked this fall about the ways to steward – to take care of – our growing in community. We value student and teacher relationships which are strong and deep, and we strive to nurture trust by communicating with honesty and caring. In the classroom, we push one another to grow new roots, to stretch out into new territory, and to take risks. We are a foundation for one another’s growing.
While the leaves are changing color and falling from the trees on campus, our growing turns its attention inwards, in the classrooms, the studios, and the field house. In this, our year to honor the Quaker testimony of stewardship, we are planting trees.
Rebecca Tatum
Director of Middle School