At the end of June, I was Professor Dawbee, getting married in the tunnel of love, the entrance to the bamboo forest in Dragonquartz, and today on May Day in the year 2020, we held our Poetry and Peace Circle on Zoom again. Our dimension of Human Greatness this week was Intuition. We wandered quietly through two tales from Brothers Grimm, "Jorinda and Joringel," and "Simelei Mountain." Both were Intuition treasure maps. Last week our Dimension of Human Greatness was Integrity. Our story was a kindled version of "Empty Pot," by Demi. For the week featurning Inquiry, we read "One Grain of Rice," by Demi, pondering exponential growth (as in a virus).
The Corona Virus changed our Place Based school through an unforeseeable and unforgettable manifestation of our Integrated Theme for this school year, "The Story of Change."
| No one has mentioned yet that even Peace Circle changes each week. Our place based school never imagined such an enormous change in the "place" part. We had no idea how prophetic this theme choice, The Story of Change, would prove to be... or did we? How quickly we went from being a school with no homework to a school of only homework. |  Did anyone expect to be homeschooling with Inside Outside/ in the cloud School. My intuition must surely have been giving me some foreshadowing of the coming change when the theme for this year appeared. The Story of Change indeed. |
Spring Forward
We had already begun our Parakeet class second semester theme of metamorphosis before spring break, but we were together in the classroom then. We sat, knee to knee on our kaleidoscope magic learning carpet, reading about complete and incomplete metamorphosis. It was nothing like Zoom.
This week I am zooming through the speeding days from the school library each morning. I change the science shelves behind me in some way every day. I wonder who will be the first to notice. I always try to share a sample of what is blooming here at school, and to create an inquiry link between concrete objects and some component of our theme, helping us remember things in a new way.
We had already begun our Parakeet class second semester theme of metamorphosis before spring break, but we were together in the classroom then. We sat, knee to knee on our kaleidoscope magic learning carpet, reading about complete and incomplete metamorphosis. It was nothing like Zoom.
This week I am zooming through the speeding days from the school library each morning. I change the science shelves behind me in some way every day. I wonder who will be the first to notice. I always try to share a sample of what is blooming here at school, and to create an inquiry link between concrete objects and some component of our theme, helping us remember things in a new way.
Last week for Earth day I showed the students a photo of the fig tree we planted together on Earth Day a few years back. This Earth Day is number 50. I was in high school 50 years ago. I wore a green armband to school that day and we had a sit in on campus. It was a good time in history to be a teenager. I had no idea then that one day I would magically understand my purpose was to dream an Earth Day kind of school into being. This fig tree has GROWN!
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