Monthly archive for July 2013

It was third of July – my mother’s birthday. I was three and a half years old and I’d pleaded with my mother to let me stay all night with Grandma.

It was the enticement of playing with all my aunts, uncles and cousins that had encouraged me to ask mom for this opportunity. And what a fun night it was. Grandpa was up six times telling us to be quiet or else. (That was a record.)

Beautiful day

The next day was a typical gorgeous summer day in Idaho. We asked Grandma if we could go across the street to play on the playground equipment of the school.

Recovering from sadness is a psychological journey we all have to take many times over. Sometimes the emotional burden is relatively light, such as when we break a favorite dish or scrape a knee. At other times, it is tremendously heavy, weighing us down like bag full of lead as we attempt to carry on functioning in our day-to-day lives.

When my marriage, which I had thought indestructible, broke down I felt just like heroine in the fairytale “The Princess with the Glass Heart”.  I felt terribly fragile, like the finest piece of Venetian glass just waiting to shatter at the slightest pressure. I needed to spend time repairing the deep crack in my heart in order that I could live healthily and vibrantly again.

“We create caring, nurturing adults, prepared to be productive citizens in a democratic society.”

I’m sure you’ve all seen that proclamation, there or thereabouts, as part of the mission statement of just about every school you’ve ever visited. It’s a common declaration. And meaningless if it isn’t followed.

How do we avoid turning it into a empty bunch of words? Just how do we create caring, nurturing, productive citizens?

People who will change the world in which we live

At Six Seconds, we want to create change makers.

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself. ~Didacus Stella

All of us stand on the shoulders of others – no-one is self-made; no-one is self-sufficient; no one person has brought into being all the things that enrich and improve our lives.

And, at the start of this new, exciting year, I am grateful for many, many shoulders.

1. Those of the dedicated, creative teachers and specialists with whom I work alongside.

2. Those of the gifted and talented students who teach me far more than I teach them.

If you’re a parent, it is one of your biggest fears.

You have some friends whose child makes you wince every time s/he opens his mouth. Or is known among other parents as a bully. Your friends are constantly being called into the principal’s office to discuss their child’s behavior. And, most crushingly of all, the child is being shunned and not invited on playdates.

Your fear is that this will happen to your child. And you.

You fear that your parenting journey that started out with such joy and a tiny, wriggly bundle swaddled in a warm blanket will disintegrate into a desperate morass of negative emotion. And you desperately don’t want that to happen.

This third part in a series of posts was inspired by a recent Back-To-School night at our Six Seconds lab school, Synapse, after the father of a kindergartener requested a list of books I would recommend reading.

I dithered when he asked and then said, “Okay, I can do that.”  After some thought, I identified six enduring life lessons for creating change, six adult books that detailed these ideas, and paired them with six children’s picture books. I believe it is vastly important to grasp these notions if we want to successfully create change in our society and reading books can help us do this tremendously well. Plus, everyone loves a good, new book, don’t they? 🙂