Celebrate!Calm

You may have gathered it from reading this blog already, but if you haven't, daughter #2 is what educator Kirk Martin calls an "intense child." Eight months in NC's wonderful Wright School helped, but day-to-day maintenance is critical and exhausting. With a child like this, there is no margin for error.

Schools, any schools, have even less patience for intense kids. They present as defiant, oppositional and rude. It's hard to see how terrified they really are. Schools are incredibly user-unfriendly to these kids and new models for interacting are needed, both at home and school.

I attended one of Kirk Martin's Celebrate!Calm workshops last week, and was astounded to hear him describing my child and the interactions we have in our home. The school cafeteria we met in was half-full, and all the other parents were nodding along with me. Martin describes his organization:

Based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Celebrate!Calm is a world-renowned educational organization that provides science-based training for educators, parents and children. While the research-based interventions help all children learn more effectively, the organization specializes in working with children affected by Aspergers, Autism, Sensory Integration, Opposition Defiant Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, OCD, ADD, ADHD and other learning or emotional difficulties.

The two hours were packed with information, which I found trustworthy because it was so similar to Wright School's methodology. Martin sells his CD series for what he admits is an exorbitant amount of money, partially because he wants it to hurt enough that people will listen to and use them. I knew I couldn't afford it, but then he announced a special individual price for people in financial need. I approached him at the break and we agreed on a very reasonable amount that I promised him still hurt considerably.

His sessions are free to participants and there is no real pressure to buy the CD's, which are worth every penny I spent on them. There is a set for teachers, for dads, for married couples and some for everyone. Check out his website and see if he's coming to your area. If you parent or teach an intense child, put it on your calendar. You won't regret it.

Give a child the gift of reading for Christmas

Do you have someone on your gift list who already has everything they need? How about a gift in their name to help a low-income, non reading child learn to read? The Augustine Project is based in Chapel Hill, NC, but has replications in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville, Hickory, Greenville, SC, and Controe, TX. Volunteers give up two weeks of time to receive 70 hours of top quality training in teaching children to read. They then work with a low-income child for a minimum of 60 lessons. Schools in these areas eagerly seek AP tutors out and invite them to tutor during the school day at school. While our tutors are not Wilson trained, they are conversant with Wilson materials and use those with their students.

The Augustine Project in Chapel Hill, sponsored by The Church of the Holy Family, has just celebrated its 15th anniversary. Check out the website and see what good work is being done. This program and its replications depends on grants and donations to keep the good work going. So check it out. And perhaps you can use this wonderful project as an opportunity to cross several names off your holiday list.

Sequoyah, creator of Cherokee's "talking leaves"

Stories about Sequoyah, also know as George Gist, differ depending upon the source. Estimates of his birth date range from 1760 to 1776. He was born in Tennessee, the son of a Cherokee woman and an English fur trader. He died in 1843 in Texas or Mexico.

Sequoyah was a silversmith who became intrigued by the white man's ability to read and write. He spent twelve years developing a written language for the Cherokee. At first he tried a hieroglyphic system, assigning a symbol to each word. When he realized there were too many words for this to work, he switched to a syllabary, assigning a symbol to 86 different syllables. He endured ridicule, even from his family. One of his wives burned his early work, considering it witchcraft. Finally he had a workable system, which he taught his daughter, who learned it easily. Slowly it began to spread as people realized the potential. It was said that a person could learn to read within two weeks, and the literacy rate among the Cherokee soon surpassed that of the white settlers.

Today, Cherokee is the second most widely used Native American language and the only one that is growing. This is almost certainly due to the fact that this form of written language preserves the spoken language so that it hasn't died out as so many Native American languages have.

Sequoyah's feat is the only known instance of an individual creating a new written system of language. To learn more about the syllabary, check out this page.

One of my heroes

One of the most important influences on me as a teacher is educator Marva Collins, who ran the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago from 1975 to 2008. She was driven to start this school because of the poor quality education that her children and other impoverished black children were receiving. Her teachers used a direct Socratic method and she believed every child could read if they were taught phonics and the structure of the language. Generally, all her students, even those labeled developmentally disabled, learning disabled, and ineducable, were reading by Christmas. Her book, Marva Collins' Way, was and is a great source of inspiration and challenge to me. She now does educational seminars, and more about her can be found on www.MarvaCollins.com. I've always thought she should be the Secretary of Education.

Two of her quotes particularly hit home with me:

—"There is a brilliant child locked inside every student."

—"Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed."