Flying without wings
We’ve got some house martins underneath our eves. It’s that time of the year when eggs that have become chicks get that one chance to learn to fly.
My son, Ben, visited his school this week. He starts nursery there in September. He’s full of enthusiasm and could have started at Easter but we didn’t think he was ready.
I’ve scraped up five house martin chicks in two days. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
It’s easy to see when something physically dies. It’s less easy to see confidence shattered, an internal fire put out, inquisitiveness squashed.
It’s not easy being a parent or a teacher. Remember Icarus? It works both ways.
It’s useful to unpick what we mean by descriptions of ‘confidence’ and ‘internal fire’. There’s a great research project led by the Canadian Education Association called ‘What Did You Do In School Today?’ that has a nice way of unpicking ‘engagement’ with school – quick diagram on p7 http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/WDYDIST_National_Report_EN.pdf
Thanks for the comment and the link, Dan. I came across that report
(probably via you!) whilst researching for my thesis last year. What really
interested me was the ‘school as community’ aspect to it and the importance
of engaging families (especially parents) in learning. I don’t think we
enough of that. Wel, *properly* anyway…