Our literature-based study of the internment of ethnic Japanese during WWII came to an end with a wonderful whole group discussion. We started by asking about the many different kinds of migrations that were part of the entire history. Students came up with quite a few: coming to America from Japan in the first place, sending young people back to Japan for their cultural education, being moved first to holding centers and then to camps, being transferred from one camp to another, being released from the camps to attend college in the Midwest and East and to enlist in the army to fight in Europe, and leaving the camps to go back home or to a new location when they were closed.

We talked about the lack of facilities and proper supplies in the camps that was changed very little during the entire internment period — housing, privacy, bathrooms, food, medical care, schools and equipment, recreation, and more. Students were keenly aware that circumstances in the camps destroyed family life, in part because many adults were ashamed by their incarceration, depressed by the lack of things to do that would make them feel productive, and unable to control their children and adolescents. The large dining halls meant that families did not have to eat together, and this led to a loss of control over the children and teens. On the other hand, our students pointed out that some things did turn out to be good — some residents were able to learn English for the first time; some started schools for children and cultural activities for the adults and were pleased with new-found leadership skills. We talked about the irony of being encouraged to join the army after being locked up as potential traitors with no evidence to support that concern. Several already knew about the courage and heroism in the all-Japanese fighting units.

Students were quite eloquent about what they thought the American government should have done from the beginning of immigration from Japan: allow ownership of land by non-citizens, permit them to become citizens, and “Welcome them and protect them when the war broke out,” as one student said. They saw that some Japanese people became politicized against the USA because of how they were treated after Pearl Harbor, despite being loyal until that time. Our students were also able to see the connection between the fear and racism of that period with the hostility toward Muslims now. There is a very keen sense of social justice alive and well in our classroom.

We’re also coming to the end of our study of Ireland. We went to see the Irish Famine Memorial on the waterfront in Philadelphia. The massive bronze sculpture showed a complex blend of crop failure, despair, emigration, and arrival. Students were able to identify all of those elements. They realized that it must have been created in a manner similar to that used for the Famine Ship sculpture located at the foot of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, which we learned about in a documentary some weeks before. They read the 8 informational plaques that are part of the part that surrounds the sculpture and agreed that a person who knew nothing about the famine and the socio-political events surrounding it would come away with a lot after visiting the site.

We’re well into 20th century Ireland now. We’ve addressed “The Troubles” with a fairly gentle hand, thinking that some of it is probably more appropriate for our students when they are a bit older. The acts of terrorism conducted by both sides as well as the hunger strike that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners in the prison known as The Maze (Long Kesh) in Northern Ireland involve a level of political and emotional complexity that would be difficult for many of our students to understand right now. On a lighter note, their performances of The Táin and their pennywhistle playing were a delight to see and hear.

We are now in the midst of watching the film Into the West, which is a wonderful story in itself and also provides some insight into the lifestyles and conflicts of Irish travelers in recent years — some of whom have responded positively to government encouragement to become “settled” and ultimately assimilated. Others have had a lot of success in the courts for being recognized as a distinct ethnic minority who are entitled to maintain their nomadic culture and traditions within the larger Irish society.

We have just a couple of Wednesday sings left in the year. Last week, we invited the students who will be fifth graders in our building next year to join us for one. Our current fifth graders also hosted them for lunch in our classroom while I met with the current sixths in Diane and Jeri’s room to continue working on choosing their gift to the school. We are keenly aware that it’s a time of transition for all of us. Graduates are working on their speeches, and fifths are putting together the skits. The end is near.

Although we don’t often have rain on the day of our spring fair, it does happen. As a result, we always choose a game that can be played indoors. Designing the game and its rules is always a learning experience as well as a lot of fun. In the last few years, we linked that game (whatever it was) to the “Flush Bucket” activity — one in which a volunteer adult or student sits under a water-filled bucket attached to the basketball back outside of the library. When someone wins the game, students ring the dreaded gong and pull the rope that dumps the bucket. Sadly, this was one of those rare rainy years, so we had an indoor fair. The Flush Bucket stayed in storage.  The fair was great fun, nonetheless, and one of the incidental benefits was that parents had a chance to see all of the classrooms as they toured the games and other activities.

Our first game involved making a pachinko board, which is kind of like a primitive pinball game. I had built a little one for the class during the “Workbench” minicourse a few weeks ago, hoping (in vain) that kids in the minicourse would be inspired to make one of their own.

Kids have played this one constantly in the classroom, however, so building a big one for the fair was a choice that the group endorsed. A 2 by 4 foot piece of MDF seemed like a good starting place, and we thank Mike Batchelor for getting it for us.

After we framed the MDF with some 1 by 5 pine, it was time to work on the interior obstacles. During several choice times, kids used soft-tack putty to position assorted items and see how the marbles rolled. As always, they thought of clever ways to use things from our maker area that would never have occurred to me.

There were five compartments at the bottom of the board. Were they equally likely to end up with a marble? We did a lot of data-gathering. By now, most of our kids know that a data sample has to be large in order to give a valid indication of the pool it represents. How many times (“What percent?”) did a marble end up in each of 5 compartments? The first few rounds seemed to favor one compartment. After a lot of rounds were played, we could see that four of the compartments were fairly equal in likelihood, while the fifth was much more difficult to hit. We discussed changing the pieces but finally decided to make that elusive compartment worth more points.  Students secured the pieces with hot glue, and we were ready to move on.

Creating the rules for play is always an interesting process. Students invariably start out with ideas that are so complicated that the fair would be over by the time they finished explaining how the game worked. We reminded them that we wanted the game to take some time — that kids will run through their supply of game tickets too quickly if the game’s playing time is too short.  We finally settled on giving players 10 marbles. Getting two into each of any four compartments would get a prize ticket. Getting a marble into the difficult fifth compartment would get another prize ticket, and more than one there would get two prize tickets. Among other things, these rules meant that there was the possibility of winning something right on up to the last marble, even if there was no hope of having two marbles in four of the compartments. The game was not only fun to play but also fun to watch, so we had a lot of observers as well as players throughout the day.

Our second game involved mounting some cones and rings on a tilted board, supplies that we had used for a previous fair. It went through similar testing and rule-creation. It wasn’t as successful, in part because it was very hard to win (despite our best efforts to make it more playable). Still, it was another activity that would be helpful for a day in which kids were not going to spend a lot of time running around outside.

This is a side note about the kind of community we are. Partway through the day, one of our students brought me a twenty-dollar bill that she had picked up off the floor. I asked the adults and children in the room at that time if anyone had dropped it, and — after a few adults checked their cash — all said it wasn’t theirs. A while later, a former student came up to ask if her father’s lost twenty had been found in our room, and I was happy to hand it to her. Trust and honesty are intrinsic to the way we engage with each other. I think we are exceptional in that regard.

We want to thank Deborah and the rest of the office staff for spending a lot of time figuring out how to best use our indoor spaces and motivate parents to come out on a dismal day. Their hard work before, during, and after the fair made it a success. Although we all hope for only sunny days for our fair in the future, they have created a plan that will stand up to any storm.

 

 

The month of May is the point at which we devote considerable time to preparing for graduation. For the fifth graders, it’s time to work on creating skits from funny anecdotes provided by the sixth graders’ parents. This is a tradition that has been part of graduation for more years than I have been at Miquon. My guess is that it was started to give the fifth graders some attention and importance that could balance with the amount of focus on their older classmates. Keeping the secrecy of the skits is incredibly important, and it is rare for our fifths to crumble under the endless questioning of the sixths. Silence is power.

We used to do the skits on graduation day, but that changed quite a few years ago when we had a graduating class of 25 students and were concerned about the length of the ceremony. The moving of the skits to the night before graduation and having an all-school family picnic has given it a more informal setting and truly puts the fifth graders into the spotlight. In music class, they start learning to play “Pomp and Circumstance” on kazoos — a touch of whimsy at the end of graduation itself. May is also the time that many of our fifth graders begin thinking seriously about the fact that they will be at Miquon for just one more year.

The sixth graders become involved with several graduation-related things. They make some decisions about the color and typeface of the “Class of 2017” t-shirts that they will wear to Skit Night. They run a couple of soft pretzel sales to raise money for their gift to the school, and they begin researching  possible gifts by talking to staff and discussing their own ideas. As always, their own suggestions have ranged from the practical (more sports equipment) to the impossible (air-conditioning for the classrooms).

They start working on their music for the ceremony. In 1982, when the school was celebrating its 50th year, Tony Hughes wrote “Miquon in our Hearts,” which remains our much-loved official school song. Some years later,  John Krumm was our music teacher. He wrote a beautiful second song for graduation — “Fields of Childhood” — that weaves its words and melody throughout the structure of Tony’s song and is performed by the graduates while the audience sings Tony’s composition. The graduates also choose one or two other pieces to do as well, usually ones that relate in some way to saying farewell to their school and community, and this occupies most of their time in music class during the month.

Most importantly, they begin creating their graduation speeches. Student speeches — where did they come from? I will confess to starting that tradition. Until we began it, our graduates were unheard throughout the ceremony until they sang at the end. But one year — too many years ago for me to recall just which one — I was on an accreditation committee for a neighboring independent elementary school. Part of their documentation mentioned that each of their 6th grade graduates stepped up to the microphone during their graduation ceremony to announce something about their experience that mattered to them — a word, a phrase, a sentence. Not much more. And I thought, we can do better than that. As it happened, our graduating class that year was quite small, so it looked like a good year to add something to what would otherwise be a very short ceremony. And we never looked back after that.

One year, something went wrong with the sound track on what was then a video-taped recording. There was a hum that disrupted the clarity of the students’ speeches. I took it to a local shop to see if it could be rescued. They put it on a player attached to a television in their showroom. Several adults who were not connected with the school stopped to watch and listen. One said with wonder, “All of those kids can speak!” Yes, they could. Although the hum could not be fixed, I’d like to hope that we got an enrollment or two out of that moment.

This speech-writing often seems to our sixth graders to be a daunting task at first, but it turns out to be a time of reflection, sharing of memories, laughter about funny experiences, and lots of thoughtful conversation as their texts evolve. Most students create three substantive paragraphs. We ask them to select a quotation that relates in some way to their message and write a few sentences that explain the connection. There’s a lot of conversation around those quotations. What do they mean, really? Who said those words, and what were the circumstances? The second paragraph is about their main idea. We ask them to write descriptively about something that they believe has been important in their Miquon experience. It may be about acquiring a new skill or interest, the value of friendship, learning to persevere in the face of difficulty, an exhilarating chase game or flying trip down the snow-covered tubing hill . . . the possibilities are enormous.

The most important thing, we tell them, is that it should be personal — a speech that only you could give. The third paragraph wraps it all up. And then they are ready to work on practicing their delivery. This all takes several weeks. The speeches go through many revisions in that time. Students often decide on a different quote as their ideas develop and change. Teachers focus on helping students express their ideas with clarity, and we do some coaching around grammar, but it’s important that the final text belongs entirely to the student and sounds like something created by an 11- or 12-year-old. We tell them that you may or may love public speaking, but it’s important to know that you can do it — because there are likely to be times in your life in which you will want or need to address an audience in support of something that matters to you.

Those gorgeous diplomas — they, too, were part of graduation before my time. But they were much less artistic and planned in my first years. Much less. They were done on big pieces of brown paper with markers, available in what was then the art room (now the after-school building) for anyone to stop in and write a celebratory description or memory on a child’s page. Now we devote several staff meetings to collect ideas from archived reports and recent memories, meetings that are filled with loving observations about each child’s growth, passions, and essential nature.

Before the building of the play barn, before the building of the graduation stage under a hired tent, before the invention of the wheel, we did the ceremony near the stream — close to where the monkey bars are now. Families brought blankets, graduates sat on folding chairs, and they were passed on to their middle schools with just as much love, optimism, and sense of loss as we do now. Later years saw a formal sit-down post-graduation luncheon evolve that became increasingly expensive for families. The graduates’ swim party was moved away from graduation day so the girls’ hair styling was not admired and lost in the same 24 hours. The diplomas became longer and more wordy, but not necessarily better or more personal.

We do seem to move in a world of continuing escalation, despite our best hopes for simplicity. Graduation is now more formal: parents work to create some lovely ambience on the stage, we hire a (nearly) storm-proof tent, and the diplomas are more artistic and thoughtfully-worded. We’ve tried to scale some things back a bit, nonetheless. The graduation luncheon is now a simpler reception with light snacks. Diplomas are a bit shorter. The graduates’ swim party happens in the week before the big event. Still, as we say every year to our students, you will have graduations that cost you more time, effort, and money, but you will never have another one that is truly all about you. Treasure it.

Before we know it, Graduation Day will be upon us. It’s just about a month away.