{"id":597,"date":"2007-10-16T14:06:06","date_gmt":"2007-10-16T20:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/archives\/597"},"modified":"2007-10-16T14:06:06","modified_gmt":"2007-10-16T20:06:06","slug":"im-high-on-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/archives\/597","title":{"rendered":"I’m high (on children)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My general perception of the current state of primary education was that we were teaching to tests and encouraging bullies. A month ago I was asked to come to a local elementary school to participate in a program they’re doing where each month a different grade takes on a different moral characteristic, learns about it, and presents it to the rest of the school. Wow.<\/p>\n

So talk about intimidating, I was asked to present a little something to second graders on responsibility. And come back each month to do another trait. Right. No worries. Just … you know … responsibility.<\/p>\n

First off, I had a lot of trouble defining responsibility, as far as how to choose a story to tell. There are so many ways to apply that principle, and second graders are going to want a bit of an analogy to make it work.<\/p>\n

Finally, I realized that I could narrow the connotation of the word down to something that fit. I decided to go with eco-terrorism.<\/p>\n

Kidding! I decided that I wanted to show them the responsibility we have for our communities. I chose the book The Lorax (read it here)<\/a>, and as we read the story, we talked about the Once-ler’s actions, and if he should maybe have been taking more responsibility for the flora and fauna that had been flourishing.<\/p>\n

At the end, the Once-ler gives John Everyman the last truffula tree seed. I didn’t even have to prompt them. They were all like “he needs to plant that seed aaaaand then put a basket under the tree and collect more seeds aaaaaand then plant a bunch more trees”.<\/p>\n

I asked them what kind of responsibility the Once-ler had for his community there, and they decided that the whole debacle would have been avoided if the Once-ler would have planted new truffula trees as he cut others down.<\/p>\n

They totally and completely got it. They got the eco theme, they got the responsibility theme, and they were still with me at the end, when I told them that I think we all have a responsibility to our community and my favorite way to be responsible is to pick up a piece of trash at the park. If everyone in the class did that, 19 pieces of trash would be in the trash can. I followed that up by saying that we can’t be responsible for everyone, but if we do a small part along with everyone else, we are all responsible together.<\/p>\n

I’m totally blissed out. I can’t wait to find out what next month’s theme is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My general perception of the current state of primary education was that we were teaching to tests and encouraging bullies. A month ago I was asked to come to a local elementary school to participate in a program they’re doing where each month a different grade takes on a different moral characteristic, learns about it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bucket-of-sunshine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outsidecat.com\/wordvehicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}