Begin by looking for the intellectual vitality of children. Hold on tight to the belief that it is there, like a mantra or a prayer and you will find it begin to appear quite regularly during play, at the tail end of a casual conversation or even in the midst of a disagreement. When you are caught off guard you are also most susceptible to a good surprise.
Always remain at your most open outside those times reserved for observation, teaching, assessment and testing. Practice this receptive discipline and you will become even more effective during formal data gathering.
I have a collection of math-inspired art pieces completed by three-year-olds, living in one of the Meanest USA Ghettos Imaginable. They had every stereotypic excuse NOT to thrive; violent neighborhood, substandard housing, educational/nutritional deprivation at home and a society that did not provide for them at the most fundamental levels. Yet every day they arrived SUPERCHARGED for learning. Their intriguing applications of shape knowledge came after weeks of working with traditional approaches like a
well-provisioned exploratory table, attribute shapes, geoboards, pattern & unit blocks, sorting sets, flashcards, charts and so much more.
Absolutely everything begins with laying that solid, conceptual foundation through much firsthand experience.
For adults, “first concept” books offer many excellent ideas. Kites and earrings are everyday examples of diamonds. Paint box tins and wallets provide examples of everyday rectangle forms. Ingenious table collections make for reliable concept transference that will continue long after direct instruction has concluded. Every sidewalk sign, product label or article of clothing becomes an opportunity for extended shape identification. Build imaginative, everyday-accessible drill and practice into the life of every child, then step back and watch the magic unfold.
The steles came on the same day I’d been teaching the three’s how to thread and sew using oversized, plastic needles. Tiny fingers and eyes were delighted to be working in coordination, pulling brightly colored yarns through sheets of 16 x 20 construction paper. What excellent preparation for the letter and numeral formation that would come later. Everyone was concentrating when watercolorists at another table beckoned to the seamsters for a consult. Shape painting and shape tearing had been the self-selected subject for the day and the interest was in connecting pieces to resemble a vertical sculpture.
From where does the inspiration for such collaboration arise? From many sources of course, but always remember that a classroom provisioned from a cultivated sensibility is capable of spawning just about any wonderful artifact or so I discovered.
This is an old idea but it is also a young idea because it is lively, mobile, flexible and fresh.
A schoolhouse does not equal a classroom. This is a confining equation. It is limiting and it certainly is expensive.
Instead, begin to imagine a group of students with learning dimensions that extend outside the restriction of a specific lab, studio, building or campus.
Draw three concentric circles.
EDUCATION is at the center.
STUDENT-PARENT-TEACHER-ADVISOR is the next ring.
Outside curve reads COMMUNITY.
All have equal access to each other.
Once upon a time Philadelphia City Schools were over-crowded.
They had exhausted physical space but their civic minds were energetic.
Thinking and problem-solving carried on even in the face of scarce resources.
Philadelphia created something that became known as The Parkway Program.
Parkway had:
School buildings and classrooms outside the traditional arrangement.
High School courses offered all around the city.
Students consulted in the hiring and evaluating of staff.
Students participated in curriculum planning.
Students and Staff directed the program using “Management Groups”.
Business and Industry contributed instructors, sites and in-kind resources.
Tuition-paying students attracted by the innovative spirit.
Parkway created classes that did not bear the designation of 10th grade, junior or advanced placement.
The formal IQ of participants ranged from 74 all the way to 150.
Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, “There is only one subject matter for education and that is LIFE.”
The Parkway Program engaged itself in the study of life. To create curriculum it asked, “What is useful to us in life? What do we need to know and investigate to make the best urban life for others and ourselves?”
Tutorial Groups were established from the onset. These student-staff units worked on basic academic skills, computerized learning, remedial studies as needed, social skills – all of this leading to a diploma.
Not everyone fit the Parkway Profile. It was not a universal solution for all.
City-based studies were often 4-day units entitled along these lines:
“The Urban Environment”
Class Schedule looked like this:
8:00 – 9:00 Physical Fitness Class
9:00 – 11:00 Out in city at business/corporate sites, cultural centers or in
city-based classrooms.
11:00 – 1:00 Management Groups met. Lunch. Check-ins with Advisors.
1:00 – 3:00 Academic Tutorials – Personal dialogue and exchange of ideas between students and faculty.
These may have involved an independent study project or a review of research underway.
Learning how to take criticism and stand up for ideas was emphasized.
3:00 – 5:00 “Pedagogical Mile” Two hour unit of city resource-based research
and learning.
Wednesdays from 11 AM to 5 PM were specially arranged activities and/or individual study.
The city’s public transit system was used by students to travel the city on study
AND the city’s transit system became a civic and economic curriculum unit. Who funds it? Who uses it? How is it administered? How does it operate as a business? What are its finances? Where are its routes? What are its special services?
Law Enforcement is an example of an Elective that was offered.
Math class was taught at the famous Franklin Institute. Literature class was conducted at the city library.
Art Appreciation was taught at the Art Institute.
Physical Education was held at the YMCA.
Zoology was conducted at the Zoo.
Students always attended the Friday Faculty Meetings.
Typical days were 9:00 – 5:00 and included Saturday classes.
Students considered Parkway and referred to Parkway as a “School for Kids”
The Parkway faculty profile was that of a teacher who was experienced in experimental and/or innovative approaches to excellence and education.
There were volunteer interns from co-op program at Antioch, Reed, Oberlin and Goddard College.
Weekly Town Meetings were held for the entire learning community and that included parents.
“I’m a foundry man me
Molten metal in my veins
I’ve sweated and I’ve toiled
But I’ll not change
Smoke’s in my throat and
swerve’s in my skin
The metal’s my life and my living”
Gas flames and populist poetry leap from the very first pages of MELTDOWN: Words and Images from a Yorkshire Foundry. Here, Heads Together’s community development artists introduce us to the men and women at Hydro Aluminium Motorcast Limited, once known as the West Yorkshire Foundries in Leeds, England.
This is a vigorous tribute, flexing muscular verbs like melting, casting, fettling and quenching alongside colorful snapshots that walk us through an imaged production sequence of cylinder heads and engine blocks for powerful V-8 motors. But even the cachet associated with Bentley, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce or Range Rover isn’t enough to protect the working life and heritage of the furnacemen, core makers and moulders. For after 50 years of talented toil, the corporate raiders and traders have arrived carrying their own disingenuous chapbook from which they recite the dreaded, familiar verse of:
“Over capacity in the marketplace
Cheaper foreign-made products
Stiff global competition”
It is a closure we are about to experience; but also a page-turner that will transform the roster of “final redundancies” into laughing, thinking, spirited human beings. Defy the inevitable by celebrating accomplishments rather than mourning their loss. Choose to be in charge of destiny, even as the winds of economic change threaten to reduce your career to smoke and ash – this is the brave message of MELTDOWN.
“Well, now I’ve got the chance, so I’m going to change my life upside down and go for it – and I aren’t going to tell you about it; you might laugh or publish it in that book.”
Contemplate changing life upside down, actually changing one’s life from the inverted posture. Everything steady and familiar is suddenly up-ended and from this head-rushing position, new dreams and directions must be crafted. Someone better publish the method and the madness required when mastering this meltdown because it is the only discipline that will serve us well at the onset of our own multi-national, peak oil, Middle East misery and mayhem. We see the curve ahead but we ignore it, preferring to accelerate our sleek, smooth riding, gas guzzling, Miss Piggy machines straight into the global salvage yard.
When we finally do put our heads together and begin to plan our way through this coming planetary calamity, we will turn in relief to the wisdom of our West Yorkshire passengers, now quite proficient at riding shotgun and holding on for dear life with a white-knuckled grip.
“When they tie the can to a union man,
Sit down! Sit down!
When they give him the sack, they’ll take him back,
Sit down! Sit down!
When the speed-up comes, just twiddle your thumbs,
Sit down! Sit down!
When the boss won’t talk, don’t take a walk,
Sit down! Sit down!
American CIO Sit Down Song, 1937 by Maurice Sugar
In the early days, West Yorkshire Foundries was an alphabet soup of organized labor: TASS, AUEW, EETPU, ASTMS, the Pattern Maker’s Union, and others competed for the time and energy of front office and floor, alike. Strikes, wildcat or premeditated, were commonplace in the mythical territory where the work went on forever but by the 1980’s, the iron foundry had permanently closed and a new owner had arrived, the German company Bruhl Eisenwerk. Fresh infusions of capital followed and expansion of product lines for GM and Ford, strengthened annual sales, and a steady stream of new hires. Both management and workforce settled into an amicable alliance where profit and professions hung in a clearly defined balance. Then a change up was thrown March 2002, in the form of a takeover by the Norwegian hydra known as Norsk-Hydro. After that, Hydro Aluminum Motorcast Limited surfaced, but eighteen months later came the announcement of murky, economic margins and a decidedly unambiguous phase-out.
The fairytale ending would have mandated the retention of all available hands for an immediate retrofitting of the place in preparation for the future that is staring us in the face. We know that mechanized ways of getting around are about to change. Gasoline will become even more expensive and scarcer. The auto industry will continue fusing, shriveling and suddenly having a whole lot more to say about MPG, hybrids and alternative or flexible-fueled vehicles. And it won’t be zealots or fearmongers becoming fluent in the language of innovation and conversions, but everyday working stiffs, laid off and idle but with enough time and sense to jump on the WEB and investigate the manufacturing particulars of:
E85
Hemp Car
Farm Fresh BioDiesel
Ebikes
TWIKE
Sparrow Electric Car
Global Electric Motorcar
Th!nk Neighbor
The GIZMO Car
Tango Commuter Car
Hybrids
Personal Rapid Transit
That’s how it could have played out but instead, the Heads Together’s dream team got invited in during early 2004 to discuss publishing a safe, commemorative booklet on the Forge. By then, a legally-structured plant run down procedure was unfolding and even as severance packages and outplacement services were being activated, employees persisted in a pointless, institutional dance of quality audits, operational performance improvements, production deadlines and charitable donation fund drives. Were they staying or were they going? They were going all right, but with the support from a generous grant, MELTDOWN was transformed into an ambitious project, percolating with poets, photographers and filmmakers. One book, a touring exhibition, a DVD, a website and a school education pack emerged as the testimony and are now available by visiting www.fettling.com.
On page 148 of the Meltdown manual, three silhouetted men walk through a dark passageway - toward something but at the same time, away from something. It is this simultaneous movement that Heads Together seems most keen on capturing. Far from home, a one-time Motorcast mate mails back a photo to Leeds. He has relocated to Mallorca, is still fumbling the requisite Spanish, but loves his reincarnation as the new owner of a “brilliant busy” pub named Whispers. “It’s great; I wouldn’t come back for a gold pin!”
But even as his new identity takes shape on the shores of Magaluf, many more remain behind, alive and pulsing. Theirs is a legacy of great stories - precisely what is stolen from every industrial culture in the rational and mathematically calculated act of something so wasteful and commonplace as a shutdown. We read it and weep but also come to realize that our own ability to hang tough, to improvise, to remain buoyant and to stand tall upon the shoulders of others, absolutely depends upon the preservation and proliferation of tough and tender tales like these. A weathered, black leather belt is contemplated. Over one hundred years old, it is a precious family artifact, about to be retired from duty. Each grommet notch is the chronicle of a workingman – the grandfather/weaver from Holmfirth, the father/collier from Parkhill Drift and the descendant of both, a soon-to-be jobless stiff from a Yorkshire foundry. One toiler looks into the MELTDOWN mirror and catches a glimpse of himself as a green apprentice, who confuses a breakfast request for a double-decker, bacon & egg sandwich with a double-decker Twix chocolate bar. He is cussed out royally for his trouble and never again sent on a canteen errand by the old-timers.
Work feeds their souls and at work, it is always good to eat well. The food stories in MELTDOWN are the remains of what was once a feast of collegiality. Encountering them is like stumbling onto a vacated campsite where abandoned platters are still groaning with succulent and satisfying.
“Now the ice cream van tolls our knell
As we sit with our backs against
The cooling foundry wall
And the world watches us go by”
There is a portrait of a smiling someone squatting in a corner gripping a covered tin tea mug. Another of a weary someone sitting alone in an empty lunchroom, head sandwiched between hands. A hungry night shift someone recalls how the late 1960’s produced an infusion of Asians and with them, an appreciation for the cuisine and the richness of human differences. The tantalizing aromas of homemade curries and samosas wafted out from the die located next to the casting station, serving up an exchange where men could become neighbors, not traumatized strangers confronting each other in terror, across the current armed, murderous abyss of finite fossil fuels. A canteen lady with a frying pan as big as her heart, is remembered for stoking the physiological furnaces with plentiful portions of eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, fish & chips and Christmas dinners, served by management. With a shrunken workforce of 200 by 1982, there was little to offer as a morale booster except the kitchen magic of the canteen maidens.
“These kind ladies gave all the food I demanded
It’s no surprise my waist has expanded
Once I was a size eight
Now, I can only just squeeze, through the man gate”
Teacarts, typing pools and troublemakers were just a few of the foundry’s female occupations. Young women in search of egalitarian or emancipatory possibilities needed to look no further than Louise Tomassi, who shoveled sand and lugged base plates tucked under each arm like so many bags of groceries. So, it was no surprise that when pushed out of line and mouthed off to one evening at the factory bus stop, ‘Big Louie’ knocked the cocky commuter into an altered state and then directed the driver to head off, leaving her vanquished foe right where he fell. Louise was a legend with a devoted following who celebrated her precisely because she embodied the fundamental lesson that genuine recognition, rank and authority are the result of hard-earned competence and never assigned through a phony construction of power, privilege or position.
As you exit this visually rich tour of a Meltdown, be sure to visit the clock faces suspended from contrasting wall surfaces and listen to their song.
Tick tock
The company watch
It ticks to our final day
So, tick bloody tock, bloody tick
After 45 years of service, the tock no longer ticks for Terry Speake or for the Parr brothers with their combined 36. Section crews cluster together for final photographs, recalling an era of seven-day workweeks, double shifts and coveralls bulging with cash from union salary negotiations. Those days have vanished, concluding in a payday of empty pockets, yet the achievement here is the treasure trove of timely reminders that Heads Together has so beautifully collected and presented.
