I've come down with the cold that's going around. Ugh. I hate being sick. Last night my throat was so sore, I could barely sleep. Already this morning, my throat is somewhat better, but I'm still sick and its going to be a loooong day.
Last night was Curriculum Night at the school. There's a tremendous difference in feeling between Kindergarten and Fourth Grade, although they're both really the same. Increasingly, I come to see that going to school is about 
learning to be subordinate -- learning to wear chains. In Kindergarten, the focus is on being comfortable wearing loose chains whereas by Fourth Grade it's all about making the chains shorter and tighter. I see it more and more clearly in what Charlie is being asked to do in school. This morning Charlie was writing his sentences. This activity requires that he write sentences that include words from the week's list of spelling words.
Just for a moment, let's reflect on this practice to begin with. Is this something that a person would ever do outside of schooling? Is this a meaningful task that someone would choose to do on their own? I don't think so. Writing is certainly important. Discovering new words is certainly important. I know that some people like to have a "word of the day" as an artificial means to learn new words, but most people learn words naturally -- by reading and talking with people, by going new places and seeing new things. The whole task of "spelling words" is an artificial task which devalues student action.
In the past, Charlie and I approached the task by trying to make it tolerably meaningful. For Charlie, it involved trying to use as many of the spelling words as possible in a single sentence and have it still make sense. Or to write some kind of story that uses all of the words. The feedback from the teacher this year, is to number the sentences (so that they're disconnected from one another) and use only one word per sentence. I couldn't let that stand. This morning, I went to speak with the teacher. She said that she wants the exercise to be meaningful and she's willing to let him have more than one word per sentence (as long as he writes enough sentences) and to let him write a paragraph rather than disconnected sentences.
The other issue that came up last night is the beginning-of-the-day time in the classroom. Students aren't allowed in the room until 8:20 and formal activities in the class begin at 8:40. In the past, the assumption has been that this time is "free time" when the students could socialize or play. Now, increasingly, the students are being compelled to use this time for school work. "Fourth Grade is about making choices" we're told. It seems to me that this is an arbitrary usurpation of one of the very few opportunities to talk and catch up with one's peers. That's often how I use my "I've just gotten to work" time. (OK, actually, I check my email, but its the same thing.) When we brought it up, her response to me was that I could come in and watch. I guess that's what I'll have to do. One of the things that's nice is that I have the flexibility to come in every morning and watch. She may get tired of seeing me, but hopefully she won't try to shut me up again by implying that I don't have a right to express an opinion because I haven't been there.
My inclination is to begin trying to educate Charlie about organizing the children and helping them learn to use the power that they have. They have a lot more power than they think in two ways. First, even if the system is designed to imprison and enchain them, what they take away from the experience is up to them. When you get beaten down, you can either learn to lay down or learn to stand up (or learn to pretend to lay down or learn to kick people before they beat you down, etc, etc). It's up to you. Second, school tasks are as real or as meaningless as you want them to be. If you decide to approach them seriously, it's not hard to do what's required. If you decide to approach them meaninglessly, you disempower yourself. If the system puts you in chains, you can learn to live with the chains or you can learn enough to know how to throw them off when you need to.
Class tonight went much better than I could have had any expectation it would, given how sick I am. My voice held out for the two hours of organized class. We went through Phylogenetic Investigator, making observations for the "Observation Project", and had a discussion about How People Learn. To get the discussion going, I took Randy's suggestion and wrote some Classtalk-like questions. It seemed to help quite a bit. I'll try that again, but see if I can begin to wean the students away from needing the structure. We got through learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered, though, which was my primary aim for the discussion. The rest of the class is trying to see if they can recognize those characteristics in other environments and undertake to implement them as they design learning environments.
By the end of two hours, my voice was shot, so we came down to the BCRC so that the students could discuss projects and work on getting their portfolios caught up. One student asked me to help her get started with HTML. When I opened my mouth to reply, nothing came out but a squeak. Another student generously volunteered to help get the other one started. The class is really starting to relax and to pull together. There is still a little flash of astonishment when I suggest that to get caught up with one's own HTML page, one should look at what other students are doing. I love it.