So I’ve booked my flight to Washington. I’ve tried repeatedly to make appointments, but his secretary doesn’t realize who I am, so that hasn’t panned out. However, I hear he frequents modern dance performances, so I’ll have to attend those regularly. Posh restaurants might be a good idea too.

I’ll be telecommuting to my day-job, and never fear, I’ll be back to Seattle in the fall. My partner Brian got some dead-end fellowship to work for a scrappy little nonprofit called Public Knowledge, so he’ll be tagging along. And I figured I’d better bring the geekling for cover when I’m attending children’s events on the lookout for Malia and Sasha.

So ping me if you’re in or around DC. I won’t be spending the whole time harassing my backwards elected officials. I do like some of them – like that dreamy Jim McDermott and his fantastic single-payer health care plan. I should bake him some cookies. I will be hopping around the east coast some while I’m out there, and you should be able to find me at local tech or storytelling events (BarCamp, PechaKucha, Ignite, etc.)

Bon Voyage!

Opening
My husband, Brian, and I have a child in Suzuki violin. We have a quirky way of practicing, and our violin teacher keeps telling us that we should tell other parents about it, because it really does work. So this blog post has nothing to do with technology (although it does have to do with lifehacking). It’s aimed at other Suzuki parents, so if you’re one of my normal blog readers and you have zero interest in music or motivating children, then move along. I’ll be back to my normally-scheduled tech blogging next week.

Suzuki is hard work
Learning an instrument is a life-long endeavor. It requires daily practice over a long period of time. If you’re like my husband and me, you’ve made the decision that it’s worth it. Our little one (I call her the geekling) is seven. She started Suzuki violin at the age of five, and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t practice every day. That’s hard work! However, our job as a parents isn’t to help her (or bribe or intimidate her to) struggle through the hard work. I’m going to tell you about the way we practice. It’s a lot of work for us. The difference is that we know we’re working hard. If all goes as planned, she thinks it’s playtime.

Trust your teacher
There’s a reason we hire teachers. Any violinist could tell a child the 1,001 things that they are doing wrong. Edmund Sprunger says in his great book, Helping Parents Practice, that his job as a violin teacher is to tell the child the one thing that will help them the most. A good violin teacher (ours is the fabulous Christine Dunaway) will tell you exactly what to practice at home. We, as parents, have a strong urge to correct our children. It’s hard to watch them practicing bad habits, but if the focus for the week is a good bow hand, let the other stuff slide. There are a lot of things to think about while playing an instrument, and trying to focus on them all at once will overwhelm you and your child. Your job as a parent is to practice what you’re told to practice. It’s a no-brainer.

Teach your child’s body
Suzuki is about repetition. It’s about muscles and neurons. Your child wants to be a great musician, and they want to perfectly execute everything you ask them to do. Telling your child “you’re just not trying, try harder” is incredibly demotivating. You and your child have the same goals, you just need to help her whip her body and her brain into shape. Try using body and brain terminology with your child. Saying “you’re having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro” is really different from saying “your fingers are having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro”. The latter is both more accurate and more productive. The problem isn’t that the geekling always forgets the c-sharp, the problem is that we need to work together on strengthening that neural pathway, because it sure is stubborn! Get it?

Motivation
Just like adults, children need a good reason to follow directions. I think we all know that “because I said so” isn’t a good reason. We quickly learn that our children think “because it will make you a great musician someday” isn’t a good reason. There is a very important difference between adults and children here. Adults want the real reason. Children want a reason. This is the really important really hard work you need to do: making stuff up. Here’s an excerpt from a recent practice I did with the geekling:

“oh no!”
“what’s wrong?”
“gremlins have just kidnapped the willow princess, and somebody has to go save her!”
“I’ll save her!”
“okay, they took her into a dark cave. you’re not afraid of the dark, right?”
“no way! what do I have to do?”
“there’s water in the cave, but fortunately there’s a rowboat. To row the boat, you need to play the first four measures of Perpetual Motion three times with a perfect bow hand, then we’ll get to see what’s at the end of the cave.”
“okay”
“get into a good play position, here we go!”

You get the idea. If she forgets about her bow hand, then we’ve lost an oar and we need to go back to the mouth of the cave and start over. We’ve done dinosaur hunts and rock concerts and even saved the world from global warming. Take whatever excites your child this week, and roll with it. If I’m having a lousy day, and not feeling particularly creative, we’ll use a book or a myth (The Ramayana works great) so I don’t have to make up the structure. The teacher tells us what to practice, the story provides the motivation, and all I have to do is put the two together.

It’s a totally flexible method too. If she’s doing great, or it’s taking longer than I expected, then a gryphon swoops in and flies us to the end of the cave. If I feel like a little more practice is necessary, then there’s a gnome at the end of the cave who needs us to row him to his brother’s place so we can all get scuba suits because the kidnappers went underwater. We also throw in a liberal dash of Choose Your Own Adventure, giving her two (or more) productive choices to turn the story in a certain direction. We always end the lesson on an incredible victory, and she’s happy to practice the next day.

Our child is particularly kinesthetic, so we also include activities like “you’ve been sprinkled with fairy dust. put down your violin and touch every doorknob in the house so the fairies can come in.” We’ll toss a coin to decide what to do, or have her collect 8 pencils by playing something eight times, but then actually let her get a pencil out of the drawer each time she plays it. If she’s extremely wiggly, we’ve even been known to have her run around the block in the middle of a lesson then come back and play.

Some people (like my husband) can do this sort of storytelling on the fly. I usually need some prep time to look over my lesson notes and form a story outline beforehand. Do what works for you.

In closing
I hope that helps. All my work is public domain, so feel free to share this with friends, copy it, publish it, whatever. I won’t sue you. I would appreciate if you keep my name attached and let me know if you liked it and where you’re passing it on. Good luck with practice!

A print-friendly version of this post is available at http://sarahdavies.cc/suzuki.html

It was also the only private school we visited that included children with learning disabilities. These children are held to the same standards as the others, but they each have a personal teacher to help them with classroom tasks. Awesome!

They incorporate a lot of science into the curriculum, with iMacs in every classroom, gardening, checking the weather, and taking care of animals.

Overall, we were impressed with the school. We will apply and see what happens.

The next school we graced with our under-caffeinated presence was the Spruce Street School.

The trump card for the Spruce Street School is that, as far as mass transit in Seattle is concerned, all roads lead to downtown, so the school is very easily accessible, and when you’re working 40 hours a week, that’s a huge factor. Also, it will be two blocks from a light rail station starting in 2009.

The music program is really impressive. All the kids learn marimba, and since there is no way to play a marimba out of key, they sound really fantastic after a few months. I wonder about the adults there though. I think listening to marimba music at work all day every day would drive me up the wall.

They have a theater program with a heavy emphasis on Shakespeare. That’s awesome. Their playground (including climbing wall) is on the roof. Also awesome.

They also have three-week “elective” periods, where teachers sign up to teach random stuff like cooking or contra dancing or juggling, and kids from any grade can sign up for the class.

They don’t have the mission or vision that we saw so strongly at Giddens.

The curriculum was extremely American-centric. They learn all about democracy and American media, and elections and presidents, but they don’t seem to learn anything about the rest of the world. Seems to me like becoming a global-citizen is an absolute requirement for being a functioning adult today, let alone ten years from now.

The weirdest part of the whole tour was that the entire school is carpeted. I’ve never seen a school with carpeting before. It seems terribly inefficient. Not sure why it bothers me so much. I just feel like schools shouldn’t be carpeted.

Overall, our opinion was mixed. The location is amazing, but the school itself seems pretty average.

This week we toured a small independent school on first hill in Seattle called Giddens School.

Giddens School was recommended to me by my colleague Leah Lee, who used to work there. She had endless praise for all the faculty and staff there, so I went in with extremely high expectations.

We first met in the library, which is a cozy little room on the top floor. It’s like a maze with creaky floors and book lined alcoves ideal for children looking to lose themselves in the wonders of reading. Our guide asked us what other tours we had been on. We told a more diplomatic version of our Waldorf experience. She seemed casual and sincere, which was a pretty big departure from the nervous and approval-seeking guides at other schools.

The guide explained that everything at Giddens revolves around their mission of social justice. This immediately impressed me. I do technology work for nonprofits because I believe that I can change the world for the better, and it’s very important for me to be able to instill that feeling in the geekling.

We went on a classroom tour, and they actually encouraged us to talk to the kids (who were all very excited to show us their work, and passionate in their love for school). Traditional academics appear to be strong there, though not spectacular. The kids get Spanish for half an hour twice a week. It’s not an immersion program, so I would guess that they come out of 5th grade exposed heavily to Spanish, but far from fluent. The music program is run by a local musician who writes social-justice oriented songs for the kids and runs an after-school choir. Each classroom has three desktop computers set aside for the kids to work on spelling, word processing, and educational games.

The kids at Giddens have a “secret garden” where they grow food. They then put the food into little red wagons and haul it over to the food bank across the street. They also plan meals for hundreds of people at the senior center down the block as one of their math projects. One of the teachers told us about how the fourth grade class implemented a postal system for the school where they sell stamps and deliver letters and packages for people. They then employed a democratic process to decide what to do with the money earned by the postal system, and ended up donating it to a local park to help them make their play structures more diverse so that kids of all ages and sizes could play there. The school has a student council which influences the decisions of the administration. Each class has representatives elected to the council.

I was very impressed by the amount of exposure that kids get to public service, democracy, and activism. After the tour, we spoke with the principal. He was very passionate about child development, and we were able to have a great conversation with him over when it’s developmentally appropriate to expose kids to things like hunger and poverty, and how to expose them in a way that inspires optimism and activism rather than cynicism and inaction.

The level of conversation that I was able to engage in with the students, teachers, and administration was orders of magnitude above the other schools we have talked to. They were open, honest, sincere, and genuinely dedicated to inspiring children to be active adult citizens.

We will definitely be applying to Giddens, and I suspect that we will become active and passionate members of the Giddens community come next year (if we can afford to!).

The first parent tour we went on was the Seattle Waldorf School, and boy are they a trip! We had some idea of the Waldorf curriculum going in. We dutifully read the full-color glossy book they had sent to our house a few weeks earlier. We’d poked around the website. We liked the idea that the kids have the same class and teacher through all of 1st-8th grade. We liked the idea of a well-researched, pre-set curriculum. The geekling is in Suzuki violin, after all, so we’re no stranger to strict lesson plans with lots of parent involvement.

We got there and were taken to the music room (all Waldorf kids learn to play violin, so it was stuffed with string instruments), and encouraged to look at laminated books of classroom work produced by different grade levels. The very polite and perky admissions officer told us that these books contained the best work produced by Waldorf students. She seemed to think this was something to be proud of. It sounded more to us like an apologetic admission that not all of their students produce this level of work.

There was also propaganda from the national Waldorf organization, one with a sexy headshot of Julianna Margulies and a blockquote about how much Waldorf education had taught her about critical thinking. That’s good, we thought, our daughter could be an actress who’s good at critical thinking!

That’s when we got off on the wrong foot. My partner Brian has mild dyslexia and a hand tremor, and depends heavily on typing and spell-check in order to be the fantastic writer that he is. He has built much of his career around securing accessible technology for people with disabilities so that they can participate in the internet and democracy and all that tasty stuff. Brian’s first question for the admissions director was naturally about technology in the classroom.

Little did we know, the subject of technology is in fact a minefield in Waldorf education. They have zero technology in the curriculum until high school. The admissions director got rather defensive, picked up one of the display books of student work, and delivered a short lecture/sermon on how important handwriting is to human development. I hadn’t realized until she said it that the workbooks, even the high school ones, were entirely done by hand. Not one typed word, not one photograph.

We bit our tongues and looked slightly shocked as this poor woman who had just essentially told Brian that he could never become a fully developed human being tucked a wisp of hair back behind her ear and asked for more questions. She didn’t know. Technology is not a dealbreaker, we thought. If there’s one experience the geekling will go into adolescence lacking, it ain’t technology.

Then we went on the classroom tours. It became obvious that they had orchestrated our arrival in certain classrooms at certain times. The whole thing felt more like a performance than an observation. The math and history lessons we watched seemed academically solid and very engaging. The classroom sizes were strange though. They only have one classroom for each grade, but some classrooms had 12 kids, and some had 29, some skewed heavily toward girls, some heavily toward boys. There was about one token minority kid in each classroom. It gave the impression that they accept everyone who applies, and if they get all white kids, then they find somebody who knows a minority kid and beg them to take a full-ride scholarship. I’m sure that’s not true, but that’s the impression the demographics led to.

We went to the kindergarten classroom last, and learned that, although Waldorf kids spend two years in kindergarten, they learn zero academics. It then occurred to me that we had seen virtually no reading and writing in the lower grade classrooms we had visited.

After the tour, since the geekling will be going into second grade, we asked to see the first grade classroom (which will be the second grade classroom next year), and we were told that was not allowed. The perky lady would be happy to introduce us to the first grade teacher at the open house later in the year, but the first grade classroom was not “ready to be observed”.

Throughout the tour, Denise, the geekling’s bio-mom (one-fourth of our super-hero parenting team), continually commented on the style in which the walls were painted. Not being a painting or home-improvement person myself, I had no idea what she was talking about.

Well, it turns out that the style of wall painting is in fact a hallmark of Waldorf schools called lazuring, and Denise’s investigation of it turned over all sorts of interesting things about the Waldorf philosophy that weren’t highlighted in the glossy catalogs. It turns out that it’s actually really controversial.

It’s not just technology that younger kids are shooed away from. It’s also strange stuff like black crayons. Here is Waldorf-founder Rudolph Steiner on the color black:

Now submerge yourself in black; you are completely surrounded by black–in this black darkness a physical being can do nothing. Life is driven out of the plant when it becomes carbon. Black shows itself alien to life, hostile to life; when plants are carbonized they turn black. Life, then can do nothing in blackness. And the soul? Our soul life deserts us when this awful blackness is within us.

According to Open Waldorf, younger Waldorf students generally aren’t allowed to use the color black, and are encouraged to wait until they are older to even draw specific forms.

The first Waldorf school was opened in 1920 with the intent to create adults who could live independently. This is why they taught house-building, farming, spinning, and knitting in addition to traditional academics. Unfortunately, the founder died in 1925. Waldorf schools today, rather than holding true to the vision of independent adults and evolving their curriculum to new definitions of independence, have instead held true to their curriculum are giving the adults of 2020 the skills that the adults of 1920 required. An adult today with nothing in life but the skills of 1920 would be begging on the street. An adult today with a decent command of Outlook, Excel, and social networking has the beginnings of a career.

All in all, I don’t think we’ll be applying. There are some good things about Waldorf. It’s definitely different, and our educational system could certainly use a shakeup. But I felt like I was given a dog and pony show during the tour, and I don’t have confidence that the curriculum will be competitive at the college level.

Have you been to a Waldorf school? Know someone who has? Leave a comment with your impressions.