Did You Know
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…that the CLF has welcomed three new learning fellows? Kevin Jagoe, Lauren Way and Amanda Weatherspoon will be joining us for the next two years. Read more →
The Legacy of Caring
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Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do
failed to overcome. Read more →
Beginning must not be the end….
As we conclude this month focused on beginnings, I am struck by the renewed interest in early childhood programs. In 1966, I began my career as a teacher in one of the very first Head Start day care centers, housed in the Plymouth Settlement House in Louisville KY. It was a quality program that changed the lives of the 3- and 4-year old children enrolled in our center. Those 45 children had an exciting learning environment, committed teachers, good food, and a safe place for a nap. Field trips and stories were the order of the day. Language skills blossomed, and curiosity was nurtured. I saw first hand how much an age-appropriate quality educational program can mean to young children as well as their families.
In this month of beginnings, universal access to pre-kindergarten programs was focused on in the State of the Union address, as well as in the NY Governor’s State of the State message. In our push to see that every child has the opportunities a sound education can bring, we ask, will this make a difference? My experience suggests that it will not unless it is followed by a quality K-12 education. As they turned 5 years old, my students left our center with its full day, 11-month educational program. I was horrified when I realized that they would then be enrolled in half-day, 9-month kindergarten classes in a school with many broken windows, and few resources, with teachers who were not supported with books and field trips, art supplies and science equipment. I feared that everything we had accomplished would deteriorate in this new environment. Since then, when I have thought of my students who would now have turned 50, I wonder what happened to them? Was their beginning truly a beginning? Or was it the end?
Much of what has been touted as education reform over the past decade has focused only on ends in the form of test scores. Individual accountability for students and staff is the order of the day. Head Start is criticized because it didn’t change the future. But true beginnings require continuity into the future, and this requires teams of educators and parents building on the beginnings and believing that they can only be successful if they collaborate. No teacher or parent is an island, solely responsible for any outcome. I was a better teacher because I worked with a team. We collaborated with parents, visiting in their homes and inviting them into the center. In the public schools I worked in and to which I sent my children and grandchild, classroom teachers and special educators worked side by side. Art and music teachers were as important as math and reading teachers. Everyone had a role to play, and we are all successful when a child was successful and happy in learning.
So what is a beginning? Is it a starting place, a place to build on? If we don’t build together, then all these beginnings will be dead ends.
How will you build on a beginning in your community, in your life?
The Beginning is Now
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The beginning is now,
and will always be….
There’s another train.
There always is.
Maybe the next one is yours.
Get up and climb aboard
another train.
—Pete Morton
The first time I heard those words was in seminary. I’d just agreed to sing with a newly formed a cappella group, and this song, Another Train, was on the practice CD I’d been sent home with after our first rehearsal. Thinking back, I’d guess I played it at least a hundred times the first few days I had it in my possession—in the shower, on my way to classes, when I went for walks, even when I was washing dishes at the sink and doing my laundry. I nearly drove my housemates crazy, but there was something about the lyrics that really grabbed me.
In the Beginning . . .
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“In the beginning….”
What inviting words with which to begin a text that is to serve as an explanation and guide for a life and a religion!
The human mind is naturally drawn to beginnings, with an urge to trace things back, and back, and back—to try to get to the root. There’s a sense that if you know the beginning of something, then you know what it is, and where it might be headed, and how you might deal with it. You have ground upon which to stand. Read more →
Unexpected New Year
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I write this, and you will read it, at the start of a “new” year. I say “new” because that is how it has been parceled out in the proper number of days and weeks and months to make a year. One is over, one is beginning. For the next couple of weeks we will all persist in writing the wrong year on checks and letters. Quickly, the new year will become simply this year, and the old year will become attached to all that’s past.
In the Beginning
From Your Minister
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One of my favorite tricks when I am frustrated, bored or stuck is to consider where things have begun. For instance, during the awkward social situations into which pretty much all of us are periodically thrown (like standing in clumps of strangers at receptions and coffee hours), one easy path into conversation is to ask about beginnings.
REsources for Living
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Have you recently started up something new? Even if you haven’t, you probably remember a time when you did. I certainly have very clear memories from several years ago when I decided for the first time to take an aerobics class. I’d joined a gym for the first time in my life, and it quickly became clear that running on a treadmill was way, way too boring to keep doing on a regular basis.
Where it Starts
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The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, Lao Tzu said in the Tao. But a better translation of this familiar passage is to say the journey begins beneath our feet—not in the first step but in the stillness that precedes it, in the place where we stand before we move, in the very ground of our being. Read more →
