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This evening, as I sit in the glow of graduation day, eyes dry from crying, I just feel so profoundly grateful for the work we get to do. And I mean all of us: the teachers, the parents, and the kids, too. What we do here is hard, emotional work.
This Friday is Cottage’s annual tradition of filling our kids with forbidden sugar and setting them loose in the sandy wonderland of the yards in the evening, also known as the Ice Cream Social. When I was a parent of an infant and a toddler, I was filled with social anxiety…
Even grown-ups act impulsively. Our growing awareness of these behaviors, a lot of practice and a good dose of self-forgiveness, go a long way towards mastering these impulses. Admonition, “That’s not okay,” for example, may not be that helpful.
I cast the kids as powerful giants in a land of vulnerable little creatures. We humans can dominate, when we so choose.
We work day by day to enact our shared ideals about valuing and prioritizing child led play, connecting with nature, trusting children as the drivers of their learning, within the structure of a loving community. We listen to the kids, both through their words and through their behavior. We respond, support flowing into the space where it’s needed, and then giving them room when they can stand on their own two feet.
Among the most distinctive aspects of being a part of the Cottage community is the way we talk to each other, and we call it Cottage Speak.
My daughter loves to hear stories of terrible fates befalling people and animals. Dog bites, broken bones, illnesses, car crashes, and pet deaths are all favorite topics. She asks to hear them over and over, many stories in succession.
You know, one of our Cottage-speak catch phrases is “the Cottage way”. I used it in another post, without further explanation, because we are cultural insiders here. Families use it all the time at debrief and in our surveys, to indicate whether or not something was in line with our collective philosophy.
Twenty years ago, when I was a Gender Studies major, long before my children were born, I had already started thinking about the great honor and responsibility of teaching my kids, daughters and sons, about consent.
In revisiting our mission statement this week, as we move into a new era, I read something new that had never occurred to me before. In the past I had emphasized the terms, “child-directed”, “social emotional development”, and “conflict resolution”, and that has served me well in recreating the mission on the ground in our classrooms each day. But this time, as I read, there was a different part that stood out, as if in bold print, for the first time.