Mango Minds

When I began teaching  in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA,  we conducted home- visit conferences with all students and families as our initial parent-teacher conference. I went to each of the 28 homes of my homeroom students to meet the families and talk about how the child was doing in school.    “La teacher is HEEEEERE!” shouted one father when he opened the door to find me standing there.   It was an aggressive approach towards establishing more collaborative relationships between teachers and parents, in some cases helping teachers to better understand the whole child and in others, it was a way to insist that parents become more involved in their child’s education.   The main premise: parents and teachers need to talk and work together. Next week, we will hold our parent-teacher conferences here at school; we will not be visiting your homes.  Though we do not visit your home, our purpose is the same: collaborative relationships be...

Dad recently sent me this photo that my Aunt Lucy scanned in from THE family photo album.  In the middle is my grandmother Agnes, surrounded by my uncle, aunt and Dad.  Being that photography was not as accessible at that time, there is one album of family pictures from my dad’s family. The whole family: one album. Each picture: a treasure; there are so few.  So many stories we have had to recreate with our own images. I have about a thousand pictures of my children, of course thanks to digital photography. They have also taken quite a few on their own, playing around with the camera or phone, and some of these are fabulous.  With so many pictures, it’s hard to identify or come up with one that is a great treasure-we love looking at them all; but I invite you and your children to go through the many, many pictures and pick out one to share with us in our upcoming 3rd Annual Elementary Photo Exhibit: Our Community, Our Friends: Belonging

As a way to excite my soon-to-be Kindergarten student about returning to school, I told her that school was going to be GREAT! because this year her teacher would teach her how to read. Last Friday, after her second day, she returned home visibly disappointed from school. I asked what was wrong, and was unprepared for her response: “You told me that my teacher was going to teach me how to read and she didn’t!” Probably not the moment to mention the 180 days still remaining in the school year. It takes a bit of time at the beginning of each year for students, teachers and parents to get to know each other, build trusting relationships, make friends, and settle into the new routine. We all begin a new school year with our own expectations, dreams, and hopes. It is hard for children and parents when aspects of their new class are unfamiliar or different than anticipated. It is scary to make new friends. We believe in the importance of children feeling good about coming to school ...

Halloween costume day at school is an example of what I think it means to innovate. Innovation begins with a problem, in this case, the problem of Halloween costume day and the dreaded question, “What do you want to be this year for Halloween?”   That a child can only dress up as one thing at a time is tragic.  As with any problem, you have to have the motivation and resource s to work on any solution… why invest the time and energy to create something new or different? Do you even have the material or intellectual resources necessary to solve it? In this case, motivation is clear—our children—but our resources are very different. Whether you set out to make a costume (and kudos to you parents who achieve that! WOW!), or did as I did and went to the Piex, Oca Loca, or Burbujas, you were motivated and used the resources at hand to end up with what was basically a garment and props. Now, I specifically use the description of garment and props, because these ...

Long days make for short weeks and even shorter years. Such could not better describe these past weeks here at BA. Since last sitting down to write to you, we successfully completed our accreditation process and our Board of Trustees announced to our school community that our future location has been finalized: Costa Sur. Both of these achievements are BIG for any school, and that they occur simultaneously, it makes it, well, HUGE. I am proud of all of the work that my colleagues have achieved over these past weeks, because not only has each been involved in a systemic review of our effectiveness as well as anticipating news of the next phase of our school, they have continued to maintain their priorities where we all want them to be: as educators for our children. And so, if you might oblige me, I would like to openly and publicly say to our Elementary teachers, support staff, custodians, and office personnel: THANK YOU.  As I write this, outside my window our Boys SUB 10 s...

A few weeks ago, the 2nd graders presented research exploring how communications have evolved in recent history. For these children, the record player is from their grandparents’ generation, CDs from their parents’ time, and iTunes is the current source of music. It was an awkward moment when I shared that records were also of my generation, silently assuming that they thought of me as part of the “parents’ generation,” and one student responded, “same thing: you and grandparents.”   As a child and adolescent, I had records and they were magical. That a black, sleek, grooved disk could, together with its player, create music always impressed me. With cassette tapes, music became portable and personal, another leap into a new magical world in which you could hear your song anywhere you went. And now, I still can’t seem to let go of my CD collection, despite my friends’ invitations to meet them in the 21st century. I do now have invisible music that I store on a device th...

Olivia’s mother is currently the story book character with whom I can most identify. She takes her children to the beach, the museum, implements time out, and has the humanity to tell her daughter, “You really wear me out, but I love you anyway.” I can relate to her negotiating how many stories to read each night before bed; Olivia wants five books and her mother counteracts with the offer of one; they compromise on three. AnaLu, Ben and I read Olivia by Ian Falconer at least twice a week, and have done so for the past three years, which adds up to about 300 plus visits with these characters. It’s safe to say that we have spent a fair share of time together. Good times, good memories. Alan Alexander Milne had a brilliant understanding of the importance of characters to children, writing two books about a boy named Christopher Robin , after his son, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh . Connecting to s...

My mother loves white beaches, rolling waves, and warm water, so each summer we joined the ranks of most of The South, packed up our car, and headed to Florida. Of course we always traveled by car, and, coming from personal experience, Texas is a large state, so these annual road trips meant some ten-plus hours nonstop that my brother, sister and I had to endure in the car together.   Sharing a confined space, such as a car, requires a great deal of self-control, specifically body control. And so, on one of these voyages, when my younger brother, probably 5 years old at the time, had some digestive issues that caused him to become gassy, it pretty much caused general olfactory discomfort for the whole family. Instead of stopping the car for a bathroom break, hating to lose-out on the good time that we were making on the road, my father’s response was what is now one of his classic fatherly lines, “Now, son, you can control that.” After her outburst of laughter, my moth...