Education: November 2010 Archives
Ok, so I'm a sucker for these animated movies. If you hate them, just move along.
(HT: ???.)
This is a brilliant program. I have personally witnessed the profound effect that babies can have on even the hardest hearts.
Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”I have visited several public schools in low-income neighborhoods in Toronto to observe Roots of Empathy’s work. What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children’s behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes.
The baby seems to act like a heart-softening magnet. No one fully understands why. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, an applied developmental psychologist who is a professor at the University of British Columbia, has evaluated Roots of Empathy in four studies. “Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes,” she explained. “The question is why.”
I've long been an advocate for disrupting the single-age cohorts that dominate our primary and secondary education systems, public and private. It's unnatural to put our kids into "Lord of the Flies" groupings where everyone is the same age. The social dynamics in such a group are aberrant and completely unlike the dynamics the children will experience in almost any setting as adults. Children should learn to have natural interactions with unrelated people of all ages, from babies to seniors. (Churches often provide such an environment, which I believe is extremely valuable.)
I briefly considered becoming a patent attorney, and was interested to the degree that I sought out patent attorneys to ask them about their jobs. The most memorable quote was: "Do you like going to the DMV and filling out forms? That's very similar to what I do for 100 hours a week."
(HT: RB and Above the Law.)
