This is the 2nd in a series about our partnership with the Chula Vista Nature Center at Gunpowder Point. These posts will document our progress as we move our middle school science program off campus– to a satellite classroom called the San Diego Bay!
It is the first day of school and so our students return. It is mid-summer… most school districts will not call their students back until after Labor Day. Not El Milagro, though. We start early. So ready or not, they are are descending– in droves. Record high enrollment and a long waiting list means business is good.
This year there are some new things, like our Full-Day Kindergarten program. And there is an automatic back gate in the staff parking lot that allows teachers to drive up and never get out of their cars as the fence opens and closes behind them. But that’s not our best new feature. This year we are partnering with the Chula Vista Nature Center and moving our middle school science program right into the middle of their facility.
The Nature Center sits on a reserve at the edge of the San Diego Bay, two miles from Mueller Charter School. There are aquariums and marshes and protected reserves that surround a natural, outdoor classroom. It will provide our students with a rare opportunity to learn in a real-life laboratory of interconnected ecosystems… every day. It is a reminder that we cannot get so preoccupied with standardized testing and teaching the basic skills required to score well– that we forget to create opportunities for authentic learning too. Opportunities to think, imagine, create, explore, discover, question, use the technology, solve the riddles of the universe and learn to love learning.
The Nature Center is our reminder that we are out of whatever “the box” is and our students could be the beneficiaries.
Last Friday the whole staff met at the Nature Center for a morning of activities and learning together. They explored the many exhibits and habitats there. They created themes around some of the big ideas of life science like adaptation and evolution, scale and structure, systems, the magic of water, color and song, and interconnected relationships in nature.
And we searched for balance.
Or at least a definition for it. And we discovered that definition in the very dream of what we think the Nature Center partnership can be for kids. If we are truly “balanced” we would do all three of these things well:
• FIRST : We would enthusiastically play the testing game and make sure our kids have the basic skills they need to excel in math and reading; that we get the big scores to keep our autonomy and independence– and our charter! We would also work urgently to achieve all the AYP goals and to assure that that our API is pushing into the stratosphere.
• SECOND: Beyond basic skills, we would work just as hard to provide a more authentic, thinking curriculum that allows children to discover their natural gifts and interests. A curriculum that features the interesting stuff that engages students every day. Like the Nature Center and all its wind-framed beauty and ocean air; its banks of slippery seaweed, its deep fish tanks that stink. Or the tidepools, tucked snugly up against shallow marshes that splash mud and seawater on kid’s school clothes when the tide is up. Or rare creatures on loan from their fragile ecosystems; sometimes strange life-forms that can make kids smile when they hold them in their hands.
• FINALLY, we would help our students develop as literate, interesting, passionate, connected, people. We help them develop the habits and attitudes of successful learners: Respect. Responsibility. Commitment. Character. And other stuff too.
The Nature Center is more than a metaphor– it is an authentic learning lab, a model for what schools must do to provide all children with a context for growing up as complete human beings. So that is the balance that we seek school-wide: 1) the basic skills required to demonstrate mastery on standardized tests, 2) the rich thinking curriculum to engage our students with their world, and 3) an emphasis on nurturing the character traits of successful citizens and learners.
If we achieve that, it will be a great year!
The musicians are coming back to New Orleans even if the business investors are not. They are everywhere. They are on the streets of the Quarter and in the clubs and bars on Frenchmans Street. Listen to them play. Feel them. Put whatever you have in their guitar cases and plastic tip buckets because, as near as I can tell, they are all we have left of New Orleans.
He was no vagabond fiddler begging for a cup of coffee. He was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most renowned classical musicians, playing some of the most elegant music ever created on a $3.5 million Stradivarius that was hand-crafted in 1713. On this particular morning, Joshua Bell managed $32 in tips from a handful of passer-bys who took the time to listen. It was “Chaconne”, written by Johann Sebastian Bach and just a few days before, Joshua Bell had played it in the Boston Symphony Hall to a capacity audience who each paid a minimum $100 a ticket to hear the performance.
The history of El Patio Restaurant is written in its walls. It is as old as California. Father Serra may have stopped here for handmade beef tamales on his journey north to build California’s first missions. His ghost is still in the corner, plugging the jukebox with strange coins and listening to classic ’60s low rider anthems and tejano ballads.
After the 10th stage of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong sits in third place. Amazing. What an athlete. The Tour de France has to be one of the most grueling events in competitive athletics and he continues to put himself in a position to win in that legendary bicycle Race to the Top…
So I wonder… as the facts and
Meanwhile, I noticed that the state of California still doesn’t have a budget agreement and that there is now a $26.3 billion deficit! The system is broke and it doesn’t appear that we are even 
As a matter of fact, I notice that the further away you get from actual classrooms where children and teacher live every day, the more delusional leadership becomes– like dancing in front of funhouse mirrors. 
mission. On most days he has a partner who leans out the window and fires the morning paper across the lawn and into our driveway, slicing of a row of agapanthus at the bud. Newspaper Guy is not a 14 year-old kid with a paper route. He is a full grown adult who drives a Cooper and delivers his morning news with a cold disaffection for how it is to be consumed.
For example, we can still use it to line the parakeet cage or paint bookshelves on the garage floor. We can use it to make paper mache Kachina dancers. We can recycle it. We can lay it down in the garden and fight off the weeds. We can make origami hats with it. We can use it to pack up our glasses and dishes and move away. 
Then he fought against the rising waters and pulled bodies from the canal. Then he fought against the bureaucracy and incompetence of state and federal organizations to create food lines for people who had otherwise been abandoned. 
Then he fought against a police force in chaos– marauding officers that looted the Red Cross food supplies so they could stock their own hunting lodges. Then he fought against the mounting anarchy– that moment in a crisis when good people bet the strength of their own resiliency against whatever force is trying to assure their destruction.
Habitat for Humanity provides some basic tools and building materials for their volunteers. And they provide a site foreman like Terry Cooney who has to take a very diverse group of people with different work ethics and skills and physical fitness and preparation and experience and lead them to some level of productivity. He has had all kinds of volunteers from celebrities to church groups to not-so-motivated teenagers to company CEO’s and corporate superstars that haven’t done a day of physical labor in 20 years– if ever. 
On Tuesday morning one of the high school groups was packing up to leave. They were exhausted. They gathered for their group meeting along side the circular saw and waited for Terry to release them. Then a sudden piercing hum rose well above the cicadas and construction sounds. And around the corner came their leader, with bagpipes wailing the Marine Corps Hymn. All other sound and activity momentarily ceased. 
“You should be proud of your work here,” he told them. “I know your parents would be very proud of you too. On behalf of the Habitat for Humanity organization and the people of New Orleans, I want to thank you for your service. You made a difference here. I want to play another song that is dedicated to each and every one of you.”
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