Connections are awesome....

(Sorry Frame, not connections connections but connections... ;-) )

Ok so this morning was pretty great with the kids. They headed off to PE and Scott and I came up with some more things to put up on the timeline. When they came back we shared our “gifts”, well their “gifts” to the crew. Some were artistic, some make people laugh, some good team players… the list goes on and on as you can imagine. I’m finding it’s really interesting to see what they identify as important to them and important to the class. When we got to seminar I found in our moral development a huge connection to my past life… AKA when I was at Sewanee 6 months ago! Having NOT majored in education but rather in international and global studies (here by deemed INGS) I’m finding that most of my educational knowledge came from the 2 ED courses I took, and granted one was in France and was about European ED sooooo anyways! While talking about Piaget’s adult-child and child-child relationships I suddenly had a MAJOR connection! Piaget defines adult-child moral relationships as the adult has an unimpeachable authority and the rules for the child are “handed down from above”. Hm, I thought, that sounds super familiar. When we discussed the child-child relations where the children together create an autonomous morality within the group and they typically tend to center around equality, cooperation, kindness and fairness. Gee, that does sound SUPER familiar!!!! Then I figured out why, adult-child is just like top-down relations and child-child is bottom-up or organic relation. I know I just started going crazy so I’ll explain. Top-down is when an aid agency for example goes into a country and says “you need a school. Here we will build you one.” The reason this doesn’t always work is because it isn’t what the people say they need. Same as why adult imposed rules don’t always work for kids. Child-child relations are much more creative and allows for them to create equality within their own relations. This is the same as bottom-up or organic creations because the people are allowed to dictate their own rules and send “up” what they need. It was so cool to make that kind of connection and to, maybe by my own definitions, not feel as lost in this whole teaching world. I try to remember that even though I didn’t major in education or minor for that matter, my life experiences and choices will lead me to being an amazing teacher because (LIFE LESSON) not all teaching occurs in the classroom….