Project!

Happiness, Joy, Love, Fulfillment and Energy Project

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to gain experience observing one’s thoughts and to learn about ourselves. We will do this by observing some aspect of ourselves that affects who we are as a student.

How we got here

According to the Red Fox Clan, we all thirst for joy, happiness, love, fulfillment and energy. We draw these experiences to ourselves in many ways- through having fun with friends, learning, cooperation, exploring, breathing, concentrating and many more. Sometimes, however, we use strategies that don’t actually lead us to joy or happiness. We have seen many patterns of this in history. People have tried to gain joy by exploiting others, lying, intimidating others, and so on. These misguided strategies often hurt others and ourselves (also seen in our country’s history). We can hurt ourselves by avoiding or taking shortcuts on assignments because we don’t learn important skills we need. Also according to the Red Fox Clan, joy arises when all work together for the benefit of all.

Mission

Our mission is to identify ways we mislead ourselves when trying to experience happiness, joy, love, fulfillment and lots of energy as students and members of a learning community. We will observe these ways/thoughts/beliefs in ourselves and interrupt them.

Procedure

First you must come up with an idea of what thought pattern/feeling/belief/behavior you want to interrupt. This is just like your trigger from the fall when you saw a leaf or heard your name. You stopped and noted what you were paying attention to. This time, the trigger is a thought or feeling inside of you, a thought or feeling that leads you away from happiness, joy, love, fulfillment and energy without you knowing it! When you notice your trigger, you will interrupt it. This can be doing jumping jacks, a few dance moves, going out on the fire escape for 30 seconds, asking someone a question… some action that doesn’t interrupt others but interrupts your trigger.

Choosing a thought pattern/belief/behavior to interrupt that is useful to you works best. Here are some suggestions to help you brainstorm your trigger:

- Consider yourself as a student in class. Do you offer ideas and contribute to discussions? Are you constantly involved or do you hold yourself back, unable to participate fully? What happens for you in at these moments when you could choose to participate or not? What feelings do you have? What is your internal dialogue?

- Do you find yourself experiencing emotional reactions to people in class or in our community? Or in group situations? What emotions arise? What happens for you? What is the situation in which your reactions arise? How can you learn more about them?

- Are you influenced more by a certain person or group of people? How are you influenced? What feelings arise? Is it beneficial for you and others? How do you interact with this person or these people? How does this group act towards others? Any intimidation or trying to gain energy from others?

- Is there a subject or activity in school you don’t like? What thoughts cross your head when you see it on the board or while preparing for it? What does it feel like in your body? Do you express what you are feeling out loud? How do you feel when you begin this activity?

Next is developing a contract and testing your trigger. In the contract you will share what your trigger is (what you will observe) and how you plan to interrupt it. You will have the opportunity to test your trigger over a few days to see if it happens enough, if it happens too often, or if you need to make other changes. We will follow the contract and interrupt triggers for a whole week. While you do this, you will be expected to take short notes about what happened and what arose for you.

As an ending project you will be asked to share with me (and others if you wish) what you did, what happened, what arose for you and any insights you gained about yourself.

All parents are invited to take part in the project along with their child(ren)!

How history has evolved

There are countless reasons as to why events unfolded as they did. We learned in the fall (and have continued to see) that history and events aren't always reported factually. Parts are omitted and the historian is often trying to get us to root for one side.

Motives of shapers of history

People acted to look good - People only want to see the good things - People didn't want the truth - Fame - Greed - Wealth - Land - Power - Profit - Natural Resources - Religious Freedom - Don't like to be controlled - Control - Cheap Labor - Working together - Share cultural ideas - Explore Land / Travel - Productivity - Make friends - Happiness

From all of these motives, we asked ourselves the following question:

What do people thirst for?

Happiness - Love - Joy - Fulfillment - Energy

In people's search to quench such a thirst, their actions can be misdirected. In order to gain what they thought was fulfillment, energy, and happiness, those with greater influence in the country used many tools to divide people so that they could grow their wealth and control. We then looked at our country's history through the 1870's and brainstormed patterns we saw that were used for dividing people.

Tools for Division

- Make people feel left out - "Because others did this too" - Racism - Fear - Lies - Intimidation - Untrue Stories - Hypocrisy - Buy a lot of something, sell for higher price - Don't address problems - Use laws to hold back others - Bribery - Give some people money - Jealousy - Treat people differently for no reason - Pick on an enemy, start a war - Put down, be man - Team up on a group - Revenge - Give some privileges/rights to fool and quiet people

How it could have been

While rewriting history, students noted that every event in history is linked to many other events. Changing one event would require changing many that came before it and occurred alongside it. With that understanding, students suggested the following:

Explorers could have been kind and asked set up trade agreements instead of acting for profit and out of greed.

Colonists could have cohabitated, cooperated and coexisted with Native peoples.

Instead of slavery, workers could have been paid and been given proper living quarters. If they were treated like people, all would be more happy and productivity would be up. Joy comes from when everyone benefits.

Diplomacy, compromise and agreements could have been made instead of the use of violence during the French and Indian War.

Revolutionary War- Was it necessary? Canada gained independence without such a devastating war. Diplomacy could have changed how this went down.

Native Americans could have been given the same rights. Land could have been shared or even gifted to them. Early Americans could have lived more like the natives, respecting traditions and living more closely to the land.

To avoid the Civil War, the North could have let the South be a different country instead of forcing them to be a part of the Union for economic reasons. There could have been better diplomacy and compromise, or they all could have elected a different president.

Spring Big Circle

On Friday the Red Fox Clan led the school in the welcoming of spring. The other clans were led through a sense meditation, looking for signs of spring/tracking and a game or two. Adults who participated shared so highly of the abilities of the children to facilitate activities for people of all ages. Check out the pictures for a visual report!

Patterns of Control and Division

This week among other things we are stepping back and taking a bird's eye view of our country's history from 1492 - 1870's. Students have read vasty different perspectives of the same stories, noticing omissions and varying motives of the story tellers. Students have expressed discontent of reading the same thing over and over again: one group gaining power and wealth at the expense of many. We all seem to be active creators in our society and individual lives. So we begin asking ourselves, "How should things have been over the first 400 years of our country?" And, "Why has history deviated from how it could have been?" Specifically we are looking for patterns of control and division in our country. We will search for these patterns not only as we progress chronologically in our country's history, but also within our selves. Driven by profits and power, millions (billions around the world) lead lives of great struggle and suffering. If we are driven by profits (money and getting our own way?) and power in our own internal worlds, what parts of ourselves are left struggling and suffering? What could things be like in our lives if we become skilled at observing how we create division in ourselves and subsequently acting to address such creations? We will work to segue this into individual projects in which students will observe their thinking and self talk and practice interrupting behaviors that are unbeneficial.

Spring!

As the earth continues to evolve under us, we came across an interesting article for you to check out: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/02/chile.quake/index.html?hpt=Mid

Another interesting and short article on the hypothesis of the expanding earth (thanks Eric) to check out: http://www.geologynet.com/tectonics1.htm

We have not spoken about the expanding earth hypthesis at school, so it might be interesting for you to introduce it to your child(ren) to fuel the investigation of geology happening everywhere.

We continue to be in full swing, from students taking part in revision/editing meetings with each other to running their own book group discussions. Investigations in math include geometry, percent/ratio/proportion and probability. Students continue to make headway on their earthquake reports, now working on illustrations. We hope to have these published around Open House/Author's Tea time in our effort to raise some funds for those struggling in Haiti and Chile.

Trial, Earthquakes, Essays and more

We had another successful trial chalk full with critical questions and answers. Three groups (the poor, wealthy elite and the British) were charged with the mistreatment, suffering and deaths of thousands of men, women and children. The British (Faolan, Will and Finn with lovely British accents) were accused with focusing purely on profit and being undiplomatic. The Poor (Milo, Peyton and Raven) were accused with allowing the minority wealthy elite to manipulate them into fighting a war and not uniting to change the terrible living conditions underwhich they lived. The Wealthy elite (Jesse, Isaac and Kiva) were charged with things such as fueling racism to divide people so that they could stay in control. Also, the elite were charged with writing the Constitution with the interests only of the wealthy in mind. Our prosecuter/judges (Iona, Ben and Rasulan), with the aid of Ariel and a visiting Elizabeth Downes, assigned responsibility to all the groups, finding the wealthy elite as having more responsibility than the other groups.

Students have been interacting with resources on earthquakes, taking notes on a wide variety of topics. They took detailed (and not so detailed) notes and are going through the process of writing topic sentences, determining how to organize their facts, and writing reports. While writing, students are seeing that the quality of notes they took are having a big impact on their ability to retell facts.

More writing... this morning Faolan and Ben led two peer editing groups. The kids have been working on 5 paragraph essays, responding to questions inspired by their bookgroup book (Three Cups of Tea and The Giver). The focus of the groups were revising their supporting details to be more clear and powerful. Every student listened and gave thoughtful feedback with no adult prompting. On the flip side, every student shared their writing and made changes in several places. Beyond revision, minilessons were taught on introductions, conclusions, and how to present one's ideas in the most persuasive ways. Students are having more conversations about writing and subsequently I am reading great progress.