Semi-Charmed Kind of Life (part one): Who kids are…and what kids need from us
By: Ira David Socol
Tags: Disability, Schools, Children, Education, Learning

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Complete Attention — problem solving is how humans learn

I’ve lived a long time and experienced a lot of things. There are the lived experiences of myself and my friends as children. There’s my time as a cop in New York City. There is the quarter century in education.

I’ve looked into the eyes of thousands of children and adolescents, and finally I think I might have boiled down what kids need from us to four basic concepts: Acceptance, Access, Attention, and Abundance. The alliteration is a happy accident I suppose.

Isn’t joy a critical measure? Do you count the smiles in your school?

For most of my life I’ve thought and said, “I don’t understand the things people do to children.” Because I don’t. I don’t understand a nation that doesn’t value parental time with every child (shorter work weeks, living wages, guaranteed vacation time). I don’t understand a society where one major political party doesn’t think kids and their parents need healthcare. I don’t understand people who abuse children and I don’t understand those who let that happen. I don’t understand adults who ignore or neglect children. I don’t understand parents/adults who prioritize their jobs, their pleasures, or even their egos over the things children truly need.

Nor do I understand those who essentially lock their kids up, blocking the vital experiences and risks of childhood and adolescence. Nor do I understand those who prioritize traditions — school schedules, school designs, school grading, and yes, homework — over the ways I think we must respond to children whose needs change daily.

The Soap Box Derby in Waynesboro, Virginia. Making things is what kids do…

And finally I have never understood adults who view children as either savages or the enemy, and like to make rules — from lining up to walk down a hall, to bathroom passes, to cellphone bans — that deny the humanity, the talents, the learning capabilities of kids.

I just don’t. Maybe I remember being a kid more than many. Maybe art schools and police work taught me different ways of seeing. I’m not sure why…

But what do kids need from us? What are the things we can do that are most likely to help kids become healthy, happy, successful adults? That’s our job as adults in a society, right?

Drawing — art in general — music, sports, engineering, et al… must not be“lesser things” in school

Children of a Lesser God

But first — I need to say this. As obvious as this must be, it requires constant repetition … the ‘traditional school’ brutalizes children. And the further a child is from the mythical ‘Leave it to Beaver’ “norm,” the worse the brutality is. If we do not understand this, if we do not commit to changing that, we can never really give kids what they need.

This is simply not who we are… and… this is not any “golden age”

The first brutality is an attack on the child’s identity. Because school success is usually built on being a middle class suburban white — preferably Protestant — child (and preferably female in primary grades, but shifting to male in the secondary experience), who is “normally abled" and neurotypical, who gets lots of parent-paid extracurricular activities, whose mom drives the kid to school, packs the good lunch, helps with or does the homework, comes to inconveniently scheduled conferences, and makes cookies for the PTO bake sale.

Any deviation, being Black, being Latino, being dyslexic, or being ADHD, being poor, having parents who both work, or not having two parents, etc, etc, means you are “less than" in most schools. When the film Children of a Lesser God appeared in 1986 it gave me a new phrase that seemed appropriate — I’m not sure better or worse than my previous “if I’m made in God’s image, we have one f---ed up God.”

But… what I wish… oh what I wish, is that — my current description for myself and all others — leading “A Semi-Charmed Kind of Life" (from the very dark but upbeat rhythm Third Eye Blind 1997 song), could be replaced with something far more positive. See, I have struggled for years to learn that I was not “born wrong,” or, if not “born wrong” then ‘Semi-Charmed’ — a kind of magical good mixed with all the crap.

Lots of kids feel that way, yes they do. We are different — and difference is the core of human development, it must not be a problem, especially… it must not be a problem in any classroom.

The way you make children — all children — ok, and safe, is to commit yourself, your classroom, your school, your school district, to these four “As.”

Acceptance, Access, Attention, and Abundance.

Acceptance means that every child is fully accepted for who they are. It doesn’t matter if they’re left-handed, or severely-multiply-impaired, doesn’t matter if they read slowly or if they climb well, doesn’t matter if they like to work in noisy, active environments or if they’d rather crawl under a table. They are all kids, and we owe every child the right to be accepted for who they are.

Access means all students can fully access the learning and the opportunities they need. Full access. If they can’t read via alphabetical code you still need to get them what’s inside the books they want. If they can’t sit still in your classroom you still need to make them comfortable in a way that allows them to stay and be fully involved. If they can’t do your ‘math facts worksheet’ but want to compute their batting average, you need to find a way that allows them to do that. When access — to books, or math, or art, or recess — is denied to a child you are making them second class citizens.

Attention means you accept — no, that you are firmly committed to — the idea that children have important things to say, about school stuff and not school stuff, and that we need to hear them, see them, and understand them. Kids need our attention, and they will do whatever they must do to get that attention, good or bad. If we are in education one of the most essential things we do is giving children our attention. When we don’t, we silence them, and that cannot be good.

Let kids follow their passions and do things their way

Abundance represents what we hope surrounds every child. That doesn’t mean things — it means primarily what we can give without any financial strain. I remember this image from when we first gave one-to-one computers to our high school kids, it was just a time between classes, and I was at the bottom of a big central staircase in the middle of our ‘most challenged’ high school. A tall freshman came dancing down the stairs, holding his laptop, with headphones on, singing to himself. That’s abundance — we could have given kids more limited computers with fewer choices and limits on downloading, we could have had rules about behaviors in corridors and on stairs, we could have created a school culture where this kind of ninth-grader self-expression wasn’t really accepted — but we made other choices. Abundance is about giving kids time, and slack when they need it, and opportunities, and second-third-fourth-fifth chances. And its about making sure that we give kids all of the above.

The principal of that high school once said, when asked why he called his students “children,” “My kids don’t get to be children when they go home. They work, take care of siblings, take care of parents. When they come here I them to get to be children.” That’s abundance.

See Part Two — a deeper dive into the four As. See Part Three — Identity and Abundance