Kudos to Central Falls High School Chess Team!

In the "beyond" part of Providence Schools and Beyond - though not far beyond - on Sunday, May 1, the Central Falls High School Chess Team placed sixth at the National High School Chess Championships. ProJo coverage is here (2nd item in the news digest).

News of the chess team's impressive showing hasn't been posted yet on the Central Falls High School Transformation blog, though the blog does share the progress of the team as it made its way to the national tournament.

Congratulations to the team members, coaches and supporters for a fantastic performance!

Writers-in-the-Schools presents Young Poets Read at AS220, April 9

On Saturday, April 9 from 3:00-5:00pm, come out to support young poets from Providence and Central Falls as they read their work at AS220, 115 Empire Street in Providence.

Writers-in-the-Schools matches poets with classrooms in Rhode Island's urban schools, providing writing instruction and poetry education/enlightenment/encouragement. On Saturday, poets from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School and Central Falls High School will share their work. Come out to support them and to show your commitment for poetry as an essential part of learning and expression.

I'll be there for sure; it happens that Elias, my fifth grader at King, is one of the performers. However, I'd be sharing this event with you even if he or his school weren't a part of it. We need to do all we can to support Writers-in-the-Schools work, and our schools' capacity to collaborate with artists, writers, poets, and others from our community who have so much to offer our students.

Leadership Rhode Island at Central Falls High School

This year, I'm happy to be participating in Leadership Rhode Island. Thus far, three months in, it's a powerful experience helping me and many others contribute as effectively as we can to sustaining and improving our state.

Due to a work obligation, I was not that happy to have to miss an opportunity to spend time at Central Falls High School on Monday morning with some of my LRI class and LRI alums, who visited the school to meet with Central Falls students to talk about careers and the future. Here's the ProJo coverage of the event. I have heard it was a mutually beneficial connection, and I think that lives were changed among the adults and young people who participated.

We need to continue to find ways to get adults and young people together, both for one-offs like this and for more sustained relationships.

The Powers and Limits of Cookies

Today, in one of those random chitchats on the way to school, I said to my kids, "There are two things I know really well: education and cookies." Actually, there's a third thing I know fairly well: my limits. So I'm going to focus on cookies today--especially today, when many education opinionators from near and far are spouting off about Central Falls High School. I am not going to do that, other than to say that I want desperately for all of Central Falls' young people to get the education and support that they need and deserve, and that I wish the community of Central Falls the grace, strength, good will, commitment and determination to make that happen. I'll leave it at that, and write about cookies instead.

Yesterday, I wrote about how my kids and I are going to make holiday cookies to give as gifts to teachers and others. Tonight we're getting started, and as it turns out, there's a lot of thinking involved with cookie-making. Today, we're focusing on the mathematical properties of cookie baking. The guys are figuring out:

1. how many plates of cookies we're going to give as gifts (bonus extra: thinking about who is important in your life requires a focus on interpersonal relations)
2. how many cookies will go on each plate
3. how many total cookies we will need
4. how many different kinds of cookies we're going to make (bonus extras: this requires much intense cookbook scrutiny--reading!--and collaborative decision making--communication and learning to work in a group!)
5. what are the ingredient totals, so that we know how much butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and other components to buy
6. how much time we will need for each batch of cookies
7. when we will make the cookies over the course of the coming week (bonus extra: time management!)

(Yes, I we're actually charting all of this. On chart paper. In the kitchen. What I really want is a kitchen with walls of whiteboard, but until then, this will have to do.)

Including the kids in the planning, before we even fire up the KitchenAid, is a key part of the process; it's the kind of informal, context-based, real-world teaching that many families take advantage of all the time, and for which we always need to be on the lookout. Yes, it would be easier to do most of the planning myself, but the kids would miss an awesome authentic learning opportunity and would be far less invested in the process.

The math ought to be fairly accessible to my kids--at least the older two--but the collaborative decision making? Oy. Not so easy. But all the more reason to brave it. They need to figure out ways to work together across differences, even if those differences extend only to the relative merits/horrors of walnuts, coconut, and raisins.

I have a mighty faith in the power of cookies, but even I know their limits. It's going to take a lot more than cookies to break through the barriers that students, teachers, families, and administrators are facing in Central Falls and in other troubled districts. But it would help, we would bake cookies for Central Falls' education and community stakeholders every day as a gesture of sweetness and belief in adults to overcome differences to do the right thing for young people and their community in a troubled and bitter situation.