Dr. Grauer's Column - A Season of Joy is Our Curriculum

A Season of Joy is Our Curriculum

History is filled with times and traditions of unity. Holidays remind us to take out the time for this unity. At Grauer, that means holiday karaoke, and Connor’s Cause present wrapping for the terminally-ill children in our area. Our faculty photo! Of course, it means final exams—gulp! The school parents have decorated the mantel and the giant fireplace is keeping us warm all day. We will miss caroling at the neighboring eldercare facility this year. Still, it seems like almost every day, our school kitchen overflows with the decadent tastes and smells of hot chocolate, cookies and fudge.

Welcoming this season in our part of the world is subtle and takes special appreciation. This is the only one of the four seasons that we have almost no tourists in town, and things feel slow and easy. We even enjoy some rain now and then. We harvested the corn in the school garden and just turned it into masa for tamales, and the kale, turnips and lettuce are ready to pick this very week. (Thank you, Parent Gardeners!) Our subtle seasons and school traditions unify us so beautifully.

These are times when unity feels more valuable than pretty much any time I can remember. What are we unifying around? That’s easy: we are unifying around how much you mean to us—how we feel about our School community. I'm focusing on it more. This year, we have started almost all of our meetings with a question: How are you feeling?

This is such a simple question that people are inclined to ignore it altogether. Just like we ignore the normal answers: “I’m good.” “Fine.” But we have been through too much in these past couple years—too much to take those answers on faith right now. 

My last year ended not with a “good” or a “fine.”  Maybe a “phew!” To be honest, though I was good and fine in many respects, the year ended with some other emotions as well, emotions many of you reached, too: uneasy, stressed, tired, conflicted. Impatient.

I suppose there is something good about all those emotions. First off, the precise recognition of an emotion makes us better off, more aware of our own feelings, and, hence, happier. In this slow and beautiful season, a lot of you are doing this kind of reflecting, too. We applaud your courage in accessing the full range of emotions. Your students are doing it too. Let us know what you need.

So, I’m good now. Reflecting back, last winter I felt exhausted, through the summer I started moving into relaxed and mellow, then this new and hopeful school starting moved me into energized, and grateful to see faces back on campus—whole and maskless faces (at least out of doors)! And now in this calmer season, I can feel myself moving into the cheerful and playful moods, with heartening bursts of being optimistic and inspired. It sounds a little like wine tasting, doesn’t it, but why not be connoisseurs of our own inner selves? There is a full menu of positive emotions available to us and, now that the holidays have come, I’m ready to feast a little bit, if not sip! Let’s take time for self-reflection. We all deserve it.

We want to know how everyone in our community is doing. Not that we can fix everything, but we want to understand, and to develop our sensitivity to what our students are going through. Let’s make a pact—you and I—to be attuned to the actual feeling of our kids and ourselves, what we are going through. To listen better, listen to the listening, and probe caringly, not to fix, not to give advice, just to understand. Befriend polarization this season, and just be there for one another. Let’s all aim for festive together. Aim at joy if you can. Aim at warm.

This is our school's commitment to great listening and empathy, patience and encouragement in this beautiful season. And of course to infusing ourselves with the peace the natural world brings. It would hardly be a Grauer blog if I did not nudge: “Get outside!”

We know from experience, research, and observation, that if we can practice these simple commitments to self-reflection and the natural world (and the arts), our students will skyrocket in their motivation, concentration, peace of mind, and confidence. They’ll thrive.

I hope no one minds if I break the tone just a tad and say, all of the above will do an enormous amount more in this holiday season than all the plastic and consumerism in the world. Can we think about this?

(I admit, I’m also anticipating getting back to the movie theater to see the new Spielberg movie “West Side Story”, a story that infused itself into my own coming of age a long time ago. You want joy and a primer on my own educational philosophy? Click here—I hope that is still politically okay enough. And, the Carlsbad New Village Arts Theater has a heartening show with great singing called “1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas”—I recommend that you get tickets right away.)

Thank you for reading another blog. At our school this season, when we say peace and joy to the world, now you know how we go about it. We will probe for joy every day, never cease in our efforts to understand what it is, and attempt to incorporate it genuinely into the way we evaluate the progress of our students and our own teaching. We will attempt to model with it conviction. A season of joy is our prime course of study, our standard for excellence, and our real curriculum.

Now if you like, click here to try a two and a half minute experience with someone you enjoy.

Happy Holidays!

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