About
About Linda
When I was two I was the youngest child on my block. My mother planned to keep me home until I was six because that is typically when children in Germany start school. Now that is changing but that is how it was when she was a child. There was no hurry in her mind. She read to me and we made our own playdough, and I played on my own, or with her, or with other kids on the block. However, all of the other children went to school and I wanted to go too. So, my mom found a nursery school that would let me attend part day even though it was a full day place. I was so excited to go. On the first day my mom came to pick me up at lunch time. I refused to leave. She had already had to pay full price for me to attend, so she left me there and came back at the end of the day to pick me up. When she did, she found the teachers all standing behind me. All of the children were sitting on the benches and I was going down the row tying their shoes. The teachers were in awe because I could tie shoes the adult way, not the way they had yet to teach the children. My mom explained that I had figured it out myself. I had dolls and they had shoes with little plastic shoe strings, which are actually much harder to tie, but I tied them as that was part of taking care of them when I played with them and got them dressed. Another thing I could do was braid my hair on my own, and then, after a while, because it was an open place where I could choose what I wanted to do, I joined the 5 year olds and learned to read. So, I was able to read at 3, but my mom claims I largely taught myself. So, I loved my nursery school, and was very happy there. That undid my mom’s expectations for how my childhood would be. I would not stay at home. I would go to school, a place I loved.
When I was nine I wanted to be an Egyptologist or a nursery school teacher. I would spend my time reading tomb robber mysteries, or hanging out in the University of Chicago Oriental Institute which is free and would let me roam around on my own, or drawing floor plans with interior designs for my nursery school. I also hung out at the playground with the moms whose husbands were in graduate school and played with their children. Later on I spent a lot of time babysitting. I loved children and my friend and I would throw themed birthday parties for the children in our building. We would make games for it, and do entertainment. When I became an adult these sorts of activities found their way into my classroom, and my own home and my child planned her own parties too. I think she just inherited that desire to organize and plan activities.
My parents were activists. They were involved in working for causes they believed would make the world better, from civil rights to environmental responsibilities. I was brought along on fundraising and rallies. We wanted life to be more fair and better for people. Our concern for the planet has been long standing. I am glad that there is Earth Day, but every day should be earth day. We have always been environmentalists in my home. We turned off lights when we were not in a room, walked and used public transportation a lot. We reused things, and did not throw out food, we ate leftovers. I still remember my grandmother making different meals from foods that were left over, like taking noodles that had been boiled one day and frying them in butter with breadcrumbs another day. Green beans became bean soup. Clothing was repaired and donated, not thrown out. We recycled before it was popular, and reused paper. When I taught my first class my students learned to make paper so that we could reuse our paper. We also had a lot of scrap paper for doing math practice and rough drafts. We had different levels of paper. New paper was for final drafts, or art work. I tried to teach good habits knowing that if you learn to do things when you are young they become automatic. I know that if we each do what we can, it helps to make the world a better place. I see children as the change agents of the future. This is what I teach my students and my child. I want them to care about themselves and others in the world. I also want them to inherit a livable world.
When I went to university where I had been accepted into an architecture program, I switched to the liberal arts college and ended up studying history and fine arts. Right after college I accepted a corporate job. There, the most meaningful thing I did was to volunteer to tutor in an inner city high school. So, I decided to go to graduate school to become a teacher. There I found my way to a concentration in multicultural and multilingual education. Supposedly my aptitude was secondary education, but I liked elementary education because I like the creativity of integrated projects and did not want to be limited to teaching one subject. I became friends with Eleanor, a Ukrainian-Russian speaking woman. She and I collaborated by bringing our students together even though we taught in different schools with different student populations, but we had done so many projects together in graduate school that it was easy for us to figure out how to bring our very different class populations together to do projects. Her students were immigrant children from former Soviet countries, while mine were mainly Black and Mexican immigrant children, and occasionally some other children in this slowly gentrifying community. We used the arts to have the students create performances where they told their collective stories in performance.
When I had my daughter Milena, I formed a group with some mothers in my community. Several were from other countries. Spain, France, Argentina, China, as well as from here. We shared parenting ideas and supported each other. I also had a group of German speaking moms so that my daughter would be exposed to speaking German in play. Many of my daughter’s friends spoke German, English and some other languages because that is what their parents spoke with them, and then English was the language of the playground. We shared ideas, and cared for each other’s children and went on vacations together. Sometimes we met each other abroad. As they got older, my daughter met with a good friend and played flute duets with her on the streets of Göttingen, Germany and Vienna, Austria, for money. After making some money they would then go spend it in nearby stores, and always give some to the people who were begging for money as well, knowing that they were cutting in on their earnings. As a parent I encouraged my daughter’s initiatives. This was not her only way of earning money, just as I made my own businesses before I got an official job growing up. They enjoyed their independence.
Once Milena was school age I returned to teaching. It is work that is always creative and rewarding. Building relationships with children and seeing them learn to do things that they could not do when they started the school year is really exciting. Of course I also had a daughter to teach as well: we parents are our children’s first teachers. My husband is her teacher as well. We all enjoy conversing together, sharing books, but each of us also has special things we like to share with her on our own. She and her father enjoy comedy together. She and I enjoy making things together. We learn from her as well. It is a symbiotic relationship in which we all grow from each other too. Ours is a home of lifelong learning.
My Mission
Each year I have tried to teach new things to learn and grow from them. I have always been someone who has pushed myself to do that. At the same time I have a lot of experiences and would like to share them. I have a rich assortment of really bright, creative and interesting teacher friends that I love to talk about education with as well. Most are very experienced like me, and some are newer to teaching who bring different and interesting perspectives. I also have friends who do other things, like write books, or work in urban anthropology, or environmental conservation, or linguistics, or Near Eastern Studies, or we share interests outside of our work, and these also contribute a lot to my understanding of the world.
Right now American education has become very divisive. I think many experienced professional voices need to be discussing what is good in education and why. We need to avoid doing long term harm to our school system. Our country is part of a group of democratic nations that want to stand together and show the world that democracy works and is a good thing. Schools are supposed to teach democracy and how to participate as good citizens. I believe that teaching is complex and as such, professional educators and parents should be giving it a lot of thought. I will be bringing my long experience with education to my blog, where I have examined schools in many countries, and will continue to do so. I will be looking at what is going on in the United States and other countries, because we should be learning from each other and see what is working. I am going to be looking not only at the curriculum but also the funding and access and support for struggling students and immigrants, in countries that have immigrant populations. I have been very interested in how math is taught in many countries. It has helped me to be a very successful math teacher.
Since my daughter is probably going to be going to college in Europe we will be discussing her college search in detail, and that of any of her friends that would like to share their experiences for comparison. So, you will be hearing about what it is like to try to get into colleges in other countries. I certainly have appreciated looking at tour videos of campuses and will be sharing some of them.
Part of the blog will be devoted to my everyday interests as well. I like both making and experiencing the arts, though I do not make art much these days. I have participated in a global music choir and am now singing when I can with a splinter group from this choir. I am researching how to make my home carbon free, and am learning about other green energy initiatives. I will be talking about them. I have and will be an avid reader of books for both children and adults and when I come across ones that I would like to discuss I will include them in my literature section. I plan to buy a home in another country so I will be discussing that experience as well and what it is like to be an expatriate, and the experiences of friends. I will be inviting friends and others to write for my blog as well, as they have experiences that they are willing to share.
I also would invite you to contact me if you have questions or if there is something you would like me to address in my blog.
Collaborating and creating curriculum is something I love to do and have been collaborating on with teachers for a long time. I also like to learn about education in different countries. When I can visit schools in other countries I do.
Some of my work is:
- Collaborated with a team to teach Chicago public high school students to develop a peer teaching model about AIDS which was then used citywide
- Partnered with a teacher of Russian immigrant children, a teaching artist, some art teachers, and an art museum to have children exchange cultures through shared arts projects and a collective performance with the Black and Mexican immigrant students in my class. (published in Methods That Matter by Harvey Daniels and Marilyn Bizar, 1998, cover art is from our project). Visit Site
- Collaborated with a colleague to study countries of the world and have third and fourth-grade students create videos which included interviews where available.
- Collaborated on many occasions to fundraise with products students have made for various social justice and environmental projects which tie into studies of the issues, as well as the math aspect of fundraisers. Summers are spent reading children’s books to select titles with colleagues in a small group for our school’s Fourth Grade Global Reading Challenge.
- Collaborated with an artist and teacher educator at the Field Museum of Natural history to create a Black history social and environmental justice curriculum on the Mississippi River with a visual timeline for teachers to use.
- Collaborated with several colleagues to teach fourth-grade students about conserving the waters of Lake Michigan then developing videos to teach about this: www.youtube.com/playlist
- Designing t-shirts to fundraise for organizations that are engaged in conservation which are sold in this Etsy shop with all of the profits going to the organizations that each group picked: etsy.com/shop/SavetheGreatLakes
All projects are about creating something to share with a legitimate audience that has relevance in the world. When I had my daughter I went back to graduate school to study school psychology. I did not end up leaving the classroom, but it gave me new tools to use in my teaching. It certainly gave me more of a focus on the social-emotional development of children as well as more understanding about working with struggling learners and identity development models. Post pandemic we seem to be in a backlash in education and many voices are needed to examine what is based on fact and what is based on emotional responses of a weary world.