A morning meander while the Hunter Moon is glowing orange

Bird Droppings  October 26, 2026

A morning meander while the Hunter Moon is glowing orange

Early this morning, as I looked out at the night sky, I honestly wasn’t sure whether the moon was glowing. I drove over to the reservoir, and the Hunter Moon was bright orange. Interestingly, I didn’t see a deer today, the first time in many days I hadn’t seen five or six every morning. The Hunter Moon might have kept them hidden. I have been chasing the moon for several mornings now. Yesterday, traffic, timing, clouds, and the angle I was looking from seemed to interfere with every attempt to get the photograph I wanted. This morning, it was there, glowing orange above the reservoir.

The moon had been there all along. Perhaps I simply hadn’t been in the right place to see it.

That thought stayed with me as I began thinking about education. How often do we look at a child and decide something isn’t there simply because we haven’t found the right way to see it? We administer a test, ask a question, or assign work, and when the response isn’t what we expect, we start making assumptions about the child. Yet the understanding may already be there, hidden behind circumstances, language, fear, experience, or simply the way we ask the question.

I started thinking back to tutoring a student, trying to catch up and return to public school. Eventually, she took a different route and finished homeschooling. This morning, I started by reading several old emails from friends in my doctoral and graduate cohort, most of whom have now defended their dissertations and officially completed the program. In another set of emails about an article on teaching memory that several teachers reviewed, they noted that the readings offered insight into the program’s successful educational adaptation.

I found I enjoyed reading it, and it reminded me of a teaching principle I learned from my father, who applied it in the steel industry many years ago. I learned this concept in a Red Cross instructor course in 1968. It is called the FIDO principle: Frequency, Intensity, Duration, and Over Again. If you repeat something often enough, it will sink in.

Granted, in today’s educational system, we might be using FIDO a bit too much.

There is a difference between repetition that reinforces learning and repetition that simply reinforces the method of instruction. If a child doesn’t understand something the first five times we present it, perhaps the sixth time shouldn’t look exactly like the first five. Maybe the question isn’t how many times we repeat the lesson, but whether we have discovered how that particular child learns.

I have been thinking about something Rob Silver and I used to do on the first day of school. We handed our students index cards. It was a simple practice, but looking back, I wonder how much more we might have learned from those cards if we had continued adding observations throughout the year. What interests this child? What questions does the child ask? How does the child approach something unfamiliar? What happens when the child encounters difficulty?

An index card could become a living record of our growing understanding of a student, not a permanent judgment about who that student is. An observation is not necessarily a conclusion, and an opinion certainly isn’t a fact.

The cards wouldn’t be meant to make children predictable. It would be to keep teachers curious.

I wonder when teachers stop asking questions about the children they teach. Is it when the curriculum becomes overwhelming? When the testing schedule takes over? When previous teachers’ opinions become accepted as facts? Or perhaps when surviving the school day becomes more important than understanding what happened during it?

I know how difficult it can be with twenty or thirty children in a classroom. Schedules, interruptions, standards, testing requirements, and countless other demands add to the pressure. Teachers have to make decisions continually, sometimes with very little information. But perhaps that is precisely why we need to remain curious.

The card should be a point of reference, never a point of fact.

“I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education is a social process; school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated, which will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race and use his own powers for social ends. I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 1897

I look at John Dewey’s ideas from nearly 130 years ago and how we still call them progressive education; it amazes me. With all the educational materials now available, many are only a few years old. Compared to Dewey, they still feel traditional.

One of our topics was comparing performance and social support. I’m leaning toward the social support direction, as it is an integral part of my day when I teach, even with general education students. This is how I see kids and deal with kids. I return to the idea I read about earlier today: move away from the pendulum swing and instead move toward a pulse. No swing either way, but a steady beat or energy.

A pendulum swings between educational philosophies. We emphasize academic performance, then social development, then accountability, then individualization. Every few years, someone announces a new approach that will finally solve education’s problems.

But children aren’t pendulums.

They are living, breathing individuals whose needs don’t conveniently change when educational policy changes. Perhaps education needs a pulse rather than a pendulum, a continuous awareness of the child, the learning environment, and the relationships that make learning possible. We should move away from the right-or-left swing and focus on what best serves the child, not always what is most convenient for society or the educational system.

I have worked with many children from a nearby low-income housing area. Many are very bright, and all are very poor. The sixteen-hour syndrome, as I call it, is alive and well in that area. As I go by several times a day between my mother’s house and my own, I see kids I have had, and often new ones, but the similarities always remain.

Looking back on my years teaching EBD students, I see that I have had more students from that one spot in the county than from any other specific location. Sadly, many are marrying within that small community. More kids are being born there. Many are on the fringe of society. Some have struggled with drugs, alcohol, unemployment, and behaviors that have brought them into conflict with schools and the larger community. As I drove by, I wondered why, thinking of kids from this enclave in the past. Several face serious hardships; some have escaped and moved away, and many will attend our newest high school down the road next year.

I wonder if anyone in that community was approached about their participation in the greater good. I also wonder how many of those children entered school already carrying expectations that had nothing to do with their actual abilities. How many were seen through the lens of where they lived, who their parents were, or what an older brother or sister had done? How many teachers were handed an opinion about a child before they ever had an opportunity to know that child? There is a difference between recognizing the circumstances in which a child lives and allowing those circumstances to define the child.

That brings me back to my index cards. What would we discover if we approached each child without assuming we already knew the answers? What if we spent the first few days of school learning about the children rather than immediately measuring how much they already knew?

And perhaps an even larger question: Are we educating children to escape their circumstances, or are we helping them develop the ability to change those circumstances?

I have been thinking about professional development as well. We spend considerable time and money developing programs, attending meetings, discussing test scores, and introducing new initiatives. Yet how much of that effort actually helps a teacher understand the children sitting in front of them? Teachers need opportunities to experience learning themselves, to experiment, ask questions, make mistakes, and discover new approaches. We expect children to learn through meaningful experiences, yet too often we expect teachers to improve through paperwork and presentations.

Are we improving education, or are we improving the machinery that surrounds education?

Interesting, as I am having a difficult time getting started this morning, wandering off a bit as if I had just driven by that community. I am always trying to keep up with my youngest son. I remember a day he decided to do a Godzilla marathon of the old Godzilla movies. I did not make it through the first one. When I got up the next morning, the video was still on, and he had crashed sometime after five, watching the twenty-eighth movie featuring the man in a monster suit.

He’d just found the latest installment, which features every other major monster and a walk-on by the computer-generated Godzilla. I often wonder if Godzilla has a hidden meaning: the powerful beast that always has a weakness in the end. Sort of the David and Goliath of nature and humanity, and my youngest, of course, came to the rescue, offering that the original concept of the monster was an anti-nuclear effort.

It is interesting how something that seems like simple entertainment can carry a much deeper meaning. Perhaps we do the same with children. We see what is happening on the surface without always considering what lies beneath.

“The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.” Laurens van der Post

For many years, I have been intrigued by this man, whom I hadn’t heard of until I found a quote several years ago. His writing about Africa, nature, and the people he encountered has continued to interest me. His life and interpretations of the world have also sparked controversy, but I remain intrigued by the relationship between human experience, adversity, and the natural world that runs through his work.

“It’s easier to go down a hill than up it, but the view is much better at the top.” Arnold Bennett

“What is to give light must endure the burning.” Viktor E. Frankl

As I sat this morning, conversations and yesterday’s events often drove my thoughts and inspired me as I wrote. Yesterday, I talked with some friends about where they had been and where they were going; as we spoke, adversity was a good word. It is about looking a lion in the face and walking away, knowing you have survived.

Only a few days ago, I was talking with a former student. She graduated from a respected associate’s program and was floored when a four-year school rejected her. She attended the two-year program on a full athletic scholarship and struggled academically to play on a nationally ranked junior college team. As graduation time approached, she had to quit softball and forfeit her scholarship to raise her grades and devote more time to studying. She had conquered her adversary and was now trying to move on. After graduating with a four-year business degree, she was still working as a waitress. However, just a few days before our talk, she was interviewed and landed a job she had dreamed of. I wonder how many people along the way saw her struggles and assumed they represented the limits of her abilities. How many looked at her grades, her athletic scholarship, or her difficulties and decided what she could or couldn’t accomplish? She didn’t stop learning simply because the path became difficult. She found another way.

I keep coming back to that moon above the reservoir. It was there whether I could see it or not. My inability to photograph it didn’t diminish its existence. How often do we mistake our inability to recognize learning for an absence of learning?

“Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you.” A saying often attributed to Māori tradition

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.” Laurens van der Post

“The chief condition on which life, health, and vigor depend is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.” — Colin Powell

Overcoming adversity begins with action: take a step forward, remember that shadows are cast by light, and know growth comes from effort. Itis hard to cross a stream if you never take the first step.Borrowing from the ancient philosophical idea that you can never step into the same river twice, I was sitting here remembering old stories and thoughts from the past.

We would hike up Toccoa Creek in North Georgia, and during that hike, we’d traverse about 500 feet uphill over rocks and boulders, climbing up the creek. As you go, water continually flows against you, and depending on the rainfall, it can be substantial. Cracks and crevices abound, and more than once you swim uphill through rock channels ten feet deep and eighteen inches wide, but at the top is a waterfall. I have been thinking about that climb this morning. The waterfall was always there, but the journey to reach it was never quite the same. Sometimes the water was shallow, sometimes deep. Sometimes the current was gentle, and other times it took every bit of effort to move forward. We couldn’t change the waterfall, but we had to adjust to the creek’s conditions.

Perhaps that is what teaching should be about. We have educational goals, standards, and expectations, but the conditions under which children learn are constantly changing. We can insist that every child take the same path, at the same speed, under the same conditions, or we can learn enough about each child to recognize when a different approach is needed. And perhaps teachers need the same consideration. We cannot keep adding expectations, paperwork, testing, and programs while wondering why so many teachers are struggling simply to make it through another day. Education should not be about making children fit a system. The system should respond to the children it serves.I think Dewey understood that more than a century ago.

Maybe the greatest problem in education isn’t that we’ve forgotten how to teach. Perhaps it’s that we’ve forgotten whom we’re teaching. The moon was there all along. So was the waterfall. The question was never whether they existed, but whether we could find our way to them. And perhaps the same is true of the children who enter our classrooms each morning. Keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your hearts and always give thanks.

Namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird