GODSPEED* with Learning Stories

  The news is that there have been significantly fewer riots and incidents of racial unrest this year compared to 2020. 100 years from now, this could be remembered as the year that America decided that we can “all just get along” after all. All in favor? All opposed?    I thought so. You don’t believe in America anymore. Here’s the thing. We’re still here. Still together. Maybe we’re taking a little break right now, but the temper tantrums we had last year were just a warm-up. We haven’t worked out our differences just yet.    It has become all the rage to boo and cheer for the story the media spins about politics. In this story, politics is a way of characterizing the world in terms of who the real Americans are - we’re good / they’re bad and we’re in/they’re out. That is the politics of eternity.    Learning Stories are less “Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil” and more “Be Here Now.” Not that there cannot be cosmic forces at play, but the gene...

Don’t just do a thing, do the right thing. This is America. We don’t care about whether you come from a royal family, we care about results. Can you deliver?   We may fantasize about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but more than anything we care about the facts of life for ordinary people. We like to watch movies, but we don’t like to be taken for fools. Real people want the real deal, with or without Hollywood special effects. How things look is secondary.    Without being dedicated to the welfare of the whole family, positive affirmations work on a superficial level. Affirming the good for oneself alone is a superstitious practice that can only have limited results, like an obsessive compulsive tic.    You may feel better if you say a prayer before your meal, but nothing real will happen unless you include others in your prayers. Actions taken on behalf of the whole family provide opportunities to participate in a permanent revolution of hearts and mind...

Gender dysphoria used to be a boy thing. Seriously. A preschool boy thing. Until 2012 there was no sign of teenage girls with gender dysphoria in the scientific literature at all. It was all about the boys. Today the Western world is seeing a surge of adolescent girls with the diagnosis. Girls are not only represented in the literature on gender dysphoria today, they have become a defining majority. They are letting us know that they are uncomfortable in their bodies, and we had better say and do what they say or else.   This is a story that goes back to when God was a teenager, with a modern twist. Teenage girls have the intelligence, the experience, and the motivation to strike fear in the heart of parents more than ever before. You may have noticed that preschool boys have not yet developed the skills to become Instagram influencers. Not so for the trans guys formerly identified as girls.  These guys have powers that would have had the puritans in Salem questioning the moti...

Becoming x-ray listeners means that we have to have to “hear” the truth of each other’s imagination. In researching and developing the ability, Judy Rees found that people use 6 metaphors a minute in an ordinary English conversation. We use words to give ideas physical properties so that we can place our ideas in the world of time and space in practical terms.   When we say we want something to be clear, we do not generally mean that we want to be able to see through it like a pane of glass. We use the metaphor of clarity to refer to an internal state of being. To understand each other, we need to use more than our ears to listen.   Words serve the same purpose for adults that an imaginary friend may serve for a child. They allow us to explore the relationship between our internal experience and every other thing there is to think about in the universe.    The saying is that “you have to build trust.” If that is how your imaginary friend says it is, then so it i...

Alan Whitaker at the Monarchy of Christania He had declared the land a separate country. Intertwined with pink and white flowers, letters of bent iron formed an arch with the words “Monarchy of Christania '' at the entrance to the property. Following the example of another utopian community in California, Alan Whitaker purchased 40 acres in the 1950s for 40 dollars an acre and put the deed to the land in the name of Jesus Christ.    “I’m not the owner of the land,” he would say. “I’m only the procurator. You’ll have to talk to the man when he gets back.” To be sure, this made him an unusual neighbor for Jane Fonda and Ronald Reagan, who also had property on the mountain side of the San Marcos Pass. It was also a surprisingly effective response to the questions of anyone who claimed to be an authority. He was beyond question.    The kingdom I called home  when I was 17 years old was high above the city of Santa Barbara, high above the ocean stretching out to...

Your life is already half over, if you’re lucky. For some of you, it could all be over tomorrow. You just never know. So what are you going to do with your day? Remember there is a difference between being busy and being productive.   Are you waiting for inspiration to make a record of your daily efforts? Something history worthy?    As my dad would say, I have a special newsflash for you. You aren't going to know what is important unless you write it down. Seriously. You know what's important to you. Maybe you like to watch YouTube videos. How many YouTube videos did you watch yesterday, this week, this month so far, this year? Which videos did you watch? Keep track of the data. You may be surprised at how much you do every day, and what is important to you.   Make a copy of the spreadsheet I started to keep track of what you do today,  starting with a link to a video of Ben Harper singing "Better Way." Or make your own spreadsheet where you write down ev...

Te Whāriki Cover Art I did not invent Learning Stories. What I have done is use the basic steps of writing a Learning Story to make it possible for families to move from hopeless circumstances to hopeful actions and heal from multigenerational trauma. I call that a 3-Step Gamechanger.  When their government asked educators in Aotearoa New Zealand to develop a national curriculum for early childhood education, they developed the world’s first bilingual, bicultural curriculum. In a departure from the Western settler-colonial worldview that has been the dominant paradigm and theoretical lens for observing learning for centuries, they tried something different. New Zealanders used socio-cultural learning theory instead of developmental learning theory as the foundation of a nationwide approach to teaching and learning.    Known as Te Whāriki , this curriculum framework represents a fundamental shift toward a meaningful focus on  who  the learner as the foundation fo...