May 5

The SAN Script – Tuesday, May 5

The Desert Fathers and Mothers

Solitude and Silence
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
The desert fathers and mothers withdrew from cities to the desert to live freely, apart from the economic, cultural, and political structure (the Roman Empire) that first persecuted the church and then later gave it a privileged status–in the empire’s own search for uniformity and control. The desert fathers and mothers knew, as should we, that the empire would be an unreliable partner. They recognized that they had to find inner freedom from the system before they could return to it with true love, wisdom, and helpfulness. This is the continuing dynamic to this day, otherwise “Culture eats Christianity for breakfast” to paraphrase Peter Drucker, and our deep transformative power is largely lost.

How do we find inner freedom? Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you’re in your mind, you’re hardly ever at peace, and when you’re at peace, you’re never only in your mind. The Early Christian abbas (fathers) and ammas (mothers) knew this, and first insisted on finding the inner rest and quiet necessary to tame the obsessive mind. Their method was first called the prayer of quiet and eventually was referred to as contemplation. It is the core teaching in the early Christian period and emphasized much more in the Eastern Church than in the West.

In a story from Benedicta Ward’s The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: “A brother came to Scetis to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, ‘Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.'”[1] But you don’t have to have a cell, and you don’t have to run away from the responsibilities of an active life, to experience solitude and silence. Amma Syncletica said, “There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.”[2]

By solitude, the desert mystics didn’t mean mere privacy or protected space, although there is a need for that too. The desert mystics saw solitude, in Henri Nouwen’s words, as a “place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.”[3] Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love. Quite often this can happen right in the midst of human relationships and busy lives.

Especially when outward distractions disappear, we find that the greatest distraction from reality and from divine union is our own busy mind and selfish heart. Anthony the Great said: “The man who abides in solitude and is quiet, is delivered from fighting three battles: those of hearing, speech, and sight. Then he will have but one battle to fight–the battle of the heart.”

Richard Rohr

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St. Anthony Today Tuesday, May 5th

Coffee and snacks for parents in the yard before and during school – every day this week

Get a family portrait!  All week we are taking pictures of parents with their kids.  Each photo will be made into a 5 x 7 portrait for the family.  We hope then to make a great composite of the St. Anthony Community by the end of the week!

Open House for the Primary Language Class – morning

Public Library visits to begin – 45 Rosemoungrade 1 today at 9:00 AM – parents welcome to join us!

Volunteer/Community Partner Appreciation tea – this is a great opportunity to meet the community partners we work with.  Assembly 4th block – tea and refreshments in the staffroom after the assembly

Table Tennis starts again – Round Two – eight week program

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Flipping for Successful Learning: The Big Picture

EDUCATION, FLIPPED LEARNING,

Flipped Learning – Turning Learning Inside Out

As we progress rapidly into the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, questions continue to be raised about how education addresses the ever increasing demands for change, integrating emerging technologies, and maximising the possibilities for every student.

Teachers are searching for ways to focus on engaging students in authentic, complex and powerful problem solving experiences for learning, unpacking content and demonstrating understanding and knowledge. The day is a finite resource, and class times are small segments of that day, so there are limitations on how much more can be accomplished in that specified time.

Flipped Learning for a Flipped World

Educators recognise changes in the learning expectations of current students from previous generations – the millennial student who has grown up using rapidly evolving technologies and has instant information access, has less tolerance for traditional lecture style teaching. The “digital native” student is one whose access to technologies has directed their acquisition and processing of information, thinking and learning, which has become fundamentally different from previous generations. The big question then focuses on how class time may be utilised for maximum student-teacher interaction. Flipped learning can be considered broadly as an approach to teaching that transforms the learning environment into a dynamic, interactive space where students have opportunities to engage in unpacking content, apply concepts and maximise the resources available within the school. These resources include experts in subject areas (teachers), peers, traditional texts and technologies.

Traditional classroom learning

Flipping The Numbers

In 2012, forty teachers were surveyed on how much time they spent reviewing and repeating classroom information to students during one 60 minute class period. The results indicated that on average, a staggering 39 minutes of the 60 minutes was spent introducing, reviewing and repeating content. The results also indicated that opening and closing activities by teachers were consuming an additional 5-8 minutes of classroom time. In total, approximately 44-47 minutes of the total 60 minutes of class time was spent presenting and reviewing information with only (on average) 13-16 minutes interacting with students unpacking content. Further evaluation revealed that the minimal amount of classroom practice time equated to 65-80 minutes per week, and 43-55 hours per year within a 40-week school year. Using this data, potentially, a student taking four years of a core subject might receive between 172-220 hours a year out of a possible 800 hours available for processing and unpacking content for understanding.

Flipping to Engage Active Learning

Active learning involves students being engaged in learning tasks that enable inquiry, creative response and thoughtful participation. Teachers are finding ways to restructure class activities so there is greater focus on the learning process and less on direct teaching. As educators, we also realise that no longer are we preparing students for factories, but rather, for a more rigorous, flexible, technology-dependent, and collaborative global economy.

K-12 students need teachers’ expertise and assistance more than ever to provide clarity and connectedness with learning and real world contextualisation. With increased complexity of problems, students need to draw upon the expertise of outside experienced experts and their own peers in addition to the classroom teacher. They also need the necessary resources and a positive, purposeful, learning environment. Traditionally, delivery of content has been built around the provision of content information in class and students do most of the processing at home for homework. In the Flipped Learning Model, classroom time is structured around activities that develop a deeper and more thorough understanding of content. Whilst there is no one specific model for flipping the classroom, the core model is to create videos and interactive lessons to introduce content and information. Students review this for homework and use class time for working through problems, engaging in advanced concepts and collaborative learning. All aspects of instruction are re-shaped to maximise learning time in class.

flippedclassroom

Passive to active learning