Category: PSCS

“You Have Been the Victim of a Random Act of Kindness”

Published on by Andy SmallmanLeave a comment

Since the 1990’s I’ve been promoting the importance of ordinary acts of kindness by offering classes, making suggestions via a newsletter, and writing kindness-related articles. A couple of my favorite kindness activities come from when I was facilitating an in-person intergenerational kindness class in a Seattle retirement community in the late 1990’s. The class consisted of elderly residents of the Fred Lind Manor and students from the Puget Sound Community School (PSCS). We met weekly to chat about kindness and, more importantly, to complete a group action.

Early in the term, the students had the idea of delivering flowers to some of the retirement community residents who had a difficult time leaving campus. A florist nearby offered to donate day-old flowers to the cause and we went door-to-door in the community delivering bouquets. One resident, a man, cried upon receiving a bouquet, telling us he’d never been given flowers before. The florist was so generous, a kindness unto itself, that we had a lot of extra flowers. The PSCS students decided to surprise Melinda at the PSCS office and delivered a bouquet to her.

The next week, one of the teens suggested we go to a nearby coffee house and anonymously pay for the coffee of a random stranger, someone who arrives at the counter, orders, only to find their drink has been paid for, a kindness act familiar to most people interested in the subject. I was a little nervous about this idea as I hadn’t taken any of the elders outside of the retirement community before. But the enthusiasm was palpable and, frankly, contagious. I checked with the Activities Coordinator, a person I greatly admired, pretty sure she wouldn’t stop us.

So off we went, walking about five blocks to a nearby coffee house. There were nine of us who went, four teens, four elders, and me. We pooled our pocket change as we walked, planning who would say what, and trying to figure out how we all could inconspicuously sit in the coffee house in order to see our unknown recipient receive our intended kindness.

Can you picture it, four teens, four elders, and me trying to be inconspicuous in a small shop? It was probably 2:30 in the afternoon, too, an odd time to be out.

In we went and up to the counter our chosen representatives went, a teen and an elder, with a couple of dollars in loose change. They tried explaining the idea to the barista, who at first didn’t understand. But after a second or third explanation, she got it and broke into a huge smile. I still remember exactly what she was supposed to say to the recipient of our kindness upon presentation of the drink:

“You have been the victim of a random act of kindness.”

Meanwhile, the rest of us had tried fitting around a small table as far away from the counter as possible but still within eyesight of it. The two rejoined us and we didn’t have long to wait. In walked a person and up to the counter she went. Around our table we tried hard not to stare, each of us individually excited, the collective excitement seeming to scream out our presence.

It went down just as you’d expect it to go down, the person ordered her drink, was told it had been paid for and that she was a kindness “victim.” At first she didn’t seem to understand, then took a second to see if it was some kind of joke. Assured it was legit, she accepted her drink and with a warm smile she walked out of the store. All of this took less than two minutes.

Upon her exit, we exploded with happiness. The barista waved to us and we walked out, united in what felt to us was an act of superhero proportions. The elders seemed younger and the teens wiser. It wasn’t four teens, four elders, and me any more. It was nine people.

We floated back to the reality of the retirement community.

French Sabbatical (From the Archives)

Published on by Andy SmallmanLeave a comment

From our first visit to Paris in October, 2010.
One of the highlights of my life, of Melinda’s and my marriage, and in our role as parents of Chloe & Ella was the 13 months we spent in France from July 2010 through July 2011. We were granted a sabbatical from our jobs at Puget Sound Community School (PSCS), both as a tribute to the work we had done to get the school going and keep it running since its humble beginnings in 1994 AND to provide the school community an opportunity to know it could exist without its founders being present (ie: the infamous “Pie Truck Scenario” – perhaps I’ll explain that in a future post).

The concept of the sabbatical being a real thing began while Melinda and I were on spring break in 2008. The concept of living in France with our children began as a pipe dream we’d tell each other before we even had children. That this could become a reality is a tribute to a lot of people, most significantly the PSCS board and staff at the time. I can vividly recall the months leading up to our departure like they were last month, not twelve years ago.

Our first family photo taken on July 6, 2010 in our adopted hometown of Nantes.
Officially, the sabbatical began with the school’s 2010-11 fiscal year, meaning on July 1, 2010. But we didn’t leave for France until July 4th so we had a few days in Seattle on our own. Because we were renting our house (note, this link takes you a site we created in 2012 to promote the idea of swapping houses with someone for a month that summer) to another family for the year and they moved in on July 1, we were staying at a friend’s. The day of the 1st, Chloe was out with some friends on one of her many goodbye tours and Melinda & Ella were doing some last-minute shopping. I was alone in an unfamiliar house with my laptop for company.

I had recently been reading how a person had documented his life for a full year by posting a daily photograph and some quick comments on a website. The idea appealed to me so that afternoon, alone in the house, I investigated how to do something like it. I knew a tiny bit about WordPress since one of the PSCS teaching staff members had taught the rest of us how to use it to post our class offerings to the students. On a whim, I created a WordPress blog, calling it “frenchsabbatical.”

Outside the Castle of Nantes (Château des ducs de Bretagne)
I had promised myself and told others that I wasn’t going to over-commit myself to projects while on sabbatical. I wanted some practice of living more spontaneously, freed from the daily requirements of being a school director. Indeed, Melinda and I would have parenting obligations but beyond that, I wanted a sense of freedom. That the PSCS board had agreed to supply Melinda and me with a monthly stipend helped tremendously with this.

Little did I know that the whim of starting my “frenchsabbatical” blog would propel not just me but many others on a daily adventure, one I never regretted for a minute. Beginning on the 1st of July from the home of our friends, I posted every day until our return (truth be told, I kept posting every day after that for another year or so, all of which you can find here). Conversations emerged, first just among Melinda, Chloe, Ella & me – “You could put that on the blog.” And, “Don’t you dare write about that.” To, “I get to approve any photos you use of me.”

The blog features a lot of silly posts, like my fascination with the sexiness of French fire hydrants.
As the months went by, our French friends got in the act. My dear friend Laurent made sure I had a way to post when his family took ours to their cabin in the French Alps that didn’t have an Internet connection. I also learned that part of his morning ritual while we were there was to read what I posted the night before.

Around the corner from our house in Nantes we met the Bertail family, people who have become among our closest friends in the world. There are so many stories to tell about them, from Christine, the mom, twice stopping by to introduce herself to us only find Chloe and Ella at home, to how they helped me celebrate my 48th birthday in style.

Then, of course, there were our friends and family members back in Seattle who used the blog to keep in touch with us. As a writer, I often would picture a member of our family as the audience to what I was writing. Michele, my mother-in-law, my brothers, or one of our nieces were common “targets.” Certainly, my mother was always in mind (she’d regularly send me edits – catching my typos with her usual flair).

To this day, I pay WordPress a fee each year to keep ads from the site and to maintain its unique domain name, meaning you can find it in its entirety at https://frenchsabbatical.com. Two years ago as a holiday present, one of the best I’ve ever received, Chloe & Ella had the blog posts made into a two-volume hardback book set that will forever hold a place of prominence in Melinda’s and my home.

I took up running while in France. Here I am crossing the turf track at the Nantes racetrack to get to the inner trotter track where I regularly ran after dropping off Ella at school.
Last week, in order to have all of my personal blog posts in one spot, I copied the content to this site, my ongoing personal blog. So if you’re interested in seeing what we were doing on a given day, you can do so right here. In fact, in the footer you’ll see a pull-down menu on the left for a monthly archive. Choose a month from the sabbatical year, July 2010 – July 2011, and enjoy some reading.

You can also use the “French Sabbatical” tag (you’ll see the posts in reverse order) or simply start with the first post I wrote on July 1, 2010 and go to the next and then the next…

Some nights when I’m feeling especially nostalgic, I’ll pick a month and do some reading, remembering what an amazing year we had.

Tap Into Your Resonance

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In the book “The Power of Kindness,” author Piero Ferrucci talks about how human beings are able to “resonate” with other human beings.

I love this concept.

He tells us that the ability is with us from birth, but if it doesn’t develop sufficiently we are in trouble. Me, I think the ability can be cultivated at any time in our lives. It’s certainly easier when we are younger, before we’ve had years of not resonating or not resonating well. But the ability is always there inside us, waiting to be tapped. I think the means is through storytelling.

In other words, if you’re ever feeling out of sorts, alone, or untouched, try telling the story of something that has touched you.

A few years back, I developed a class for teenagers on the subject of empathy. I wasn’t at all sure how many students would be interested. And since the classes that get scheduled at Puget Sound Community School are determined by student interest, I honestly wasn’t sure if this class would make the cut. Typically, more than 75 classes are offered to the students for each of the school’s main three terms, and the maximum any student can attend is around 20.

When I pitched the empathy class, I told the story of visiting my newborn daughter Ella in Children’s Hospital one Saturday morning in early 1997, she having been admitted (along with my wife, Melinda) because of a possible case of meningitis.

Ella was only 2 weeks old.

The day before, we had taken her to the doctor because of a high fever and the doctor ordered us to the emergency room. There, Ella experienced a spinal tap, during which the nurse’s assistant passed out and Melinda had to step in and hold still the crying/screaming baby Ella while the doctor inserted a needle into her spinal cord to get a fluid sample. Fearing meningitis, the doctors hospitalized Ella and treated her as if she had the illness while the fluid was tested over a period of three days. Melinda stayed with Ella while I was at home with her older sister, Chloe, not quite 4 years-old.

Two week old Ella’s IV was in her ankle.

So early that Saturday, with my mom having come to watch Chloe, I arrived at Children’s Hospital to be with Ella and Melinda. At that time of day, they have a special entrance for parents. I entered there and took the elevator to the Intensive Care Unit, where Ella was being watched.

Exiting the elevator, I encountered one of the most moving scenes of my life – a young boy playing with a remote control car. 8 o’clock, Saturday morning, playing like little boys all over the world, down the hospital hall came this pajama-clad boy directing his car, remote control in hand. Keeping up next to him was his father, pushing the IV cart, making sure it stayed attached to his little boy’s arm. It was so poignant that it took my breath away. A little boy just being a little boy on a Saturday morning. And a dad just being a dad, doing what he needed to do so his boy could play.

I told those stories to the students during my class pitch. Lots of students prioritized the class after that. It made it on the schedule.

I’m not sure if the class ever matched the stories that I think sold it, but it was a great class. The second week I brought in photographer Lynette Johnson as a guest speaker. Several years previously, when I first heard of her, she was trying to start a nonprofit organization.

The purpose?

To provide professional photographs to parents of their terminally ill children before they died. Yeah. Kind of hits you right there, doesn’t it?

Lynette succeeded in starting her nonprofit and has since been featured in People Magazine and on the TV show “Today.” She calls her nonprofit Soulumination and they’ve since expanded their services. They now take professional portraits, at no charge, of terminally ill parents so their children will have photos to help remember them.

Lynette told the students why she started the nonprofit, tearing up each time she told the story of one of the children she has photographed.

Two weeks after introducing the students to Lynette, I took them off campus to meet a couple in their 90’s who were living in the same retirement community as my parents. Both had lost their spouses and finding the other, they thought it made sense to share an apartment rather than pay for two. But the conservative retirement home wouldn’t allow this unless they married. So they got married. As it turns out, we learned the woman was at Pearl Harbor in 1941 when it was bombed.

What stories these two people had to tell a group of teenagers!

Feel the resonance? If so, did experiencing this resonance change how you were feeling? Pay attention to this.

What stories do you have to tell? Tell them!

Dyslexia, an Advanced Form of Evolution?

Published on by Andy SmallmanLeave a comment

In 1985, at age 22, I was a first-year college student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. I had spent the four years since graduating from high school trying to figure out who I was, my high school having done such a poor job of helping me do that. Having been moved by my experience mentoring a young boy as part of the Big Brothers program, I felt a calling to make a career in education and chose Evergreen as a place to begin my more formal training.

One day, while at the public library near my apartment and as part of a search on child development, I found a paperback book called “Son-Rise.” The book tells the true story of how author Barry Neil Kaufman and his wife, Suzi, helped lead their son out of his autistic world. Reading the book changed the trajectory of my college experience.

At the next academic quarter, I shifted my academic focus at Evergreen to issues in special education. I began conducting independent study projects on topics such as dyslexia, brain injury, and cross-cultural special education practices. I began working with brain-injured children as part of my studies, earning college credit in the process.

Teaching in 1995
The summer of 1986 I signed up for a program of study called “Children of the World.” One of the professors was a Navajo and during one meeting with him he said something that literally stopped me in my tracks. I had been reading about dyslexia and was trying to understand if dyslexia was a condition more about a child or more about the educational settings in which a child was placed.

Sharing a Navajo perspective, but phrased in modern terminology, my professor asked me, “Andy, have you ever stopped to think that dyslexia might be an advanced form of evolution, an advanced way of seeing things?” It was a radical thought for me at the time, an example of outside-the-box thinking that I’ve tried to employ since. Instead of viewing dyslexia as a “dis”-ability, as I had been doing, what if I treated the concept as providing some kind of advantage?

That got me thinking about our school system. Certainly, being dyslexic was not an advantage in a typical American school setting. But how much of this disadvantage came from the beliefs and attitudes of those people working with dyslexic children? Couldn’t teachers learn to accept students for who they were and instruct from their strengths?

My studies continued. Evergreen allowed me to do something I had never done before as a student – study what I wanted to study, when I wanted to study it. The idea of a school allowing this never occurred to me. Such uninterrupted immersion in something could only be done after the requirements were met, and usually after the school doors were closed. A spark that had all but been extinguished began to glow brighter as I welcomed each day with an armload of books, which one day included “Son-Rise,” which I began to re-read.

When I first read the book I was impressed by its clarity. Re-reading, what Kaufman wrote made even more sense to me, opened me up and allowed me to gain access to a part of myself that was waiting to emerge. I became more accepting of myself and others; in his writing I found words for things I had never been able to express. In short, the Kaufmans developed a therapy program for their autistic son based on a lifestyle of love, trust, and acceptance. The basic principle of their lifestyle was that people were always doing the best they could based on their current beliefs, that each of us is our own best expert.

In the spring of 1987, I accompanied a family with an 18-year-old autistic son named Eric to The Option Institute in Massachusetts, the institute founded by the Kaufmans to help others learn from their experience. We spent a week there learning from the staff how to create a home-based therapy program for Eric. Returning home, I began working with Eric several days a week, hoping to join him in his world as a way of communicating that I respected him for whom he was.

Working with Eric, I came to know myself better than I ever had. The principles of love, trust, and acceptance had a natural effect in other areas of my life. I began living in the present. Instead of doing things for some future reward, I ended each day knowing I had done exactly what I wanted to do. Another thing became clear to me – I settled on wanting to be a teacher.

I graduated from Evergreen in 1988 and in 1989 entered a graduate program in Human Development, the first year of which was a teacher certification program, through Pacific Oaks College. I completed both programs, earning both a teaching certificate and a Master’s degree. Because of my work with Eric and other children with unique needs, and my independent studies done at Evergreen, I carry Special Education endorsements on my teaching certificate.

I began teaching in 1990 and have always tried to bring what I learned from my study of the Kaufman’s philosophy to my interactions with students. The creation of Puget Sound Community School in 1994 was a clear attempt to create a school that allows students to take charge of their lives. I’ve now spent decades helping young people learn that while I may be a trained teacher, I’m not an expert on who they are. I want to help them to learn to identify their goals, however trivial they may seem to others, and plot courses to achieving them. I want them to trust themselves fully, to be happy with who they are.

I believe that happy people have a burning desire to grow and develop, reach out for new opportunities and challenges, and are an asset to the world. A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill, wrote, “All crimes, all hatreds, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness.” Imagine a world that puts as its priority the happiness of its citizenry.

So back in 1985 I read a book that dramatically changed the course of my life. It deals with such topics as love, trust and acceptance, topics that typically aren’t discussed in books on education, in most teacher training programs, or in most faculty rooms.

I challenge you to ponder why that is, and to think of the possibilities for schools and students if they were.

Dear Jimmy – “Advice” to a Former Student

Published on by Andy SmallmanLeave a comment

(Back in 2020, the mom of one of my former students reached out to me and asked, as she was asking others, to write a little note to her son on the occasion of his 25th birthday. If I recall correctly, she was asking influential adults in his life to offer him some advice. I was pleased to get her request and spent more than a little time considering and then composing my note. Searching for another piece of writing on my computer, I found my note last week and decided to archive it here. I hope some of you find it entertaining, if not full of decent advice. –Andy)

Dear Jimmy,

As your 25th birthday was approaching, your mother reached out to me and with great dignity and honor suggested I may have something of value to pass along to you. I understand I’m not the only person to whom she put in this request, which in some ways lets me off the hook. I mean, somewhere in the vast compendium of letters you are undoubtedly receiving on the occasion of doing nothing more extraordinary than having a pulse for a quarter century, you’re bound to get something more useful than anything I can cobble together.

For instance, the first thing that came to mind was to plagiarize something that was a meme before there were memes – “Wear sunscreen.”

Honestly, that is pretty decent advice, given that climate issue we’re having, but I’m betting you received it as a little kid or, failing that, figured it out by yourself by now. The really juicy stuff at this point in your life needs to be advice that gets you to stop what you’re doing, cock your head to the side, scrunch your eyebrows, and say something profound like, “Damn.”

Just for effect, you’re a director after all so take some direction from me, go ahead and imagine I just gave you some good advice:

Stop what you’re doing (reading, I imagine), cock your head to the side (600 mg of ibuprofen might aid with this – I know it helps my 25 + 32 year-old knees before I go for a run), scrunch your eyebrows (that’s the fun part), and say, “Damn.”

Don’t you feel better?

Yeah, it was probably just for saying, “Damn.”

To digress from the digression and on the subject of strong language, I’ve been working to promote a new swear word. It probably won’t catch on because it’s not four letters and our collective 21st century attention span can’t stand things that take too long (see: Twitter). Anyway, I invite you to take it for a test spin, see how it comes off your tongue. To really try it out, hold the first syllable for an extra split second, put emphasis on the second syllable, and then let the third syllable slide out, a denouement of sorts. Here it is, my new swear word for 2020:

Pandemic.

Hmmm… It seems now that twice since I began this letter, I have offered you direction. And thinking about that, isn’t direction just a form of advice? This is what you do for a living, as I understand it. You direct actors to do stuff. That’s a form of advice, directing actors to do stuff, at least in my mind. You don’t know whether or not those actors are going to do the stuff you direct them to do. The actors get to make up their minds whether they’re going to take your direction, your advice. There is still free will, right?

Right?

Back to your mom. It occurred to me that she might be worried about you, given she is seeking out people like me to knock some sense into you on the occasion of you taking 25 tours around the sun on our collective blue-green spaceship.

So, Jimmy, here goes, my third direction to you: Humor your mom.

How? PRETEND you’ve gotten good advice from those to whom she reached out, including me. I’m sure it will make her feel good. See, when you PRETEND you’ve gotten good advice, you actually have to look inside yourself to find what to do. This makes the advice you’re pretending to have gotten be GOOD advice.

Funny thing about looking inside yourself… When you do it with a dose of trust, you find you’re not pretending at all.

Your old pal,