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Health & Fitness

Learning Through Service... and a Great Poem

Service learning is as much about the service as the learning.

Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others...
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
~Walt Whitman

I love the magic that Walt Whitman penned in his life.  I always have.  (If you haven't read "O Captain, My Captain", please do.  It's an ode to Abraham Lincoln after his assassination and it's just lovely.)  The words above are quite fitting right now as I reflect on events and projects happening around the district.

Fifty-four students and staff from the "A" School, a student choice alternative program located within Robbinsdale Armstrong High School, volunteered at Feed My Starving Children in Chanhassen on the morning of November 22nd.  That event was a culmination of a service learning project for the "A" School students that has become an annual project.  Students generated ideas to help the efforts of the organization, hosted a fundraiser in the school cafeteria (selling root beer floats... yummy!) which raised money used toward the purchase of ingredients for the meals at Feed My Starving Children, and proceeded to prepare over 16,600 meals - enough to feed 46 children for an entire year.  Our "A" School high school students did something that not only benefitted them in their education - in their idea of what education really is, but benefitted children around the world.  If that's not connecting to the learning, I don't know what is. 

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On the other end of the age continuum, the Robbinsdale Area Schools  Creative Play Preschool students learned math in a great way while helping others out as well.  The preschool combined a food drive with learning math skills, such as sorting, shapes, graphing and more.  They learned math and collected over twelve hundred pounds of food for local food shelves.  (Take a look at the picture - aren't they adorable??!)

I can't help but think, when learning is combined with service, the result is relevancy in the lives of those who are learning.  It's breathing life into a concept.  It's creating something that lasts.   I remember one of my first years teaching eighth grade.  Our team of teachers and students partnered with a local organization who worked with elderly adults with disabilities.  We hosted a holiday party for many of the adults, and we asked them to tell us what their holiday wish was.  We then began collecting the goods to present to them at the party.  The students LOVED this project.  They wrote skits, prepared food, decorated our classrooms - they were engaged and turned into real leaders.  One of the adults, Sadie, had a very unique wish.  She was in her 80s, and had never been inside a school.  Her wish was to go to school.  She was one of the adults who came to our party, and every student we had wanted to be the one to welcome her when the bus got to the school.  (We had to choose. It wasn't easy.  I think we drew straws.)  This tiny woman walked through the front door of the school with a basket of candy canes to give to the eighth graders, and I have never to this day seen such a look of pure joy on anyone else's face that would top the sheer joy on hers.  She clapped her hands and hugged everyone, and at the end of the party, said it was the best day of her life.  My students (and the teachers, no lie here), were reduced to tears, as I am right now as I write about this.

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I keep in touch with several of those students to this day - they are in their late 20s - and they tell me that that project stands out to them as one of the most important times in their educational career, and in their lives.  They will never forget it.  We didn't realize it at the time, but we created a great poem.  Just as the "A" School students did, and the darling preschoolers did. 

And what a beautiful poem it is.  I think Walt might be proud, too.

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