Foundation Years

Cafe 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 22:04:00 +0000

The kindergarteners shared what they knew about Forest City before the pandemic. One said, "If the people didn't come here the buildings would not be sold. Most of the buildings in Forest City are very tall." Another child said, "Forest City buildings are built floor by floor. The earthquake might come. If the foundation in the building is not very strong it's dangerous for the people to live in it."

In the first year, a crack appeared in the bottom of the pool at the International School and all the water drained out. A crew was brought in to repair the crack, and they filled it up with water again. As the earth continued to settle, a hard rain resulted in a prefabricated cement tunnel sinking an inch deeper into the sand where the cement met the roadway. A crew patched the gap with asphalt so the cars didn't have such a hard bump as they passed through. It was explained to me that the city was built quickly in such a way that it would be as cheap to build as possible, but it would be expensive to maintain. Like counterfeit luxury items made in China and sold in the United States, Forest City looks good on the surface. The reality of the place does not match first impressions.

One kindergartner said, "The building might fall, so if it falls they will rebuild it again. If nobody stays in the building it will become very old and bad people will go into the building." Another child added, “An engineer went into the house and talked to my mother. The engineer told her how to check whether the building will fall. If the building is shaky it means it will fall and become very shabby and abandoned. The engineer is very honest so the building will not fall." There have been other developments like this in Asia that have become shabby and abandoned. The idea was that with such close proximity to Singapore a couple miles away, Forest City would be different. Even with the border closed due to the pandemic, there was still hope this would be a thriving place in the future, that all of those homes with lights on for show would one day be filled with people.

If the original meaning of utopia was "no place," Forest City might be a good example if it wasn't for the fact that there was a place there before the sparkling tall buildings. Before there was a private island with it's own duty-free zone and customs checkpoint, there was a community of indigenous fishermen who had been there for hundreds of years. Kelp beds with seahorses were there aside the mangrove forest. This dream city was built in a short span of time with great fanfare, winning awards for it's eco-friendly design. Without honesty about what was there before, it is no wonder the foundation is still a bit shaky. Still, every part of the story is only a part of the story.

In the Summer of 2020, the island was still under construction. The pace was nothing like what I had seen there less than a year before, with thousands of men working around the clock. The outwardly mobile middle class people of China were no longer arriving by the busloads to participate in the My Malaysian Second Home program and tour the Sales Gallery. Workers who had once lived in the camps on the land adjacent to the city had moved into the condominiums, and worked out in the gyms, and made up the majority of the patrons of the Cafe 2020 in the Forest City mall.

My friend Jassi and I went to Cafe 2020 to celebrate his 30th birthday. Jassi spread good cheer freely to those who crossed his path, singing in Punjabi. In a convenience store, passing by the other guards. Friendly tones making the place feel like a welcome home, so much more than the signs by the roadways of the mostly empty Forest City that read "selamat pulang." My brother. We had both arrived in Forest City at nearly the same time, and ended up leaving at the same time almost to the day. He went back to India and I went back to the United States.

Jassi was in Forest City to work as a gate guard, and he knew every license plate number of every car in Forest City, along along with the faces of all the people in them. All of the people didn't necessarily know him, but he knew them. One day as I was passing through his gate I stopped to talk a bit and learned that he was the son of a farmer in India who had studied at the University of Chandigarh. We discovered we had a common interest in exercising our bodies, and made plans to be among the first, if not the first people to ever run the circumference of the island on foot. We trained through the fall and ran the whole way around the last time we saw each other on the island.

If there is anything worth remembering about the foundation years in Forest City millennia from now, it will be the sweet tones of the voices of those who greeted each other with goodwill and song. The year the whole world turned inward and paused for a moment to make real progress in the changed atmosphere. Before the vaccines that made it possible to come and go from the island with relative freedom. Even if the madness of building and commerce and what we call progress continues, we have had time to become aware of the foundations of our being in a place where children were as wise as anyone about what was at stake.

I was fortunate to make a friend in Forest City during a period of transition to a time when coming generations depend on our actions more than ever to build the foundation of a just and healthy future. This is about more than engineering and quick construction. This is about the beating hearts of the children, women, and men who began to see the dream for what it was. This is about the vibrations of our voices echoing across time from what were once hushed corridors between high rise buildings to a time when it will be hard to tell where one echo stops and another one begins there will be so many people. This is about what great fortune it is to have one good friend in a place outside of time, at the beginning of history. No matter how long the buildings stand.

Follow the Leader

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Wed, 27 May 2020 12:32:00 +0000

The Past

Why is it that in what still remains very much the city of the future I talk so much about the past? I notice how quickly everything moves. How everything is changing from moment to moment and I want to wait for what might be a good moment to write about what is happening. A moment when I have some sort of perspective. At first there was such a rush of impressions. I was always making a note of something to remember to get back to and expand upon later.

The Present

What just happened? It isn’t so much a matter of needing to expand on anything. It doesn’t matter what I write down, by the time I get back to it the context has changed. I tried to write about this in my last post. Once we say a thing, once we commit to it, then everything becomes organized around that. The official word may be all that we had time for. The conversation could have gone on late into the night until the decision made itself but there seemed to be no point. We know what we know and based on what we know we are going to do x. Y and z are for the future. For now we start with the known variable, which from what I have seen may be the thing someone who has been very silent throughout the whole conversation says at the right moment when people have grown tired of vacillation and back-and-forth. That person is the leader, the one who has been following what has been happening the whole time until everyone else has lost perspective, or said too much already.

The Future

We could say the leader is the president, the queen, the king, or the Wizard of Oz. If anyone in one of those positions would slow down the conversation and ask around, if they could find out what the people who have the least to say are thinking, they would know what their options were before they ran out of options. So who are the people that are saying the least in this situation, here, right now in the high rises surrounding our school Forest City? I would say the people saying the least are the people who do not have children attending our school already. They are the families with young children who were not old enough to attend this year but would have liked to.

All of the families with children old enough to attend our school are already attending our school so they have a lot to say right now about how we are handling everything in the light of the pandemic. We will go back and forth with them about how to manage the past and the present until the start of next year, when the people who wanted their children to be here all along have their chance. They will be the leaders. The families with the youngest children in our community will enroll their children at our school in the fall, as our community will have grown tired of going back and forth about the present and the past what we should do or could do by the time the new school year starts.

Our silent leaders have been waiting for future, and that is why we will add more children under the age of five than any other age group at our school. We will be living in the city of the future again. Of course, this is not privileged information. You have as much power to predict what is going to happen here as I do. I just want to put it on record before the context changes, and my perception becomes obsolete. We’ll meet in the future. We can play Follow the Leader.

The Official Word

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 15:52:00 +0000

The first week of January I bought a thermometer for every one of my classrooms. Thanks to one of my parents. She asked, “Are you checking the children’s temperature? You’ve heard what’s happening haven’t you?” It takes me a moment to think if I know what she’s talking about. “What? No. What do you mean?” It seems like I should know. She tells me, “The flu. There’s a really bad flu in China.” That seemed vaguely familiar, and oh yes I did hear something about that and I say, “Oh yeah, I did hear about that.” She has an expression that looks almost like panic on her face, fear, like this isn’t the ordinary flu. And like she’s wondering why I’m not taking precautionary measures she asks once, but with great insistence, “Can you check the children’s temperature?” The look on her face. “I can have the nurse check temperatures,” I say. No reason why not.

The last week of January I woke up to a message from my friend Cathy. “Hey, are you guys okay with this virus thingy?” By this time the nurse has convinced me that she needs her thermometer back, so I’ve bought one for each of my classrooms. 7:03 am. “Yeah, checking everybody’s temperature every day.” Cathy’s been planning on relocating to Vietnam for months but now she’s thinking about it again. “I hope they can contain it. We may have to wait a bit before we come over now.” I’m still thinking this is far away. I write back, “Thousands of cases, not good. Bright side though, less than 100 deaths right? Out of the whole world?”

Then the world got a little smaller. 8:40 am. I learned that the virus was a bit closer to home. I wrote to Cathy. “Wow. Might change my tune. Confirmed case at the Phoenix Hotel, 1 km from the school.” This was January 26th, the fourth confirmed case in Malaysia, which makes sense. This is supposed to be the destination for the upwardly mobile Chinese middle class, the ones who Country Garden hopes will make Forest City the most densely populated area in the world in 30 years. That mobility and the dream of the Malaysia My Second Home (mm2h) program brought the “virus thingy” right to one of the first places on the map here, built just after the island itself and the Sales Gallery, the five-star Forest City Phoenix International Marina Hotel.

We were still on break for Chinese New Year but the leadership team met that afternoon. When it was clear where this was headed, I sent Cathy a note. 1:30 pm. “I’m in a meeting with the leadership team right now. We’re shutting down school next week. Closing the campus to outside visitors.” And that’s how it began. Instead of returning from break, we spent the week figuring out what to do about the coronavirus. We consulted with International SOS, and they supported us in closing the school. They saw it as a conservative decision based on the information we had at the time but what were they going to say? We were being too careful? We stopped allowing deliveries. Off-campus staff were asked to work from home unless requested by their supervisor. Everyone else was to report to work after breakfast on Monday as we began the process of figuring out how to support students at home, using systems we already had in place for online learning.

The school closure was announced on Sunday, the same day the first case was reported in Forest City. I was only too ready to regroup and use the time as an opportunity to do some training that we hadn’t had time to do during staff orientation at the beginning of the year. That wasn’t the kind of regrouping my staff had in mind. I had at first asked for my whole team to be there on Monday morning, including the off-campus staff. When that didn’t go over so well with the residential faculty, I backed off on that and told the off-campus staff to be available in case they were needed. I would call to let them know what to do when I knew more.

The early childhood school faculty met in my office that morning. Each one of them was wearing a surgical mask. The message was clear. They were taking this seriously and I didn’t understand what needed to be done. Obviously. I wasn’t even wearing a mask. The pastries and fruit I had so blithely offered to bring as a comforting treat in my email were left mostly untouched. They were in solidarity over the absurdity of my acting like this was going to be a chance for us to engage in a conversation about developing a culture focused on responsive interactions when I hadn’t even checked in with them about how they were feeling, or what they were thinking our next steps should be.

Either in that meeting or in an email exchange the night before my faculty had pointed out what must have been the hundredth “if..then..” I had heard in 24 hours. If the Head of School had instructed off-campus faculty to work from home unless requested otherwise by their supervisor, then …. There was no then. The “then” for them was just no. It made no sense to have anyone who didn’t live here on campus. It didn’t matter that there were only four cases in all of Malaysia. It didn’t matter that our off-campus staff had as much chance of coming in contact with one of those people as they did. The official word was no people from outside the gate allowed inside.

We cleaned and sanitized everything. We increased the frequency of our cleaning and sanitation, door knobs twice a day. We bought masks. The leadership team read what epidemiologists and medical experts had to say about how the virus was spread and talked about what we were going to do. We sat at the conference table and made sense of things, talked about what things meant and the consistency of the logic in what we would decide upon. In a group of 7 or 8 we had easily twice that many changes of position and “on the other hands” in an hour. More. While what we were going to do shifted from one extreme to the other on every aspect of our plan, our Head of School entertained every point of view. And then it was decided. We were going to reopen.

I cannot tell you the final logic that went into that decision. I can tell you that it didn’t make sense to everyone, and the measures we took based on the best information we had available to us were not enough for anyone. What about having everyone wear a mask? Why not allow deliveries? We were saying it was safe here, and that we were taking every reasonable precaution but what we know about this virus is that it is not reasonable. That’s what’s so terrifying. In logic, we can prove that something is possible, but we can’t prove that something is impossible. We just don’t know. That uncertainty is an invisible truth embedded in every public policy. There is always a chance that something can happen that is beyond our control.

The thermometers I had bought so each of my teachers could have one for their own class were requisitioned for the tables set up as checkpoints at the steps leading to the Elementary and Upper School buildings. If you don’t have to be symptomatic to shed the virus, what is the point of taking temperatures? Well, it’s not going to hurt. It’s not going to hurt to wash our hands. And while we were not requiring our students or faculty to wear masks we provided them. There is always going to be a possibility that anything we do will be better than doing nothing.

I spent the better part of a parent meeting listening to a dad explain how our whole school needed to require for everyone to wear a mask. Listening to his reasons, I didn’t agree with him. But I still didn’t have a good reason not to wear a mask myself. I didn’t believe my wearing a mask was going to prevent the spread of the virus, but I also didn’t think it was going to hurt anyone if I did. I told him I would wear a mask. Until I thought of a better way to show that I respected the beliefs of those who thought differently about this than I did by my daily actions. This was weeks after the early childhood school faculty had stopped wearing their masks. Now this was solidarity of another type, I am not sure how absurd.

None of our Kindergartners were wearing a mask that day. The next day, almost half of them were. All children of parents who attended that meeting where I said I would wear a mask. I had a moment where I worried that my willingness to adopt a practice that meant something more than I had intended might have been sending the wrong message. They wanted me to be an example and I had agreed, but only because I didn’t see what harm it could do. I was thinking of Gandhi’s talisman, and it seemed to pass the test, but whose side was I on now? Was I on a side?

Our actions are a semblance of our reasons for them. People interpret the official act with a logic that moves forward without nuance or qualifiers. Whatever the reasons for an action might be, its meaning becomes what others make of it. I wore the mask the whole week, even when I was working alone in my office, even after two of the dads who had their children start wearing masks visited me there to explain that it wasn’t doing any good for me to wear the mask in my office by myself. Until I understood how to use the awareness I had gained by wearing the mask to change my behavior without unwittingly starting a political movement. While I disagreed with them about the need to wear a mask, I respected their beliefs and agreed that we needed to do whatever we could to protect our students. It was a week before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak was a global pandemic.

The official word is like any other word really, an approximation, a best guess. It doesn’t matter what the word is so much as what it leaves room for. Does it provide room for dialogue about personal and collective responsibility? I’ve said before that what makes it into the books is only part of the story. What we see in the news is even less. Fonts and symbols, the contrast of figure and ground that allows us to discriminate and recognize patterns. The meaning we make of the printed word is interpretation of what is hidden in the spaces between the words. Nobody really knows if what gets printed today will turn out to be true tomorrow, but critical distance will allow us to see the truth was always there if we knew where to look. The thing about telling our children the truth right now is that we don’t really know where to look.

The question becomes not so much what do we tell the children, as how do we teach them to listen. Who do we tell them they can trust? Who will keep them safe? Us? Their teachers? The government? If your child tells you their teacher said something that you think is right or wrong, what does that have to do with them as a learner? Do you tell them that’s right, that’s wrong? Wear a mask, wash your hands sure. If that's what it takes to stop a deadly virus. As a community though, how do we teach our students to listen without prejudice and trust the power they have to transform their fear, persist through challenges, and take responsibility for their actions?

A student may not see the point in doing what their teacher says, or they may think they shouldn’t have to do it unless they can first be convinced there is a good reason. While that may be right, the community recognizes the teacher knows some things the student doesn’t know yet and that is why we should not tell our children whether or not we think the teacher is right or wrong. It’s up to them. It’s their interpretation that matters. Whatever the parents and the teachers are thinking is incidental on some level. The real learning happens when the student recognizes that they don’t know something, but they are willing to find out.

There is wisdom in asking a child for answers, asking what they think about their problems without offering any solutions, or giving any indication if you happen to approve or disapprove of what their teacher or the school says. The focus should be on the student’s capacity to persist in making an effort to fulfill their self-identified responsibilities, not whether the world can be trusted. On a certain level, being a grown up means that you are not at liberty to explain the logic of your actions. There are no excuses, and no explanations are allowed. Just your best guess, the official word, and your continued solidarity in the seemingly absurd.

The Essential Question

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 03:03:00 +0000

I’ll tell you the truth. I have been thinking about how to tell the story about what’s happening here and I have been having a little bit of trouble getting started.

If you look back at what I have put down already, it’s mostly prologue, not so much story. It’s been about how the city of the future will be built on the foundation laid by the people who are here now, how we all come with our Forest City dreams from other places and other people and what appear to be other realities. How what looks like the beginning is really a continuation of a story that has passed from view. How we carry on the story of the people and the places we come from, and how we have an opportunity to start over with the best of what we were given to go on. How we believe different things about what is possible here and where it might go. How privilege and opportunity look through the lens of race and cultural diversity. How death has been part of life here from the beginning. How when we die, what anyone will know about who we were will depend on who we are in the lives of children, on our fearlessness in saying what we actually think, what we actually believe - and how otherwise what anyone really knows about us when we are gone will be what we said instead of that.

It's been about my hesitance to include the names of people in my story, or any identifying information beyond what is already in the public domain, because I believe that those names and those stories do not belong to me. They are not my stories to tell. So I have been sharing my impressions. I have been sharing my thoughts and intuitions about what is happening, anonymous ideas that could belong to anybody. And today I woke up with the idea that it might be possible to share the story of my experiments with encouraging the first people to live in Forest City to tell the story from their perspective.

Stories are the way people have passed on wisdom and learning before there was written history. Stories are a record of the meaning people have made from their questions about the world and everything in it, and how that is carried forward. Mostly I am interested in their questions, what they are learning and want to learn, what they think and what the changes in their thinking look like, what songs they sing, what is the poetry that speaks to their heart. And I know that leaving a record of all that takes courage, because every good story involves a struggle or a challenge, something that has to be overcome to achieve resolution and reveal a deeper meaning.

The writing process, or what used to be the cave painting process, is far from straightforward. There is so much prologue to account for, so many impressions about the meaning of life and death. So many feelings to explore about who are we to be telling a story and what our relationship to the story is and how we feel about sharing it, about making our learning visible so that everyone can see what we struggle with.

One reason that the process of teaching and learning is mostly invisible is because it takes a while for anyone to make meaning of what they are learning and share it with others. Making learning visible means telling the story of what we think is happening, what we are wondering about and interested in, what we want to try, what we think about what someone else said about what we want to try, and what we learned from what we tried. In other words, it means explaining how our thinking has changed and is changing through our persistent efforts to develop new skills, understandings, and interests. Our lives are “learning stories” and writing them down makes it possible for others in the future to learn from what we are learning. We are not just passing the time here, and then passing away. Something real is happening.

I was fortunate to be invited by Dr. Annie White and the amazing Wendy Lee to join a Learning Stories Intensive Study Group in New Zealand last October. Our study group was invited into the homes of the Māori people, and we were honored to visit a Māori immersion school where we were welcomed and included in their traditions with a traditional welcoming ceremony, or pōwhiri. Speeches from the elders told the story of the creation of the world and its first people, the ancestors of the Māori in the stars, as it has been passed down to them through the generations. As children echoed the elders’ words with singing and dancing, we learned of the long journey to Aotearo, Land of the Long White Cloud, New Zealand. We sang our songs for them and shared the story of our native lands. We pressed our noses together in the hongi. In that way we introduced ourselves and our people to each other and became a part of their story.

We visited early childhood programs designated by the Ministry of Education as Centers of Innovation, and immersed ourselves in learning about how stories can be used as formative assessments to recognize who children are, who people are, and our responsibility to recognize the power of words in constructing learner identities. We also learned about how the educators considered teaching and learning as inseparable, and how evaluation of their teaching was woven together with their own identity as learners. We saw how they used questions as the basis for assessment of their teaching, and how they shared their learning process with each other by reflecting upon, sharing, and adding to each other’s stories.

On an island that was made in one year from the ocean floor, the idea of a creation story is fascinating to me. I am inspired by the possibility of creating a culture of kindness and inquiry in a place that didn’t exist before. I want to explore what it would be like for us to share our stories with each other. Stories that are in-process evaluations of the meaning of our time together, stories of students and teachers developing their interests, skills, and understanding. Stories about our curiosity and questions. Stories about qualities and dispositions we aspire to nurture in ourselves and others. Making the heart of our teaching and learning visible to each other, and passing all of this on to those who will come to this school and this city in the future.

The Writing on the Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 02:34:00 +0000

It may be that people in every culture and every part of the world have thought of themselves and where they live as being at the center of the universe at some point. And why not? There is no objective reason I can think of to place the center anywhere other than where we are. Let people in other parts of the world make their own maps. They have their own perspective. For me, I am placing my little part of Malaysia right in the center.

I have ventured out. This past month, while our students went home to be with their families and all of our faculty was on break, Kimber and I spent some time in Cambodia and Vietnam. We had a photograph in front of Ho Chi Minh’s tomb in Hanoi, and thought about what it would have been like if Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations had welcomed him as a brother who shared their ideals instead of sending him packing. We went to Angkor Wat.

Designed to represent Sumeru, the mountain at the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes, Angkor Wat was the "city of the future" of the 12th century. This was a planned development meant to serve as the center of the industry and lifestyle of a million people at the heart of the Khmer empire. Dedicated to the god Vishnu the Preserver, it is also the largest religious monument in the world to this day. Over time, over 800 years, this planned community was abandoned to the point where it truly was a forest city, its pillars and galleries reclaimed by the jungle. So what happened to the vision of its founders? What was there at the beginning that still remains after all this time?

In many places, traces of the old story carved into the walls and pillars were defaced by invaders. Wiped out, like the lives of millions from the surrounding countryside that were murdered by their government in my lifetime. What remains are bullet holes from where the bored child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge passed the time shooting their guns at the sculptures. What remains is the curiosity of a new army touching everything with their hands, millions of visitors streaming through the gates every year, stepping off cheap flights with easy access to lay their hands on what was once held as sacred. Laying hands on the bas relief depicting the emergence of the apsaras from the churning of the ocean of milk in the galleries. Laying hands on the faces of the buddhas that were added to the temple later, tracing the crude marks left by tourists in the 1990’s. Walking on the fallen lintels and sandstone walls that once formed the temple. Taking away what remains of the story from the ancient Khmer script carved into the pillars and walls of the temples with every grain of sand brushed away by their fingers.

Coming home, I was stuck by how quiet it is here in Forest City. The magnitude of millions, the impressions of so many lives are missing here. Mostly the sound is of construction in the distance, across the miles of bare sand between my living room and the Pacific Ocean, bordered by high rise condominiums by the shore on the right and the Carnelian Tower, still partially covered in scaffolding, on the left. Or the sound of gardening shears trimming away at the vertical landscaping that was supposed to be an untrimmed feature of what makes this an eco-city; curtains of greenery shading the windows and balconies of our high rises to produce oxygen and reduce the need for air conditioning. Mostly it is quiet, with the silence of the dozens of people who mop the tiles in the courtyards and walkways, one side to the other and back again all day long. It is so clean here. Clean and quiet. Millions have not been murdered. The air is not crowded with the memory of so many human lives.

If you believe the marketing, Forest City is poised to be more than a wealthy suburb of Singapore, and a key participant in the emerging global economy in its own right. For now though, there just aren’t enough units being sold. Only 5,000 keys turned over to residents so far in a city lit up like a Christmas tree to look like tens of thousands live here. As the first phase of construction begins to wind down, half of the workers building the city are being laid off. Remember the dad who said he wanted his son to grow up free in his mind, free from the government in China and what he referred to as mind control? There is no more work for him here. He and his family are moving back to China.

What is happening here is the story of every civilization in every era, only in fast motion. What was it about the marketing that captured my imagination? What was there about the role I was offered that still resonates? What was here at the beginning that will remain? On the surface, things appear to be changing. Even at the beginning, there were signs that what was promised was too good to be true. Really though? What if what is good will always be true, and how things appear have nothing to do with it? How will we act? How will we treat each other? How can we use this as an opportunity to build something lasting?

I am here because I believe that what is best for children and families is possible here, if not now, in time. I accepted this position because of who I am, and because I thought that I would be able to serve this community without compromising my ideals. I accepted this role because I knew that beginnings are important. Because I knew that the end of things is in their beginning. Without having been at the beginning like this before, I wanted to get in before history and custom and the weight of centuries had a chance to distort the original vision. I wanted to have a part in fashioning the original vision, defining what is possible in terms of love and hope and kindness.

So what if my understanding of my position is different than the understanding of someone I am duty-bound to serve now or in the future? A child, a teacher, a family member, anyone who works here alongside me? The board, the Chairman? The Sultan of Johor? In the face of certain death and being forgotten by time, all we really have is our own understanding, and no one else's. We stay as long as there is a place for that, and what we do here, others can do as well. This is an experiment anchored in something deeper than the ocean floor, something that will remain when this island returns to the sea. This is something that will not be worn away by the feet and curiosity of millions to come in the future, even though it is right in the center of everything. It can't be touched.

White People

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 02:40:00 +0000

Pass the Nepali guard in the red beret who stands in the center divide of the highway and salutes those passing in their air-conditioned cars. Cross the bridge from the mainland in the hot, wet, sunshine on the island of Forest City. The island itself occupies a space that until five years ago was the seabed.

Where life once teemed in the seabed, and beneath the surface of the water, there is now green foliage and flowers, grass not to be walked on, lagoons between landed homes, shops, and of course the towering high rise condominiums. Reclining beach chairs are arranged beneath palm trees and umbrellas with a postcard-perfect view of the Pacific Ocean, but you can’t go in. The guards by the shore will stop anyone who ventures near the edge. That is the far side of the island. Beyond the edge of the island in the other direction, in the actual mangrove forest, outside the city without a forest anywhere but in name lies another scene.

There is a back way to Forest City hat shows up on Waze, it just isn’t publicized. It leads through the other Forest City, which is where the workers who are building this sparkling clean private city live. It has its own arch. The lintel is painted with the name this separate city shares with its neighbor, Chinese characters on the pillars. Their arch is painted red for luck, in contrast to the white washed arch of the neighboring city, already lucky.

Prefabricated apartment buildings made out of what appear to be thin aluminum shipping containers stacked on top of one another border the dusty road that winds its way through the place. Rickety fire escape stairs lead to the only entrances and exits, and fabric is pinned flat across the surface of windows in faded hues. In my first week here, I was part of a caravan of four or five vehicles coming back from a welcoming celebration. We were stopped by a guard at the edge of the camp. A flash of identification with an index finger pointing our white faces was all that was needed. He was not going to send us back to have another look at the conditions we had seen there.

The guard sent our Malaysian Chinese guide back the way she came. This was our colleague who had guided us all through our first meal together, naming the types of fresh fish laid out on the ice. In the restaurant on stilts in the mud flats, with us being ignorant of the Malay words on the menu, our colleague described the different preparations available for the fish as we stood by the counter. On the way back home, the guard sent her back to go around the long way even though he let the rest of our group pass. White people.

She was sent back through the dusty streets, past the covered open air outdoor kitchen where there were some women serving mostly brown and taupe construction workers. Past all manner of transport, some briefly paused for a moment, mopeds and cars and buses and the dump trucks I have seen from my balcony loaded with dozens of people standing, poking their heads over the sides across the pavement stones laid down across the sand on their way to one of the construction sites closest to the shore. Harder for her to get home to the other Forest City, where she did not appear to belong, even though she is from this country.

Forest City is a duty free world with its own customs station, where busloads of Chinese disembark at the transportation hub to visit the open arena of the Sales Gallery with the sprawling 1/100th scale model of the future city, passing the guards with black epaulets on white uniform shirts and their distinctive berets, standing at attention and saluting passers by out of respect to themselves and their families back in Nepal as much as anyone. Through the open doors of the arena while the air conditioning cools the air outside a hundred feet from the entrance.

There is constant activity all day and all night. The island that was there when I go to sleep is not the same as the island that is there when I wake up. They have placed a palm tree in the mile between the construction site on the shore and my balcony in the middle of the night. Why there? It seems like hardly a place, but perhaps it is some kind of marker, the edge of what will someday be another lagoon? They have added a cement path lined by palm trees and green grass from the high rise condos on one side of my balcony view to the Cerulean tower on my left. Every day something new is added, and the more that is added the less fantastic it seems, like there was always a there there, giving the impression of something that has lasted already, and stood the test of time.

Matter of factly, the Kindergarteners have shared their ideas on the subject. They think the buildings and the island must be very old. They don’t know that they were here before this island and everything on it. How could something so seemingly big have less history than a small child in this world? Thousands have labored and are laboring to give that impression. They are working around the clock in shifts, returning to the camp long enough to sleep a few hours before returning to build a world where they cannot afford to live.

Everyone here is from someplace else, less obviously synthetic. The old organic world. We all have a history that is reflected in the relationships we have with each other here now. In many ways, our old habits of relating with each other have already been established. Take White people for example. When I see a White person outside of Forest City something curious happens. My eyes perk up at what seems like coincidence, the experience of seeing someone who appears to be like myself, perhaps someone who comes from a place where they do not stand out, someone who can relate. “Hey White people!” I want to call out to them. “I’m White too! There are not so many of us! Isn’t it queer?” Our privilege here is extraordinary, different and more blatantly obvious than where we come from, where we deny that we have privilege because things are the way we expect them to be. But there is no sense of recognition. More often than not, almost always, they look away.

Super G

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:10:00 +0000

Everyone here has different beliefs about death, and about talking about death, so when Ms. G, Super G, otherwise known as Stefanie Goebel became one of the first people to die in Forest City, each of us had different ideas about what to tell and what not to tell the children. Whether to tell them she was gone and what happened, whether to mention her name. I want to show my respect by going on record to say she was fiercely protective of the children she spent her days with. So much so that she was fearless about speaking her mind on their behalf. Whether I agreed with her or not is another thing, and whether she knew how much I appreciated her disregard for convention and conformity for the sake of keeping up appearance is something else.

She was so keenly attuned to the wonderings of young children and their interests. When they spoke to her she listened, and found multiple ways for them to represent what was in their mind with dots and lines and colors, both on flat surfaces and in three dimensions. "Easy peasy" she would say. And her whole body would wiggle and dance when a child ran up to her, arms fluttering up over her head before coming to rest on her knees, so she could look in their eyes and ask about what they cared about. Without a hint of distraction.

She went back to her apartment after breakfast not feeling well, and was presumed to have died sleeping in her bed on a Tuesday around noon. Her students miss her, and they know very well how suddenly she took her leave. A few of them, the first children in Forest City, will remember when her family came here from the Netherlands dressed in black, the people who called her their daughter, sister, crazy aunt, all gathered in Forest City in grief with the young man from Thailand, her adopted nephew, who would have gone anywhere to honor her memory. That young man may have been the only one who knew all along that she wanted a Buddhist ceremony to mark her passing.

That's what I remember about her and the people who came to honor her memory. Other people have their own memories, but my memories are part of me and her story is part of me now. And though her story doesn't belong to any of us, it belongs to all of us. We can all respect that we may have memories that would reveal different facets of her humanity. And that there was even more to her than what any of us will ever know.

When one of us dies, we are no longer here to tell our story. Almost immediately, the meaning of our words and actions becomes ripened and distilled in memory, then diffused everywhere. Everyone remembers us a different way, and makes sense of our life according to their own experience of it. No two stories will be the same. The story of one person becomes the story of many people. One person transforms into many, and the names and the words we use have the power to change the way we remember.

Until now I have told the story of the first people to live here without mentioning a name to remember them by. Out of respect. Not everyone wants their stories to be known, or passed on. Our families are not always proud of their circumstances in this sparkling new city. A single mom whose children have different fathers, from different countries. Families with ongoing abuse and domestic violence. Children living here with grandparents that miss the rest of their family in China, and they don’t want to talk about it. The unhappy realities interwoven with our Forest City dreams, mine included. But what does it matter after we are gone? We have to be very careful, out of respect for that part of the story that will never make it into the books.

Our names are among the first words of our life story. I think it's strange that a few years after being born, just as a young child from China might be getting used to their name they come to an American school and on the first day, they are introduced to their teacher with an English name. They become Bob, or Cindy, or even more likely Jason, or Judy. It's supposed to be easier for the teachers. We expect these children to learn an entirely new language, but the first concern is that it might be hard for us to learn their name. One of the first things a Chinese child in an American school learns is to start over again, to learn to recognize and identify with what they don't know. The whole world may have something to learn from this. There is always some part of the story that can't be told, that remains unknown. To remember that we have to remember the storyteller, and not be distracted by the story.

Rainbow Songs

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 23:45:00 +0000

Enough time has passed for me to start seeing what I expect to see, within the narrow band of the visible spectrum. I have been very busy. Our brand new world is starting to look a lot like the old world in my eyes, and the high rise buildings have faded into the background of my perception.

Before this, for a brief moment, I saw a wider spectrum of possibilities. So much new information was bouncing off the back of my eyes I felt like my brain was stretching and my old habits did not serve to make sense of what I was looking at. Then I got busy, and so tired that I began using my prior beliefs as a sort of shortcut so I could focus my energy on a monsoon-like deluge of increasing responsibilities. Time for a rainbow. Time to remember what is possible.

Every new world has a beginning in the worlds that preceded it. While the story told by the indigenous people of Malaysia stretches far back before recorded history, in Forest City, everything seems to be happening at once. It isn’t only the construction. While the high rise buildings are anchored to the ocean floor, the surface of the land is constantly shifting. After a hard rain the sand will settle, and the ground will shift to expose cracks on the surface of roads and walkways. Last year, they had to resurface the bottom of the swimming pool at my school so that it would hold water. The point is, everything is happening so fast, I wonder what will last. 100 years from now, we will still be the first people to live on this island. If the island is still here or not, what story will there be to pass on? What if the city never comes close to the marketing hype? What will the city be like, and what will our culture be like? How will the people show that they respect and care for one another?

During our staff orientation week I posed the question in terms of how we could work together as a learning community to pass on a story of value to future generations. As we explored the question together we thought of many aspects that would need to be considered, identified the ones we thought were most important, and came to consensus in the process of naming groups of related ideas. That was about two months ago.

Since then we have settled into a routine. The people are becoming familiar to me, and I have begun to see them as I expect to see them, no longer with new eyes. What is their heritage? Who are their ancestors? What wisdom moved them to come to this place? What songs will there be to pass on the legend? While the new construction fading into the background sets the stage for our heroes to emerge, I do not see them through the lens of familiarity. I need to hear their voices.

Invisible Forces

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 23:31:00 +0000

I woke up from a dream remembering something that happened several weeks ago. The dream was about our conceptions of beauty, peer pressure, and the influence of ideas about whiteness and blondness. It was about forces of nature.

I was remembering an interaction with two girls in the Kindergarten classroom. They were sitting up straight, side by side at a low table with their elbows at near right angles to the pages in front of them. Their colored pencils were upright in their hands, and they were talking back and forth as they glanced at each other's drawings. Interested in what they were talking about, I knelt on the ground between their chairs.

While her own hair is a lustrous black color cut in a pageboy style, the girl to my left had drawn a figure with long yellow hair, and a dress with a neatly ordered rainbow colored bodice together with a sky blue scarf to match the hem. She later told me that she was the figure in the drawing.

"Ok," I said. "So what are you two talking about?"

"We are talking. In Chinese." It was the first thing she ever said to me.

"I know that," I said, "But what do you mean? What is the meaning of what you are saying?"

A moment passed while I wondered what she understood about what I was asking. This was the first day of Kindergarten, and I had yet to discover this girl would be the first one of us to receive and give meaning to the language emerging from our bilingual, bicultural community of learners.

The girl said, "We are talking. About beauty." Her finger rested beneath the elevated hem of the figure's sky blue scarf. She nodded at the girl sitting next to her: "And she says, that this, doesn't go up."

I observed what the other girl had pointed out and thought out loud, "Well what about the wind? If there was wind outside, that would make the scarf go up."

The girl’s hair moved ever so slightly as she turned to look at me. She looked back to the page, and with a deliberate hand drew a number of spiral symbols to denote the wind in the space between her figure and the top of the page.

We gained something in that moment.

Understanding is receiving what is offered, and adding perspective or possibility. What doesn't make sense or doesn't seem beautiful wants something invisible to make it whole. It isn't finished yet.

Turn Signals

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 01:57:00 +0000

This week, I took an inadvertent field trip off the island. It was my first time driving in Malaysia and I was bringing one of the boarding students to the clinic by the transportation hub at the sales gallery. You know when you’re playing it cool like you always drive on the left side of the road, sitting in the driver's seat on the right side of the car, and you go to put on your turn signal which is on the other side of the steering column than you're used to and the windshield wipers start waving? Don’t give the young man any reason for concern. He’s already got enough to worry about. I’m cool. Done this a thousand times.

I made a wrong turn at the roundabout and ended up driving about 10 kilometers, along the only road to and from the island before I was finally able to make a u-turn. On the way back, past green earth and mangrove trees at what I imagine to be the tip of Southeast Asia we had time for me to ask the young man a few questions. He gave me some ideas about his experience of Forest City so far. The reality of the school doesn’t match the image he had in mind before coming here. He wondered what kind of international school it was if almost all the students were from China. He wondered why there was an international school here, and why there was a Forest City. What could I tell him?

One of our students, a three-year-old, cried for most of the day until we asked for his family to bring him home and try again the next day. This is not just a case of “giving him what he wants.” It's about building on what is familiar. His mom explained that she usually holds his hand to help him fall asleep. That was the image he held, and the sensory experience associated with rest in his mind. When his family brought him the next day he threw himself at the windows as he watched them leave. I held him tightly as another parents returned to leave a swimsuit and towel in her child's cubby and left again. Seeing how I was holding the boy so tightly to prevent him from throwing himself at the windows, she told the boys family what was happening and his mom and dad returned to talk with him. His mom told me he wanted to be with someone who spoke his language. One of our teachers, a Malaysian Chinese woman who speaks Mandarin comforted him. Every time he is comforted in familiar ways, he gains experience that builds on the foundations provided by his family, and adjusts to school more and more every day.

The same teacher shared her thoughts with me about what was the most important part of her work with the young children here. The picture in her mind, what was important to her, was for the children to be happy at school. If the children were happy, their family would be successful here and they wouldn’t have to go back to mainland China. She is helping the families of these children realize their dream of a better life in a land of possibility. The children’s happiness in school is paramount to the ability of their family to realize that dream in her mind. If they do not realize that dream, they have to go back where they came from.

Our early childhood team came to a decision about the best placement for one of our four-year-olds. We decided that giving him an opportunity to gain more experience developing foundational skills at his own pace outweighed our reasons for considering a placement for him in the Kindergarten class with the five-year-olds. I explained to his mother and father that our goal will be to help him move from primarily parallel and associative play to more cooperative play. More so than his English language vocabulary, experience playing with peers at a similar level of development is essential for developing the foundation he needs to gain the self-confidence to succeed in Kindergarten and beyond.

His family is concerned about their son having the level of support he needs to “be the best,” and they communicated a strong sense that the best place for him to have that support may be in the Kindergarten classroom. As we explored their values and concerns further, his father said that he does not want to push his son, and that he understands what we are saying about allowing his son time to grow and develop naturally. He explained that in China, if a child is four years old they are expected to do complicated maths, and know 300 English words. “That’s why we are here,” he told me. “We chose an American school because in China the government wants to have mind control.” He must have noticed my jaw drop a bit. As I looked up into his eyes, he said, “You know that. We want him to grow up freely with his mind.” He still wants his son to be in the Kindergarten class with the five-year-olds.

When we encounter an unfamiliar experience we rely on our mental models, or the images we hold in our minds, so there is a tendency for us to act in familiar ways even when we know the rules of the road are going to be different. If we envision the future as a place or experience that is different from where we come from, how will we recognize what we value in our new surroundings? How do we know which way to go?

Dream City

noreply@blogger.com (Nathan Johnston-Chiszar) — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:17:00 +0000

Although it is in Southeast Asia, it turns out Malaysia is the wild wild west of early childhood education. And Forest City is the new frontier. This is the story of the children and families in this frontier community. It is a story about how we make meaning of a new world, and come to understand the laws of nature in a place that until recently was the middle of the ocean.

I was brought here to accompany my wife Kimber to serve with her on the faculty of the American boarding school that serves as an anchor and selling point for the emerging community. Kimber is the director of the weCreate program, which means she helps teachers and students use design thinking to develop solutions to real life challenges being faced by our school community. She is a technology integration specialist and a force of nature who understands the needs of different types of learners. She can figure out how to make anything you can think of. She knows things I didn't know were there to know, and how to do them. She has a deep understanding of children's development and learning that crosses disciplines, and informs her practice as an educator and mentor for others. So that's why they hired her.

Before they brought us on board, the senior leadership team wanted to know if I was up for living in what they described as an isolated, post-apocalyptic seeming construction zone. It was still their first year, and a lot of the staff they hired were not prepared to live on the wild frontier. I said I was game. I had work teaching online and didn't need a job, but when they asked me about my experience and philosophy of early childhood education I told them the truth. They liked what I had to say so much that they offered me a position as principal of their early childhood program serving children in Kindergarten ages 3,4, and 5. Having been so clear about the heart and soul of what is important to me in serving young children and their families, I figured if they wanted to offer the guy who said those things a position I had to accept. I was and am that guy.

This is the first international school launched by a boarding school institution from the Midwest with a 160 year old tradition. This is their first venture into the world of early childhood education. The founders of the school were inspired by the philosophy and approach taken by teachers at the preschools in Reggio Emilia, and they are actively supporting collaboration between early childhood educators and a full time atelierista, as well as other full time teachers focused on music, movement, and dance. With many stakeholders, the school is the passion project of one of the wealthiest women in China on an island created with contributions from the Sultan of Johor. There is a lot riding on this venture for everyone. As of now, during its' first phase of construction, the foundations are still being established.

Except for the children of staff members, very few of our students' home language is English, and most of our students are not from Malaysia. The families here are mostly Mandarin Chinese speakers from mainland China, drawn here by the promise of a better life for their family. Our first day of school was last week. I made the radical decision to invite our families to spend the first day of school with their children and teachers in the classroom, and it was a great success. I spent the day learning what I could about the children, their families, and where they come from. Mostly I was learning to wrap my heart and mind around their names, and using my tongue in different ways to say them. I feel so fortunate to have spent so many years learning about language development from the perspective of infants and toddlers, and to be guided by an understanding of the role of culture and the family as the foundation of healthy social emotional development and all future learning. I am here with new families at the beginning of the lives of the first inhabitants of a new land. Our team of early childhood educators and specialists has developed a vision for curriculum and instruction in response to an essential question I posed in the days before school started.

The story has yet to be written. There is an opportunity to develop laws to establish a culture of kindness and respect, preserving This is the opportunity of a lifetime for an educator with my values and background. It could just as well be called Dream City.