From the director:

“You’re the director, so you should know the answers to these questions. Who has a digital camera?” “Who has a computer?” “Who would be going down the curvy part of Lombard Street?”

Other staff members have faced similar questioning in the past few weeks: “Have you been to Baker Beach this month?” “Who has a brown sweater?” “Did you go to a Giants game, or do you know anyone who did?” “Can you identify this ring? ”

These questions are being posed by teams of detectives from the first grade, who are trying to crack the mystery of Mr. Cool Cat’s weekend adventures. In case you have not been following this breaking story, Mr. Cool Cat is a puppet who moved here from Montreal with Kelly, our first grade teacher. Early in September, Kelly and the kids found a photograph of Cool Cat and his puppet pals cavorting on the Golden Gate Bridge, and no one knew how they got there. The puppets were safe in their usual spot in the classroom, yet clearly had been out on the town over the weekend.

The mystery grew over the ensuing weeks as photographs continued to appear: the puppets enjoying clam chowder and poking Dungeness crabs at Fisherman’s Wharf, buying tickets to a movie at the Castro Theatre, waving to the crowd at a Giants game, riding a cable car through Chinatown, enjoying the view through telescopes on Twin Peaks, posing in front of Lombard Street’s curves, sunbathing on Baker Beach . . . Cool Cat and his friends were really getting around!

How were they doing it? The puppets were going places Kelly had never heard of, and clues were few and far between. First graders were swarming around school asking questions, but no one had answers—including Kelly, who was as mystified as the kids.

Then the class got organized. Each student wrote a letter to a staff member, asking what did we know and when did we know it. Every one of us answered in writing, and the students used our responses to rank our probability as suspects. Kelly got a map of San Francisco so that they could plot Cool Cat’s travels. A uniformed police officer from the San Francisco Police Department visited the class to help crack the case, and she gave the students tips on how to gather evidence. Kids practiced their deductive reasoning skills by developing a set of questions that might reveal information about the perpetrators, and decided who they would interview as potential witnesses. Questions were written down, teams of detectives were dispersed to depose the witnesses, and answers analyzed.

As of this writing, The Case of the Weekending Puppets has yet to be solved—although rumor has it that the first graders are getting close! I’ll keep you posted.

Kudos to Kelly for seizing the unexpected to create a wonderful example of progressive education, and to the mysterious rascals behind the whole affair for providing such clever and engaging material!

From the deans:

Diversity awareness/appreciation/action starts with self-knowledge. Only by knowing and fully understanding yourself, your surrounding, your proficiencies and deficiencies, and being comfortable with that “analyzed,” processed self, can you really begin to know others and be comfortable around others. The road to knowing yourself is a lifelong drive filled with harrowing twist and turns, but there are several simple, practical things that we, as individuals within a diverse community, can do to get in touch with self.

Create a Family Tree - Creating a family tree will help you to find out about the diversity that “makes you up.” Be patient, it may take some serious time. The family tree that my father and I constructed took well over four years to complete, but the benefits far outweigh the effort. Familial information is also easier to access today with the advent of free genealogy websites like www.familysearch.org.

Meditation and Fasting - Meditation and fasting have been used since ancient times to discover and balance self. Every great, documented holy person, from Jesus’ forty days in the desert to Gandhi’s fast to save India to Muhammad’s revelation in the cave, used meditation and fasting to reach a state of enlightenment or “betterment.” Modern man tends to laugh off meditation and fasting as new age balderdash, but historically, wise women and men have embraced them as the unique tools for self-discovery and peace of mind.

Physicists and best-selling author, Frutof Capra describes meditation as a “quieting of the mind,” where the “basic aim of these (meditation) techniques seems to be to silence the thinking mind and to shift the awareness from the rational to the intuitive mode of consciousness.” Meditation can be done in a variety of ways, and many of us already meditate without seeing it as meditation. One variety uses the intense focusing of one’s attention on a single object, “like one’s breathing, the sound of the mantra, or the visual image of the mandala.” Other methods focus on physical activity that bring about intuitive consciousness like T’ai Chi, which involves body movements “not learned by verbal instructions but by doing them over and over again in unison with the teacher” without the interference of any thought. These rhythmical chantings and movements bring about a state of awareness devoid of the rational mind’s adherence to categorizing and defining; the environment is experienced in a direct way without the filter of conceptual thinking. ”

Fasting as a tool to enlightenment goes back to ancient times. Alvenia M. Fulton, fasting expert, in her book, The Fasting Primer, states, “Looking back in time, we now know that fasting as a health measure as well as a spiritual exercise was considered such an essential part of the health and intellectual development of the ancient peoples of Egypt, Greece, and India that the practice was reserved for the nobility and the educated classes. ”

Fasting, like meditation, aids in the process of self-discovery. Many mystics, including every major prophet, used fasting to reach a higher level of self-discovery. Fasting calls for a periodic restriction of some physical need or desire, like eating, drinking, or sex, to reach a state of spiritual awareness. It is a simple process, by depriving one aspect of self, other aspects become more acute; by depriving the physical, the spiritual becomes stronger. Fasting through different methods reaches the same goal as meditation; it releases the body from rational thought and opens it up to intuitive consciousness.

Good luck in the amazing quest for knowledge of self!

Mohammed Soriano-Bilal
Dean of Multicultural Programs and Services