Lisa Catteral - Growing Up in Santa Cruz

Breaking the Cycle of Bullying

Lisa Catteral — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:50:54 +0000

When I was in “junior high school,” which is what middle school used to be called, I struggled to find a group of friends who felt like a fit. My parents were educators and I grew up while they were in graduate school; I never experienced wealth, and yet, their teaching jobs allowed me to attend a private school in Beverly Hills for free. They wanted me to have a private school education, but it came at the cost of me fitting-in. It wasn’t just class and status, I was pretty different from the other students in many ways. I had a broken home and family life was strained; I was used to embracing counter-culture and the school was very mainstream, and of course, I hadn’t started out at private school. The academic work wasn’t easy. I ate lunch with a girl who also didn’t fit in well, for completely different reasons. She just hadn’t grown up yet. She still liked to play with dolls while everyone else was planning their “look” for the next dance and eating rice cakes and fancy bottled water for lunch (it was LA, in the eighties). After a few months at the school, I found friends in the grade above me who had much more in common with me. They also had divorced parents, wanted to dye their hair blue, and liked punk rock music and art. I did not have the skills to share how I felt at the time with anyone. I knew I wanted to be with these new friends, but I did not know how to talk to the girl I had been sitting with about it. I didn’t know how to behave or what to say. But I did not want to “hang out” with her anymore. When I look back, I know now that what I did was become a bully. It was brief, but I can still feel the pain of that in my heart and my body when I think about it. While the two of us did not make much sense as friends, I know that I hurt her very badly by excluding her and even finding ways to push her away that were clearly mean. There are as many forms of bullying as there are human beings. We tend to think about it as a problem on the playground in schools, but research shows that adults are bullied in the workplace at the same rate that kids are bullied in school. For the purpose of addressing this widespread problem, experts divide bullying into four categories: physical, verbal, social/emotional, and cyberbullying. When I have encountered bullying as a parent or teacher or in my own life, I see that it often crosses boundaries between all of these things. The common thread is that a person with more power than another uses their power to hurt. Children who are involved in bullying from either side, victim or bully, have a higher chance of encountering many types of problems later in life. Schools must face the issue head on. In rural schools, 27% of students report being bullied. This could mean that over half of students are involved in bullying, because in each of those cases, someone was also doing the bullying. The most recent research on bullying shows that many common methods of addressing the issue do not work. Simple punishment and traditional behavior modification are the least effective methods of resolving bullying behavior. Placing the victim and the bully on equal ground and having them “talk it out” is also ineffective and sometimes backfires and makes the issue worse. The two most effective ways to combat bullying are creating an overall positive school culture that honors childrens’ feelings and emotions, and to have a school-wide understanding and language for social emotional learning (SEL). While recent political discourse has shown to increase bullying (it is true that groups targeted by politicians experience higher bullying in school), it is true that all fifty states, red or blue, have mandates that schools must have an anti-bullying programs. While social scientists have many instruments to show that a program claiming to reduce bullying is effective, there are few mandates to show, and report, that these programs work. How can we support our kids so that they do not become bullies, or victims of bullying? Research shows that honoring their feelings, and helping them to give words to their feelings, is very helpful. Taking the time to communicate and check-in, and paying attention to how they are doing in school is also important. Noticing that teachers and adults working with them in schools and elsewhere have the ability to greet emotional dysregulation with empathy and coaching rather than punishment is also important. Native educators offer us the “sweetgrass method” for bullying prevention. The idea is that communities prevent bullying by weaving together a strong metaphorical basket made by family and schools, using self-reflection, coaching, values, songs, and stories that fit the culture of the community, with continuity and follow-up. Familes must partner with schools to support kids’ resolution of issues that arise from power differentials. All children are powerful, if we allow them to be so. When I look back on “junior high,” I wish I had had that metaphorical sweetgrass basket of community to dwell in during my experiences. I wish I’d had the language and the mentors to use it with, so that I could look back on that time of my existence with pleasure instead of sadness. I love that my school now has adults who honor upper elementary and middle school students, who are in the most common years for bullying behavior to emerge, as powerful individuals with agency and important feelings. The truth is, we can end bullying in a split second. We all just have to decide to stop it.

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Human Capital and Human Capability

Lisa Catteral — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 19:46:09 +0000

When I was just starting out as a teacher, I asked the founders of our small mountaintop school why they started the school to begin with. They said that in the early seventies, there were very few public schools in the area that served the local population in rural south Santa Cruz County, and they firmly believed that everyone deserved a good education. I actually got many different answers to “why are we here,” but the simplicity of this one stuck with me. We all deserve a good education. Later on in my career, after I had done a few things that attracted some attention, I was hired as a consultant by the biggest school district in China. My job was to train principals and teachers in Beijing to use STEAM and arts integration in their lesson planning. This was a monumental shift for their system. The schools I witnessed still had rows of desks nailed to the ground and supplies gathering dust and locked away in cabinets. The classroom teaching I saw reminded me of reading about Laura Ingalls WIlder’s experience of working in the American West in the 1880’s in her Little House on the Prarie books. Just like in Laura’s historic classroom, students in China in the 2010’s memorized things from books, then stood up and recited those things, in an environment free of critical thinking, creativity, and questions. My work in China grew and gathered fame, and eventually, the highest official in China’s education bureau sat down to lunch with me. I asked him why he founded the program that hired me. He said, “everything you buy in the world says ‘made in China.’ We want it to say ‘invented in China.’” He wanted a different type of education because he saw an opportunity for economic growth. A good education. An educated citizenry. What is the connection? I believe there isn’t a very big connection in those motivations for having a school, or indeed, an entire educational system. The first one, a good education, must be the entire motivation for a school. The other follows, but I don’t think it should be the root. Let me explain. Most funding and support for education from governments arises from the “human capital” view that an educated population will grow the gross national product of a country and contribute to financial prosperity. When STEM and STEM testing became a hot topic in the US in the 1980’s, the decision was made to add computer labs to every school and do any number of things to increase test scores in engineering, science and math. The idea being that if our American population got smarter in those areas, we’d all be richer. I’ve rarely met a teacher who operates under that motivation. Teachers want to discover and develop students’ gifts. Most teachers naturally backwards-map their lessons to be sure they reach learning objectives. For example, if you need students to understand Romeo and Juliet, you first teach basic poetic rhythm, then you introduce a sonnet, and so forth. Thoughtful administrators backwards map curriculum, and government leaders backwards map from what they want for a population. In general, the goal for government leaders is financial. Governments follow a “human capital” model. I believe that true educators and excellent schools use a “human capability” model. We believe every human deserves to develop and grow their capabilities. Learning is joy, and developing oneself is a path to a fulfilling life. That is where the real work of a school should lie. A tension between educators and the system they work in nearly always exists because “human capital” and “human capability” are at odds. I’ve never met a teacher in the United States in the current decade who marched off to work determined to mold young people into productive workers. Great teachers, however, love to help individual students grow for the pure happiness and health of it. The state required curriculum is often more of an annoying check box that gets in the way of that lofty goal. Why on earth am I sending all of this educational thinking into a parenting magazine? All of us sending our kids to school, or running a homeschool, bump up against less freedom in curriculum than we would like. With that I offer you the idea of creating a time and space where you and your kids do have the freedom to discover and develop in any direction that feeds a child’s bliss. Summer camp! Our area offers so many incredible options and opportunities to explore during the summer. I have one child who will spend the entire summer drawing if I make the space for him and curate the proper tools. I have another who wants to dance all summer, and one who would just like to collect and catalog flowers. We are so fortunate to live in an area with such a rich tapestry of interesting people offering children interesting experiences. As a teacher, I breathe a sigh of relief and satisfaction when a student shares excitement over a camp or experience they will embrace over the summer. Happy camping!

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A Guiding Value: Selfless Community Service

Lisa Catteral — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 23:50:19 +0000

If you want to have new ideas, innovate, rise up from depression or heal a wound, the most direct path you can take to your goal is to forget about yourself for a time. I have wonderful ideas when I am washing dishes or running. I’m pretty sure the running ideas are from how fast the blood is pumping through my brain, but the dishwashing is because I am not thinking about “me” while I do it. An even better way to pause destructive or negative thinking is to get involved in a service project. When I first arrived at Mount Madonna School as a new teacher, fresh out of a very intense job in corporate America, the idea of “selfless service” was not entirely foreign to me, but it had never been something I would adopt as a way of life. As an American, my values were closer to home; I was building a family, and that nuclear family was what I was working for. That was selfless enough for me. I discovered, through working at the school, that the benefits of really taking on humble service in the community is like shaking up a snow globe and watching a little world come to life. It’s so simple to have kids do service projects. Let’s go volunteer! Schools everywhere participate in service. It’s different when it is a deep, abiding, underlying value of an entire community. At the end of senior year at my private school, we were sent off into the woods for a week. Our class was handed shovels and instructed on how to rebuild a stream that had been interrupted by logging corridors. We spent a week saving a habitat for a rare sort of fish that lived there. Instead of the creek spreading out over the new tree-free scars and into sticks and mud, we made beautiful little channels and pools for the water to fall into so the fish could swim. Unhealthy social norms we had established as a group of high school kids fell away. Everyone was sweating together. The pressures of success in a college-preparatory environment fell away. Everyone was talking and thinking as one. The fear of leaving home and each other for college fell away. We were in the moment, for the first time that year, perhaps. At some point on about day three, I looked up and realized how happy I was. I took that forward into life, but it got lost in other things until I circled back into the world of private school. In the distant past, private schools may have had an idea about being home for the privileged, and needing those privileged students to share out their good fortune. Now, however, service is well known to equate to a deeper sort of success for all humans. Private schools are working hard to welcome and support students from any socioeconomic background, with programs like the flexible tuition offered at Mount Madonna. Service has a different goal; what we have to offer each other is not material, but rather, it is shared humanity. My students ask why, when we work in the community, there are people with nice cars picking up free food. They are not judging, they are just adjusting their notion of who might be hungry or in need in our community. They are learning to extend their empathy and open their hands to anyone with the courage to ask for help. They are learning to drop assumptions about other humans based on what they see. They are learning to be curious before they criticize. They are also learning to find and follow their bliss, and that self-interest is not nearly as satisfying as looking outside of themselves. It starts with a simple “that was FUN!” after we volunteer somewhere, then it naturally embeds in their hearts. I’m grateful for our private school’s requirement that students serve their community, however that notion originated, and I wish it were required absolutely everywhere. Every single one of us, every single student, has something to offer to others. Mount Madonna School originated in the crucible of the Mount Madonna Center yoga community in the 1970s. The guru of that community, Baba Hari Dass, suggested that the yoga students name their fellowship after the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. None of the members at that time, and to this day, consider themselves to be Hindu, in fact, many of them are Jewish. But they did enjoy many aspects of Indian culture, and certainly, dedicated their lives to the study of yoga. When I joined the school as a teacher, I was informed that Hanuman was the god of selfless service, and that’s why he was such an important icon to the founders of the school. Selfless service in the Mount Madonna world, Hanuman’s world, went much deeper than logging community service hours or doing a volunteer task here and there. It was a daily, deep, way of life. I now work with adult children of the founders who look for ways to help others, every day, without expectation of “anything in return,” rather, the return is the opportunity to serve in and of itself. True, humble service brings joy and happiness. It’s so simple, and so profound at the same time. After a few years of teaching at the school, I had the chance to travel to the “orphanage” in India that was also founded by Baba Hari Dass, and run by the same group of people. I refer to it in quotes, because Baba Hari Dass did not set out to create a traditional orphanage. Orphans are stigmatized in India, so he simply created a gigantic home, with a gigantic family. The proprietress on the ground was a self-proclaimed “soccer mom of 65 kids” and the children were loved unconditionally and treated like a giant family. It was so inspiring that when I came home, I finally took a step I’d been contemplating for years and began the adoption process here in Santa Cruz County. Service, and love, are the most rewarding things in this life. What was there to fear? Indeed, there is nothing to fear about giving your time, and your heart, to others, and to your community. I’m so grateful that my children, and my students, are surrounded by this sentiment, on every level, every day.

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Visible and Invisible

Lisa Catteral — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:49:01 +0000

This year I have the honor of guiding our senior class in carrying out a capstone project. They came into the first day of classroom work with ideas of wanting to help everything and everybody, locally and around the world, in every possible way. They had no idea how beautiful a concept this was, or what a gift their priorities are to our area. For anyone who has ever had a loss of faith in the upcoming generation or a draining away of hope for the future, I can assure you, there are young people who are ready to serve. As the students narrowed their ideas down and honed the scope of their project, they came to the conclusion that what they really wanted to do was bring people’s invisible struggles in our community into the light. They want to make the invisible visible for our county. Specifically, they want to do that for our local children and youth. When struggles are visible, we in Santa Cruz County are a community of problem solvers. If we see it, we work to make it better, because who among us wants to bear anothers’ suffering in our own local community? I live in a middle class neighborhood, and several years ago our students illuminated a community living less than a mile away from me that faces abject poverty Hunger, lack of education and healthcare, and a complete lack of resources are problems these humans face every day. Our students worked with the Center for Farmworker Families in a holiday drive for basic supplies and support, and I was stunned to discover that six hundred migrant workers are quite literally my neighbors. My invisible neighbors. Young people in our county have a special power to bring these issues into our consciousness. I remember, as a high school student, wondering why adults could not see the pressing issues that were right in front of them. As parents, most of us work to shield our children from the harsher realities of the world, to keep them innocent, or to keep them believing that the world is good and kind, for as long as possible. As students become teenagers and wander out of their parents’ protective bubble, they are novel to the struggles that exist all around them. Seeing the world through their eyes is a privilege and it is also revealing. When we “grown-ups” have collected enough experiences of the world at its worst, we develop skills to cope with harsh realities. Sometimes those skills involve, at least partially, shutting things out or denying what is right before our very eyes Does it hurt to have the veil lifted, to see what is really there? My students inspire me to react with action, love and hope, rather than despair We meet two times a week, and the students assign themselves action items, and then we meet again to update each idea or initiative to reach down off the mountain from our comfortable school. A teenager, at the threshold of adulthood, is a gift to a community. Too often we view them as problems. What do we do to keep the kids busy after school, so they don’t cause trouble? How do we keep the kids out of trouble? My students, on the other hand, are going to keep the adults out of trouble. They are going to remind us of what a community is, and how we can engage with it in the best way possible. I can’t wait to see what they do, what they see, what they discover, and to share the activities of their project, MMS Off the Mountain as it develops. Readers can follow MMS Off The Mountain on instagram, at @off_the_mountain_2025

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