Explaining to a Dim-Witted Pupil

"Teacher Tom, did you know that space is round?"

"I didn't know that."

"It's round and then it gets really long and really high."

I didn't know what to say to that so I nodded. It didn't make sense to me, but the honest truth is that children often tell me things about which I can make neither heads nor tails.

The three-year-old was gesturing with his hands as he explained. In fact, his whole body was gesturing as if what he was telling me could only be fully expressed through dance.

"There's the top part," he said while stretching his body upward, on his toes, his fingertips showing me the top part. "That's where the aliens live." His wide eyes demanded a response so I said, "The aliens live in the top part."

"On the top part," he corrected me.

"On the top part."

"And it's so huge." He stretched his arms out as if to show me it was too huge even for a hug, then sidled to the left, then to the right, indicating that it was even huger than that.

"That's pretty huge."

"And it goes inside my body and gets mixed inside of me."

Stupidly, I asked, "Are you still talking about space?"

He rolled his eyes and stamped a foot in frustration, "No!" He was momentarily at a loss for words. Or rather, he was searching for the right words. Finally, he said, slowly, feigning patience, "It's like there are little pieces." He waited for me to reply, so I said, "Right, little pieces." 

"No it's like there are little pieces." 

By now, my mind was racing through everything I knew about space. I was literally thinking about Einstein and dark matter and the bits I think I might understand about quantum mechanics. He was clearly trying to explain something to me, maybe a scene from a movie, something that was a bit over his head, and he was trying to understand it by explaining it to someone else. This is often the best way to get your mind around complex ideas. Most of the time when this happens, I can at least guess at what a preschooler is striving for, but today I was, in fact, the dim-witted pupil he seemed to think me and was attempting to break things down into more and more simple ideas, the way one does.

"It's like there are little pieces," I answered.

"And then they come out like this." He wiggled his fingers to show me what they come out like.

I wiggled my fingers as well.

"And then it goes . . ." He arced an arm over his head, then raised his eyebrows at me as if to say, Do you get it now?

I arced my arm in imitation.

He looked at me then with a tight-lipped smile of satisfaction. I wished I understood, but that wasn't the point. I could tell that he understood to his own satisfaction and that had to be enough. Some day, perhaps, he'll publish a novel or compose a symphony or write a dissertation so that I can come a little closer to understanding, but for today, this was as close as this dim-witted pupil was going to get.

******

Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, please consider joining Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp. This camp is my popular 6-week foundational course compressed into a single, intensive week and is designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create and defend an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. It's an especially great way to get the whole team on board for the upcoming school year. I can't wait to share it with you! Registration opens soon. For more information and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play, Like Love, Is Always in the Eye of the Beholder

You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs

But I look around me and I see it isn't so

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs

And what's wrong with that?

I'd like to know

'Cause here I go again.

                          ~Wings (Paul McCartney)

On her album Cowboy Carter, Beyonce covers and updates Dolly Parton's heart wrenching classic Jolene. Whereas the original is about a woman in love begging for mercy from a rival who has set her sights on her man, this new version is about a woman in love threatening that same woman. As Parton said about the new version, "Beyoncé is giving that girl some trouble and she deserves it!"

If an alien from another planet were to try to understand "love" by listening to our love songs, it would likely conclude that we don't know what we're talking about. Love is kind. Love is a battle field. Love is blind. Love is a second hand emotion. Love saves. Love is a lie. Even more confusing, I imagine, would be to realize that these songs are mostly about romantic love: that there is also parental love, the love of a child for a parent, spiritual love, and love as a universal, unifying force. We love our cereal. We love that love song. Love makes the world go 'round. People die for love. And for the same reason that we will never run out of love songs, our alien researcher would never reach the end of a definition because there is always something else or someone else or some way else to experience that crazy little thing called love.

Just as there is no agreed upon definition for "love" there is no agreed upon definition for "play." Defining play is every bit as elusive as defining love, probably because it includes emotion, intelligence, and behavior that is universal in terms of both time and space. The best we can hope for, for all practical purposes, is to identify characteristics or conditions, that when they exist, would indicate that a person is playing, but an all inclusive definition is far beyond us.

And that's fine, because on a day-to-day basis, none of us need a definition of play. We know it when we see it, or feel it, and that's enough, which is likewise true for love. I mean, if you've got it in your life, why mess around trying to pick it apart, right? Both tend to disappear when looked at too closely, so the best plan is to use it or lose it.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what scientists do, pick things apart in order to understand them, and in our modern world, if science can't explain it, if there is no data to discuss, then it's nearly impossible to get policymakers, for instance, to take it seriously. Without an agreed upon definition, play, like love, appears to the hardheaded decision-makers as silly.

I think this is why we've had so much difficultly creating a cohesive and persuasive body of research to support play-based learning. If you can't define what you are studying, the tools of the scientific method, like creating replicable experiments, won't work.

In his book The Genesis of Animal Play, evolutionary biologist Gordon Burghardt proposes five characteristics that must exist in order for us to call behavior play: 1) It must be nonfunctional (at least not obviously connected to survival or reproduction), 2) It must be purely voluntary and not forced by external influence, 3) It must be distinct from the animal's other behaviors, 4) It must involve repeated movements, but with variations and modifications, and 5) It can only occur when the animal is well-fed, safe, and healthy.

Of course, not all scientists agree with Burghardt. Indeed, I imagine that many of the play-based practitioners reading this have quibbles, and therein lies the challenge we face, I think. If we are to get policymakers, administrators, parents, and others to understand the power and centrality of childhood play, our modern world demands a robust body of research that "proves" it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation's oldest and largest professional association, has likewise struggled with play's definition, but their impressive survey of the existing research has led them to once again reaffirm its position that childhood play is central to the physical, intellectual, social, and emotional health of children. Their clinical report on play specifically points to "academic" style preschool as harmful to our children's development.

Over the decades I've tried to share the science and data about play, but the current state of affairs is that it's all over the place, often unconnected and contradictory, usually because each study seems to start with a different idea of what constitutes play. There is over a century of play research out there, but it doesn't feel like we are any closer to understanding play within the context of human evolution and learning than we were 100 years ago.

Perhaps that's because play, like love, is always in the eye of the beholder. And it's why we must do more than cite research if we are to persuade others that our children need play and lots of it.

Love doesn't come in a minute

Sometimes it doesn't come at all

I only know that when I'm in it

It isn't silly, love isn't silly

Love isn't silly at all.

******

Despite our inability to agree on definitions, we know it when we see it, even if it takes different forms in different places, with different people. The bottom line is that the scientific consensus is us that young children learn most of what they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp is my 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy compressed into a single, intensive week. This camp is designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create and defend an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. It's a great way to get the whole team on board for the upcoming school year. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to get on the waitlist, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

I Have a Philosophy?

I started this blog in 2009 simply because I'd written a couple articles for Seattle's Child magazine that I thought were pretty good and felt they deserved a life beyond the recycling bin. That was the entirety of my ambition. This blog would provide an online home for these two articles. Period. They didn't have any readers beyond my friends and family, and that was fine because that's all I expected.

Before long, however, I began adding posts, inspired by the children as they spent their days playing at Woodland Park. It became a place where I told their stories, where I told my stories, and where I told our stories. As the only teacher in this school owned by the parents who enrolled their kids, I began to crave connection with other educators who felt as I did, who were learning from young children as they played. It took some hunting back then, but I finally found a handful other educators scattered around the globe that were, like me, celebrating play-based learning.

The cocktail of being a relatively new teacher, children at play, and these inspiring women, who to this day I think of as sisters, was a heady one. Our little informal collective began to inspire one another. We shared ideas and projects. We challenged one another. We one-upped one another. We had each felt alone in our play-based worlds, but now that we had found one another we began to realize that maybe we weren't crazy after all. In a world in which preschool was becoming increasingly academic and, frankly, hard-hearted, we were creating, in our own ways, and in our own corners of the globe, the opposite.

We were trusting children.

We were following children.

We were embracing this radical idea that, through play, through their self-selected activities, the children in our care were learning to be self-motived, to work well with others, to be critical thinkers, and, most of all, to love learning. 

Slowly at first, then suddenly, we all began to see our audiences grow. There were others like us! I guess I knew that something big was happening in 2013 when I was invited to speak in Athens Greece where a man who I now count as a dear friend, John Yiannoudis, had started his own urban preschool based, he told me, "on your philosophy." 

I have a philosophy?

When I met John face-to-face he confessed, "At first I thought, 'Who is this crazy guy in a red cape doing all these crazy things with kids?' But then I started reading your posts and realized that this is what I wanted for my own daughter."

John had organized an event at which I was the only speaker, scheduled for 6 pm on a Friday night, and the venue he had rented seated 400 people. Talk about crazy! When I saw all those empty seats on the day before the event I felt sorry for him. I imagined how disappointed he was going to be. There was no way, I thought, that more than a couple dozen people would turn out for this event featuring an English-speaking preschool teacher from a little cooperative school halfway around the world. 

When the day arrived, however, there were people sitting in the aisles. Maybe this idea of play-based learning wasn't so crazy after all.

Over the years, as I've continued to write, I've tried, each day, to share something true, something I've learned, or something about which I still have questions. And nearly every day someone tells me, echoing John, that they want "this" for the children in their lives -- play. Over the years I've received thousands of messages from educators and parents asking how to "do what you do."

This is the motivation behind Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp. We've taken my popular 6-week course and reimagined it as one intensive week in which I share my "philosophy," one that places the pure joy of learning at the center. In this course, I provide the details, insights, and reasons behind my unique approach to child-led, play-based learning, with the idea of helping you to develop your own unique approach, one that honors the children and families in your life. Take it on your own, of course, but the main idea is to enroll the whole team so that you start the fall with everyone on the same page.

My career as an educator has been an accidental one in many ways. I was lucky to find my way to where I am. I'm grateful to my readers, my mentors, my blog sisters, and especially the families and children who continue to inspire me to look deeper, to think more radically, and, ultimately, play harder. You have helped me realize that I do have a philosophy, one that has emerged one blog post at a time, one question at a time, one epiphany at a time. I've been sharing it little by little for well over a decade now, scattered over 4000 posts, two books, and hundreds of talks. This new course is my attempt to pull it all together in one place, not so that you can do what I do, but rather so that you can do what's best for the children in your life, which is, as always, to let them play.

******

The waitlist is open for Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp (August 2-8). It's for early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, and caregivers who believe the radical idea that children deserve an authentic childhood centered around play and wonder. You will be both challenged and inspired as we launch into the new school year. Sign up your entire "team" (discounts available) to get everyone on the same page! Click here to learn more and get on the waitlist.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"We're All Watching"

There was a "bad guy trap" being built on the corner of the rug. The builder commanded, "Teacher Tom, watch me!" so I watched him. I said, "I'm watching you."

He explained how the trap worked which involved the bad guy following a complicated, yet deviously enticing, obstacle course, which ultimately brought him to a room in which saws cut him in half.

I said, "That's would be a bad thing for a bad guy."

He answered, "Yes."

I was lying on my stomach, the box of plastic farm animals at my shoulder. There was a rather fierce looking bull right on top so I grabbed it, saying, "This bull is also watching you," positioning it appropriately.

"I'll show you." He picked up a small cow figurine and walked it through the obstacle course right through being sawed in half.

I said, "That must have hurt the cow."

He answered, "Yes."

I shook my head, "I don't like to get hurt."

There was a long pause as we both sat with our thoughts. Then he perked up, "But bad guys like to get hurt!"

"Oh! So they like it when they're cut in half?"

He answered, "Yes."

"Well then I guess that's not so bad, although I don't really like the idea of anyone getting cut in half."

He answered, "It's not a person, it's a cow."

Bam! He had me. I said, "Yeah, I guess you're right, cows have to get cut in half if we're going to eat hamburgers."

He answered, "Yes." Then, "And they're bad guy cows, so they like to get ate."

I took a model sheep from the farm animal box. I said, "This sheep is also watching you," placing it beside the bull.

He said, "My bad guy trap isn't finished."

I told him that we (referring to both the plastic farm animals as well as the small clutch of kids who had become interested bystanders to our conversation) would have to wait until the trap was finished, adding, "And now this pig is watching you," as I put it alongside the other animals. He answered, "Yes."

As we waited, the other children began adding farm animals. By the time he declared the trap finished, we had recruited a formidable line-up of livestock to watch him.

He said, "Watch me, Teacher Tom!"

I said, "We are all watching you," gesturing toward both the animals and the gathered children.

He then showed us how the bad guy trap worked, a more elaborate version of the original, still ending in a room full of saws.

I said, "I sure hope there aren't any bad guys around here because if there are that trap would sure hurt them!"

He answered, "Yes."

I said, "We're good guys. Everybody here's a good guy, right?" There was general agreement that all present fell into the more virtuous camp. "Good thing there aren't any bad guys around," another comment that was greeted with general consent.

Then our trap builder said, "But there are real bad guys! Like zombies and ghosts."

I said, "Zombies and ghosts aren't real."

He said, "Yes," adding for clarification, "but they're pretend real."

The expression delighted me, so I repeated it, "Pretend real!" Several of the other children then echoed me, "Pretend real!"  I said, "The animals are pretend real watching you."

"But you're real real watching me, right?" When I answered yes, he replied, "Then watch what happens when this pretend real bad guy cow goes in my pretend real bad guy trap."

I said, "We're all watching," to which he replied, "Yes."

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

"All Human Acts are Committed on Insufficient Information"

The girl was standing on a table near the entry gate to the playground contemplating the distance to the ground. Her friends had already jumped off, leaving her behind in their pell mell downhill dash. She had seen her friends do it. They had landed on their feet, they had not fallen, they had not been hurt, yet she wasn't so sure about herself. If she was going to jump, she was going to have to take a chance, which is, to act without sufficient information. She was frozen there, right on the edge, not yet willing to jump and not yet willing to give up on the jump.

This is the human condition in a nutshell. There are the things we do, the predictable things, the things that we can do in our sleep. There are the things we don't do because they seem unpleasant or downright hazardous. And then there are those things we want to do, but there are enough unknowns that we are frightened, often into the sort of frozen state of this girl standing at the table's edge.

If the girl was going to jump, she would be taking a chance. In her mind there was a fairly equal opportunity for joyful success or painful failure.

The poet and author Marge Piercy wrote, "All human acts are committed on insufficient information."  As the girl stood there trying to summon the courage to leap off into the unknown, I was tempted to call out to her, "Go for it!" or to walk over and offer my hand, but she wasn't asking for help. Indeed, she was deeply focused on the moment, wrestling with her doubts, summoning her courage, dealing with the fact of her insufficient information.

In the end, she elected to climb cautiously down from the table. This too was a human act, one undertaken with insufficient information. Once back on the ground, however, she raced after her friends, joining them at the bottom of the hill, once more a part of their game. She may never return to take that chance, but she will take chances because to be human is to have insufficient information and to act nevertheless. And it's from these moments, in large measure, that we later, in the clear vision of hindsight, are able to piece together the story of our lives.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

You'll Want to Bookmark This Clinical Report

In 2007 the American Academy of Pediatrics published its clinical report on the importance of play in the healthy development of children and young children in particular. It reaffirmed the report in 2018, citing new and growing evidence that the decline in childhood play is harming children physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally. This report, which specifically points to the push-down of academic-style instruction into early years programs, was once more reaffirmed at the beginning of this year.

The AAP is the largest and oldest association pediatricians in the US.

I want to bring attention to this paper because almost every day someone writes to me asking for help in finding "data" or "research" or "evidence" that supports play-based learning. They are seeking to persuade nervous parents or dubious administrators that what they are doing in their play-based classrooms is the best practice when it comes to young children. Which is to say, giving children the permission and opportunity to follow our species' biological heritage to direct our own learning through self-selected pursuits, driven by curiosity (i.e., play). And that the increasing academic "rigor" that has come to replace play for too many children is directly harming them.

This report includes links to all of that and more. I urge everyone to bookmark this report.

Of course, I've learned that "facts" alone are rarely persuasive when it comes to play-based learning. The scientifically unsupported mythology of modern schooling has too strong of a hold on our cultural mindset to be unsettled by mere data, research or evidence. You will still need to turn to emotional arguments as well.

That said, parents tend to listen to their pediatricians, especially when they say that academic preschools are intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally harmful to their children. This report provides the evidence.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Really Crappy Vocational Training

Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift ~ Bob Dylan

The most common answer to a child who doesn't care for school is that they must suck it up so that they can 1) get a good job or 2) get into a good college so that they can get a good job. No matter what kind of lip service the rest of us give education, the prevailing idea is that it's vocational training.

Really crappy vocational training as it turns out.

By the time a typical American child graduates from high school, they've received some 22,600 hours of schooling and all that qualifies them for is an entry level job, probably at minimum wage. If they go to college for an additional 8,000-10,000 hours, they might qualify for a management training program.

In the end, all that schooling gets reduced to a single line on a resume. If you don't have "connections" (which is the real advantage of attending Ivy League universities) the most important thing a young job seeker can have, the thing that sets them apart, is actual work experience. That makes sense because at the end of the day, employers are hiring people to do a job, not matriculate.

Microsoft's founder Bill Gates famously dropped out of college, but there are millions of other very accomplished people, in all fields, who don't hold degrees. I have a close friend who has worked at the highest level in major corporations, she's run several of her own businesses, and won awards for her accomplishments including being recognized for her accomplishments as a woman in a STEM career. All of that, and to this day she continues to hide the fact that she never graduated from college. Technically, she didn't even graduate from high school. 

And on the flip side, for every MIT graduate who's gone on to great things, there are millions more who hold degrees from prestigious institutions who are, at best, muddling through. 

Of course, when you ask teachers, few of us would say that we're in the business of vocational training, at least not directly. Our job, we say, is to shape young minds, to help children learn how to think, to help them develop the skills and habits of citizenship and responsibility and perseverance and accountability and grit and whatever other buzz word is making the rounds.

But we must also be doing a crappy job at that as well. I mean, when was the last time you heard anyone say, "These kids today, they're doing just great!" When was the last time you read a news article about children taking their civic responsibility seriously or being such hard workers. No, the prevailing theme is that kids today are lazy, entitled, and unmotivated. All they want to do is play video games and dance on TikTok.

The rule of thumb is that if you spend 10,000 hours making a study of something, anything, you will emerge as one of the world's leading experts. After 20,000-30,000 of schooling, our children emerge as experts at nothing at all, except, perhaps taking tests and jumping through the other hoops required to "progress" through school, skills that have no relevance beyond school.

What if instead of marching all children through standardized curricula just so they can tick the "education" box on a job application, we committed those tens of thousands of hours to supporting each child in becoming one of the world's leading experts on something, anything. Expose them to the world and let them decide. In the early years, that might mean dinosaurs or princesses or superheroes. Later it might be science or dance or drawing comic books. Maybe they would never quite make it to the level of "world's leading expert," maybe it wouldn't even lead to a job. But they would discover where their curiosity, self-motivation, and the support of caring adults can take them. They would discover what makes them tick, what makes them come alive, and that at the end of the day is what the world needs far more than one more test taker.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!