I Usually Call It Love

(Note: Several weeks ago, my blogger friend and fellow teacher, Pumpkin Delight, posted her answers to a questionnaire that had once been a popular party game around the turn-of-the-century. The writer Marcel Proust completed this questionnaire, twice, and his answers were published in Andre Maurois’ book, Proust: Portrait of a Genius.  To this day, Vanity Fair magazine uses this set of questions in a regular feature.

The lure of thoughtfully participating in a game played by Proust is really too much for me to resist. My intent is to create intermittent posts out of my answers as I complete them.)

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

(Love) is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another. –Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ve experienced perfect happiness, usually in fleeting moments, felt as a joyful connectedness to everything. I usually call it love.

Happiness is not an emotion that stands up to much introspection. I can examine my sorrow or anger, while remaining sad or mad, whereas happiness tends to disappear the moment I become conscious of it. That suggests to me that the state of being unaware of my own emotions is an essential element to achieving happiness. I’ve most often experienced what I’d call perfect happiness during those times when I was operating outside myself, connecting meaningfully with the other living things, forgetting me entirely. And as much as I sometimes fantasize that I might find contentment in withdrawing from the world, I know that, for me, happiness requires reaching out and engaging the rest of you. I usually call it love.

I’ve long been aware that one of the fundamental, selfish reasons I teach preschoolers, is that it takes so little effort for me to want to engage them. I easily lose myself in their world. Perfect happiness often comes to me when I’m lying on my stomach under the loft, taking dictation from a 3-year-old telling a sad story. Perfect happiness catches up with me in the middle of a song about a big ship sailing on the “Illy Alley Oh.” Perfect happiness is the hot and muggy co-mingled breath of a dozen kids engaged in the magnificent feat of an all-class group hug without anyone falling down or being squeezed too tightly. Perfect happiness is a child’s hot tears soaking through my shirt and onto my shoulder while she cries for her mommy. Every preschool teacher knows exactly what I’m talking about. I usually call it love.

In these moments, I’ve achieved a state of desirelessness, the Buddhist nirvana. It is enough to be there, with that person, or those people, helping them, or playing with them. I usually call it love.

The subtitle of this blog is “Teaching and learning from preschoolers.” The capacity for happiness is one of those things they teach me. Children innately know the answers to Tolstoy’s famous Three Questions and they remind me of them every day:

The most important time is now.

The most important person is the one you are with.

The most important thing to do is to be kind to that person.

Those, for me, are the conditions that produce perfect happiness. I usually call it love.

The “Take It Or Leave It”

One of my family’s favorite escapes from the city is to the San Juan Islands, which are located in north Puget Sound, and we’ve been particularly drawn over the years to Lopez Island.

Lopez’ history is as a farming community, although in recent decades it’s primary industry has been taking care of people like us who ride the ferry over for recreational visits. It’s a pastoral place with a small village, a couple restaurants and lots of hiking, cycling, kayaking, and skipping stones.

Typically, we drive straight from the ferry terminal to the grocery store, stock up, unpack, then as soon as humanly possible my wife Jennifer and daughter Josephine get to the local library to check out a stack of books. I, however, must save my favorite part of Lopez Island until the very end of the trip.

Being a small, rural place, Lopez lacks some basic municipal services to which we’ve become accustomed in the city, one of which is curbside garbage collection. This means that everyone on the island must haul their own garbage and recycling to the dump, including the tourists.

Having often been to Seattle’s garbage transfer stations, I appreciate the tidiness and efficiency of the Lopez operation, especially since there never seems to be anyone there working in an official capacity. I used to love taking Josephine with me when she was younger to help sort our green, brown and clear glass, as well as to separate our cardboard from our paper. She particularly enjoyed heaving our garbage bags into the pit from whence it ultimately gets transferred to places unknown – at least to me.

But the highlight of our trips to the dump, and for me the highlight of every trip to Lopez, is stopping in at the “Take It Or Leave It.” This is where the islanders leave their items that they can’t quite bear to throw away without at least giving them a chance at a new life in a new home. I’ve written before about my bag lady tendencies, a compulsion I did not have prior to becoming a preschool teacher, and this is one of the best places to get my fix. Not only have I found tons of great stuff for the preschool, but there are almost always other people to talk with, both local and from out-of-town, just hanging out with the junk.

One time I lucked upon this incredible find:

The guy who dropped it off was actually still there (or maybe there again) and he showed me how to assemble it. The San Juans attract their share of self-sufficiency types and he was one of them, having originally acquired this hand wheat grinder as part of his mission to own the production of his own bread, from the planting to the eating, without even the introduction of electricity into the process. He confessed that he gave up on the wheat grinder after only one loaf of bread, saying, “It’s too damn much work.” And by the look of his hands, I could tell he knew from work.

This naturally makes the hand wheat grinder a perfect appliance for a preschool classroom with dozens of willing hands and energy to burn. We fill our sensory table with hard, red wheat berries, attach the grinder to the side of the table, and let the kids go to town.

Perhaps my most useful acquisition is this interesting tool:

I’m not sure what it’s called, but a parent once told me it’s a tool used by mechanics to retrieve other tools that they’ve accidentally dropped into a hard-to-reach part of an engine. You squeeze the spring end like this,

I mainly included this photo to show that my 

fingernails are sometimes clean

which opens these surprisingly powerful claws:

Look, it can easily handle this newborn sized doll:

Last week we learned that it can pick up a caution cone. The kids cheered when I did it.

The practical uses of such a tool in a preschool need hardly be detailed. Two-year-olds in particular are notorious for trying the experiment of dropping objects into the gap between furniture and the wall or the floor. I especially love when something finds itself in the narrow gap between our loft and the wall. Since the sides of the loft have Plexiglas inserts we can all see the item, but can’t hope to reach it without the help of what we’ve come to call “The Tool.” Once every few weeks children will come up to me with furrowed brows saying, “We need The Tool. We need The Tool.” I first demonstrate how the tool works, then with a gang of kids watching through the clear panel, we fish out the lost object. Last week it was a bunch of chiffon scarves that a 2-year-old had shoved down there the day before (the older kids know that it’s against the rules to drop things from the loft, but the 2’s are still learning). I felt like a magician pulling them out one by one.

I once found a large bag of these objects at the “Take It Or Leave It”:

I’m not a gun person, but someone at the dump told me that these are used for loading shot into a shotgun. I hope this is true because we’ve learned to turn them into flowers:

The Bravest Child I Know

Today I want you to read a story about my student and friend, Alex. She is the bravest child I know. Please head over to her mother’s blog, Crumbs & Quibbles. You’ll come back here with a full heart. I promise.

Alex is one of those siblings who have been visiting our classroom since she was a baby. On her first day of school last year, as a 2-year-old, her mother Maya brought her in early to train me on how to re-insert her prosthetic eye should it come out during class. Apparently, there had been some episodes of her removing it in anger and tossing it across the room. Maya wanted me to be able to handle it so that it wouldn’t “freak out the other kids or parents.”

Alex lay on the floor that morning, so still, as I fumbled around with her eye, demonstrating a patience and fortitude far beyond her years. Her calmness put me to shame and I’ve looked up to her ever since.

On her feet Alex knows who she is, loves her friends and is often found right in the middle of the action. At the same time she has no problem turning to one of them and saying very clearly, “I want to play by myself.” There’s a confidence in her, perhaps forged in adversity, perhaps taught by Maya and Jon, perhaps an aspect of her inborn nature, but probably a combination of all three, that inspires me every day I get to be with her.

That said, I rarely think of her eye and the cancer that took it, because on a day-to-day basis it just doesn’t come up. I try to stay conscious of her limited peripheral vision and the need to keep her good eye protected, but she actually requires far less attention than most of the other kids. She’s there to play and gets right to it.

This is Alex wearing her superhero cape at the hospital

Maya and Jon were already incredible parents by any standard, but the grace and humor with which they’ve handled adversity is almost as inspiring as Alex’s own. I’m honored they let me be part of their lives.

Alex wears glasses, not to aid her eyesight, but as protection. Last week we were dancing the hokey pokey, the children taking turns picking the next body part to put in and take out. We did all the usual appendages including tummy and bottom, when someone suggested eyes. I’ve always made the kids laugh by taking my own glasses off and on in place of my eyes. As we finished the verse I spotted Alex. She was putting her own glasses back on, still beaming about the visual joke we'd told together. I was suddenly so full of joy that I just about cried right there in the middle of the song.

When I grow up I’m going to be just like Alex. If you haven’t yet, go read about her now.

Babies

Babies happen around the preschool. We’re a little lighter than usual this year on the pregnant mommy/infant front, but there are still at least twenty younger siblings popping in and out of our classroom this year, both on their own two wobbly legs as well as in vitro. It’s not uncommon for a third of the moms in our Pre-3 class to be pregnant at the same time. I’ve often said, “I assume that all ya’ll are pregnant. Just let me know when you’re not.”

It’s life-affirming to be surrounded by all this fertility.

That said, I’m not a true baby enthusiast. They’re cute and perfect and sweet and wonderful, of course, but I get far more interested in them once they start to walk and talk. At the same time there is nothing I enjoy more than talking to preschoolers about their new babies.

Some of them are proud. Charlie M. announced his new baby to me even before his parents did by saying, “I a big brother now.” I swear his chest was puffed up as he said it.

Last year, Ella wasn’t quite as sure about her new sister, finally dismissing me with, “Whatever!” when I pressed her too far.

Cora’s baby is only a few days old as I write this and she’s already quite expert. According to her, the baby cannot walk or talk yet, but he can sleep, cry, poop, and drink milk.

I can almost always tell when little brother or sister starts to crawl, often to the day, simply by the behavior of their older siblings in class. That’s because mobility means that baby can get into the big kid’s stuff. This is particularly evident in the case of formerly single kids, who have never before had to “defend” their possessions. It almost always comes into the classroom in the form of hoarding or guarding toys, and over-reacting to the encroachments of others.

Some children really get into describing how they, as big kids, are superior to babies in every way. I like to use this attitude as a jumping off point for looking back at our own lives and talking about all the things we can do that babies can’t. It is truly amazing, even when the retrospective only covers 2 or 3 years, how far they’ve come, and once they have a baby in their lives they can really see it. Big kids can walk, talk, eat food, go to school, play with toys, be gentle, ride bikes, sing songs, paint . . . the list is endless.

We have several “baby” songs we sing at circle time, but I’m particularly fond of this Bev Bos version of the Sally Rogers song Circle Of The Sun:

A baby is born in the circle of the sun,
In the circle of the sun
On a birthin’ day.
Clouds to the north
Clouds to the south
Wind and the rain
To the east and the west.
A baby is born in the circle of the sun
In the circle of the sun
On a birthin’ day.

I then ask, “What is something a baby needs to learn?” and the children raise their hands to suggest things a baby needs to learn. We then make those suggestions into new verses:

A baby learns to walk in the circle of the sun
In the circle of the sun
On a walking day . . .

A baby learns to eat in the circle of the sun
In the circle of the sun
On an eating day . . .

A baby learns to ride bikes in the circle of the sun
In the circle of the sun
On an bike riding day . . .

And while it’s true that I find myself mostly interested in babies as viewed through the eyes of their big brothers and sisters, I did come across this movie trailer over at Urban Preschool that I wanted to share with you:

And even though it’s about babies, I can’t wait to see it.

The Art Parent

During our free-play time at Woodland Park, there is an adult assigned to each of our stations -- blocks, sensory table, drama, table toys, snack, and art – for which they are responsible on a rotating basis. This means that each parent gets several turns as “art parent.”

Some of them don’t hear the score of a horror movie in the background each time the words “art parent” are mentioned, but some do. You see, I have something of a reputation for favoring messy art, which isn’t entirely undeserved, but is mostly based on 3-4 projects each year that get totally out of control.

Many of the parents dread walking into the classroom on their “art parent” day fearing that they'll find they’re responsible for something like fly swatter painting.

We probably reached our high-water mark for messiness a few years ago when Discount School Supply accidentally included 2 extra gallons of red tempura paint in our order. I phoned them about it, and the guy I talked to said, “Just keep them.” Coincidentally, this happened during a week of erupting our volcano so I thought it would be fun to use this windfall of red paint for some sort of volcano-related art. This translated into turning our art table upside down and dumping 2 gallons of red paint into it, call it “hot lava,” then setting a 2X4 balance beam across it. The stated idea was to cross the beam without falling into the lava, but of course, it didn’t take long to understand that falling was where the real fun was. We’d spread butcher paper around the lava pit to capture their footprints. It was a slimy, slippery, painty mess that, frankly, looked very much like the scene of a mob hit.

I think we may have matched that high point again yesterday. We’ve had a very exciting construction site set up in our block area this week and I wanted to extend that play into art. As I rummaged around in the workroom for ideas, I came across an extra jug of purple paint, which probably made yesterday’s art parent, Jaimee, have horrible thoughts about me via the kind of bad-news-travels-fast ESP that notifies parents of teenagers when their child’s been in a car accident.

I removed the art table altogether and replaced it with a tarp, upon which was unfurled a length of butcher paper. The paint went into a tub large enough to accommodate our large Tonka diggers. The idea was to make tracks on the paper. But this seemed like too much of a one trick pony, so I also broke out our rubber mallets, which could be used for “hammer painting.”

Jaimee is an experienced Woodland Park parent, not to mention our chairperson, and arrived dressed for mess. She’s also a teacher so she knew at a glance what she was getting into. I’d provided a chair for the adult, but she just took up a spot on the floor and got to hammering. One of our first casualties was Isak who was sitting with his back to the art table, several feet away, minding his own business, working on a puzzle, when he got splattered. He didn’t notice, but I’m sure his mom wondered how it happened when she picked him up – I’m sure it was dry by the time he sat in the car, right? But Isak was by no means the only, or most, paint besmirched kid yesterday. The surrounding walls and cabinetry took their share of damage as well.

And, of course, there was Jaimee herself who managed the diddly-o-dandy out of that station. She saved a couple of terrific pieces covered in tire tracks and hammer splats (which I forgot to take pictures of), then just kept breaking out fresh paper as we got into straight-to-the-recycling-bin mode. By the end of our day, as so often happens with super messy art, it had evolved into a crazy game of finger painting with Ella, Josephine, Katherine and Annabelle right in the midst of the action.

Here’s what it looked like by clean up time:

This photo really doesn’t even do it justice. The perimeter of purple footprints covered a good quarter of our classroom floor and at least half of the kids. Not to mention Jaimee, who, I might add, looks fabulous in purple.

We spent a significant part of our Circle Time discussing what we thought the cleaning solution smelled like as Jaimee mopped up.

I don’t know how other teachers do it without the daily support of their student’s parents, especially good sports like Jaimee who just dive right in and make the best out of Teacher Tom’s half-baked ideas. I’m fully aware that this could have been a disaster without her. Instead it was a memorable art experience for everyone. I know I don’t always show my gratitude enough, especially in the moment, but our Woodland Park parent community warms my heart every bit as much as the kids. It meant a lot to me yesterday when I stood surveying the damage with Jaimee and she just looked at me and said, “It’s okay,” reading my mind.

I’ll make sure not to do fly swatter painting the next time it’s her turn as “art parent.” I promise.

The Policy Of Inclusion

Our parent educator and I have had an ongoing, friendly and public, dispute over class size for the past couple years. She wants us down to 18 kids, while I feel that 24 is the right size for the 3-5 class. She claims that “best practices” dictate a smaller class, while I take the position that as a cooperative, in which we add an assistant teacher (in the form of a parent) to the classroom for every 3 kids, we’re a different kind of animal from a typical preschool class with 1-2 teachers and 18 children.

If there has been an ongoing sore spot at Woodland Park during my tenure, it’s been the 3-5 class enrollment policy. Legally, our Pre-3’s and 3-5’s classes are separate schools, each wholly owned by the parents who enroll their children for that school year. The two schools share a space, share a teacher, and work together under the auspices of a “joint operating agreement.” So in spite of the legal separation, in practice we operate very much like a single, 3-year preschool program.

As part of this relationship, the 3-5’s class has for decades given priority to the Pre-3’s families when I comes to enrollment. The problem was that we typically had only 10-12 spots available for a potential pool of 20+ Pre-3 families, which lead to a lottery in which some members of our community were “rejected” each year. When I was a freshman teacher, my board found this distasteful and rewrote our by-laws to say that all Pre-3 families who wanted a spot got one, regardless of class size.

I know, crazy, right? But what a beautiful thing as well. The discussion among the board, and then the larger parent population, centered on the notion that we were in the business of creating a strong, inclusive community for our children, and arbitrarily kicking people out of that community based on the luck of the draw didn’t contribute to that.

We understood that there was the potential – albeit unlikely – that this policy would lead to a day in which we enrolled 30+ kids, the prospects of which seemed daunting, but when it went to a vote, the policy passed unanimously. Imagine that. It took an incredible leap of faith by an entire community to make that decision.

Our first spring enrollment period under this policy lead to a roster of 28 families. Ulp! We comforted ourselves with the idea that there would be some attrition over the summer and sure enough, by the time we opened our doors in the fall, we were down to a very serviceable 22. The following year we enrolled 30 (not so unlikely as it turned out) then dropped to 23. The next year we were up to 31, but started the year with 24. (It was this experience that lead me to conclude that this was a perfect size for our class for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here.) Since then we’ve had classes of 22-23.

I know from talking to other co-op teachers and parents that all of the schools in our system incur a certain amount of roster shrinkage every summer, no matter what the enrollment policy, so some of what we’ve experienced is just the nature of the beast, but I have to assume that 2-4 families every year are scared off by the prospects of a huge class. Only two families over the past 8 years have cited this as a reason for withdrawal, but it’s likely that there have been some who haven’t elected to provide their full reason. Still, they’re choosing to leave the community, rather than being excluded by a lottery, and I have to believe that this is a healthier situation.

On the other end of things, however, we know that every family in our school, no matter how big our enrollment, has chosen to stay, eyes wide open. This tells me that even if we did one year wind up with 30 kids and had to implement our over-enrollment plan, it would be with a fully supportive, committed community of families who will do whatever it takes to make it work. If we had 30 children in class, we would also have 11 adults in the room working as my assistants. Yes, we would likely have to bust out of our little classroom and start using our gym as part of our free-play time, but I see opportunities there for incorporating more large motor activities into our mornings. There would be issues and challenges we can’t foresee right now, I’m sure, but I have every confidence we would put together an incredible year for our kids.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that a small part of me kind of wishes for this to happen. I would love to see how we make it work. It might very well turn out to be something we never want to do again, but there’s no way it would be a disaster, not with our community. We would put together an incredible year for our kids come hell or high water.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that first board, with its chair Laura B. and the geographer who has become my colleague Teacher Aaron. In many ways it is their visionary policy of inclusion that is the heart of the educational community we are today.

***************

And because yesterday I promised photos of our volcano, here they are:

You'll notice that the green paint has been washed off our cotton ball "trees" over the years and that they've been dyed orange by the lava, but it's still a functioning volcano.

The Glue Table

There is a short list of items every teacher considers essential to running his preschool classroom and on mine, right near the top, is white glue – gallons of the stuff. Typically we order 6 gallons to start the year, knowing that we’ll likely have to place a second order sometime around late winter.

While most of us think of glue as a means to an artistic end, un-indoctrinated preschoolers approach white glue as an art medium all by itself (much the way they do tape). We do dozens of collage projects in class using all sorts of exciting materials (e.g., carpet squares, feathers, spare marker caps, small metal parts from machines we’ve disemboweled) but inevitably there are a half-dozen or more finished pieces that are nothing more than a pool of glue overrunning a piece of cardboard. Usually, these pieces are stuck so firmly to our drying shelves that I have to use a screwdriver to pry them off. Often they’ve dripped through onto the art of others. Sometimes they take the whole week to fully dry.

Man, that drove me crazy as a beginning teacher. “Don’t you want to put something in all that glue?” I’d ask, but as I’ve learned to give up my agenda in favor of the children’s, I’ve just started ordering more glue. And why not? As an art medium it costs less than half of what tempura paint costs, and while clean up is a bit more of a challenge than paint, it’s still water soluble, at least while it’s wet. Where I once saw waste, I now see beauty.

And it’s the greatest beauty of all; it’s that look of meditation or concentration that settles over the face of a child as she systematically empties bottle after bottle of glue onto a target of some kind. It's clearly a scientific exploration into the physics of viscosity, gravity, and squirt bottles. Or maybe it's part of a spiritual journey, judging from the look of tranquility on some of their faces. It doesn't really matter. All I know is that some kids are driven to it and far be it from me to tell them when to stop. I love how earnestly they hold up their empty bottle to declare, “I need more glue.” And I love even more that we hand him another full bottle. An adult could stand there over a child’s shoulder, I suppose, and give instructions on the “proper” use of glue, stopping him after those few essential drops, but I’ve found it far more satisfying to just let kids get there on their own – and they always do, eventually.

But first we have to let them get it out of their systems. One way we do this are our ongoing group, glue collage projects. Parents have come to refer to this as the “glue table,” although it is technically our Do-It-Yourself Table. I have an enormous collection of what was formerly referred to as garbage that we use for these projects. Here is one we are working on right now:

We’ve been adding to this piece since the second week of school; not every day, but frequently enough that the glue bottle emptiers among us are getting their fill. As you can see, we’ve decided to start adding glitter – you know, for the holidays – and it will take a ton of glue if we’re going to encase the whole thing.

We usually keep these projects around for several months, bringing them out until they attract no customers, then they get pitched. Although, here’s one that’s been hanging on our wall for the last 3 years:

That particular class of kids really grew to treasure their group project and were one day talking about wanting to paint the whole thing gold. That evening I gave it a coat of metallic gold spray paint and put it by the front door for the kids to see as they entered. As they arrived, each and every one of them said, “Look mom! It turned gold!”

(Note: Many of you have asked for a photo of our volcano. I'll try to remember to take one today and post it here tomorrow.)