Girls V. Boys

We recently experienced an outbreak of girl v. boy rivalry in our 3-5's class. There's always a little testing out of exclusionary play of the "no boys" or "no girls" variety, but this was on another level involving a group of boys collecting at the top of the concrete slide chanting, "Boy Scouts! Boy Scouts!" while a group of girls gathered in our playhouse answering back, "Girl Scouts! Girl Scouts!" The game included the girls making occasional forays up into the boy's area while being verbally pummeled by the chant, followed by the boys braving the playhouse to the same effect.

The game featured intense expressions and taut body language, so I kept an eye on things, checking in with the kids. I said things like, "You look angry. It makes me think you don't like this game," but was more or less shooed away while being assured the game was "fun," so I stepped back, staying close in case things turned physical or verbally abusive. These are kids who have known one another for a long time, played well together, even visited one another's homes. As I watched this game that was so unsavory to me play out, however, I was impressed by how responsible they were. I mean, they weren't hurling insults, just chanting statements of gender solidarity. There was all kinds of aggressive posturing from both sides, but no pushing, hitting, or even impeding going on. I would have appreciated a smile every now and then, some evidence they were actually having the fun they insisted they were having, but none of them broke character, just as none of them seemed inclined to leave the game.

I'm pretty sure there were times in my past as a teacher when I would have barged in to scuttle the game, letting my adult judgement of things rule the day, probably pushing it underground, sending the message that certain thoughts and themes are "bad." I'm glad I've learned to be slow to react, to dig in first and try to see events though the eyes of the kids, which, after all is the perspective that matters most. It's their play. It's their experience. It's their education. After a couple of days, they moved on to other things, apparently having learned what they needed to learn, the girls and boys remixing as usual. 

Adult knowledge and understanding is a great thing, but it's not the only way to view the world, let alone the correct way.

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Real Math

Not long ago, we made our own paint by mixing liquid water color with water and corn starch. Around the internet, this is often referred to as something like "chalk paint" because it dries into a kind of powdery pastel color and washes off with the next rain, which in Seattle is any minute now. You can find "proper" proportions and "recipes," but the way we do it is to start each kid off with the color of her choice in a small mortar, to which the she adds however much water and corn starch she wants, then employs the pestle to mash it all together.

Some kids wind up with a paste, others with more of a soup. We then help them move their emulsion into a baby food jar, hand them a brush, and send them off to pretty much paint whatever they want in our outdoor classroom.

We've been doing it on our workbench because it's a classic tinkering project, one that brings kids back again and again and again, each time mixing new colors and textures of paint. Frankly, it seems we could do this activity every day without ever running out of customers.

It's such a simple thing, but it hits a sweet spot for kids, one that involves a step-by-step process, yet allows for endless experimentation, has no wrong answers, and is directly applicable to the children's lives.

As I took part yesterday in a Twitter party in my role as a Math Mentor for PBSKids.com (#PBSKIDSAddsUp), I found myself, as I often do when considering how we teach math to young children, thinking about applicability.

One of the most common gripes about math, especially about math homework, is "When am I ever going to need this stuff?" It's a question we asked when I was a boy. It's a question children asked long before my time, and it's a question kids still ask today. Of course, the answer I got back then was one that made me feel like it was a stupid question.

After all, from an adult perspective things like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are manifestly useful, directly and practically applicable to our daily lives. And beyond that we know that math learning is more than mere calculation. In a broader sense, it's about using reason to discover immutable truths, forming the foundation of logical thinking. A professor once introduced his course to a group of us non-math majors by encouraging us to think of it as a "philosophy class," which was a stroke of genius when talking to young adults, just on their own in the world, and in the process of questioning everything. That was applicable.

You see, the stuff we so often call math -- the numbers on paper, the flash cards, the worksheets -- those are abstractions from the concrete world in which children operate. "Real math" is something we do with our hands, with our bodies, and it always applies to our real lives. The sequence of measuring out ingredients, then combining them with a mortar and pestle, then transferring them to a jar, and, finally, using a paint brush to apply our creation to the playhouse, a drum head, or the sandpit mailbox, is what I call "real math."

We have plenty of time to figure out how this all works on paper, but today we're really learning it, internalizing the concepts, making "mistakes" with them, and truly coming to an understanding of how they apply, so that when we do finally come across those algorithms, they aren't just ciphers to manipulate, but rather a new way to communicate something we already understand; not just as an abstraction, but as it applies to our lives.

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Choosing To Taking Turns

A few years back our 3-5's class went on a field trip to a local post office. The woman leading the tour kept asking the children to "form a line" and follow her from place to place. It was a knee-jerk reaction on her part because, quite frankly, the facility was compact, making this sort of crowd control technique entirely unnecessary. It was frustrating for her and confusing for the kids. I suppose some might argue marching around in single file is a way to teach a kind of discipline, but this isn't something we do at Woodland Park, although with the right motivation, meaning when it's necessary, we can manage the queuing up part with the best of them.

In a world of limited resources, and preschool classrooms are certainly that, there is a necessity for figuring out a way to make things fair. Taking turns is one of the key ways we do that. I don't exactly set out to teach the kids to line up, but it always emerges when the time comes. I'm not saying it's something the kids naturally do, exactly, but enough of them typically do have the instinct, or the experience from other places (like dance classes or sports teams), that usually all we need to do is introduce the "limited resource" and the kids fall into a kind of self-managed line.

For instance, a couple weeks ago, we put a large chunk of wood in a shallow cardboard box, then invited the kids to climb atop our super sturdy art crate, one that was designed specifically to transport a sculpture by the great artist Alexander Calder, a perch from which they poured cups of tempera paint mixed with white glue, one at a time, over the top, a "tall paintings" technique pioneered, coincidentally, by Calder's grandson Holton Rower. (For details on how we did our version, click the link.)

At first, the project only had a few takers, early adopters who were willing to give up on their other outdoor activities to take a moment to pour their paint from on high, but as the first followers began to catch on, the challenges of limited resources began to show themselves. I thought of that poor woman at the post office as, with only a little coaching from the adults, the kids lined right up, one behind the other, talking among themselves about such important concepts as "no cutting" and "move forward" and "you're next," self managing the fairness of the process because figuring out a way to take turns was necessary. When someone tried to barge to the front of the line or take more than one turn, the others would point out, "That's not fair!"

When we're infants our needs are few and, unless we're very unlucky, such things as food, clothing, shelter, and human touch are plentiful. If they're not, that's a sign of gross unfairness that shouldn't exist in any civilized society, let alone a democracy. As we get older, however, and desires beyond our fundamental needs come into play, resources tend to become limited. How we share those resources is one of the central questions in any society. Preschoolers in our democratic preschool chose to take turns.

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The Fantastic Adventures We Shared

There's always sadness mixed into this time of year; the melancholy of approaching the end of the school year, knowing that some of these kids, these families, many of whom I've known for 3 or more years (in some cases many more) are moving on. I take comfort, of course, in knowing that every year, most of the kids are returning or that younger siblings will guarantee I stay in touch, but there are always a few of them I'll never see again.

It's in the nature of being a teacher to be a rock in the stream, standing in one place while the river races by, tumbling over and around you, shaping you while you're shaping it.

We start our final parent meetings by going around the circle remembering, reflecting on the year, what our children learned and what we, the adults, learned as well. There were some tears, as there ought to be, and we laugh a lot too, especially when thinking back to who we all were back then and comparing that to who we are now.

One of the themes of Thomas Mann's greatest novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) is the passage of time: how when one lives life "horizontally" (reflectively, disengaged, in repose) the time may seem long as you live it, passing slowly, yet when you look back, you see a largely empty blur of sameness that, in fact, passed in flash. When, on the other hand, you live "vertically" (active, engaged, moving forward) the time passes in a flash as you live it, yet seems impossibly rich, full and long in retrospect. As we pass the hopes and dreams torch around our little circles, I can't help but recognize that we've definitely lived a vertical year together. September was just yesterday, but from the perspective of May, I can't believe all that we've been through together. How could we possibly have done all that?

I may, on another day, wind up pulling out some purple-tinted prose to finish writing a sappy piece about all of this, but what I mainly want to do is bask on the best and most concrete reward of being a teacher in this community: the kind words and acts of appreciation that come my way as we wind down for the year. I've had a few other jobs over my half century -- baseball coach, salesman, junior businessman, writer -- none of which provide, like teaching does, this natural, emotional, even cathartic moment in May when we're all still together, but knowing the time is short. 

I'm looking forward to summer, but I'm also clinging to these people and their children for a few more days; and I know I'm not the only one who looks forward to the future, but wishes that the next week and a half would pass as slowly as it passed for Hans Castorp as he lay, horizontal, in his sanatorium bed running the mildest of fevers. But that isn't who we are. We are always vertical together and it will be behind us the next we blink. But oh it will be a time to look back upon and think what fantastic adventures we shared.

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Working Puzzles

I have a love-hate relationship with puzzles in our classroom. On the one hand I'm very pro-puzzle: I might not be the world's most avid puzzler, but I've always enjoyed the intellectual challenge. On the other hand, the way our classroom is set up, more often than not, when there are puzzles out, if I turn my back for a second, I return to find them dumped out on the floor or table top, pieces neglected and scattered, uninviting to even the children most apt to take them up. 

Puzzles live in a kind of strange place at Woodland Park where we don't obsess over "the right way" and where making mistakes stands at the core of our curriculum. There is, after all, a right way to assemble a puzzle. Or rather, there is a correct answer that may be reached by many different paths, but ultimately everyone produces the same result. And I suppose that's why some kids find puzzles so frustrating. I reckon that's why, every time we're playing with the puzzles, there are some who can't bear to walk past without dumping or otherwise making a mess of them before walking way. Maybe it's like a sort of statement of, "Screw you" or a "You're not the boss of me!"

Another dynamic at work, I think, is that puzzles, at least for me, tend to be a kind of solitary activity and our school is essentially a social place. I've seen a lot of kids look longingly at a puzzle, apparently attracted to the picture and the challenge, kids whose parents report will work puzzles for hours at home, but who just walk on by in the classroom, drawn away by the more social prospects of dramatic play or a group art project.

So we have those things working against us every time puzzles make an appearance. 

I go through flurries of trying to figure out how to make puzzles work in our classroom and every time my conclusion is that there needs to be an adult there, not to help the kids assemble the puzzles exactly, but to help make it a social, cooperative, goal-oriented activity. And maybe that's the nature of some goal-oriented activities, to need a kind of leader or guide willing and able to hold the big picture in mind as everyone else works on the details. One of Woodland Park's most glorious puzzling days was a few years back when master-puzzler Sasha took charge of a group of older boys, guiding them step-by-step through the assembly of a large, complicated floor puzzle, a project that engaged a half dozen kids for at least a half hour.

What Sasha did so brilliantly was to start by getting her team to buy into her strategy, which involved, first studying the picture on the box, then turning all the pieces face up so you could see them. She then had them start with the most prominent feature in the picture and work outward from there, the opposite of the usual adult strategy of looking for corners, then edges, in a process of building toward the center. 

I'd noticed that with my own daughter, who was never a big time puzzler. If she was going to tackle a puzzle it was because there was something at the heart of the finished puzzle that attracted her -- a princess, a butterfly, something -- and that's where she always wanted to start. This is the approach I've been using with Woodland Park's puzzlers: doing my best Sasha impression.

I start by looking at the box or fully assembled puzzle and declaring something like, "I'm going to work on this T-Rex," to no one in particular. This will typically draw-in at least one kid, which is enough to get going. "First we need to find all the T-Rex pieces." Switching from "I" to "we" is my invitation for others to join me. I begin by turning all the pieces over so we can see them, while the kids help me hunt for pieces that seem to go with the T-Rex. I try to maintain a steady banter, keeping our immediate goal in front of us -- in this example the T-Rex. 

We'll usually start attracting other children, some who just want to watch. Others join in. And some decide to go to work on their own part of the puzzle. "I'm going to make the triceratops." "I'm collecting sky pieces." As new children arrive on the scene, I give them an update on what we're doing: "Audrey's working on the T-Rex," "Luca's making the triceratops," "Mason's collecting sky pieces," each comment an invitation to drop to your knees and join us.

Some useful statements I learned from Sasha are: "If you sit on the puzzle you'll break it," and "Okay, everybody stand up. Somebody must be sitting on a piece."

Naturally, there are still many kids who continue to look upon our efforts with disdain. And there are some who are clearly itching to reduce our efforts to smithereens. That's another reason I stay nearby, to  protect our efforts by serving as an reminder of self-control, and by assuring these kids that clean up time will come: if they just have a little patience, they will ultimately have their day.

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When Someone Needs A Rescue

He was having a prickly day. Things were not going his way. He'd been in tears or enraged several times already, the toys with which he wanted to play were already being used, the other kids weren't doing what he wanted them to do, and the adults were failing in their attempts to make it all better.

He sulked up to the swings where he could be alone, hanging limply in one of them, using his feet to get a little momentum going, but without vigor.

I'd made various forays in pursuit of bucking him up: a hand on his back; chit-chat about the makes and models of cars, his hobby; an inside joke. I'd managed to get him to smile a couple times, to lean into me, to take me up on my offers of friendship, but we already like each other so it might have just been out of politeness. Right now, as he swung, I was keeping my distance, watching him deal with his prickly day in his own way.

After a few minutes of just hanging there, he tossed back his head and without volume or urgency, to no one at all, called, "Help."

I didn't move, nor did anyone else, and he didn't look around for a response either, lolling his head back to look up into the trees, tugging a little with his arms as if trying to get the swing going like that. Then louder, "Help!"

Still, I was the only one who heard him. The other adults were busy in other parts of the outdoor classroom. His closest friends were engaged in canal building in the lower half of our sand pit, an activity that for them usually involves lots of shouting out to one another, which makes it hard to hear cries of help from all the way at the top of the hill.

"Help! Help! Help!"

As his cry became more insistent I moved closer. I said, "You're calling for help."

"I want someone to push me." He wasn't asking me to do it. All the kids know I don't push kids in swings.

I nodded, "Like those kids over there?"

Sourly, "I don't care. I just want someone to push." Then, "Help!"

"I think you'll have to be louder."

"Help!"

That's when someone other than me finally heard him. 

"Oh no, someone needs a rescue!"

"Who is it?"

"To the swings!"

Most of the kids dropped their shovels as they swarmed in pursuit of his cries, "Help!"

Once there, they didn't need to be told what he needed. They got to work, helpers in a crisis, pushing their classmate who was now grinning ear-to-ear, still saying "Help," but with a laugh, the first I'd heard from him all day.

After awhile of being twisted, turned, pushed and pulled, all of which delighted him, he said, "Okay, okay, that's enough." When the kids ran back to their canal digging project, he ran with them.

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Where We Actually Live Our Lives

I was raised as a Lutheran, the original Protestants. When I came home from my public school talking about evolution, my devout mother said, "Isn't it incredible that this is how God chose to create the world?" In other words, I grew up in a family in which religion and science went hand-in-hand, one a living proof of the other. Facts, logic, and reason were the language of God, and each new revelation made by science was a new revelation about God's creation. This is how I've lived most of my life, blissfully unaware that there were cults taking the view that science was somehow in opposition to their Christian-ist beliefs.

These are fundamentalists. Every faith has fundamentalists, and in every case these are the dangerous believers. Fundamentalists commit acts of terrorism. Fundamentalists view non-believers as sub-human, heathen, infidel. Fundamentalists have no faith in a living god, but rather in a literal reading of dry ancient words interpreted for them by pastors, priests, and imams, which is how it comes about that they deny science: their version of god stopped speaking 2000 years ago.

Oh, I understand that I'm walking into a brier patch here, one in which I'm certain to be bloodied by the thorns of religion and politics, but damn it, every time I look for trouble in the world I seem to find a fundamentalist of some sort at the bottom of it. Every time. Jesus Christ was absolutely not a fundamentalist. Martin Luther was absolutely not a fundamentalist. They were both true, lower-case protestants: men who stood against the entrenched fundamentalism of their time. 

So why write about this here? Why today?

I suppose it's because of this 4th grade "science" quiz that has gone viral:

And here's the second page:

When I first saw this, I thought it must be a hoax, but Snope.com has confirmed its authenticity. This is actually what children are being taught at the Blue Ridge Christian Academy in South Carolina. Apparently, according to Snopes, this quiz is based upon a curriculum developed by the same folks who brought us the anti-science "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. Now, this is a private school, of course, and people are entitled in a private school to teach their children anything they want, even if it's pure religious indoctrination, but increasingly these schools are receiving public money via charters and vouchers, making them part of our public educational system, and that makes it all of our business.

I don't know anything specifically about the Blue Ridge Christian Academy, but the state of Louisiana recently expanded the number of students attending these so-called Christian schools on the public dime. According to Reuters:

The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition . . . The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding . . . At Eternity Christian Academy first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution . . . "We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said . . . Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

The courts have ruled the state's voucher funding mechanism to be illegal, but the state is moving forward with it anyway. And Louisiana isn't the only state actively seeking to inject religious training into public education. Public schools across the country, but mainly in the south, are actively teaching this kind of anti-science curriculum. If you want your children to learn this bunk, then Sunday school is the place for it. The purpose of public education in a democracy is so that we have a well-educated population, capable of self-governance. This type of fundamentalist theocratic education does the opposite.

I shake my head for these poor children who will grow up to be laughed at by the rest of the world, but also for our own children who will be forced to contend with an ever-expanding know-nothing electorate in the already challenging job of self-governance. Democracy requires a population of critical thinkers, people with the intellectual flexibility to come to agreements with those with whom one disagrees on public matters. Private morality is the business of the individual, but public morality belongs to all of us and must always emerge from compromise. Compromise is impossible with fundamentalists.

Fundamentalists will always be with us, of course, always out there as a threat to peace and prosperity, but our public schools cannot be in the business of intentionally creating them. That, at its core, is anti-democratic, anti-American, and frankly, anti-religion because it puts government directly in the church's business, the reason the devout James Madison gave for his own insistence on a separation of church and state.

The ultimate danger of a fundamentalist of any kind lies in his dogmatic inflexibility: what he believes yesterday is the same as what he believes tomorrow no matter what happens today. But what those of us who don't deny science know is that what happens today always matters: that's where we actually live our lives.

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!

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