Everything Human Must Be Maintained

We’re in New York City right now, here to celebrate our daughter’s graduation from college. The city has become a sort of second home for my wife and me these past few years as we’ve regularly visited our girl, and I expect that won’t change as her plans are to continue living here for the time being pursuing her career in the theater.

Yesterday morning I met my parents, who are also here for the ceremonies, at Vessel, a recently completed landmark building/work of art constructed as the centerpiece of the Hudson Yard redevelopment. It’s a new, shiny thing, a feat of human creativity and industriousness, and whatever you think of its artistic merits, there is no doubt that it stands, like the rest of this city, as a bold statement about things we human beings can do.

After taking our photos, we walked back into the city, dodging our way through the barriers and caution cones that are there to protect we pitiful pedestrians from the massive amount of construction taking place in this area as it revitalizes. It reminded me of my own neighborhood back home in Seattle with its skyline of tower cranes and maze of closed sidewalks. Later on, we walked under some of the ubiquitous scaffolding of NYC, evidence that this or that building was receiving its facelift; roadways were being dug up as crews worked on underground infrastructure; planters were being weeded and watered; sidewalks pressure washed and swept; every block, it seemed, presented at least one temporary obstacle made necessary by the need for something to be repaired or maintained or created anew.

It’s easy to become frustrated, to be brought down a bit by the noise, dust, and ugliness, but, of course, it’s a necessary part of any vital city: everything human must be maintained. And that doesn’t just go for cities. Farms and villages, cars and bicycles, gardens and parks, art and science, indeed anything created by humans carries with it the obligation of maintenance, even including, perhaps especially including, such human things as our relationships, our mental and physical health, and love. Without our constant attention, all of the things we hold most dear begin to erode, to come apart, to fray around the edges, just as the brand new Vessel has already begun to do.

In fact, life is about waking each morning, maintaining, repairing, and improving things, only to arise the following morning to find we have to do it again. It is relentless, which is why we need to find ways to step outside of it, if even for a moment. Meditation, alcohol, video games, reading, or simply spending time in nature (where maintenance is not required), it seems to me, are examples of ways we try to temporarily remove ourselves from the never-ending obligations of maintenance. It occurs to me that this is also one of the blessings of spending our days in the world of young children, humans who have not yet been taught the lessons of maintenance.

It gets to all of us at times, even overwhelms us, but there is none but temporary escape if we are to fully engage this world as humans. A city that is not maintained is one that is dying: an unmaintained life is likewise one that leads to despair no matter how much we wish it otherwise. And so we rise each morning, wrestle life back into shape, then rise the following morning to do it again. It’s true for each of us. Whether to embrace or fight it is up to us.      

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“And They All Got To Be Friends”

To those who weren’t part of the process, it probably looked like nothing much: a bunch of boxes, some children’s drawings, a few stuffed animals. If it wasn’t for the chairs set up in rows and the slightly raised bit of flooring that reads as a stage, few would have known that they were in a theater. 

This stage was set for our play, one our four and five-year-olds have been working on for the better part of five months, starting in January, “writing” it one line at a time. For weeks, I would set myself up at a corner table with a clipboard and pen, taking dictation from whatever children stopped by. Sometimes they worked alone, sometimes in groups, layering their ideas one upon the other, brainstorming, creating plot lines and characters, trying to make one another laugh. Occasionally, they would ask me to read the entire script to them, usually declaring it “too short,” before adding more.

My father-in-law was an English professor and once told me that he preferred Victorian novels over contemporary ones, complaining, “Traditional novels have satisfying plots; modern novels just seem to be one damned thing after another.” This script was definitely of the modern variety, as knights and mermaids and ballerinas and ninjas joined with cats and snow plows and ice skaters and birds to race about, fight, discover, play, defeat bad guys, clear roadways, build robots, adventure, and make friends, while offering the audience three separate all-cast dance parties. 

While the first draft took place around a table, the real “writing” happened as we rehearsed, and boy did we rehearse. This is the 18th time I’ve helped children create a play for their end-of-year celebration and I’ve never had a group so eager to practice, often demanding it when I had other plans, like playing in the sunshine. During the rehearsals, kids would call out to me, “Take that part out!” They would decide to change their character in the middle of a scene. Better ideas replaced the old ideas in the blink of an eye, and my job, as director, was simply to keep up, recording their wishes as accurately as possible.

As we got closer to the end of the school year, and the final form of our show began to come clear, we began to work on our sets and props. So often, when parents come to see their preschoolers perform, this is where the adult hand is most evident, but just as we managed to leave the script and rehearsals to the children, this too was fully a product of their collective creativity. I would say, “We have lots of bad guys in this play, but none of you want to be bad guys. What should we do?” And they responded, “We should draw them with markers.” When I said, “Right now, we’re just pretending there is a castle. Do we need a real one?” They responded, “Let’s build one out of boxes.” And this is how we created, each detail, no matter how small, the product of our collective, creative, dialog.

Word-by-word, character-by-character, set piece-by-set piece, prop-by-prop, and damned thing-by-damned thing, our play came together, and on Tuesday we performed it. It was a delightful, chaotic, mess of a performance, the kind of thing that could have only come from the minds of these children; it was a piece of art that we presented on a stage for an audience at a given time on a given day, but that has already existed for months and will continue to exist far beyond the brief moment when we allowed the wider world a peek of who we have become, together. The final line of this play said it all, “And they all got to be friends.”

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Becoming Wiser, Gentler People

It happened in a flash. He wanted to dump the bowl of "jewels" (florist marbles) that he had collected into the mud. She wanted them to remain clean. He dump the jewels. There were loud voices and when I looked from across the sand pit I saw her push his face, then storm off.

Both children were upset. The boy's mother was nearby and after checking to make sure he wasn't hurt, engaged him in a discussion, so I followed the girl whose body was tense with rage. She marched this way and that for a moment, jaws locked in anger. As I approached, she turned her back on me, so I stopped in my tracks.

What was I going to say to her? Maybe I was going to remind her of the rules we had all agreed to some weeks ago, specifically mentioning the one that goes, "No pushing." I might have been preparing to say something like, "When you pushed his face, you hurt him." She walked slowly away from me, her shoulders hunched forward. When she got to a corner formed by a railing and a random cart that has found its way onto our playground, she knelt on her knees, nose in the corner.

I looked back at the boy who was now chatting easily with his mom as he bent down to the mud handling the jewels he had dumped there.

I didn't say anything to the girl because, frankly, there was nothing to say. Or rather, anything I said would be redundant at best. There was no question that she was already feeling remorse, regretting her action, mulling it over in the quiet of the corner she had found for herself. I stepped away and left her to her conscience. After a couple minutes, she moved herself into a more distant corner, although this time she faced outward, her face a study of sorrow, staring into the ground.

Again, I began contemplating words I might say to her. Maybe I could comment on her emotional state. Or perhaps there was something I could say to help her understand the cause and effect of the affair. But again I realized that anything I said just then would be a mere distraction from the important work she was doing, sitting alone, calming down, and painfully reflecting.

Moments later the boy approached her, hand outstretched. In it was a jewel. He offered it to her saying, "I cleaned this one for you."

She took the jewel and held it in the palm of her hand. The boy shifted from foot to foot as if waiting for her to say something. When she didn't, I softly said, "That was a kind thing to do." He went away then, back to his play. The girl watched him go then looked back at the jewel in her hand, contemplating it for a moment before clutching in her fist. She stayed that way, thinking and feeling, until she was ready to return to her own play. It's from these moments that we become wiser, gentler people.

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Playing With Matches

I could not have been more than six-years-old when my friend Jeff and I "borrowed" a book of matches from his mother, took them to an undeveloped lot in our suburban neighborhood, a place we called "the woods," and practiced first lighting the matches, then setting small fires. We did this over the course of several days, going through many books of matches. We never discussed it with one another, but we obviously knew that it was somehow wrong, hence the hiding amidst the trees and underbrush. These were tiny fires, ones we would only let burn for a minute or two before putting them out. One day, as was inevitable, however, our fire got out of control. Some stray pine needles carried the blaze to larger clumps of tinder and before we knew it we were desperately stamping. It took everything we had to finally catch up with the fire we had started.

I'm inclined to say it was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, but looking back now from the perch of a half-century later, I recognize it simply as a six-year-old thing to do. "Stupid and dangerous" is an adult framing. If you had asked my younger self, I'd have said, "We were playing," which is to say, asking and answering our own questions. Jeff's mother was a smoker and he had learned to strike matches by watching her, a skill he passed on to me. He showed me how to tear one of those cardboard matches from the case, then flick the sulfured tip across the striking surface. When I'd struggled, I figured out how to fold the matchbook cover backwards, allowing me to pinch the match head against the striking surface. Then all it took was a quick jerk and I had a flame. I already knew how to blow a flame out, having done so on candles, but we also found that a quick wave would also do the trick, as would depriving it of air by stepping on it, or, as Jeff had seen his mother do, bravely pinching it out with our bare fingers. We had practiced these things and more for weeks before heading off into the woods to set our fires.

And we definitely learned something about the dangers of fire that day, something far more profound than adult warnings. Indeed, for years, that lesson almost incapacitated me as I recalled the flames spreading beyond our control; the surge of sweaty panic that filled me, the vision of every house in the neighborhood being burned to the ground. It was to the point that one could almost say I had developed a phobia, one that given the experience, could be considered a healthy one. I never "played" with matches again. Even today, more than a half-century removed from that moment, I can still summon up a flash of that terrifying day: I still run spent matches under water for far longer than necessary, I make double, triple, and quadruply sure that my campfires are out, and I can't relax at dinner when my companion uses the table candle light to read the menu.

It's tempting to say we were "lucky" that we didn't burn the neighborhood down, but that wouldn't be entirely true. We had slowly built our skills up over days and weeks, learning how matches worked, how we could control them. When we went to the woods, we were clearly seeking to take our knowledge to the next level and it was our previously developed skills that allowed us to prevent disaster. That day in the woods still stands out as one of the most traumatic of my early life: indeed, I remember it precisely because of the trauma and it is why I can today "document" my learning.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that we turn our preschoolers loose with books of matches, but I do think this story illustrates the sometimes dangerous, even hazardous balance, that we all must find in our quest for knowledge. The children we are raising today will spend virtually their entire existence under the supervision of adults, with little chance of getting their hands on a book of matches, let alone access to the privacy within which to play with them, and that is probably a good thing, but what else won't they get try as we keep them under our forever watchful eyes? It's something worth thinking about.

  

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What Do We Do With All Those Keys?

We have a lot of keys, hundreds of them, collected over many years, both in batches and one at a time. What do we do with all those keys?

"I'm putting red keys in my bowl."

"I'm trying to find black keys."

"Hey, this one has a face."

"I know, let's take turns!"

"Yeah, I'm first!"

"No, I'll be first, you be second, and you be third, and you be fourth, okay?"

"Okay, your turn."

They proceeded to go around the table, each child selecting one key at a time, some doing so with quick assurance, with others taking their time, hunting for just the perfect one as their friends waited patiently, anticipating their next turn or studying their own collections. As the game went round and round the table, others joined them. Some watched for a while, making a study of the game, before saying, "I want a turn." Others started with the question, "What are you playing?" or the statement, "I want to play."

Room was made, more bowls were found, the key game continued round and round. Every now and then, controversy arose. 

Some of the keys are connected by key rings, forming bundles of keys. Did they count as one key or too many to take on a single turn? If someone walks away, do their keys stay in their bowl or get returned to the common pile? 

"Hey, you took a golden key! I'm collecting goldens."

"It's not your turn."

"I don't have enough keys."

But more often, as the game progressed, the children began to work cooperatively rather than competitively. If a child had made their collecting strategy clear (reds, blacks, goldens, etc.), their friends made suggestions, saying things like, "I see a big key!" or "This is a beautiful one!" Sometimes they would even offer one from their own collection if they felt it would better fit in that of a friend's. Indeed, the game finally evolved into a trading game with children sharing keys with one another, making the case for why their friend needed this one or that one. Then two girls formed a team, combining their collections into a single bowl. More teams formed, until finally they were all one team, going around the table, each still taking a turn, adding a key to the community bowl until it was overflowing.

What do we do with all those keys? It's different every time.

  

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What It Means To Balance

The kids were balancing along planks that had been set up as bridges between two points. Most of them were managing it just fine, but a few lost their balance and had to jump to the floor. After several minutes of this, one of the kids announced, “If you don’t want to fall, I know how.” He spread his arms out to either side, then began to walk carefully across a plank. “If you hold your arms like this, you won’t fall.”

He had discovered a fact of physics that we all learn in childhood, usually through the trial and error of play. Some day, he may be formally “taught” the concept in a classroom, perhaps including a formula and certainly with some scientific jargon, but since he has this head start, since he already “knows” how it works in real life, it will come much more easily for him.

This is one reason why play in early childhood, and lots of it, is so important. Too often, traditional schools start with the abstractions of algorithm or sentence structure or phonics. Without the sort of underlying understanding that comes from having actually experienced what these things describe in the real world, most children struggle far more than they need to, taking years sometimes to learn things that they could have “learned” in a day or two. No wonder they come to think of school has hard: it tries to teach them things backwards.

If we want our children to grow into well-educated adults, and by that I mean people who actually understand beyond the kind of rote memorization required by traditional schools, they must play, and play a lot. Now, I’m of the mind that this is how we should be learning throughout our lives, but there can be no doubt that when it comes to the early years, play must form the foundation.

Within minutes, arms spread wide, the children followed their friend across the planks, knowing, deeply and with their full bodies, what it means to balance.

  

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Becoming A Community Of Experts

Not long ago, I wrote about releasing the butterflies we raised from caterpillars. What I didn't mention was that we also had front row seats to lady bug larva pupating and praying mantises hatching from their egg cases. As with all things we do around the school, some of the kids were only mildly interested, while others were super excited. And then, there was one boy who was out of his mind with anticipation and joy.

He already had a passion for small critters of all sorts, including insects, spiders, garden molluscs, worms, and anything else one might find on leaves or under rocks, an interest that grew in the place that had previously been occupied by dinosaurs. But our classroom insects seem to have accelerated and amplified things.

Our class begins its day on the playground, but he could do nothing before rushing into the classroom to check on the bugs in their habitats. He took it upon himself to give daily (if not more frequent) reports during circle time on the insects' progress, including his theories about what we could expect in the coming days. He noticed when the pray mantis finally began to hatch within seconds of the emergence of the first one. He wanted to try various kinds of "food" to see what they preferred. His parents read to him at home and he enthusiastically added his new information to our classroom discussions, sometimes refuting the literature that had come with the eggs and larvae.

Every teacher has taught students like this, ones given to a single-minded intellectual curiosity, kids who are driven to "go deep" into whatever it is that has captured their imaginations. It can last for weeks, months, or even years, sometimes to the point that parents express concern, using words like "obsessed," worried that their child's focus is too narrow, that they are missing out on everything else. But it's a misplaced concern. There is no right or wrong way to satisfy curiosity: some of us tend to be generalists, while others are more inclined to specialize. The important thing is not what trivia we memorize, but rather to, through out self-selected interests, have the opportunity to fully develop our own unique way of knowing, to learn how we learn. Some go broad, some go deep, and most of us do a little of both.

For the last couple of weeks, this boy's enthusiasm has spread to his classmates. Whereas we were once only casually interested in "bugs," there is now at any given moment a bug safari taking place on our playground, with our resident expert playing the part. They'll call out to him, "I found a slug!" and he rushes to the scene. They gather around, forming a voluntary audience for his impromptu lectures, asking questions, starting their own bug collections in imitation of him. His passion has gone viral.

We started as a community with one bug expert, but we are rapidly becoming a community of bug experts, not because it's what some adults determined we should be able to regurgitate onto a test in order to continue along an education assembly line, but rather because it's what we have decided, together, to become, a community that shares passions, learns together, and grows together.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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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