I'm Only Going To The Top Of The Hill

You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself. ~H. Norman Schwartzkopf

I don't know if you'll take the leap with me here, but if "the cardboard box" and "the stick" have been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, then certainly "the hill" belongs there as well. Of course, hills are not portable, which may be part of the definition of a toy. And if you admit the hill into the pantheon, "the tree" would undoubtedly be next, followed by "the wind" and "the tides."

When we moved to the center of the universe, we got a hill, a couple hills, in fact. The first thing many of the kids do each morning is run down the long hill from the gate to our entry door, some cautiously, up on tippy toes, while others pound down pell mell to the bottom. I've been thinking we need a stack of hay bales or something down there. 

The overall hilliness of our outdoor classroom was what inspired the two-level sand pit, down which our water flows, from the cast iron pump through gutters and channels dug into the sand, making waterfalls and eddies and floods. Some of the kids spend most of their day playing with this hill. 

If you went to a toy manufacturer to pitch this concept, I'm guessing you'd be laughed out of the office. "What's it do? There's an up and a down. That's it?"

But, you know, you never run out of the things to do with a hill. A gradual slope makes for a terrific place to work on summersaults. While a steeper slope is built for thrills.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it, but the view is much better at the top. ~Henry Ward Beecher

And just think what would happen if the toy maker brought in his attorney.

That would result in one doozy of a warning label, if he'd even let them go into production at all.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. ~Nelson Mandela

But you can hardly be considered educated without the wisdom of the hills; without the battle with gravity; without the dance with gravity.

Even the simple act of standing on a hill skews you, makes you use your body differently, forces you to take a different point of view.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ~Phillips Brooks

No, I take it all back, hills are so much greater than mere toys, abstractions of something real. Hills are the material of life.

They are opportunity and challenge and beauty and toil. They prove truth to the optimist and pessimist alike: a perfect symmetry of ups and downs. Hills are the balance of trudging and flying; running like the wind and falling like a stone. And let me tell you one other thing I know about hills: no one enjoys walking on them sideways. That's not the way humans are made.

Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. Stop and get me on the ride up. I'm only going to the top of the hill. ~Tom Waits

All of life is about hills. If we're not in the process of going up or down, we're contemplating the challenge or taking in the view, but inevitably a hill is to be undertaken, at some point, one way or another, even if all we're doing is rolling things down it.

Hills are perhaps the first metaphor we're capable of understanding. In fact, it's one we're each lead to by our experiences with ups and downs.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help. ~Vinton Cerf

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.  ~Jose Marti

No one throughout time has misunderstood hills.

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"I Don't Want To Come To A Stink School"

Yesterday, I wrote about a Woodland Park tradition. Here's another one.

It's a variation on the classic sink or float experiment. We start with a jar of water, then test various objects to see if they are more or less dense than the water -- a wine cork, pink eraser, paper clip, apple slice, grape, piece of candle. After taking a moment to share our thoughts on this and other things that may or may not sink or float, we dump the whole thing out, fill the jar halfway with water, then begin again. This time, however, we start by adding some vegetable oil to see that it starts by sinking into the water (carried by its momentum) then forms into blobs and rises to the surface, ultimately settling into a nice, thick slab of one liquid floating atop another. Someone will almost always suggest we put on the lid and shake the jar, which we do, then sit watching as the liquids, miraculously, re-separate.

I perform this pretty much like your traditional teacher-in-front-of-the-room classroom experiment. The kids have daily opportunities to play with water and even get their hands into vegetable oil on occasion as well, so they've had a couple years worth of free-play experiments under their belt. One thing I like about doing this sort of thing every now and then is that it gives the kids a chance to practice accommodating their friends. At each step of a process like this, there are some, sometimes most, who bounce up onto their knees, even to their feet, who can't help creeping forward, who, when left to their own devices would move inextricably closer until they're sitting on my lap, nose to the glass, all clear signs of intense interest, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, this always leads to calls of, "I can't see!" from those who want to take it in from a more leisurely distance. There is jostling for space and sight lines, even a bit of pushing.

We all scoot back, put our bottoms on the rug, and otherwise adjust our bodies to make it possible for the whole group to see what's up, looking over our shoulders in an exercise in putting our eyes into the heads of others. Then as the experiment resumes, the inexorable return movement toward me begins again, like a tide. It used to frustrate me, but now I see it as a necessary part of what we're doing: an experiment in how to make it possible for everyone to see. I've learned to perform most of the official experiment within those bubbles created just after they've backed away.

After we're convinced the oil will always float on the water, we break out a jar of molasses. Most of the kids are unfamiliar with this tar-like syrup. They each get a chance to smell it, as they did previously with the oil, and I move it around in the bottle so they can see its thickness. We then make our predictions about what level to which it will sink. Will it float on the oil? The water? Will it sink to the bottom? As it streams to the bottom of the water (I pour it over a spoon to create a slow steady flow), many of the kids are convinced it will "bounce back" like the oil did, but soon we're all convinced it's the most dense liquid of the three. We then return to our solid objects and test them one at a time, predicting, then witnessing at which level they will settle. I choose this particular collection of objects because I've learned that there are some that will float on oil, some on water, some on the molasses, and some that will go all the way to the bottom.

We finish by putting the lid on the jar and setting it on a shelf at eye-level, where we leave it, promising to make new observations in the coming days. Over the course of the following days, we notice some of the objects, having absorbed one liquid or another, change their density and sink to lower levels as time goes on. The molasses eventually dissolves into the water. After a week or so of intense observation, we then tend to forget about our jar for a long time.

We started this experiment in September. Recently, there's been renewed interest in the jar on the shelf. Now I've learned from experience that one of the most significant, easily detectable changes is in terms of oder. A few years back, Luca's mom was tasked with the year-end job of cleaning out the jar to prepare it for the following school year. She removed the lid, began to retch, then just threw the whole thing in the trash, electing to instead buy us a whole new jar. It's a pretty vile smell.

Yesterday, we decided we were going to smell for ourselves. A few took my word for it, wanting nothing to do with it (a group that included most of the adults), but most chose to whiff for themselves. As the children who were going to brave a sniff moved to one side of the rug, while others took up spots on the far side, I told them the story of the stink dough (click through if you dare), finishing with this admonishment: "I'm going to be taking the lid off this jar. The stuff inside is very stinky. If I spill it, it's going onto our rug or onto you. I don't know what will happen if it gets on you, but if it gets on the rug, our whole school will stink for a loooong time. Stink dough was bad enough: I don't want to come to a stink school." After their laughter died down, I earnestly explained how important it is that they don't try to smell it with their hands, that they remain calm and still as I pass it under their noses, that there be no bumping, pushing, or fighting for space lest they cause me to dump the contents on them or the rug. I painted the prospects as a potential tragedy because, indeed, it would be, believe me. The stuff, as I said, is vile: like the most intense stinky cheese you can imagine . . . then assume it's a little worse.

As I waved it under their noses, one at a time, no one popped onto his knees, no one jostled. Everyone had plenty of room and perfect sight lines. Indeed, they remained as still as statues, even as they retched and squealed and pinched their noses.

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I Do Not Feel Like I'm Lying

I've written before about the Shapey project. I've introduced it now to our Pre-K class for 12 years running, one of the few things like it, a tradition one might say. The set up is a letter from outer space from an alien named Shapey who has gotten to know about us through out class mascot "Love Cat." Shapey lives on a far away planet called Polygon where it is nearly his mother's birthday. He wants to give her a portrait of himself as a present, but lacks the ability. He has heard of our class' legendary talents and kindness and is counting on us to help him by creating one from his written description, a pencil, a ruler, glue stick and some pre-cut construction paper pieces. We then separate into two groups, each working with the same materials, using the same instructions.

As a project it's definitely out of character for our play-based school, but there's not once been a child who objected to participating. Sure, there are some who grow impatient with how long these group decision-making projects take, but no one has ever walked away, except perhaps to check in on what the other group is doing. Yesterday's skeleton crew of 7 kids spent a good half an hour working on their portraits, finishing at more or less the same time.

When we reconvened on our checker-board rug, I mentioned how excited I thought Shapey would be to receive not one, but two, identical portraits. And they would be identical, wouldn't they? We used the same materials and same instructions, so logically they would be the same portraits. Of course, they never are, which leads to a discussion about how this could have happened. Then we wonder which one is the real Shapey. Then we decide that only Shapey can tell us, deciding to send both of them to Polygon. Next Tuesday we will learn that they are both perfect portraits: one is how he looks when he's awake, the other when he sleeps.

Much of the Facebook discussion under yesterday's post revolved around what we tell children about things like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, many saying they felt betrayed when their parents finally told them the truth. Many have apparently opted out of the game altogether, not wanting to perpetuate these "lies."

Santa and the Tooth Fairy came to our house, although without the whole "naughty and nice" conditions. Other than that, we really didn't give it much thought. To my wife and me, they were just fun stories we told, traditional stories like the one about Shapey. When our daughter asked her questions, I started (as I do with any "serious" question a child asks) by asking for what she thought. Like with her questions about death or sex or violence, she would then share her thoughts and theories, I would do what I could if she was upset, but generally just listen and nod. Her theory of Santa evolved over the years, sometimes imagining him as a kind of ghost, sometimes rejecting particulars of the story, like his flying reindeer. Finally, however, she asked me the direct question and insisted on my answer. She was probably eight or nine, old enough to have sussed out the impossibility of the story all on her own. I replied, "Do you really want to know?" 

We were walking together toward the grocery store. We continued in silence as my question hung there. We both knew we both knew. Finally, she answered, "No, I don't want to know," keeping the myth alive awhile longer. She's now 17 and Santa still comes every Christmas morning, even though she has, of her own accord, chosen to embrace her Jewish heritage.

I've never considered Santa or any of his cohort to be "lies," but rather myths. We often use the words as synonyms, but they are not. Myths are in fact true; maybe not literally, but they are always unflinchingly honest in the same way our dreams are always honest:

It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately, we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.  ~Mary Zimmerman

You see, the thing about fiction in general, but specifically things like mythology and fairy tales, is that the good ones contain so much truth that it's impossible to deny them, even when the metaphors used to convey those truths are not technically true. Children are capable of understanding this. It's why it's such a problem when we sanitize them, always giving them happy endings the way Disney does. Santa is the incredible idea of generosity, not of money, but of time, a jolly man who spends his entire year making toys for others, a figure of service and kindness to be emulated. But it has been corrupted and cheapened by commercialism. He is no longer a figure of wonder and philosophical investigation, but rather an icon that for many has come to represent the happy-faced mask of greed. Instead of us telling the story, we've left it to Hollywood and Wall Street, who have turned the myth into a lie.

I do not feel that I'm lying to the children when I tell them the story of Shapey, a character who is only known through a few lines of description in a letter I've fabricated. We talked yesterday about his space ship, what his planet might look like. I heard Rhys suddenly pipe up as he worked with his group, "I know why he's named Shapey, because he's made out of shapes!" Others talked about his mother, his planet, what he and Love Cat (a stuffed animal) did together. We wondered how Shapey would get his finished portraits back home, which would be the one he would accept, if we would ever get to see him. As we created our public dream together, weaving it from sentences that began, "What if Shapey . . ." we discussed and debated everything we know and do not know about the universe.

This, I think, is the distinction: when adults tell the story of, say, Santa, and insist upon its truth in all its particulars, we are lying, especially when we attempt to use it to command obedience. But when we are creating these stories together, as part of our lives, as a path toward both inner and outer understanding, we are creating myths, without which we can never hope to approach truth.

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"Why Didn't You Tell Me?"

Daddy's gone.

My brother's out hunting

in the mountains.

Big John's been drinking

since the river took Emmy-Lou.

~Neil Young (Powderfinger)

When my daughter Josephine was 6-years-old she reacted strongly to learning that the catastrophe of 9/11 had happened during her lifetime:

"You mean it happened since I've been alive? Why didn't you tell me?" I explained that she had been too little, just 3-years-old. She scolded me, angrily, "I want to know these things! I want you to tell me the truth about these things!"

It's a story I've told before, and one I'll certainly tell again. It was a moment that changed me forever; my wee, innocent baby demanding truth. Until then, I thought I'd been the epitome of an honest parent, never shying away from her questions, but that moment, a moment that occurred as we approached the hole in the ground where once the towers of the World Trade Center had stood, caused my own conceit of integrity to collapse within me.

I hadn't told her about it, I thought, because I hadn't wanted her to be afraid. And now not only was she afraid three years removed, but feeling betrayed by her own father. I'm just glad she had the awareness or courage or whatever it was to call me on it. I don't want to ever again be in that position, not with my child, my wife, or anyone for that matter. It's one thing when the world is crap, it's another to make it crappier.

When we lie, either overtly or by omission, especially to a loved one, we might tell ourselves it's altruism, but at bottom it's almost always an act of cowardice. It's us who don't want to face truth. When we say, "She's too young," we're really saying, I'm not ready to face the pain or the shame or the fear. 

We skip pages in books. We fast-forward through the scary parts. We distract their gaze from road kill.

I'm not saying that we should, unsolicited, lay out the whole unvarnished horrible mess before them, if only because we don't need to. It will reveal itself to them soon enough. Our job is neither to distract their gaze nor draw their attention to it. It is rather, out of our love for them, to answer their questions, to speak the truth as we know it, and to say, "I don't know," when that's the truth.

What anchors our children is not a sense that the world is perfect. They already know it isn't. They don't need more happy endings. They need to know we love them enough to tell them the truth, and to accept their emotions, to hold them or talk to them or just be with them. 

It's adults, not children who worship the false idol of childhood innocence. It's only adults who don't want to grow up.

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No One Has Ever Wanted To Escape From Freedom

Children don't like school because to them school is -- dare I say it -- prison. Children don't like school because, like all human beings, they crave freedom, and in school they are not free.  ~Peter Gray

On my first day as the teacher of the Woodland Park 3-5's class, a parent warned me, "Paul is an escape artist. He's quick and he's clever. You'll need to keep an eye on him all the time."

My throat was immediately blocked by my leaping heart. I envisioned Paul slithering under the gate or getting lost in the dark, off-limits, back hallways of the building in which we leased our space, a prospectively inauspicious beginning to what I was hoping would be a long teaching career. 

Paul did not try to escape that day, nor in the days ahead. In fact, and I suppose I ought to be knocking on wood as I write this, in my 12 years during which I've been daily coming to this preschool, we've not once had a kid even attempt to make a break for it. Oh sure, there are the occasional 2-year-olds who simply want to go where mommy is going, following her to the door or the gate, and perhaps standing there for a time to miss her, but that's not the same thing as trying to escape. According to parents, most kids are disappointed to awake on weekends to learn that it's not a school day.

I still think of Paul's non-escape quite often. It had simply not occurred to me that a child would want to escape school. But isn't that the stereotype? Kids hate school. Around our place that isn't the case. I've not found it to be true in the progressive, play-based cooperatives with which I've been associated that kids hate school. And honestly, I've not found that to be generally true with kids pretty much up through elementary school. In fact, I had several of my former students who are now K-2 come to visit with their younger siblings this last week, and they all still "like" school. They like their friends and their teachers, they love to show off the things they're learning. (William taught me all about "word families" last week, writing C-A-T and words that rhyme with it all over our art project for the day.) It's going well for them, it's clearly engaging, and over the years I've found this to be true with most of my former students until they hit about middle school.

A few years ago, I was talking with Zsa Zsa, a former student who was just finishing sixth grade. She had recently figured it out and it pissed her off. I can't recall her exact words, but she was quite cynical about the whole thing: tests, and studying, and learning about stuff you don't care about and will never "use" just for grades, and all so you can do it over again the next year. I've heard similar rants from other middle schoolers. My own daughter hit it at about 11-12 years old as well. Me too. It's around this age that children begin to see it for what it is. They've gained the wisdom to understand that they have no choice about if and where they go to school, nor what and when and how they're going to learn. And I have no answer for them when they ask, "What does this have to do with my life anyway?" It's a valid question, one that is not sufficiently answered by saying it builds character.

Some kids thrive, of course, while most make some sort of peace with it, but some want nothing more than to escape, be it under the fence or into the back hallways, if only because they crave freedom, the freedom to learn what and how they learn best. I might suggest that much of what we ascribe to adolescent surliness is largely attributable to this: they've had this epiphany about school and, like with Zsa Zsa, this whole school thing looks like a huge sham. Even the kids who do well in school come to see that it's all a game they're playing, a series of hoops through which they have to jump to satisfy their teacher or the administration or the school board or their parents. When do they get to satisfy themselves?

It's surprising how few of them actually do make a break for it. 

It's a pity because children are born passionate about learning. That's what play is, at bottom, the drive to learn. That drive doesn't go away when they hit kindergarten; we slowly begin to take it away by our insistence that learning is work. This system of education that we've been using for hundreds of years isn't backed by centuries of research, it isn't a product of careful testing and tweaking. It is, rather, a mere product of history and habit, just as is our assumption that children will hate it. Even the kids who came to visit me last week at Woodland Park, those who still like school, told me they were excited to have "ten whole days off." They didn't feel that way about school even last year.

One of the legacies of Paul's mom sharing her fears about him with me was that I became rigorous about installing barriers and locks to ensure that kids couldn't escape, although I'm not aware of a single time that they have been tested. In fact, most of our measures couldn't hold a persistent child, one who really wanted to escape. We don't even put the barriers up for the 5's class, who think they are just there for the "little kids." It's because they are free at Woodland Park, free to learn what and how they will, to play without coercion or a sense of "duty" imposed from without. No one has ever wanted to escape from freedom.

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"Improving Their Work Slowly Over Long Periods"

Like a lot of five-year-olds, he's been tagging everything with his name, forming the letters with care, ordering them left-to-right, leaving his mark pretty much wherever he has a chance. This is my fourth year teaching him: he's always been a perfect fit for our school, a kid who needs to move his body, who learns best not by watching or listening, but by doing. From the moment I met him, he's had something in his hands, fiddling with it, testing it, bouncing it off of things. As a two-year-old, he was fascinated with our classroom hamster wheel, which he played with in every way imaginable, trying to fit it into places where it belonged and where it did not, spinning it, turning it over and rolling it, dismantling it, and sometimes going so far as to hide it so he could find it the following day in order to continue his experiments.

Even when it comes to social skills, he's always been a hands on learner. Most of his interactions involve some sort of physical contact, like a friendly bump, a shove, actions that are often misinterpreted by others. He will sometimes take a friend's face in his hands, his palms cupping their cheeks as he smiles at them, just to show them how much he likes them. Some children object to this, not understanding, but the ones who "get it," and there are plenty, find in him a pal for the ages.

These days, he spends his mornings in a public school kindergarten and his afternoons with us at Woodland Park. He's not a fan of the worksheets or the long stretches of sitting indoors, and when they recently inflicted the cruelty of an academic standardized test upon him, he was ranked near the very bottom, bringing his mother to me in tears. And this is a mom who knows better, who knows that some perfectly normal kids have brains developmentally ready to read at two, while many others don't get there until seven, eight, or even later. Much of the rest of the civilized world doesn't even try to start teaching children to read until they're seven. What he hell does it mean: a reading test for five-year-olds? Only someone with no knowledge of child development, or a complete jerk, would use such a tool as anything more than, perhaps, a research benchmark. But to share the results with parents, along with rankings? What is that about? Is it supposed to be some sort of motivation? Only a sociopath would think this is a good idea: I suppose the same ones who punish kids who have trouble sitting still in their chairs by taking away recess time.

This is the great crime of the standardized, assembly line curricula found in most of our public schools. It simply cannot make allowances for children who aren't ready to learn something when they "ought to," according to arbitrary timelines, ranking them, slapping labels on them, driving them with threats and punishments, causing inappropriate anxiety for both the child and his parents.

Based on his academic performance, Winston Churchill's father was convinced that he would never be able to earn his own living. Likewise, Walter Scott's father found his early attempts at poetry so humiliating that he discouraged him because he feared it would reflect poorly on the family. Einstein and Darwin were such poor students that their teachers felt they would amount to nothing. Louis Pasteur's teacher called him "the least promising boy in the class." 

This isn't a race, folks. I've taught many children who were, say, precocious readers, puzzlers, or artists, kids upon whom adults glibly slap the label of "genius." In fact, in every class I've ever taught, there are one or two children like this. They're delightful to teach, a joy, but their early years accomplishments are no better indicators of their future successes than the less notable accomplishments of their peers. Some of our great geniuses showed themselves early, of course, like Mozart, Orson Welles, or Picasso. We are impressed by such greatness at such a young age, but often fail to recognize that the rest of their careers, while still worthy, never approach the genius of their youthful work.

And then there are "dull" children like Churchill, Scott, Einstein, Darwin, and Pasteur, people who needed time for their genius to ripen.

Several years ago, University of Chicago economist David Galenson took a look at this phenomenon, especially as regards creativity. He argues that there are really two methods of genius at work here. Prodigies, like those kids who are sounding out words as two-year-olds, tend to approach their "work" with a clear idea of what they want, then set about doing it. "Late bloomer" genius, however, is of the sort that comes from the experimental approach characterized by a kid who, say, spends hours and days horsing around with a hamster wheel. "Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental," according to Galenson. From his book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: 

The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trail and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods.

Of course, most children, are not destined to become geniuses of either sort, but Galenson's work is to me a clear illustration of the broad range of what can be considered developmentally "normal," something that is confirmed by every expert in the fields of eduction and brain science. We know this, teachers should know this, as should administrators, school boards, and education policy-makers, yet they are increasingly throwing their lot with the crazy idea that education is a competition with winners and losers and rankings.

Last week, this boy who ranks near the bottom according to a standardized test, spent a half hour on our "concrete slide" with a piece of chalk, sliding down while dragging the chalk behind him, trailing lines on the concrete surface. As he slid, he studied the chalk in his hand, the colors, and the shape of the lines he was making. When another child dumped a bucket of water down the slope, he discovered that he could create more intensely colorful lines with wet chalk. He slid again and again and again, sometimes joined by other kids, sometimes all on his own, gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trail and error, each time down leading to the next, and none generally privileged over others. It was a process of searching, a process in which learning was a more important goal than passing a stupid test.

This is education and it's not a race that will necessarily be won by those first out of the gate. Education, like life, is a long game, one with a finish line so far away it's hardly worth worrying about.

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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