"You Never Change"

"Teacher Tom, you always wear the same shirt."

It wasn't entirely true, but I understood why a kid might say that. "I wear different shirts."

"No, you always wear your purple shirt."

Again, not entirely true, but I did always wear something from my by extensive Woodland Park logo t-shirt collection, and among them were three purple ones. "I do wear a lot of purple shirts."

"And you always wear the same jeans."

This was true, although I'd switch to shorts when the weather permitted it. I had one pair of threadbare jeans I thought of as my "work pants." They got washed every weekend whether they needed it or not. "Fair enough."

"And you always wear the same shoes."

By now, I was starting to feel a little defensive. I had several pairs of shoes I wore to school, but I had to admit that I'd gone with the same old (mostly) waterproof boots during the preceding long, wet winter. "I don't always wear the same shoes. I just mostly wear the same shoes."

"You don't even change your hairstyle."

"It gets longer and shorter, but yes, you're right about that."

Up to this point he had taken the posture of an earnest prosecutor, laying out the bare facts as if from notes. I appreciated his honestly and was flattered that he had apparently given my appearance a good deal of thought, even as I wasn't exactly thrilled with the portrait he was painting of me. But now he smiled as he came to the conclusion toward which he had been working, "You never change."

In a flash I recognized that while I do change, while I do continue to grow, in this boy's eyes I am a man upon whom one can rely day after day, a man that he saw as solid, predictable, stable, and safe, like my father had been for me. That isn't the kind of man I have always been. I liked what I saw in this unexpected reflection of myself. I said, "Thank you for telling me that."

"You're welcome."

******

 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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

That Is Flat-Out Cruel

Not long ago, I was asked to observe a two-year-old who was, according to his teachers, disruptive in class. When we were outdoors, I saw a curious, outgoing, physically active preschooler going about his business. When we were indoors, I saw a curious, outgoing, physically active preschooler whose curiosity was suppressed by a limited, fairly bare-bones environment where his outgoing-ness and physical activity showed up as a problem for the teachers. And that was essentially my on-the-spot "report": if you want to change his behavior indoors, then change his indoor environment.

I could tell his teachers were doubtful. After all, most of the other kids were "just fine" with things they way they were.

Later in the day, a young man with a clipboard removed the boy from the classroom. When I asked what was going on, I was told that this was the boy's occupational therapist. In other words, the poor boy already had a diagnosis based on his non-standardized behavior. Now, it's quite possible that there was something else going on that I hadn't observed, but I assure you that his behavior would not have raised an eyebrow in any school in which I've worked. Of course, I've never worked in a standard school, but rather ones that operate based on what decades of research tell us about young children, learning, and development: there is nothing standard about any of them.

Perhaps the greatest cruelty inflicted on children by standard schools is the unscientific notion that this child or that child is "falling behind." Falling behind is not a psychological or developmental concept. It is a notion that emerges, not from research on how humans learn, but rather statistics, based upon the manufacturing concept of standardization.

The idea of falling behind, for instance, is based on standardized tests. Test-makers identify a narrow range of things to measure, administer their test to a bunch of kids who are all the same age, then use their average score as their "standard." This means that approximately half the kids are above average while the rest are below average, or behind. They adjust their ranges so that a pre-determined percentage of the kids test as being up to standards. It has nothing to do with what they know or don't know, what they can do or can't do, but rather where they sit in relationship to a statistical average. 

Non-standardized children, like the two-year-old I observed, are identified as problems. Children whose genius lies in the infinite array of non-tested areas are labeled deficient. There is no psychological of developmental basis for connecting these standards to age. My own daughter said her first word at three months old. She was talking in full sentences by five months. Had there been a standardized test for that, she would have been identified as "gifted." She did not crawl, however, until her first birthday and wasn't walking until she was closer to two. On that standardized test, she would have been "behind." We performed no special interventions nor did we provide extra instruction, yet today she is an adult who walks and talks like all the other adults.

Clinical psychologist and author Naomi Fisher recently wrote, "Imagine that I decided that speed of running up the stairs is an important skill, and I tested thousands of 6-year-olds on it. I could create norms for that age group, and now I can identify 6-year-olds who are behind in stair-running. I can offer them extra stair-running . . . I can tell their parents that they need to do special exercises to catch them up. I can create a lot of worry about their deficiencies . . . The more things that you assess, the more likely it is that you'll find areas where a child is significantly different from the average."

Maybe none of this would matter if educators, schools, and districts used these averages as one data point in an ongoing process of improving themselves, but that's emphatically not how they are used. Instead, these averages, these standards, have become goals in and of themselves, while non-average, or non-standard, are problems, both for the individual child as well as the teacher, school, and district. Parents are called in and told that their child is "behind." That is flat-out cruel.

Now we have a child labeled as deficient, which too easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of each child being allowed to play, develop, and learn according to their own unique timetable, these deficient children are subjected to extra stair-running. It's cruel because it tells their parents that their child is deficient because they are not average. It tells children that there is something wrong with them because they are not standard. It's cruel because it is, quite simply, fear mongering.

This whole concept of age-standards or grade-standards, of "falling behind," is a deeply flawed cruelty disguised as science. It makes us define anything outside the narrow norm as a deficiency that needs to be fixed at all costs. Maybe we've always, secretly or not-so-secretly, sought to standardize our children, to make them all fit perfectly into the egg carton, but count me out.

Instead of hunting out deficiencies, what if we dedicated ourselves to identifying what makes each child non-standard, what sparks their curiosity, what motivates them? What if the goal was schools that preserve and support each child's unique genius, where behind doesn't exist? What if we didn't cut down the tall poppies in the name of average, standard, and uniform, and instead made natural habitats in which each child got the soil and sun they need to grow into the best version of themselves, no matter what the other poppies were doing? Maybe we'll discover that they aren't a poppy at all. What if we simply envisioned schools as places that adapted to the actual non-standardized children, rather than the other way around?

******

 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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

We Asked One Another, "What Do You Do?"

I spent recent evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbeque in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's shorthand for "What to you spend your weekdays working at, which is ultimately the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in many cases it is illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over he course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do? There are valid answers other than work. I see it every day at preschool.

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

"Okay, I'm Going To Drown The Baby"

A few years back, someone donated a box of swimming and waterpolo trophies and medals to the preschool. It's the sort of thing we treasure. For a time, they dominated our playground, finding their way into the every game or story. They were mostly plastic, but made to look like gold. The shiny medals with their fabric ribbons became both jewelry and coin-of-the-realm. The statues of fit young women in mid-stroke were especially popular: the children thought they looked like superheroes. 

Over time, the statues became separated from their bases and arms were snapped off. Some became lost in the depths of the sandpit. It's the story of loose parts on our playground: gradually dimming, dwindling, and wearing away. The bits and pieces of the trophies never regained their initial popularity, but they still surfaced in the children's games for several years. By now, they were largely a memory, although I'd recently spied the upper torso of a muscular male preparing to throw a ball. 

The children asked me for a story. On the playground this has a specific meaning. We start by gathering up a collection of loose parts, then convene in the sandpit row boat where we use them as props to tie together "Once upon and time . . .," "Meanwhile . . .," "It was about this time . . .," and "The end." I found myself holding this torso. I said, "And then along came . . .," then paused for the children to offer their ideas.

Someone shouted, "A baby!"

"Along came a baby . . ." and we continued our story featuring this baby. There is never only one story. The props often transform into new characters with each new story, but in this case the baby remained the baby, playing a part in a half dozen impromptu tales of friendship and adventure. One boy in particular took an interest in the baby, wanting to be responsible for it. At one point he asked me, "Is this metal?"

I replied off-handedly that I thought it was plastic, but he apparently wasn't convinced. As the story-making session began to wrap up, he asked me, "Can I have the baby?"

"Sure."

"Okay, I'm going to drown the baby."

"What did you say?" I was certain I'd misunderstood.

"I'm going to drown the baby."

Of course, it's not unheard of for children to incorporate death, even killing, in their games, but these words struck me as particularly brutal, especially as he delivered them in such a matter-of-fact, almost scientific manner. There was none of the "I'm being a bit naughty" delight that usually accompanies these games and I found myself, not worried, but certainly wondering. The boy ran off with a friend to "drown the baby."

I didn't know this boy very well, nor his family, so the comment wasn't as easy to dismiss as it might have otherwise been. There was nothing I'd learned about the boy so far that worried me, but drowning babies isn't an every day theme. If there was a baby at home to be a rival for mommy's attention, it might have made sense, but the boy was the youngest. Where had he picked up the idea of drowning babies? It doesn't turn up in children's stories or programming, but maybe he had access to more grown-up fare. The media can certainly plant upsetting ideas in the minds of children. Children often talk about all manner of things at preschool, but it was the sort of emotionless way he had said it -- "I'm going to drown the baby" -- that really struck me.

Presently, I became engaged in other matters and forgot about the boy until he rushed up to me, full of information. "I tried to drown the baby, but I couldn't do it!"

"Well, I'm happy about that," I replied, "I don't like the idea of drowning babies."

"Come look!"

I followed him to a bucket of water where the baby floated in the water. "See?" he said, "The rocks drowned, but the baby floated."

I said, still not getting it, "The baby is swimming."

He looked at me as if I was a special kind of idiot, "No, Teacher Tom, it's floating. That's because it's plastic. If it was metal it would have drowned."

As I stood there appreciating his moment of "Eureka!" I was happy I'd simply wondered, which is, most of the time, the proper stance of an educator. I'd been wrong in all my suppositions and musings. Anything I would have done or said would have been, at best, confusing, not to mention wildly off the mark. My inaction created the space for this perfect experiment designed by him to answer his question.

I said, "Plastic floats and metal sinks."

To which he replied, "That's what I said."

******

 

"This inspiring book is essential reading for every family choosing a preschool, every teacher working with young children, and every citizen who wonders how we can raise children who will make the world a better place." ~Dr. Laura Markham, author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

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

The Education Transformation We Need

In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Its focus on the low standardized test scores of (some) American children compared to those of other nations combined with dire warnings that it would, if not urgently addressed, lead to our imminent economic demise, made it one of the few non-partisan issues in our ever more deeply divided nation.

This wasn't the first time that politicians blamed education for economic problems, of course. That goes back to the beginning of modern schooling when industrialized nations created mandatory assembly-line schools in the hopes manufacturing assembly-line workers to serve the Industrial Revolution. Since then, whenever policymakers have been confronted by their own failures, they've conveniently pointed their fingers at schools. What was new in this report, was the assertion that racial inequality and poverty could also be solved by schools.

So for the past 40 years or so, our entire political establishment has more or less agreed that our schools, which is to say teachers, parents, and children, are responsible for fixing racial and economic inequality as well as the economy as a whole. It's not an accident that every administration since Reagan has, in one way or another, called education reform "the civil rights issue of our time." This conveniently shifts the blame for their failure to address inequality onto our schools. When, predictably, inequality has gotten worse due to lack of political action, our policymakers predictably deflect the blame onto "incompetent teachers", "bad parents", and "lazy children".

Recession? Poverty? Racial inequality? Blame the schools, blame the teachers, blame the parents, blame the kids. And since it's impossible to educate our way out of these systemic problems, of course our schools fail, which leads to yet another round of top-down reform. 

It's a vicious and cruel cycle.

Do we need to reform education in our country? Absolutely. And the first step in that reform is to bust the myth that education is here to serve the economy. If the primary purpose of our schools is to train workers, which is what policymakers of all political stripes would have us believe, then perhaps we the people shouldn't be paying for it at all. If it's all about vocational training, then maybe it's time to let the corporations train their own damn workers.

So then why do we need schools? Well, frankly, we don't, but if we're going to be a self-governing, democratic society, one that values equality and justice for all, we need a population of critical thinkers. We need citizens who have the skills, habits, knowledge, and curiosity to think for themselves. We need citizens who listen to one another, who value fairness, who know it's not just their right, but also their responsibility to articulate their own nuanced thoughts and ideas, and who are capable of coming to agreements, of working with others, and who are self-motivated.

Can our schools do this? Not as they are currently conceived. We probably need transformation more than reformation. But when we think in terms of critical thinking instead of schooling or education, we find common ground across the political spectrum. 

I'm just one preschool teacher who spent his career in one school. I never once considered the economic prospects of the children in my care. All I ever concerned myself with was creating a community in which everyone was free to think for themselves. And because it was a community, these free thinkers would have to talk and listen to one another, to come to agreements, to figure out how to get their own needs met while, in fairness, also making it a place in which others could get their needs met. Because it was a community, if things were to get done, it wasn't on me or some other authority to do it, but rather the responsibility fell to these critical thinkers, working together.

This is the education transformation we need.

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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!

Healthy And Unhealthy Relationships

Early childhood educators, taken as a group, are among the most compassionate, caring humans I've ever encountered.

We love the children even when they cry and yell and tantrum on the floor. We love them even when they hit us or say they hate us or sneak up behind us to dump a bucket of cold water over our heads (which has happened to me more than once). We love them when they boast, when they're mean, when they're combative, and when they're irrational. We keep loving them even when they get on our very last nerve.

We might not always like them, but when it comes to young children, most of us, most of the time, love them even when they behave in ways that would cause us to put continents between ourselves and any adult who behaved in the same way. 

We don't take it personally. We tell ourselves that it's just a phase, that they are still learning, that their executive function is still developing, or that there is something else going on in their lives that makes them act out. On the most difficult days, we remind ourselves that behavior is communication, then set about trying to figure out what they are trying to tell us.

If any of these things were happening in our adult relationships, our therapists would be telling us to run like the wind, right? I mean, if our spouse or parent or co-worker or friend behaved in these ways towards us, if we kept coming back to them, excusing them, we would call that an abusive relationship. The difference, of course, is that by virtue of being the adult, there is an implication that we ultimately have the power. We are physically stronger, we are more experienced, and at the end of the day, we have both the ability and (according to society) the right to compel them, to command them, and to punish them.

And I know that many educators exert that power: all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time. As former students ourselves, I doubt any one of us hasn't at least been in the room with a teacher who regularly exerted their power, perhaps even harshly, over the children in their care. Most of us have experienced the disempowerment that results from being at the receiving end.

That said, most of us strive, however tempting it may be at times, to avoid wielding the power that comes to us by virtue of our role as the adult amongst children. Instead, we see that the only valid use of power is to give it away: to seek to use it to empower the children in our care. Indeed, much of what gets labeled as "bad behavior" (or "challenging behavior) is really about feeling powerless. Likewise, the antidote to those behaviors, rather than compulsion and punishment (which usually makes things worse), is empowerment.

This doesn't mean that we are weak. Too many adults outside of our profession believe that if we don't use our power to control the children, then that means they are controlling us. But we know that what we are doing, to put it simply, is creating healthy, normal relationships with these fellow humans. In any relationship, power ebbs and flows, but ultimately, if the end result isn't mutual empowerment, then it ain't a healthy relationship. And healthy relationships is what we are all about.

Of course, in any relationship, there are the occasional power struggles. But when power struggles are daily, when they come to characterize the relationship, when a child is forever acting out (which is to say, attempting to exert power), even when they've been scolded and punished, when the adult is forever commanding and correcting (which is to say, attempting to exert power), then we're looking at what can only be called an unhealthy relationship. I mean, it would be obvious to everyone if we were talking about, say, a marriage. But we have trouble seeing it when children are involved.

This is the milieu in which we find ourselves as early childhood educators, and is why compassion and caring stand at the heart of what we do. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are in the business of creating healthy relationships. The rest is secondary. 

******

 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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

Imagine Being A Child

I was walking along a neighborhood sidewalk. As I turned a corner, a man fell in behind me, keeping pace with me. I didn't think much of it at first, but then I took note of the sound, thup-thup-thup. I looked to see he was wearing flip-flops, or thongs for my Aussie readers. It was a cool, wet day, not flip-flop weather, but whatever, it was none of my business, that is, except for the thup-thup-thup, which was getting under my skin after just a block.

I crossed the street to escape the sound, but the man crossed behind me. I sped up, putting space between myself and the aggravating sound. I felt a growing peace as the thup-thup-thup receded behind me, only to have the sound catch up when I was forced to wait at the next crosswalk. I was looking forward to a moment's reprieve as he waited with me, but as luck would have it, the light turned to "walk" before he'd come to a complete stop. Thup-thup-thup.

I told myself to calm down, to just ignore it, to try to focus on other things. After all, this was nothing, an every day sound even, not worthy of notice, let alone a matter over which to grind my teeth. A part of me wanted to scream, to lash out; it even crossed my mind to take it out on this poor guy who was probably enjoying the thup-thup-thup of his flip-flops, a reminder of a recent holiday in the sun. But try as I might, it was in my head, taking up residence there like a pebble in a shoe. Finally, I feigned interest in a shop window, standing there until I could no longer hear the sound of those damned flip-flops. Then I waited a little longer, just to make sure, before tacking along a divergent path by way of totally eliminating all possibility of catching up with him should he be attracted by a shop window or stopped by a pedestrian signal.

As I continued along my way, calmly now, I chided myself. What a silly thing, I thought, to be aggravated. This is a city; a place full of sounds. Why did I allow this one to bother me? I began to think of the children I teach, about how some of them become overwhelmed by just this sort of "silly" thing. I thought about the girl who covers his ears when we play recorded music. I recalled the boy who cried whenever we sang the birthday song. I sympathized with the kids who lash out at their classmates, verbally and physically, when spaces get crowded or rowdy or noisy. I understood those children who shout, "Stop!" at another child when there doesn't appear to be anything that needs to stop. I remembered those times when a child's face wore an expression of pain over what seemed like nothing to me.

I'm an adult person, not typically prone to these sorts of aggravations, yet a mere thup-thup-thup threw me completely off my game for a time, causing what others would consider inappropriately strong emotions, so strong in fact that I had taken measures to remove myself. Imagine being a child, less mature and experienced. Imagine being unable to pinpoint the cause of these strong, prickly feelings, not having the option to remove yourself, or the experience to do so, nor the self-control to not lash out. Imagine feeling that way much or most of the time when out in our cacophonous world. There is nothing "silly" or "mere" or "inappropriate" about these feelings, even if they seem that way to those of us who are not feeling them.

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

Beautiful Moments

Over the past couple decades, I've asked thousands of adults to recall a "beautiful moment" from their childhood, then asked them to describe the moment.

Only once did someone's beautiful memory involve being indoors. And in her case she was in her apartment building in New York City where the kids had run of the building and "everyone" had their doors open. So while it was technically indoors, it still had the savor of the freedom that comes from being outside.

And speaking of freedom, it's rare for anyone's beautiful moment to involve adults in any sort of meaningful way. No one's beautiful moment involves school or church or sports teams. Most recall being outdoors, unsupervised, or at least lightly supervised, which probably explains why so often these moments involve an element of risk taking. "Thank god, mom didn't know about it!" is a common refrain.

Their stories are most often told in the first person plural because there are other children -- best friends, siblings, neighbors. "We would ride our bikes to . . ." "We would all met in the woods . . ." "We pretended we were pioneers . . ."

Other than bikes, balls, and dolls, toys are just not a part of most people's beautiful moments. If there are playthings, they are objects from either the natural world, like mud, sticks or flowers, or from the "real world" like tools, abandoned objects, or other junk.

But perhaps the most universal aspect of these beautiful moments is the sense of time, or rather timelessness, that runs through them. No one's memories involve being hurried or scheduled. They share their memories like epic tales, full of details, and a vast sweep of time in which to fully engage with the world. "We didn't have to be home until the street lights came on." 

There are variations -- infinite variations -- on these themes. And, of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule. But at the end of the day, the common threads that seem to make our most beautiful childhood moments are being outside, unsupervised, with other children, few toys, and lots of time.

In all honesty, that's all I've ever wanted to offer the children in my life. That is education enough. That is life itself.

Every time I ask adults for their beautiful childhood moments I worry that this will be the time when someone will talk about playing video games or getting the highest test score or going to the museum with their parents. So far, even when there are adults in their 20's, it hasn't happened. Even children raised in the 90's still seem to have memories of being outside, unsupervised, with other children, few toys, and lots of time. I worry, however, that the day is coming when no one but us doddering old-timers will have first-hand memory of the beauty of an authentic childhood.

As a person who has spent most of his adult life working with and for young children, I see it as my responsibility to open the doors, to step into the background, to create real world environments full of other children, and to give them the time they need to forget about time. This is the natural habitat for childhood, the place for beautiful moments, but only if we can preserve it.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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A Joyful, Intense, Life-Affirming Expression Of Love

I've experienced it enough times to take it for granted, but whenever kids wrestle at preschool, I always at some point feel as if I'm peering into something very important, and very good, about human beings.

We throw down the gym mats, remind ourselves of the agreements we've made together, kick off our shoes and go. We always make common sense agreements like to not hit or kick on another. We always agree to try to not lay hands on another person's head or neck and to only wrestle with people who have agreed to wrestle by stepping on the mats.

Since people always get hurt when we wrestle, bumped heads mostly, we have a crying chair where you can sit it out until you're ready to rejoin the fray. Some children are back within minutes while others put their shoes on and walk away judging the risks of wrestling to be a price too high.

We tend to think of wrestling as an activity that boys enjoy, and it's mostly boys who participate, but not all of them, and there are always girls who hurl their bodies into the mix.

These four and five year olds wrestled with such joy, a dozen of them at once at times, grappling, rolling, dog-piling. They were laughing, making faces, and shouting "Stop!" when things got too intense, a signal we had agreed to heed. And they did respond, as children usually do when they wrestle, almost instantly. The rule of thumb is that adults must wait a minimum of 15 seconds (often longer) for a young child to answer when asked a question, but when they wrestle they are so finely attuned to one another, reading expressions, listening to words, responding to how they move their bodies, anticipating, that there is minimal lag time between call and response.

When they wrestle like this, it's as if they've stopped being individuals and have joined together as a single body, each part fully conscious of and responsive to the others. They are forever checking one another's beet-red faces, reading expressions, looking there for consent, for invitations, for cautions. So often we label this sort of play as violent or aggressive, but when you really watch it, it becomes quite clear that, on the contrary, wrestling is a joyful, intense, life-affirming expression of love: a love that's so powerful that they can't keep their hands off one another.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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!