Oh Brother, Thwarted Again!

Nothing is certain

It could always go wrong.

Come in when it's raining

Go on out when it's gone. 

          

          ~The Greatful Dead

"Oh brother, not again!"

It had become one of our classroom jokes. I have no idea where it came from, but it's a common enough expression that it's not surprising that it cropped up in a preschool classroom. 

I say it was a joke, and the kids meant it humorously, but there were no belly laughs. They were using it the way adults use expressions like this, as a way to respond when life thwarts us. And there's always lot of thwarting.

When we observe children at play, much of what we witness is thwarting. The block tower topples over. We trip and fall. We want a red one, but all that's left are blue ones. We want to play one game and our friends a different one. 

The old Yiddish expression, "Man plans and God laughs" is another of these expressions.

"If I didn't laugh, I'd cry all day" is yet another.

There isn't nearly as much thwarting as we might think, although it doesn't always seem that way. Our brains are prediction machines. Generally speaking, when our predictions prove correct, it doesn't even rise into our conscious awareness. It's usually only when our predictions prove wrong that our conscious minds are brought to bear. 

Some have even asserted that if nothing ever went wrong we would have no need for consciousness at all.

Linus: "Don't worry, Charlie Brown, you win a few and you lose a few."

Charlie Brown: "(Sigh) Wouldn't that be nice."

And without consciousness, we would have no sense at all of being alive. If we never failed, if everything went according to plan, if life were perfect, we would have no need to know about it. It's the thwarting that brings our attentions to bear on life, it's what calls us to action, even if it sometimes feels like thwarting is all there is. Without thwarting, success means nothing.

Of course, sometimes all the thwarting frustrates or angers us. Sometimes it makes us cry all day. Sometimes the thwarting overwhelms us, but on a day-to-day basis, every mentally healthy person must learn to shrug or laugh or roll their eyes. We might not laugh exactly, but the cosmic joke is that it's the thwarting that ultimately connects all of humanity.

When a child says "Oh brother, not again" I hear a child who is learning to take the thwarting in stride. And when they then return to the task at hand, whatever it is, with a new plan, with corrections, with the wisdom of previous thwarting under their belt, I see a child who is learning. 

Without thwarting, there is no need for thinking. 

Without thinking there is no learning. 

Without learning there is no life.

"Oh brother, not again!"

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

It's the Risk That Matters

A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me and started to move past her. As I did, she stopped me, "May I ask you a question? Don't you worry about riding your bike out there in all this traffic? I know I worry about you all."

This is far from the first time someone has expressed this to me, going back decades. I've spent my entire life, from the time I learned to ride, sharing the road with cars. There have been a few close calls, but not as many as you might think. In part that may be because drivers aren't as "crazy" as we've let ourselves believe, but mostly, I think, it's because I've learned to stay alert to my surroundings while on the bike.

In the rest of my life, I can let my mind wander, but on the bike, on roads full of pot holes and random debris, amidst cars and trucks and buses, all being driven by people who may or may not be giving their full minds to the task, I better stay alert . . . or else! And it's my alertness that has kept me relatively unscathed over the decades. (I'm knocking on wood as I write this!)

This is a powerful thing for my 63-year-old brain, even if it means taking risks with my 63-year-old body.

One of the delightful things about working with young children is that young minds are exceedingly plastic, which makes it a perfect mechanism for absorbing data about the world. Everything is new. Novelty is everywhere. You never know what to expect next, so you better stay alert. They say that our brains are prediction machines, that we don't perceive the world as it is, but rather as we expect it to be. This is essential to survival, but it can sometimes blind us, or cause us to gloss over, changes both large and small. But you can't get much past a young child because they are so alert to anything out of the ordinary. I like to think that's one of the things cycling does for me as well.

There was a time, not very long ago, when we believed, as a fact of biology, that adult brains simply stopped being so plastic. This was determined by studying bonobos (one of our species' closest relatives) in cages. Perhaps not surprisingly, when scientists thought to study bonobos who were not in cages, they found that adult brains retained much of their plasticity, which is to say their capacity for learning new things, throughout their lives.

I've been thinking about those cages as a metaphor as I've moved into the final third of my life. Too many of my peers become befuddled, disinterested, and set in their ways. We generally think that this is just a natural part of aging, but what if these prediction machines we carry around in our heads have, over time, simply built a cage that doesn't allow us to perceive much of anything beyond the bars of the expected? If our brain expects nothing new, it becomes less alert, less capable of caring about, let alone perceiving, novelty.

When we watch a young child encounter something new, they approach it with some combination of excitement, trepidation, and curiosity, all of which are manifestations of alertness. As they contemplate this novel thing, as they handle it, as they ask questions about it, they're in a state of open-minded awareness, beyond the cage of hidebound prediction. They then, as they play with that object, begin to feel the satisfaction of mastery, of knowing, of understanding. In the natural order of things, this is followed by an alert restlessness that draws them toward the next new thing. This entire process is a visceral experience of our plastic brains absorbing data then gradually solidifying around what we perceive to be true before moving on to the next new thing.

And the cycle repeats like a flexing muscle.

A mind that stops being alert, that anticipates nothing new, falls increasingly into a cycle of habit, which helps to further ensure that nothing new happens, including learning. 

This is all just personal theory, based on my admittedly limited understanding of brain science and my more extensive experience in observing young children at play, which is to say, while learning at full capacity.

Of course, when people worry about me out there on my bike, I generally just agree with them, showing crossed fingers, but that belies my confidence (if that's the right word) in my own ability to remain alert for anything that seems amiss, unusual, or odd. And, yes, at the end of the day, it's the fear that I might get injured or even die, that compels me to be alert.

It's the risk that matters. Real, visceral risk, including risk of the social, emotional, and intellectual variety. Children need this as well. And they know it. This is why no matter how safe we try to make things, the children in our care invariably attempt to play the risk back into it: they climb too high, go too fast, wrestle, hide, and explore as we overly-cautious adults scold them back to "safety." There are no reliable statistics on playground injury rates, but what little we have tends to tell us that our "safe" playgrounds do nothing to reduce injury, and may, in fact, lead to an increase. I suspect that's because when everything is padded, when all the corners are rounded, the children perceive that they can let their guard down, to be less alert. When they perceive that there's nothing here that can hurt them, they fall into the habit of letting their minds wander from the task at hand, and as a person who has spent as much time as I have cycling amidst traffic, that's when things get truly dangerous.

I appreciate the people who worry about me, but I'm happy that none of them have the power, the way adults do over children, to force me to stop. Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, points out that our minds have evolved for hunting and foraging, free from our self-imposed cages, both alert and on the move in a world full of both hazards and opportunities, fingers crossed. It's called being alive.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Eat Your Veggies!

A parent pointed out that her son was eating raw kale that he had picked from the playground garden. "He won't touch it at home, but here, he devours it!"

This isn't the first we've heard of this phenomenon at Woodland Park. In fact, we see it almost every day. One spring, I mentioned to a parent-teachers that we needed to polish off the kale and lettuce growing in one of our raised beds in order to make way for different crops. I wanted her to urge the kids in that direction, but instead, she harvested the leaves herself, then took them to the snack table where she arranged them artistically, like a fan, on a plate. The children were avoiding it like it was the plague.

I told her, "If you want them to eat it, try taking it back into the garden." She doubted me, but moments later I spied children queueing up in the garden for their own leaf to munch. When she said, "You were right!" I wasn't surprised because I've seen it so often I no longer doubt it's true.

Children are notoriously picky eaters, especially when it comes to vegetables served to them at the dinner table, yet time and again we've seen that most kids, most days, are eager to eat pretty much anything from the garden. No one is surprised when kids fall on the berries, but our chives are almost as popular. We eat green beans straight from the vine, the seed pods of radishes that have bolted, and green tomatoes because we are so eager we pick them before they're ready. A pair of boys once ate an entire crop of immature beets straight out of the ground causing their parents to panic when they later produced red urine. We've eaten a whole eggplant, raw. And when they are done, they beg for more. Occasionally, a parent will report that this new adventurousness about vegetables has carried over to home, but more often than not it doesn't: they'll eat the kale from the garden, but not off a plate.

I recognize that there is a lot at play in food pickiness, including power dynamics, but I've begun to suspect that this reluctance to trust unknown or unusual food is at least in part an aspect of ancient wisdom, an evolutionary trait that helps to insure survival. I mean, it makes sense to be instinctively suspicious of new food that just appears on your plate, that was previously displayed at a supermarket, after having been transported on a truck or a train or a plane from a different state or even another country. It's adaptive, I think, to want to know where your food comes from, to have seen it grow, to have watered it, and then to have picked it yourself. I wonder if the pickiness of children around vegetables isn't due in part to our modern system of producing and distributing food. We like to know where it came from and there is no surer way to know than to grow it yourself.

Of course, this doesn't explain the popularity of hamburgers and chicken fingers, because, honestly, if children knew how those things are made, they would likely swear off them forever. Still, it seems like a plausible theory when it comes to veggies and is an argument for every child having access to a vegetable garden.

If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, it's not too late, or too early, to get planting!

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

"They Taught Themselves"

Some time ago, we took the children on a field trip to the local post office. We were a group of some 20 children and eight adults. The woman giving us our tour introduced herself as Ms. Lui, before insisting that the children get in a line. It was an inauspicious start. The kids had no idea what to do. Even we adults were at a loss. Queueing up isn't part of what we do at Woodland Park.

I could see Ms. Lui was irritated with us. She tried to remain cheerful, but it was through gritted teeth. When I explained that we didn't know how to line up, I reckon she thought me the worst teacher in the world.

As a play-based educator, I strive, against a lifetime of training to the contrary, to resist the temptation to exert power over the children which is what we do when we insist on things like marching in lines or sitting in straight rows. It's what we do when we insist on zippered lips, dress codes, or asking permission to use the toilet. School is notoriously a place of rules and regulations, of teachers in the role of drill sergeant, or, if I'm being honest, prison guard.

I am responsible for the children's safety and general well-being, of course, and in that capacity there may be times when I cannot allow a child to do certain things, like jumping off the roof of a three story building, but by default, any power that comes my way by virtue of my titles of "teacher" or "adult" is to be returned to the children in the form of empowerment.

I can make an argument for this position from moral grounds, but my genuine motivation is simply to be a good teacher. I'm familiar with the research on the effects of people possessing more power than others and I've concluded that when I exert power over children, especially the capricious and arbitrary kind of power exerted in most classroom, I'm doing direct harm to the children's educational prospects.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind: "One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you'll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you . . . Tragically, not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows the people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They're hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they under-estimate their own intelligence."

That adults should exert power over children is so ingrained in us that many cannot imagine it any other way, but by doing so we make the children smaller, we make them feel ignorant, and we undermine their confidence. 

We've all experienced educators who are convinced that the children are lazy, that they can't be trusted, that they must be constantly monitored and managed. It's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I asked Ms. Lui if we could just promise to stick together as a group. She didn't think that would work at all. She wanted us, on the spot, while on a field trip to a place of great excitement, to instruct them on how lines worked. Fortunately, there was a painted line on the floor so we asked the kids to stand on the line. Most of them tried it out for a moment or two, but as empowered children they were far more attuned to their curiosity than standing on a line. Some wandered off. Some pointed and asked questions. Others negotiated with their friends over their exact position on the line. After several minutes of this cat herding project, I turned to Ms. Lui and said, "This is the best we can do. Do you really need us to march in a line?"

It was a simple question, but it stumped her. After muttering something about "keeping order" she shrugged, adding, "Can you at least tell them not to touch anything?"

That I could do, although even then, I returned the power to these empowered children: "There's a lot of stuff around here that could hurt you. Ms. Lui wants you to ask her before touching anything." I did not command them, but rather gave them information.

She shook her head as she led the way. At every point-of-interest, from the sorting machines to the post office boxes, the children asked, "Can I touch this?" or "What would happen if I touched that?" At first her tone was slightly scolding, but gradually she began to relax, even seeming to take pleasure in the children's obvious curiosity, their confidence, and their willingness to voice their ideas and opinions.

In preparation for this visit, we had written letters addressed to ourselves. Ms. Lui showed us the outgoing mail slot and the children, unprompted, lined up, one-behind-another, to deposit their letters. She was by now in fine spirits. I joked, "See? We can line up."

She lowered her eyebrows at me, "I thought you said they didn't know how to line up."

I replied, "I didn't think they did. Maybe they just didn't need to know it until now."

This time when she shook her head it was with a sense of wonder, "I guess they taught themselves."

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

"It's Really Quiet Here"

"Teacher Tom, it's really quiet here."

I was sitting with the three-year-old at a table. There were puzzle pieces in front of us, but we were just goofing around, making no effort to assemble them. Objectively, it wasn't quiet. There were children squealing, laughing, and low-key bickering all around us.

If an adult had said this, I'd have likely sought clarification, "What do you mean, it's really quiet here?" But when I listen to young children, especially when they say something confounding, I try to give myself a moment to let their words sink in, to contemplate what it is they might mean before responding.

Young children are still learning to express themselves through language. Often what it sounds like they're saying is really an effort to express something else entirely. A boy once told me he was going to "drown the baby," an alarming thing to hear, until I figured out that he wanted to try the experiment of dropping a toy baby into a bucket of water to see whether or not it floated.

Maybe this boy was trying to express the concept of it seeming "relatively quiet." Maybe he was talking about our stillness at the puzzle table in comparison to the motion around us. Maybe he was talking about his own internal state, a kind of internal quiet. I even wondered if maybe he was expressing something about his sense of hearing. (I covertly checked his ears; after all, young children sometimes stick random objects in there!) I considered what I knew of his home life, the morning leading up to this moment, his particular passions and interests.

He was tracing the shape of a puzzle piece with his finger. Without looking at me, he asked, "Can you hear it?"

I told him the truth, "I don't know."

"You have to listen really hard."

I nodded, still wondering what we were talking about.

A pell mell of children frolicked past us, a couple stopping to consider our puzzle before moving on.

"It's really quiet here," the boy mused in their wake, maybe to me, but while looking at the ceiling, "but sometimes it's hard to hear because of all the noise."

In that moment it clicked for me. I sang, "Within the sound of silence . . . "

His head whipped around toward me, "I know that song! Mommy plays it in the car! . . . Did you know silence means quiet?"

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

This Messy, Hard, Emotional Work

We didn't have a huge set of big wooden blocks, which was okay because we didn't really have enough space for more and besides, if the kids are going to play with them, they generally needed to find a way to play with them together, which is what our school was all about.

The kids in our 4-5's class had been playing a lot of "super heroes." It was mostly boys, but they hadn't been particularly exclusionary, with several of the girls regularly joining them, often making up their own hero names like "Super Cat" due to the lack of female characters of the type in our popular culture. This in turn inspired some of the boys to make up their own hero names like "Super Dog" and "Falcon," along with their own super powers. And although there had been a few instances of someone declaring, "We already have enough super heroes," in an attempt to close the door behind them, most of the time, the prerequisite for joining the play was to simply declare yourself a super hero, pick a super hero name, and then hang around with them boasting about your great might, creating hideouts, and bickering over nuance.

At one point, however, a break-away group began playing, alternatively, Paw Patrol and Pokemon, which looked to me like essentially the same game with new characters. One day, some boys playing Paw Patrol used all of the big wooden blocks to create their "house," complete with beds and blankets. A girl who was often right in the middle of the super hero play wanted to join them, but when they asked, "Who are you?" she objected to being a Paw Patrol character at all. Indeed, she wanted to play with them and with the blocks they were using, but the rub was that she didn't want to play their game.

After some back and forth during which the Paw Patrol kids tried to find a way for her to be included, they offered her a few of their blocks to play with on her own, then went back to the game.

She arranged her blocks, then sat on them, glaring at the boys. They ignored her. I was sitting nearby watching as her face slowly dissolved from one of anger to tears. An adult tried to console her, but was more or less told to back off. I waited a few minutes, then sat on the floor beside her, saying, "You're crying."

She answered, "I need more blocks." I nodded. She added, "They have all the blocks."

I replied, "They are using most of the blocks and you have a few of the blocks."

"They won't give me any more blocks."

I asked, "Have you asked them for more blocks?"

Wiping at her tears she shook her head, "No."

"They probably don't know you want more blocks."

She called out, "Can I have some more blocks?"

The boys stopped playing briefly, one of them saying, "We're using them!" then another added, "You can have them when we're done," which was our classroom mantra around "sharing."

She went back to crying, looking at me as if to say, See?

I said, "They said you can use them when they're done . . . Earlier I heard them say you could play Paw Patrol with them."

"I don't want to play Paw Patrol. I just want to build."

I sat with her as the boys leapt and laughed and lurched. I pointed out that there was a small building set that wasn't being used in another part of the room, but she rejected that, saying, "I want to build with these blocks."

I nodded, saying, "I guess we'll just have to wait until they're done." That made her cry some more.

This is hard stuff we working on in preschool. And, for the most part, that's pretty much all we do: figure out how to get along with the other people. Most days aren't so hard, but there are moments in every day when things don't go the way we want or expect them to and then, on top of getting along with the other people, there are our own emotions with which we must deal. Academic types call it something like "social-emotional functioning," but I think of it as the work of creating a community.

It's a tragedy that policymakers are pushing more and more "academics" into the early years because it's getting in the way of this very real, very important work the children need to do if they are going to lead satisfying, successful lives. In our ignorant fearfulness about Johnny "falling behind" we are increasingly neglecting what the research tells us about early learning. From a CNN.com story about a study conducted by researchers from Penn State and Duke Universities:

Teachers evaluated the kids based on factors such as whether they listened to others, shared materials, resolved problems with their peers and were helpful. Each student was then given an overall score to rate their positive skills and behavior, with zero representing the lowest level and four for students who demonstrated the highest level of social skill and behavior . . . Researchers then analyzed what happened to the children in young adulthood, taking a look at whether they completed high school and college and held a full-time job, and whether they had any criminal justice, substance abuse or mental problems . . . For every one-point increase in a child's social competency score in kindergarten, they were twice as likely to obtain a college degree and 46% more likely to have a full-time job by age 25 . . . For every one-point decrease in a child's social skill score in kindergarten, he or she had a 67% higher chance of having been arrested in early adulthood, a 52% higher rate of binge drinking and an 82% higher chance of being in or on a waiting list for public housing.

Here is a link to the actual study. And this is far from the only research that has produced these and similar results, just the most recent one.

If our goal is well-adjusted, "successful" citizens, we know what we need to do. In the early years, it isn't about reading or math. It's not about learning to sit in desks or filling out work sheets or queuing up for this or that. If we are really committed to our children, we will recognize that their futures are not dependent upon any of that stuff, but rather this really hard, messy, emotional work we do every day as we play with our fellow citizens.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

This is Why Babies Belong Everywhere

Mark Toby

Prisoners placed in isolation, even for a relatively short period of time, experience anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, and an increased risk of self-harm and suicide. These conditions often persist even after they are released. 

Babies who are not held and touched enough experience similar mental health effects that can last a lifetime. Some have even been known to simply roll over and die.

These are not findings derived from studies of rats (which would be bad enough), but rather things we've learned through human cruelty.

The stereotype is that we are born knowing nothing and must be taught, but I'm beginning to wonder if the opposite is true: we are born knowing everything, the true nature of the universe and our place in it, then are taught the opposite.

Babies are born seeking connection, yet our entire educational system, our entire culture, is designed around separation. We leave babies to "cry it out." We rush them through nursing, shaming mothers who continue beyond some arbitrary number of months. We dismiss separation anxiety. We scold school children to "stop socializing," to keep their eyes on their own papers, and to see their classmates as competitors. We laud those who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (a physical impossibility), while disparaging those who accept a hand up. It's almost as if we spend the first couple decades of a child's life, teaching them that connection is for the weak. The strong stand on "their own two feet," we insist. And don't get me started on "tough love."

I feel that I'm speaking for all babies when I say that this is all cruel BS. 

In Doris Lessing's novel, The Four-Gated City, a supposedly mentally ill character asserts, "If you don't know something, you can't know it. You can only learn something you already begin to know. I can't tell you something you don't know . . . though of course the 'knowing' might be hidden from oneself." On the surface, it seems like she's setting up some sort of philosophical paradox, but if we're truly born "knowing" the nature of the universe it all makes sense. Lessing is talking science.

Even our definition of "knowing" is warped by having been taught, for our entire lives, that separation is our natural state. We can't just know, but we must know we know and then demonstrate that knowing to others for it to count. This means that babies and trees and the birds on their branches can't know. They might have instincts, but we adult humans, we elevated beings, are the only ones who could be said to have intelligence.

But again, I'm beginning to understand that it's the other way around. The knowledge that we dismiss as mere instinct is, in fact, the highest form of knowing. It is the wisdom that needs no proof, that needs no conscious knowing, and most importantly, is not separate, but rather only fully understood through connection. It's hard to write or talk about it because true knowing defies the ham fist of language.

Psychologists believe that during the first stage of life, babies do not perceive a separation between themselves and their caretakers. Where does mommy end and I begin? is a meaningless question. And increasingly we are beginning to understand that existence, at a physical level, is simply a web of relations. Indeed, our theories of gravity and other forces suggest that things have no properties in isolation. Everything we perceive is a relationship we create with that thing we perceive. Even measurements and observations are relations that we establish with something: things only acquire properties through their point of contact with other things.

And this goes for us as well. No wonder prisoners in solitary confinement lose their minds. In fact, many of them literally begin to doubt their own existence.

Imagine a world in which nothing but your own mind exists. You can't. There is no mind without relationship with other people, places, and things.

I can't help but reflect on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the original humans who lose paradise because they ate of what is often mis-labeled as "the tree of knowledge," but is rather more precisely "the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Like our babies who are born without cruelty, without malice, without the capacity for anything other than forming relationships with the rest of creation, Adam and Eve were without sin, but lost their place in Eden because they ate the fruit of disconnection, thereby committing the original sin.

Over the course of my life on the planet, I've seen this original sin magnified and accelerated. There are humans who go entire days, entire weeks, without human interaction that is not mitigated by some technology or other. We call it a crisis of loneliness or alienation. 

We were born knowing, however, that relationships are all there is. This means that somewhere within each of us, is this knowledge. Those of us who spend our lives connecting with the very young, are perhaps more aware of it than others who have more thoroughly learned our cultural lessons about disconnection, division, cruelty, and even sin. But it's still there in each of us, waiting to be learned.

Of course, the story of Adam and Eve is ancient. The biblical version was written around the 10th century BCE, but likely existed long before then in oral form. Humans have always been aware, at some level, what physics is now discovering, that reality is a web of relations. They have known without knowing that disconnection is like the color brown, it doesn't exist on the spectrum. It's an invention of arrogant humans who would seek to set themselves somehow outside or above the rest of it. What is new in the modern world, however, is that for the first time, many of us spend our lives without knowing any babies. Our ancestors always kept their babies right in the center of life, where they belong. Removing babies from the center is the bitterest bite of the fruit of disconnection.

Babies belong everywhere because this knowledge is not yet hidden from them. They are here to teach us. And it's only through re-connecting with our babies, a practice most commonly understood as love, that we can hope to approach the knowledge that can heal us. 

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Fairy Godmothers

"The center of the universe is everywhere," writes Rebecca Solnit in her retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Waking Beauty (or Eleven Times Upon a Time), "and of course it always seems to be right where you are, so there are more centers than there are drops of rain in a rainstorm or stars in the sky when the rainclouds blow away . . ."

When we're on our knees, wiping the nose of a child who probably should have stayed home sick today, we are with them at the center of the universe. When we take a small hand to support a nervous child through their uncertainty, when we sooth their hurt bodies and feelings, when we wiggle their shoes onto their feet, their coats over their shoulders, their mittens onto their hands, we are the real life fairy godmothers.

No one needs a prince, but everyone needs a fairy godmother.

Fairy godmothers are kind and wise. Fairy godmothers are patient, compassionate, and clever. But most importantly, we are subversive. That is the ultimate power of fairy godmothers.

In her book length essay, The Far Away Nearby, Solnit writes, "Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted aways from their own selves and lives. Even the princesses are chattel to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in who they were made for but for their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one."

As real life fairy godmothers we are here to help children become their own selves and live their own lives. We are down there on our knees, wiping noses, in the center of the universe, tenderly, lovingly subversive. Our role is not to liberate them, but to do whatever we can to give them the chance to liberate themselves. And that is subversive.

From where we kneel, we let them know that they have an ally and, as Solnit puts it, "Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality."

People often ask me, why I work so hard to set young children free when they will be soon enough subjected to a world of controlling fathers, wicked stepmothers, and entitled princes. When I step outside the center of the universe to contemplate the world, I can see their point, but from the center of their story, from the center of our story, I know we're planting seeds, together, in our subversive alliance, that will bear fruit when they need it.

We fairy godmothers are often made to feel small and powerless ourselves, marginalized in our pink collar ghettos, forgotten until there is some sort of crisis, like the pandemic. They see us on our knees and assume we are almost as powerless as the children themselves, harmless, sweet, patient. They say, "You're a saint," which always feels to me like a pat on the head.

But secretly, subversively, we're at the center of the universe, where we cast our fortifying spells of fairy godmother magic with every dab at their nose, protecting them against being enchanted away from their own selves and their own lives. 

And what is our subversive message? What is it that the powerful don't want the meek to know? It's that secret about the center of the universe, the one about there being as many centers as there are "grains of sand under the sea." It's the secret about social awareness and empathy, about sharing, collaborating, and kindness.

"And they all lived

happily,

sadly,

busily,

quietly,

noisily,

dreamily,

sleepily,

wakefully

ever after,

or at least for a good long while,

tangled up in everyone else’s story,

like all of us."

That's our subversive secret, between the children and we fairy godmothers. That's what the powerful don't want us to know.

******

 

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

It's Hilarious

Last night, I attended a community "open mic" event in which our neighbors took turns showing off their talents. I was there at the invitation of my friend Bill, an older man who lost his wife a little over three years ago. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to him were in consolation for his loss. He was going to read some poetry he had written during the intervening interval, although he appended that information by saying, "I think you'll be surprised."

We show up for our friends, even if they're going to read their mournful poetry of loss. And besides, I told myself, he had been a professional writer, a newspaper journalist, so I went hoping for a nice surprise, although a part of me was on pins and needles, worried that I wouldn't be able to sufficiently hide my cringe response.

He was announced by the emcee and came to the mic dressed in black. He began by telling us a little about his journey over the past three years, saying that his wife had specified that she was to be cremated and her ashes scattered in a beautiful place to which she had never been. 

"So," he said, "I scattered them around the kitchen."

There was a pause, then the audience erupted in wild laughter.

As a joke, it was, frankly, hackneyed, even potentially sexist (although she'd been a successful novelist, so it's quite possible she didn't have time for cooking), but the delivery, the set up, the surprise, made it hilarious. He went on to do a full on comedy set centered around his experience as a recent widower.

"Peek-a-boo" is a classic, nearly universal game we play with babies. 

We cover our eyes with our hands, wait a moment, then drop our hands to say, with a smile, "peek-a-boo." 

We do it because most babies find it hilarious. Yes, some may startle at first, even cry from the surprise, but once they "get" the game it never fails to delight.

Science reporter David Toomey writes in his terrific book Kingdom of Play, "There is a pleasure in the momentary disorientation of being tricked, or perhaps more precisely, a pleasure in learning that one has been tricked, that one has been, in a word, 'played'."

When we observe young children at play, there is generally a lot of laughter. Studies find that young children laugh something like 300 times a day while a typical adult might make it to 20.  Part of the reason, I'm guessing, is this peek-a-boo response. Yes, we seem to take pleasure in being tricked: four and five year olds almost always laugh when I use slight-of-hand to pull a penny from their ears. And being tricked is the slightly gentler cousin of being surprised. Of course, it's possible to take things too far, as chronic practical jokers eventually discover, but most of the time, once our hearts have slowed down, we laugh. 

A big part of the reason children are compelled to play is the prospect of being tricked or delightfully surprised. Indeed, some theorists believe that play is natural selection's way to prepare us for the unexpected.

Our babies genuinely don't expect our face to appear. When it does it surprises and delights them, often even more so as we do it again and again. The open mic audience expected five minutes of melancholy, but were surprised with jokes. The children expect to see a penny in my hand, not their ear. I expect that young children laugh 95 percent more often than adults because they live much more in a world of the unexpected. As adults, we've seen more and so have gotten good at predicting, or, as if often the case, good at missing the surprise because we assume we've seen it all.

For young children, even discovering such fundamental things as object permanence, is delightfully surprising. When faced with the unexpected, when playfully surprised or tricked, we learn the value of staying on our toes, remaining flexible, and never being too certain. Indeed, looked at one way, whenever we learn something new our sense of the status quo is shaken and something new and unexpected has emerged to take its place . . . And play teaches us that it's hilarious.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!