The Feeling of Being Alive

As a boy, I would feel excitement about, say, Christmas morning or an upcoming family vacation. My heart would beat a little faster in anticipation. My thoughts would race ahead, attempting to live the moment, and all its possible permutations, before it had arrived. As the day approached, it could be hard to sleep or eat or do much of anything else. Sometimes my whole body would tense up with the excitement, unable to contain it as I squealed, "I can't waaaaaait!" 

Today, a couple times a month, I find myself in front of an audience of early childhood educators. In the days and minutes leading up to these events, I find my heart beating a little faster. My thoughts race ahead to all the possible permutations. I often toss and turn the night before, my appetite tends to shrink, and as the moment approaches, I can't really focus on anything else. Sometimes, often just before taking the stage, the feeling fills my entire body and the only way to release it is to tense all my muscles, then release them all at once with an explosive expulsion of breath.

Somewhere along the line, I've learned to interpret this collection of bodily experiences as nervousness or even anxiety. Psychologists call this phenomenon "cognitive reappraisal," although they are most commonly talking about it going in the opposite direction, as they help their patients recognize and label sensations in order to reinterpret them in an adaptive way. A typical example might be to reappraise nervousness as excitement, although it appears that as I've aged I've gone the opposite direction. 

Over the past several years, however, as I've become increasingly aware of how human minds work, I've tried to be more aware of my "interoceptive sensations," which is to say the feelings that come from my bodily organs and extremities. This, new research tells us, is where our emotions begin, in our bodies, and our brains then construct our emotions. Our bodies are not subject to cognitive bias the way our brains are, which means that our bodies are often more rational than our brains.

When I'm aware of my interoceptive self, I'm better able get in on the ground floor of the emotion being constructed and have found that I can more often than not reappraise my feelings as excitement instead of nervousness. 

"Common sense," writes psychologist and philosopher William James, "says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. (But) this order of sequence is incorrect . . . (W)e feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble." Our organs and extremities are always a few milliseconds (even as long as two full seconds) ahead of our brains: that's the raw material from which our emotions are constructed.

Interoceptive awareness is how we can take control (sometimes) of our emotions. As early childhood educators, we take advantage of this every time we encourage a child to take deep breathes, to pause and notice their bodies. We are doing this when we stop coaching and distracting and instead allow a child to fully feel their strong emotion. So often we're coached to "help" them by labeling their emotion (e.g., "You're feeling sad," or "You're feeling frustrated"), but I wonder, given the latest research, that maybe we're better served to allow them to first tell us what they feel. Our suggestions may turn out to be spot on, but they're more likely to be simplifications or even misappraisals. Worse, our words can even become self-fulfilling prophesies in which we rob them of the opportunity to construct their own emotion from the sensations their body is experiencing. For all we know, they were on their way to constructing excitement and instead we construct anxiety on their behalf.

René Descartes famously declared, "I think therefore I am," but maybe it's time to reevaluate that. For her book The Extended Mind, science journalist Annie Murphy Paul interviews neuroanatomist and interception expert A.D. Craig: 

(I)t would be more accurate to say, "I feel, therefore I am." Craig maintains that interoceptive awareness is the basis of the "material me," the source of our most fundamental knowledge of ourselves. Because our hearts beat, because our lungs expand, because our muscles stretch and our organs rumble -- and because all these sensations, unique to us, have carried on without interruption since the day of our birth -- we know what it is to be one continuous self, to be ourselves and no other. Interoception, says Craig, is nothing less than "the feeling of being alive."

And that is the greatest gift we can give a child -- or anyone -- the feeling of being alive.

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After three printings, we are getting to the end of our book supply and it's unlikely that we'll print more. We've shipped what's left to Amazon, so here's your last chance to get your copy of Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book. 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D.

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!

Habit and Routine

Since the Enlightenment, the general consensus has been that our brains essentially react to signals received via our senses and what follows is an orderly chain-reaction of emotion, reason, analysis, and decision-making, which is sent back to our bodies as commands about how to move in response whatever we're sensing. In recent decades, however, neuroscientists have discovered that this isn't at all how it works. Our brains, it seems, are not reaction machines, but rather prediction machines. They aren't waiting for stimuli in order to respond, but are rather actively anticipating, even creating, what is happening based on experience. Indeed, some 90 percent of what we "perceive" is actually our brain's prediction about what it expects to be happening, with only 10 percent of our so-called perceptions being facts about the world as it actually is.

As a result, we live in a world of habits and routines derived from our experience that in turn further confirm our predictions in a kind of self-filling cycle.

Habits and routines are important to all of us, but especially to young children because they don't have the accumulated experience we adults have from which to make predictions. Classroom routines are part of creating an environment for young children in which at least some of the stressful guesswork is removed from the prediction process. 

Of course, this lack of accumulated experience also, at least in part, explains why young children are notoriously facile divergent thinkers (the process of creating multiple unique ideas or solutions to problems, commonly referred to as "creative thinking"). They haven't developed the habits and routines of thought that tend to lock us adults into a more limited range of ideas and solutions.

Routines are a collection of useful habits, ideally self-selected. Of course, the initial classroom routine may be imposed by adults, but in a healthy classroom, the children themselves immediately begin to shape it to suit themselves both individually and collectively. We may have provided the initial framework, but over weeks and months what the children do within that framework is all their own. And as anyone who has ever tried to flip-flop their classroom routine, or otherwise wrest control of it from the children, quickly discovers how important it is to them: some might go along, but many more will, in one way or another, fight back. 

That's because habits and routines are important.

The great psychologist and philosopher William James wrote, "Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior." This, of course, jibes with what we know about the predictive nature of human brains: our very survival is dependent on this type of "education."

That said, we all know that habits and routines can become problematic. Many of our mental health challenges, like anxiety and depression, can at least in part be thought of as "bad habits," habits and routines of mind that careen beyond our control. And the pursuit of mental health is one of attempting to replace those bad habits with better ones.

But on a more prosaic level, our habits and routines can deaden our experience of life because they leave little room for surprise. I think of it as a kind of calcification in which the world becomes duller because my brain's predictions have become, well, predictable. Old habits can make it increasingly difficult to think outside the box, because, after all, by the time we're "experienced" 90 percent of what our brains perceive are actually just habit or routine responses to the messages of our senses. I regularly find myself inspired by the sheer creativity of young children who, when left to think for themselves, solve problems in ways my old, calcified brain simply would not conceive on its own.

When our habits and routines are too rigid and inflexible, they cause us to pay less attention to the actual world around us as we get lost in our habitual predictions. We miss the changes, subtlety, and beauty. We may have purchased our home for the view, but habit and routine tend to blind us to it until a visitor enthuses over it. 

We cannot live without habits and routines, but at the same time, if we aren't aware, they make the experience of life less intense and therefore less real. I've been thinking a lot lately about the 90 percent of my experience that is, essentially, habit and routine. That percentage definitely drops when I spend time with young children, when I travel, when I engage with art, when I read a novel, and especially when I remember to be curious instead of judgmental. 

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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!

Play, Not Work, Sets Us Free

"Adolescence" was invented in the mid-1800's by the warlike Prussian nation. They had just suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Napoleon and felt their downfall was due, at least in part, to their soldiers not being obedient enough. Some had even run away at the prospect of dying for their nation.

Part of their plan to create a more loyal and malleable population was the invention of schools. As Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk, the idea was to slow the "transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage." The goal was to "create a permanent state of childlike compliance in adults," so they designed schools around the same methods used to break horses and other domestic animals: separating the young from their parents, confining them in enclosed spaces, limiting access to their natural habitat, and using rewards and punishments to force compliance with meaningless tasks. This Prussian method of compliance-based schooling was a boon for both for the military as well as the economy, which is why it became the foundation for most of what passes for education in the industrialized world today.

Shockingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Prussian slogan for their educational system was Arbiet macht frei (Work sets you free), which was infamously employed a century later at the gates of Nazi concentration camps.

We tell children they can grow up to be anything they want to be. We say it even though we know it's a lie. Most of us do not get to be whatever we want to be. We say it, however, because others have said it to us. We say it because we don't want to crush their little spirits with the truth that work is in their future. We say it because it the is one of the mantras we use to inspire them to keep their noses to the grindstone. Oh sure, we allow them to play at being artists, dancers, princesses, and athletes, but only while they are very young. Soon enough, and in some cases even during their preschool years, we begin to pressure them, both subtly and not-so-subtly to at least prepare a "fall back plan," like accounting or computer science. 

I imagine there are some readers here who are thinking, "But, Teacher Tom, you can be anything you want to be. You only have to work hard enough and never give up." How is that different than Arbiet macht frei?

It wasn't that long ago that US Secretary of Education Migual Cardona sent a message from an official social media account: "Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow's global workforce." People try to tell me that today's schools are nothing like the old Prussian model, but even our top education policymaker seems to disagree. We are here, it seems, to serve the economy, not the other way around. Arbiet macht frei?

Yunkaporta points out that the word "work" does not even exist in many Indigenous languages. Indeed, the "work" his people did do prior to colonization was confined to a couple hours a day and was comprised of things many of us now do as a break from work like gardening, cooking, hunting, hiking, camping, tinkering, and fishing. They spent the rest of their time building relationships, making art, dancing, playing games (almost always cooperative), telling stories, and making music. Indeed, they spent their time doing the very things that our youngest children do when left alone to be whatever they want to be -- not when they grow up, but right now. Play, not work, sets us free.

In many ways, "You can be anything you want" is just the contemporary version of Arbiet macht frei. In many ways, our complaints about children being distracted, not staying on task, and only wanting to play video games all day, are the very complaints the colonizers had about Indigenous people they encountered around the globe. And just as we did with those populations, we are doing to our children, generation after generation. No wonder societal change is nearly impossible. No wonder the rich keep getting richer. No wonder inequality of one kind just morphs into inequality of another. We are taught that a life of work will somehow set us free, when all it really does is sustain the economy.

You might ask: But what can we do about it? After all, this is the way it is. Certainly, we can't tell our children to just stop working. Believe me, I get that. I've spent well over two decades trying to get people to see that there is a better, more democratic, more equitable, and more human way to do school; that play, not work, is the secret to a population of critical thinkers instead of obedient drones. And I'm not the only one. Yet it doesn't seem we've moved the needle very much, except perhaps in some small corners where play is nurtured and protected like an endangered species. 

And that's what we can do. The Prussian model seeks to create a population for whom work, no matter how mind-numbing or back-breaking, is the only hope. That's why they try to inspire us with the promise of a freedom that will never come. When we keep play alive in our own lives, in the lives of our children, even if it is just in the nooks and crannies, we are creating real hope for freedom. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those people keeping play alive. In this world, play is the one thing that can give us genuine hope. It is the only path to freedom. And that is why play is the greatest threat to the status quo.

It's play, not work, that will set us free.

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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!

What We Learn When We Let the Children Lead

Faig Ahmed, hand-woven textile

When our daughter Josephine was born, we lived in an apartment in downtown Seattle, a block away from the famed Pike Place Public Market. One of the reasons we loved living downtown was that we could walk everywhere and that included her, at first in her bassinet stroller and then on her own two feet.

One of our regular destinations was the Seattle Art Museum. Museums are notoriously dull for young children, especially when adults march them through the exhibits, one-gallery-at-a-time, urging them to look at this one or that one, and peppering them with questions with the idea of making the experience "educational. And I get it. We adults have paid good money, made the effort, and it seems like an incredible waste when the kids start begging to leave after 10 minutes of riding the escalators. After a couple of experiences like this, instead of giving up, we had the idea of purchasing a family membership so that we could pop in and out at will. It turned out to be a genius move. Now, the pressure was off. Josephine could say, "I want to see the painting of Jesus whacking those guys" (an actual reference she made to a medieval painting of Jesus driving the money lenders from the temple) and we were free to do just that: walk to the museum, look at that one painting, then leave without feeling any sense of having wasted even a second.

This simple move of an annual membership allowed us to let Josephine lead the way. I wasn't Teacher Tom back then, but just a father whose wanted, for reasons not yet clear to me, his child to be free to just explore. And her instinct was to walk fast, treating the galleries like a kind of maze, pointing and remarking, but only pausing briefly before moving on. Without the pressure of getting value for my money, I found I could relax and just follow her, figuring that at least she was getting a bit of exercise, because it sure didn't seem like she was engaging with the art. We would walk round-and-round, ending up back where we started, then plunge back in to do it again. 

I've probably visited this Albert Bierstadt painting, Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, a hundred times. This photo can't do it justice, but if you click it, you will see it a bit larger. I feel like this is my painting.

Looking back, I can see how wrong I was. She was, in fact, fully engaging with the art. She was starting with the architecture. 

We would sometimes spend a half hour just motoring through the space, mapping it, noticing the windows, the balconies, finding the elevators and bathrooms, riding the escalators, saying hello to staffers, and only then, only once we knew our way around, would she say something like, "I want to find that silly painting." She would then lead us directly to it, like finding a landmark while traveling through a strange land.

With the lay of the land firmly in mind, Josephine would then often crawl onto a bench, where we would sit to ponder whatever art was within view. I specifically remember a piece by Cindy Sherman, a self-portrait in which she portrayed a queen on a throne. My memory of the specifics is fuzzy after all these years, although I recall it as a somewhat unsettling image. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, over the next few months we visited it a half dozen times. What fascinated Josephine was that this queen, this woman in a puffy, fancy dress, was apparently looking at something off the edge of the canvas. What was she looking at? Josephine was convinced that she was looking at her baby girl and that she was sad that her baby girl wasn't sitting on her lap. She would then tell stories about that baby and why it wasn't with her queen mommy, conjuring exactly the kind of introspection and wonder that every artists hopes to evoke.

Another time, I had made efforts to steer her away from a particularly macabre artwork that featured a dissembled woman's body on a collection of video screens. I thought I had been successful, until Josephine declared, "I want to find those TVs." And sure enough, she led me right to it. I was prepared for her to be frightened, but instead she stood laughing at the absurdity, a response so genuine that it completely shifted my own perspective on the piece.

This experience of following a toddler's lead taught me how to not just appreciate art museums, but to love them. To this day, I'm the guy you see either buzzing through the galleries or sitting on a bench. Never do I slowly and systematically making my way through as if ticking off boxes. But more importantly, it was one of my first lessons in letting a child lead me, of trusting young children to know how and what to learn, and, indeed, allowing myself to be their student.

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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!

How Can You Understand "Just Right" Until You've Explored "Too Much"?

During my first year teaching preschool, I was appalled at the amount of glue kids were squirting from our little Nancy bottles. It just seemed so wasteful. Committed to not bossing kids around, I tried using informative statements like, "That's a lot of glue," "It only takes a dot of glue to hold a googly eye," and "I think that's too much," but to no avail. I attempted role modeling and narrating my own "proper" glue usage with similar results. I even purchased new bottles, snipping the tips to create extra tiny holes in the hopes of limiting the flow. The kids just handed the bottles back to me saying it was "too hard," causing me to make the holes a little larger and little larger until the good white stuff was flowing freely again.

It was only after many months that I finally gave up my obsession with waste, introduced the glue table, and started just buying gallons of the least expensive glue I could find. I no longer think of glue as an adhesive, but rather as a stand-alone art medium.

This was the beginning of my journey into the deep philosophy that waste is in the eye of the beholder. It's not just glue. All kids some of the time, and some kids all of the time, will use the materials at hand to what adults perceive as excess, sometimes with spectacular results (bubble printing is a classic example), but more often with spectacular messes, both of which are valid results of a trial-and-error scientific process. After all, how can you understand "just right" until you've explored both "not enough" and "too much"?

One of my favorite lines from all of literature is this one from Johann Wolfgang Goethe:

In limitations he first shows himself the master.

More often than not, we interpret this to mean the limitations imposed from above or without, forgetting that most of our limitations in life are of the self-imposed variety. Playing with extremes is how we learn about self-limitation, which is at the heart of self-regulation or self-control. When we're not permitted the opportunity to explore limits, it means we are under the control of others, leaving us with two choices: rebellion (the natural human response to external control) or obedience (the unnatural one), neither of which tend to contribute much positive to our self-identity or our ability to think for ourselves.

I've often boasted that our school runs upon garbage, using for one last time those things heading off to the landfills and recycling centers, not using stuff as much as finishing using stuff. The fact that this is good for the environment is truly an unintended consequence: it really came about because we value managing our budget and value exploring the extremes. You just can't waste stuff that is already waste. Garbage and cheap materials are one of the ways we accommodate these seemingly opposing values.

This is why when a child dumps an entire bowl of googly eyes into a lake of glue then empties a shaker of bio-degradable glitter onto it, I no longer see waste. I see a true artist at work. And I know they are using just the right amount.

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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 Never Too Late to Show Up

I went back last night to take a look at what I wrote here on my birthday eight years ago (which was based on a post from 13 years ago when I turned 50). I'm happy to report that I still stand by (almost) every word, so I'm sharing it again today with a few edits to account for the passage of time.

Now I'm 63. It's not exactly a milestone birthday, but I nevertheless think that permits me the indulgence to offer a little unsolicited advice.

"Ninety percent of life is showing up." ~Woody Allen

That's a long time to have shown up, don't you think? Sixty-three years? I've seen well over half a century. I've lived in historic times. I should by now know most of what I'm ever going to know about life. I've still got my health, despite a few well-earned aches and pains. I love my work. This should be my time, baby!

"Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." ~Goethe

Here's one thing I know: Goethe was right, there is magic in boldness. If 90 percent of life is just showing up, then I'd say another 9 percent is boldness.

"Experience is the name we give our mistakes." ~Oscar Wilde

Of course, boldness must be formed from something; otherwise it's just brashness. I've found one does need at least a little genuine, deep-down confidence to credibly pull off boldness, and that can only come from experience or out-of-this-world innate talent. Since I never discovered my world class innate talent, I'm left to rely on experience. I'd say that 90 percent of boldness comes from that confidence. And 90 percent of that confidence comes from experience. And experience is the name we give our mistakes.

So, you know, the secret to life is to boldly show up and make some mistakes. And I'm here to tell you, the decades may pass fast, but it's never too late to show up.

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Speaking of showing up, this course starts today and we intended to close registration last night, but with the number of requests for "just one more day," we're keeping it open a little longer. So, it truly isn't too late to show up!!! In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. Registration will close soon, so act fast if this sounds like something you can use. To learn more and to register, 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!

Bird Brain

Yesterday, a pair of crows drove our dog crazy by play fighting outside our living room window. At first I thought it was an actual fight, and maybe it was (I have no idea what was in their hearts) but after awhile it was hard to see it as anything other than a bit of rough housing, especially when they finished by flying off together, wingtip to wingtip to perch side-by-side on a tree branch where they proceeded to casually preen their feathers.

Crows, they tell us, are one of the animal kingdom's most intelligent creatures, certainly at the top of the heap when it comes to birds. They belong to a family of birds called corvids that includes ravens, rooks, and jays. Scientists use things like their ability to solve problems, make tools, and their ability to anticipate future events as evidence of this intelligence. Crows even seem to possess a "theory of mind," which is to say they consider other individuals' states of mind. They actually make customized tools. They  understand causality, can reason, count up to five and it's said they remember individual human faces, so if you're mean to a crow, they'll know to avoid or dive bomb you when next you meet. They're so smart they outperform apes in some tests of intelligence. This has lead some scientists to assert that crows are second only to humans.

These are all criteria we use to determine human intelligence as well, so we're probably prejudiced when it comes to assessing this trait in other species. Naturally, we more highly value evidence of the kind of intelligence humans possess while dismissing, say, a canine's olfactory intelligence as less significant. Tool use, for instance, may well be a marker for this thing we call intelligence, but what if it isn't? 

Scientists in Australia have recently found that tool making does not correlated to larger brains in the avian world, brain size being another characteristic that we associate with high intelligence. Instead, they've determined that the best predictor of larger brains in birds is their tendency to play. The more a bird plays, and the more sophisticated their play, the larger their brains tend to be. Birds that don't play have relatively small brains. Birds that engage in solo play have slightly larger brains. Those that play with objects like sticks have even larger brains, but the largest bird brains of all are those found in those who play with one another.

Cause or effect? I have no idea. All this really tells us is that birds who play together have the biggest brains of all. It could be that those with bigger brains tend to play or it could be that playing causes brains to get big. We also don't know if this can be applied to humans, although we do know that humans have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio in the animal kingdom and we likewise tend to believe that we wear the crown of intelligence. We also, as a species, have a longer period of "childhood" than any other species, and childhood, in most animals, is associated with play. At the very least we can say that brain size and play are closely related, yet we tend, as a society, to dismiss play as "useless." Our schools, in particular, do this as we increasingly minimize recess while increasing instructional time. Indeed, much of what teachers are expected to do in the early years is suppress play (which is pretty much the entirety of "classroom management"), despite the evidence that growing brains either need play or need to play. Either way we are systematically depriving our children's brains.

At the end of the day, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to understand intelligence, even as it's an endlessly fascinating subject of speculation. More often than not, they are using a highly selective collection of data points, ones that are easy to measure, while disregarding anything inconvenient, and call it "intelligence." That's what I.Q. tests do, for instance. Brain size is one of those things that are easy to measure and, of course, no matter how intelligent a crow is, its brain is the size of a walnut, while a dog's is the size of a tangerine . . . And what of other kinds of intelligence?

Maybe intelligence is the wrong prism through which to look at these things. Whether or not play has anything to do with intelligence is a moot point from where I sit (although it looks like it definitely could be). The link between the lack of childhood play and its negative impact on emotional development is a strong one. A lack of play in humans leads to an increased propensity toward anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control. Even if all-work-no-play models of schooling do somehow increase intelligence, at what cost? Most of us would chose to be less intelligent and mentally healthy over brilliant and miserable any day. I'm far more concerned with mentally healthy children than intelligent ones, but if this research on bird brains tells us what it seems to be telling us, then there is really only one choice: let the children play.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. Registration closes today at midnight, so act fast if this sounds like something you can use. To learn more and to register, 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!

Like Lilies, Play is a Perfection that is Not Improved by Gilding

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is the part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it."

He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans come into contract. In our efforts to improve upon Mother Nature, Leopold bemoaned our urge to build roads into perfect places in order to make them more accessible; to manage the plants and animals in order to create a more desirable "balance"; to construct facilities to make the experience of wilderness more convenient. We gild natural places with fences and signs and bear-proof trash cans only to find that our love is suffocating. We can't seem to resist the urge, as Shakespeare put it, "(t)o gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the rice, or add another hue unto the rainbow . . ."

Even the lilies we purchase to decorate our homes have been gilded in their way, cultivated to produce over-sized blooms that come in a gaudy rainbow of colors never seen in nature. Not long ago, I found myself among wild growing lilies, pure white with yellow-tipped stamen and instantly felt the difference. These were the flowers that have inspired culture, art, and literature before they were made tawdry in our efforts to one-up Mother Nature.

We've done the same with children's play, which is to say the natural urge to educate ourselves. For some 300,000 years or so, our species, Homo sapiens, has evolved an extraordinary intelligence through the processes of curiosity-driven exploration, discovery, experiment, cooperation, and invention. Play stands among the perfect things, yet alongside that has emerged this human urge to gild the lily.

We see this gilding in the advent of modern playgrounds and the proliferation of manufactured toys. We see it whenever someone touts an innovation by labelling it "play with a purpose" (which renders it not-play) or by asserting, "They won't even know they are learning" (as if children must be tricked into it). We see it in our classroom management methods which seek to replace the sacred urge to play with rules and curricula that require the application of external motivations like grades, punishments, and rewards. In my new course Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we will explore alternatives that avoid the temptation to gild. (See below.)

Play is enough, especially in the early years. Everyone knows that this is when we are at our most capable as learners, when our brains and bodies are as facile as they will ever be. "They are like sponges" we enthuse and we are right, but it only works properly when self-motivation is the engine, which is to say, when we are playing. Play has evolved as a perfect mechanism for learning, yet sadly, too many of us cannot leave it alone: it's a lily we are too ready to gild.

When we build roads into a wilderness, we begin the process of rendering it less wild and therefore less perfect. Our intentions may be good, but a gilded lily will never live up to the ones that grow in natural places. Play is another perfection that is not improved by gilding.

When we resist the urge to gild and instead stand aside as our children play, we see a perfection in our imperfect world, and if we would keep it, we must resist the urge to gild it.

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In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, 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 Fundamental Freedom

I once taught a girl named Laura who would sit with the rest of us on the rug during circle time, but when she spoke, she popped to her feet to pace back and forth. She had fresh, thoughtful contributions to make to our group discussions, but clearly needed to move as she said them. She did this when she was two, then three, then four, then five. This was a cooperative preschool, which meant her mother was often in class with us. At first, her mother tried to persuade Laura to conform, but I asked her to back off, so no one told Laura not to pace as she talked.

Naturally, some of the other kids tried it out. Indeed, we went through a spell during which it was a fad. Whenever someone spoke at circle time, they did so on their feet in imitation of Laura. But for most of her three years at Woodland Park, she was a lone pacer, a habit that was not remarked upon one way or another. It was just what Laura did when she had something important to say.

Then she went to kindergarten where she was made to sit at her desk. A few weeks into the school year, Laura's mother wrote me, asking for advice. It seemed that Laura had gone mute at school. Her teachers thought there was something wrong with her. She sometimes spoke on the playground as she played, but never indoors and rarely to adults. I reminded Laura's mother about the pacing. "I thought of that," she said, "but her teacher won't let her stand up during desk time." Apparently, the teacher was afraid that if she accommodated Laura, she would have to let all the kids pace around, and that, in her mind, represented chaos. I other words, she knew that at least some of the children would benefit from moving around as they learned, but classroom management was more important than learning.

Most young children, most of the time, don't have much say in their lives. This isn't a good feeling. No one likes to feel powerless. I wouldn't put myself in a preschooler's shoes for anything. I would hate having someone dictate when I go to bed and when I wake up. I would bridle at being told what to eat, what to wear, and how I'm going to be spending my days. I would rebel against being forced to go places I didn't want to go, especially if I was made to go there every day, like a job I couldn't quit, and be made to do things I found meaningless, tedious, or plain old stupid. I would cry if I were confined indoors on a sunny day, or made to ask permission to even use the toilet.

Of course, I'm looking at this through the filter of having been an an adult for four decades, but that doesn't mean that children don't crave control over their own lives. Why do you think it is that so many parenting battles are over things like bed time, food, and toileting? These are things over which children do have control. You can't make another person sleep. You can't make another person eat. And you can't make another person poop. Exhaustion, hunger, and tummy aches are the prices many children are willing to pay for even these small, small scraps of freedom. In their way, they are freedom fighters.

Adults have power over children. Most of us wield it benevolently, although we can all be dictators at times and we know, sadly, that there are far too many children living under the thumbs of adult tyrants. But no matter how gentle we are, our young children don't have a great deal of say in their own lives. This, more than anything else is why I value play-based education. Yes, it lays the foundation for future learning, it grows the brain, it is how humans have evolved to educate themselves, and there is mountains of research conducted over centuries to support this, but from where I sit, all of that is secondary when set beside freedom.

Of all the freedoms we have, the freedom to think is the most fundamental, yet for most children, school is a place where they are told not just what to think about, but when they are to think about it, and also how they are to think about it. Original thoughts are wrong answers. They are punished when they rebel. 

Laura is not the first child to discover that school traditionally sets classroom management above thinking. Compliance comes first. Thinking, which is what we call the process of learning, is discouraged in favor of sitting quietly. When children are free to learn, it's always the thinking that comes first.

It's been a few years since I've spoken with her mother, but last I heard, as a third grader, Laura had finally started to figure out how to think, speak, and sit simultaneously. She was a "pretty good student," according to her mother, but, "she hates every minute of it." Laura still remembered preschool, however. "It was a golden era," her mother said. It's not the first time I'd heard that. And Laura is far from the first child who has learned to hate school. This is what standard "classroom management" systems teach most children. (In my new course, Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management, we will take a deep dive into alternatives that place the freedom to move and to think at the center. See below.)

Thinking and learning is what we naturally do with freedom. We are driven to it. It brings us joy. I see it in every child, every day, as they play together in preschool. Without the freedom to pace, the freedom to think, what kind of education is it?

******

In this brand new 6-week course, you will learn how to break the cycle of control, command, punishments, and rewards that have characterized the childhoods of so many of us. If you're ready to transform your classroom management skills so that you are truly supporting every child to get their needs met, and in turn transform challenging behaviors, then please consider joining the inaugural cohort for Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management. To learn more and to register, 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!