If It Isn't Purposeless, It Isn't Play

"Octograbbers" was a game that the children played for months on end. It involved possessing two shovels, one for each hand, then using them like pincers to dig, pick things up, and occasionally, in the spirit of fun, menace one another. 

We'll never know who invented the game of "octograbbers," but we can be pretty certain that it didn't emerge from Darwinian evolution. Or rather, not directly. It's not one of those things like walking or talking for which most human's are born with the biological programming. Octograbbers was what could be called a cultural phenomenon, one that was conceived by children at play. It then spread from child to child to the point that any newcomer, within a few hours of involvement with us, would be fully versed.

Everyone in our community knew about octograbbers. Someone might ask, "Where's the dump truck?" and someone would answer, "Over there by the octograbbers." This would have communicated nothing to an outsider, but within our community, everyone, child or adult, understood instantly. A parent would ask their child at the end of the day, "What did you do today?" And the answer, "Octograbbers" made perfect sense. 

Scientists who study animal behavior in the wild, ethologists, generally define play as behavior that is purposeless (nonfunctional), voluntary, obviously unlike the animals' typical behavior, involves movements that are repeated with modifications and variations, and that is undertaken by animals that are well-fed, safe, and healthy. I might quibble with this definition, for instance, I would add that play is always open-ended, but for most purposes it's workable. And the game of Octograbbers fits this definition in all its particulars.

We've taken it upon ourselves to point to learning that takes place as children play, even going so far as to assert that learning is the purpose of play. And these children were certainly learning, or at least practicing, skills that would serve them in the future, most notably cooperation and teamwork. By self-handicapping -- replacing their arms and hands with shovels -- they were forced to consider the physical properties of the world from another perspective. And, of course, given that we didn't have enough shovels for everyone to play the game at any given moment, there were likely lessons in supply-and-demand economics to be found in the game. But the game itself had nothing to do with learning. It was just play. And while the game itself did not emerge from Darwinian evolution, the urge to play most certainly did.

Many believe that one of the most human activities of all, making music, is the product of play. There was no obvious purpose for early humans to begin singing or tapping out rhythms. It was most certainly voluntary, it was behavior unlike the usual functional behaviors like hunting and hiding, and, of course, being music, variation and modification is essential. And, naturally, no one makes music when they are sick, hungry, or under threat. It was not inevitable that humans would make music. In the beginning it was, like octograbbers, a cultural phenomenon that spreads from person to person, and continues to spread from generation to generation. 

Unlike octograbbers, music has obvious adaptive advantages. It clearly facilitates the bond between caregivers and infants. It unifies us as members of cultures, clubs, and religions. It enhances our sexual attractiveness. All of which promotes the survival of the species. But it is not behavior that would logically emerge from the imperatives of survival, although, in the same way that octograbbers most certainly spurred learning, our invention of music has enabled, over eons, the proper neural circuitry needed to make and process music. 

The children playing the game of octograbbers, like those humans who first made music, were doing it simply because it was fun or pleasurable. The learning and the unifying, however valuable, is a side-effect of our urge to play.

"Organic evolution" is the term scientists use to describe this phenomenon. There is regular Darwinian evolution, in which our biology causes us to do things like breath, eat, procreate, fight, fly, fawn and freeze. And then there is organic evolution which is how we effectively direct our own evolution through play.

The game of octograbbers disappeared at the end of the school year. I imagine some of the more avid players sought to recreate it in new settings, and maybe the game is still bubbling away somewhere under the surface of society, but it's unlikely that it will be as universally impactful as the playful invention of music. Still, the two are of a type -- music and octograbbers.

Critics of play almost always base their arguments on the premise that it is purposeless or nonfunctional. "It's a waste of time," they insist, but that's exactly the point.

"Natural selection," writes science journalist David Toomey in his new book Kingdom of Play, "possesses a number of specific and well-defined characteristics. It is, for instance, purposeless. It has no intention, and no objective, and as Darwin averred, it "includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development." It is provisional. The evolution of any organism is a response to whatever conditions are present at a given place and moment. It is open-ended. The evolution of an organism has no moment of arrival and no end point -- a fact highlighted in the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species, a slow building crescendo whose final note hangs in the air and never quite resolves: the forms of life, in concludes, are even now "being evolved." In all these ways, natural selection is like play . . . (I)f you could distill the process of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play. Alternatively, if you were to choose an evolutionary theory or view of nature for which play might seem to be a model, it would be natural selection . . . Life itself, in the most fundamental sense, is playful."

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Littlewood's Law

I know the secret to making your dreams come true.

In an essay written for New Philosopher magazine (content not available online), Oliver Burkman discusses what's called Littlewood's Law, named for a British mathematician by the name of John Edensor Littlewood:

Let's suppose . . . that you're awake and active in the world -- as opposed to sleeping or resting -- for a mere eight hours a day. Suppose furthermore that a tiny 'event' of some sort occurs at the rate of once per second during those hours: you see someone in the street, you read or hear a sentence, or have a thought, and so on . . . Crunch the numbers on that basis, and it turns out you can expect to experience a one-in-a-million occurrence -- the kind of odds most of us would call miraculous -- roughly every 35 days.

So, simply from a mathematical perspective, each of us experiences a very lucky moment on roughly a monthly basis; unbelievably lucky, astronomically lucky, a miracle. The thing is, we don't get to choose what that specific lucky moment is going to be and because most of us are intent upon chasing a specific kind of luck, which we often label our "goal" or our "dream," we don't recognize those one-in-a-million occurrences.

When I graduated from college, my first employer was so impressed with my ability to write "proposals" that my unpaid internship turned into a paid one within months. I had been taught in school to write clear, unequivocal mission statements, followed by goals and objectives, supported by strategies and tactics, all in the service of that original mission statement, the idea being that if we just followed our plan our business dream would come true. Those plans helped us secure business, they helped us get going, but I soon came to realize, first with despair and then with a shrug, that our beautiful plans were almost immediately relegated to the file drawer in light of real events and real people. I realize now that those plans, far from helping us achieve our goal (which in business is always to make money), were really just blinders that pretty much guaranteed failure -- or at least a success far beneath the one postulated in the mission statement. The more seasoned businesspeople around me knew this already, at least in part, which is why my beautiful plans wound up by the wayside as we took the more certain path of making it up as we went along with varying degrees of success.

When I was young, before the pressures of "getting real" were upon me, I dreamt of being a superhero and a saint, of a life of hedonism and of adventure, of building things and tearing things down. I saw myself by turns a spelunker, baseball coach, architect, firefighter, daddy, hobo, titan, jewel thief, politician, archeologist, tinker, tailor, solder, and spy. I imagined myself living a life of ease and great striving, both poor and rich, complicated and simple. I toyed with all of those ideas for myself, each holding special charms, then, as I approached that arbitrary point we call adulthood, I pretended to focus on one of them. I was going to, one day, be the creative director of a Madison Avenue advertising agency. I know, pathetic, right? Even I didn't fully believe in it, although I had a "plan" for making it happen.

I really beat myself up about it, but by the time I had graduated from university, I was certain that I didn't want to be one of those Mad Men, so it was without enthusiasm that I continued to work that damned plan, which landed me with that first employer who was impressed by my ability to write plans: that employer, by a one-in-a-million chance, turned out to be the woman to whom I've now been married for the past 35 years. I don't know if I even recognized it at the time, but my dream had come true: I was and still am the luckiest man alive.

And I don't mean that in the usual sniveling, husbandly way, even though I know how it sounds. I don't care. It's true. I'd always dreamt of finding a true life partner.

One of my thousands of dreams was to follow in my own mother's footsteps, to be a parent and homemaker, something that had seemed an impossibility given the gender of my birth, yet, as luck would have it, I found myself in exactly that role when our daughter was young, just as I'd dreamt.

At some point, in my infinite list of youthful dreams, I'd fantasized about being a teacher and by the unpredictable turnings of fate, via a one-in-a-million long shot, someone asked me at just the right moment, "What are you going to do with your life?" And when I didn't have an answer, she replied, "You should be a preschool teacher." And that's what I did. What incredible luck! My dream came true!

In pre-Covid times I found myself traveling to places around the globe, self-indulgently "suffering" the toils and uncertainty of travel, speaking to audiences of colleagues who seemed to find me both entertaining and informative. This was another of my dreams coming true. I'd often romanticized the life of a traveling minstrel, roaming from town-to-town with nothing but a rucksack and a song. I was living the dream.

For a long time I dreamed of being a writer, and now here I sit, writing every day and people actually read it. My dream is reality.

It's all been pure luck. And please don't try to spoil it by insisting that it was luck made by hard work, diligence, and putting my nose-the-grindstone because despite popular mythology, that has had absolutely nothing to do with it. I've not worked hard: I've been lucky because I have dreamed a million dreams. 

And so that's my secret to making your dreams come true. Dream a lot. Dream often. Dream like a child, every day, passionately, then hold onto that dream even as you dream the next one. Because for every new dream you dream, you increase the odds that your monthly allotment of one-in-a-million long shots will be the one for which you've been waiting. It's this lesson, not the one about grindstones that I want to teach the children in my life.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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 Mind at Three Miles Per Hour"

"The Thinker," Auguste Rodin (The worst possible way to think?)

"(S)it as little as possible," writes German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."

Nietzsche was notorious walker and hiker, a man seemingly always on the go, yet he's known as a thinker, one of the most influential of the 19th century, a mustachioed ponderer of the big questions about life and the universe. 

He's not the only one of our great "brainiacs" to credit their bodies with their best thinking.

Essayist Rebecca Solnit, one of today's prominent thinker-walkers, writes in her book about walking, Wanderlust, under the inspired chapter title, The Mind at Three Miles Per Hour, "Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden." 

"Exploring the world," she writes, "is one of the best ways of exploring the mind."

There are exceptions, of course, but humans, from Socrates to Virgina Woolf to Richard Feynman, have understood that brains work best while bodies are in motion. That is until our current era of schooling in which our children, despite their Devine urge to move, are trained from an early age that their thinking is best done while seated, assembly-line style, quietly, listening passively, and moving only when told, and then, only in approved ways. It defies everything we know about how human minds work, and an hour of PE is not going to fix what's wrong, although more recess -- a lot more recess -- might.

Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of these efforts."

We must be taught to sit quietly because it goes against the very nature of life itself. Our brains are a part of our bodies and bodies are meant to move, preferably at three miles per hour. It's even better when that movement happens outdoors. 

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Our Schools Have a Boredom Problem

When I talk to adults about their years of schooling, they rarely talk about what they learned in math class. They talk about teachers. They talk about their social life. And at some point almost all of them talk about the boredom. 

Boredom researcher John Eastwood from York University in Canada defines boredom as "The aversive experience of wanting, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity." He and others have found that boredom is linked to, and in some circumstances potentially the cause of, depression and anger, pathological gambling, bad driving, sensation seeking and impulsivity, and lowered levels of self-actualization. This is unsurprising because, after all, the feeling of boredom is very similar to the symptoms of clinical depression -- emptiness, sadness, lack of focus, limited attention span, apathy, and lethargy.

Other researchers believe that boredom provides the important function of motivating people to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those before them. It is a spur to creativity. This is the thinking behind those who urge parents to "let your kids get bored" over summer or holiday breaks.

So, it seems that some amount of boredom is a good thing, but too much is potentially harmful. This is an important thing to think about when it comes to standard schooling. Because teachers are charged with administering a particular curriculum to all children, whether they are interested or not, we too often place our children in a position of boredom from which there is no escape. If they try to engage in activities that are more meaningful, like fidgeting, goofing off, or trying to change the subject, which is apparently the evolutionary purpose behind boredom, we reprimand and punish them.

Many teachers go to great lengths to make the curriculum interesting in an attempt to curb boredom and many children ultimately figure out how to take an interest for the same reason. But for many children, the boredom begins to affect their mental health.

When I was a boy, adults would tell me, "Only boring people get bored" in an attempt to shame me out of my boredom. There's a lot of that in our society, this idea that experiencing boredom too often is some kind of character flaw. This is how we shift the blame onto individuals rather than admit that our schools have a boredom problem. And it's a problem for children when they have no way out.

This is a problem that self-directed learning (or play-based learning) will never have because when boredom arises, the children have options, as nature intended.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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 to Raise Ethical, Caring Children

Most of us want to raise children who are ethical and caring. Indeed, when surveyed 96 percent of us say that this is a "very important, if not essential" parenting goal. I've not seen the numbers for teachers, but I would assume that a super majority of us feel likewise. If nothing else, we want the future to be populated with adults of character and we believe it begins with us, the adults responsible for the rearing and education of children.

Unfortunately, a full 80 percent of youth surveyed say that they are more concerned with "achievement" or "happiness" than with caring for others. Not only that, but eight in 10 also say that their parents and teachers feel the same way. And to put the cherry on this ugly cake, teachers, by the same percentage, perceive that the parents of their students value achievement over moral character. In other words, we are, as parents and educators, quite consistently sending our children a message we don't want to be sending.

Ironically, most research also shows that lack of caring for others leads to humans being less successful and less happy.

We are living in a time in which one in five children are suffering from a diagnosable mental illness. Our schools have become increasingly academic, where our children are being judged, daily, by their ability to pass tests and otherwise regurgitate facts on command, while their "free time" is being gobbled up by homework and resume-building extracurriculars. Our policymakers increasingly emphasize the economic importance of schooling, while ignoring the fundamental role education plays in building the character traits necessary to productively and cooperatively participate in the democratic process of self-governance. Despite our stated intentions, we are raising a generation of children who feel disconnected from their fellow citizens, who are pitted against one another at younger and younger ages, and who are urged to "race to the top," a metaphor that naturally places one's fellow humans a step below. 

I'm not the only one who has pointed this out, of course, and there are countless attempts underway to "teach" empathy, compassion, and caring. The Atlantic article to which I've linked here, quotes experts saying that parents and teachers ought to redouble their efforts to "give their children opportunities" to be helpful and caring, one even going so far as to encourage "repetition," the hallmark of the sort of rote learning that characterizes so much of our "achievement" focused educational systems, as if it is just another subject to be included in a pre-packaged curriculum.

We don't need any more curricula. We don't need any more subjects to be graded or judged by adults. Trying to "teach" caring for others is doomed to failure. I mean, think how most children feel about the "subjects" we already teach. Do we really think that we should teach caring the way we teach math or English?

The way children learn to care for others is through example and practice. If we truly want our children to help others, then we must role model it. They must see that we genuinely do prioritize caring over achievement because right now they clearly perceive we are just giving it lip service. 

Secondly, we must set children free to actually practice being helpful and caring which means we must stop pitting them against one another like combatants in some sort of reality TV program and leave them free to engage with the world as human beings rather than cogs in an achievement machine. Human beings are born to connect with one another through helping one another. Children as young as 14 months consistently demonstrate the drive to help others without the expectation of anything in return. Over the course of the past two decades, I've watched young children, through their play with one another, discovering the joy and intrinsic rewards that comes from caring deeply for one another, cooperating, and finding the joy of being not better than others, but rather a contributing member of a community.

Caring for others is not not something that can be "taught." It must be experienced. It must be discovered. If we really want our children to be ethical, empathetic, compassionate, and caring, we must step back from "teaching" and "parenting" and instead be the change we want in the world, while providing our children the freedom to be that change as well.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

"As You Make-Believe, You Will Begin to Believe"

The three girls were in a sort of irritable stew. They were bickering with one another like it was a stereotypical family holiday dinner, moping, whining, and fussing.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not . . . Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.  ~William James

One of them began to spin in circles, at first, it seemed, in frustration. The other two stepped back, wary, but still sparring. The spinning girl began to chant, "I'm having fun now . . . I'm having fun now . . . I'm having fun now . . ."

How do you get yourself to a point of believing? Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make-believe, you will begin to believe you have received. ~Rhonda Byrne

The other girls continued debating over some finer point of their play until one of them began to stomp away. As she did, she passed closely by her spinning friend who reached out and grabbed her arm. She stopped spinning for a moment to look into her face and say, "I'm having fun now." The two started to laugh, then spin together, their chant now altered to reflect a new reality: "We're having fun now . . . We're having fun now . . . We're having fun now . . ."

Men acquire a particular quality by acting a certain way. ~Aristotle

Now there were two girls spinning together, chanting feverishly, wildly. One girl was still holding on to her irritability, still trying to get the others to listen to her whinge, but they were too busy having fun to hear her. She stood outside the "fun" for a moment in silence. Then she made a choice; I saw it in her face, and she too began to to spin and chant, "We're having fun now . . . We're having fun now . . . We're having fun now . . ."

And they were.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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're All Scientists"

A while back, I was chatting with an artist, a painter, at her studio and gallery, discussing her process. I always ask artists about their process because I'm forever trying to steal their ideas and figure out how to convert them into preschool art explorations.

When I told her I'm a preschool teacher, I added, "All our art is process art. It's really just science." And she replied, 'That's how every artist approaches their work. We're all scientists."

Whether an educator, parent, or just, you know, a human being, it pays to be curious about process.

For instance, some time ago, I came across this video:



My initial thoughts were, "Way cool" and "There is no way to make this into a manageable, affordable class room project." It was at about this time, however, that I received some shelving I'd ordered that came with far too much packaging. In fact I wound up with something like 60 pieces of perfectly good corrugated cardboard cut into nice 12" X 10" pieces that had been stuffed into the boxes to fill up the empty space. That's when it began to occur to me that if the "tall" part were short enough, the paint thick enough, and the pouring containers small enough, it just might work.

So I got to work with our "third teacher," the environment.

I had several pieces of scrap 2"X2" cedar around the school which I cut into 2" to 3" lengths. I then hot glued them to the center of the cardboard. I wanted to thicken up the tempera paint so it wouldn't run all over the place, plus reduce the cost, and white glue seemed like the perfect answer, so I pre-mixed roughly 3 parts glue to 1 part paint. And finally, to increase the odds that the "paint" wouldn't just run right off the cardboard and onto the floor as it dried, we used small specimen cups to control the quantity the children had for each pour. 

Then, "Go!"

The kids didn't always stick to pouring on top of the wood and, naturally, there was other kinds of experimenting, like mixing our own custom colors (primarily "preschool gray," which is what you get when you try to mix a "rainbow").

I'd removed all the chairs, thinking the kids would have better "aim" on their feet, but several chose to work sitting anyway. 

We were so engaged that we took the project outdoors and kept going.

I'd call this a success, even though the dried pieces, which we scattered around the classroom on every available horizontal surface, adhered themselves to the table tops in such a way there were only a few left to take home on the following day. But that's hardly the point. The kids were entranced by watching how their paint flowed, oozed, and mixed, and that's the point. They got to tinker with the idea which is where the learning takes place.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!