What Are the Babies Crying About?

Young parents with a crying infant know that behavior is communication, although it may take weeks or months to figure out exactly what it is their babies are communicating. Does this cry mean I'm hungry? Does that one mean I'm in pain? Frightened? Tired? 

Coming to understand our new babies generally involves a lot of trial and error as we try one approach after another. If they reject the breast then we check their diaper. If they don't respond to singing we try rocking, bouncing or cooing. In other words, we try everything we can think of from burping to taking them for a drive until we hit on the proper response. 

The one thing every new parent learns is that the proper response to their baby's cried request or query or demand or complaint, is to do something to change their environment or their situation within the environment. It's not our babies that need to change -- they are the one perfect thing in an imperfect world. Their crying is feedback on their experience in that imperfect world and their place in it. And in this business of being an adult caretaker, the customer is always right, so we do what we need to do to make the world, at least for a time, a bit more hospitable. Then we do it again and again until one day we decide, usually gradually, but sometimes abruptly like on the first day of school, that it's not the world, but the child that must change.

This is the beginning of what we call "education." Behavior continues to be feedback: I need more time. I need to go outside. I need to know everything about this mote I've discovered under my fingernail. That's why I'm covering my ears. That's why I'm bouncing off the walls. That's why I can't keep my eyes on you and attend to your irrelevant blather. The adults have decided that they will no longer respond to their request or query or demand or complaint by doing something to change their environment or their situation within the environment, but rather strive to change the child, to invalidate their communication with, say, scolding, bribing, shaming, and even punishing. I've known far too many children who have been kicked out of preschool because they are unable to change to suit this or that environment or curriculum or methodology. 

But they need to learn to adapt, we argue, it's a life lesson. The world is the way it is. We say this even though we've all discovered that the real world simply doesn't box us up in packages of two dozen people of like age, sit us in chairs, face us forward, silence us, and compel us to attend to whatever nonsense is on the pre-planned agenda for the day. We say that we are preparing our children for reality, which is to say an unchanging world that will only accommodate requests or queries or demands or complaints within a limited range. There will be no taking you for a drive or cooing or laying you down for a nap on the top of a running clothes dryer (the thing that finally soothed our infant daughter for a time). We continue to do this even though it is demonstrably untrue that this is the way the real world works.

On the contrary, we double down on changing the child to suit this mythical "real world." If you don't keep up, if you don't shut up, we will label you. If you don't know this week's spelling words this week, you're "behind." And you remain behind even if six months later you demonstrate you know how to spell those words because the curriculum has been cranking out new spelling tests in the meantime. 

It's like a train that continues to chug along even when passengers are falling off. Instead of stopping to let them hop back on it continues moving forward expecting the children, children who are screaming "Wait!" to just, somehow, catch up. And if the child won't or can't run after the train, they are labeled as deficient in some way and specialists are called in to fix the child who has all the while been clearly saying, through their behavior, This sucks for me!

In the actual world, however, there is always another train. In the actual world, unlike school, you can take a taxi or ride a bike or walk or opt to go somewhere else on an entirely different timetable. Or just choose to not go anywhere at all. The real world may have its tracks and obstacles, but ultimately it is infinitely malleable. 

What if this were the core lesson of school? What if instead of being charged with shaping all children according to some artificial and arbitrary norm, we made them into places that strive to understand the children's requests or queries or demands or complaints?

Awhile back we were in New York to visit our daughter. While there, we went to see the world premier of a documentary about performance artist Taylor Mac's 2016 "24-Decade History of Popular Music", a 24-hour, one-time-only show about the American experience. The show featured dozens of costumes by the designer Machine Dazzle. During the question and answer session following the screening, an audience member asked Mac to name his favorite costume. He seemed genuinely stumped before good-naturedly refusing to answer the question, quoting author Iyania Vanzant, "Comparison is an act of violence."

Our schools are simply not designed to support each child in achieving their own unique potential, which is what our babies are always calling out for if we would only listen. Instead they are in the business of comparing, measuring, grading, and ranking with some sort of arbitrary standard or norm in mind. This is harmful and limiting not just to every child, but every human. It's violence.

What if we instead saw education as a process of trial and error, one that sought above all else to understand what each child is crying about; what they are communicating about the environment and their situation within that environment? What if, as educators, we dropped our measuring sticks, forgot our timetables, ditched our curricula, and focused instead on listening in order to properly respond to what the children are trying to communicate? Maybe then we would have an educational system that truly prepared our children to engage fully with life itself.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

It's Remarkable That We've Gotten it So Wrong

Young children do math for fun. Most of us, however, have been taught to misunderstand mathematics. We think it has to do with numbers and equations, but that's like mistaking a map for the actual terrain. A friend with a PhD in mathematics once told me that most of what he does is discover increasingly beautiful ways to pattern, organize, sequence, and group things.

In other words, when we see a child arrange blocks in a red-blue-red-blue pattern we see a child engaged in math. When children sort objects by color or shape or some other characteristic, they are doing math. When children discover a clapping pattern or identify an animal as belonging to a smaller category called "bugs," they are engaged in math. Math is one of the fundamental ways that humans make sense of a complex world. The numbers and equations are academic abstractions that help us communicate, explore, and solve specific problems, but when we center this aspect of math in the early years we rob it of its essential connection to the human experience. 

In other words, we tend to render it boring and meaningless, an academic exercise done for the purpose of grades or a teacher's approval.

Shakespeare is an other example of something profoundly beautiful that schools tend to render dull by treating it as an academic pursuit. I wasn't introduced to his work until high school where I was expected to read the script of Romeo and Juliet. I struggled through it, listened carefully to my teacher explain it, then managed to pass my test, but it was dull, dull, dull. When we complained, our teacher recommended we try reading it aloud, which helped to enliven it a bit. Finally, as a senior, a group of us were rewarded with a field trip to the Ashland Shakespearean Festival, where we were in the audience for several plays. I still struggled with it, but it was far from dull.

My daughter's experience with Shakespeare was quite different. At 8-years-old, she declared that she was going to grow up to be a Shakespearean actor, a pursuit that carried her through college. Her introduction to The Bard was through a summer camp in which the kids spent two weeks acting out scenes with an emphasis on fight choreography. She went on to spend the next several years performing in a series of Shakespearean plays through a youth program offered by the Seattle Shakespeare Company. She was never bored. Indeed, she became obsessed with the works of one of the greatest artists to ever live. I'll never forget arguing with her about something or other when she was 10. She settled matters by quoting Macbeth, a play in which she hadn't even yet performed. Shakespeare wasn't something for school or study, it had become intertwined with her life.

The works of Shakespeare, perhaps the most influential and enduring art in history, are meant for the stage. When we read them, they bore us. When we see them acted, they come alive. When we act them ourselves, we embody them. Schools, however, tend to do it backwards, just as they do with math: they start with the disembodied abstractions, then, some day, once most of the kids have long given up on Shakespeare, it's offered as an extracurricular activity that only "nerds" care about. It's as if we tried to teach art by making preschoolers start with years of tedium like horizontal line theory, only allowing them to paint a full canvas painting once they've worked their way through years of shape, color, and shading drills. Taught this way, everyone would hate painting.

But this is what normal schools do with everything. Academic instruction dehumanizes things that are essentially human. Academics instruction strips away the the natural motivations of beauty and relevance, replacing it with dry external rewards (like grades) and threats ("If you don't learn this, you'll never get into college."). It's a system that makes learning itself, perhaps the most inspiring thing any of us will ever do, into drudgery. 

As a boy, I played and watched a lot of baseball, a game that features a whole lot of statistics involving averages and relatively complex calculations. Long before I got to the academic version of averages and other statistics, I understood it because I'd been motivated to make sense of all those columns of numbers of the backs of baseball cards. In the same way my daughter was fully conversant with Shakespeare long before it was presented to her as an academic pursuit. This is the direction in which learning is meant to flow. We must first experience the terrain before we can comprehend the map. 

This is exactly the way play-based, or self-directed, learning works. We start with the beauty. We start with the relevance. We start with self-motivation; with life itself. We start with the full canvas painting, the patterns, the terrain, the comedy and tragedy. When learning starts with our natural curiosity about life itself, the educator's role becomes one of keeping up rather than cracking the whip. 

Learning is the easiest, most natural, and joyful thing in the world. It's remarkable that we've gotten it so wrong.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Little Boxes, All the Same

We sing . . . 

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes

All the same.

(I then pause to ask, "Are they all the same? Someone always answers, "No, they're different colors.")

(That's right!) There's a green one . . .

And a pink one . . .

And a blue one . . .

And a yellow one.

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

And the people in their houses

All go to the university . . .

And the all get put in boxes

Little boxes, all the same.

And there's doctors, and lawyers

And business executives

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

(Someone usually calls out, "They do all look the same! or "They're all red!")

And they all play on the golf course

And drink their martinis dry . . .

And the they all have pretty children

And the children go to school.

Then the children go to summer camp

And then to the university . . .

And they all get put in boxes . . .

And they all come out the same.

And they all go into business

Get married and raise a family . . .

And they all get put in boxes

Little boxes, all the same.

There's a green one . . .

And a pink one . . .

And a blue one . . .

And a yellow one.

And they all are made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

This is a variation on the song "Little Boxes, written and originally recorded by Malvina Reynolds, although I learned it through Pete Seeger. I like singing folk music with young children.

I don't expect the kids to understand the underlying message of this song, but I do hope that it will click for them in the future when they find themselves confronted with dilemma of little boxes, all the same. When we come to the end, someone usually wants to sing it again.

When the song is finally played out, we head out outside with our glue-paint (mostly glue with a little paint added) and made damn sure our own little boxes (empty mint tins, bottle caps, and whatever else we might pick up from the playground) are not the same. Indeed, we couldn't make them the same, even if we tried.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

Making Meaning in the Company of Others

"The bad guys go in here." 

He was explaining his pastel drawing to me.

"Then they go around like this." 

He contorted his body to demonstrate.

"And this is the knife part." He pointed to a jagged pastel mark. "Sometimes they get stabbed, but sometimes they run away."

He and his buddies had spent the morning excitedly scribbling on both sides of architectural printouts that a parent had brought in from her office recycling bin. The drawing took far less time than the explanations. In this case, we were learning about the details of a bad guy trap.

"Then they fall off this part, into this hole. They can't get out because the sides are too slippery."

The process they had collectively developed was to declare your subject, say, a tornado, scribble frantically, sometimes using more than one color. The penultimate action was to crumple the paper into a ball before unfurling it, declaring, "This is my tornado." Then came the final step, which was a detailed explanation of what we were looking at. The boys were obviously making it up as they went along, working hard to both make sense of their scribble and entertain their friends. There were lots of knives, poop, underpants, fighting, blood, baddies, and goodies in these emergent stories.

Often there was even a question and answer aspect to the creative description. "What happens to the bad guy when he's trapped?" "Then he gets out and goes to jail."

Sometimes there were creative suggestions. "And then you put tigers in the hole!" "Yeah, and lions and snakes!"

These boys had been playing together for nearly three years. They had grown up together in our school, but this was the first time I'd seen them sit down en masse to make art. Usually, they were racing about in costumes or playing out their games with blocks. If any one of them had stopped by to make art, they had done so solo, as a way to take a break from their usual intensity.  

But today, these boys had come together to create worlds. From the randomness of scribbles and crumples, they were constructing meaning by combining what already knew with their imaginations and connections with others, making sense from senselessness. This is what the human mind has evolved to do: make meaning in the company of others.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

16 Books That Transformed My Work With Young Children

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.  ~George R.R. Martin. 

What will you do with your summer? It's what our teachers always asked us as the school year wound down. As professional educators, many of us get to ask ourselves the same question.

My answer then, as it is now, is read.

Indeed, if I have one piece of advice for early childhood educators it's to read more books. Whole books. Education and development books, of course, but more importantly, books on any topic or by any person that sparks your interest.

Unfortunately, our time is limited. Much of the reading we do as educators tends toward "professional reading" -- curriculum materials, lesson plans, assessment tools, policy documents. Sometimes we might take a look at the latest book on play-based learning. Most of us have a stack of books that we "need to" get to. But the bottomline is that this is all just functional reading, reading to solve problems and produce results, like how to manage behavior, how to meet standards, and how to deliver content. 

When this forms the bulk of our reading, it tends to narrow our vision . . . not to mention exhaust us because we are reading for a purpose, as opposed to reading for pleasure. It keeps us circling around the same assumptions, the same language, the same ways of seeing children. We can too easily get trapped in a bubble of ECE orthodoxy. As John Dewey reminds us, education is not preparation for anything; education is life itself. And books give us life . . . a thousand lives. 

If our role is to create environments in which children are free to follow their own curiosity and teach themselves, then our most important tool isn’t a strategy or a script. It’s our capacity to see. The wider and more deeply we see the world, the more perspectives we possess, the more possibilities we’re able to offer. That kind of vision won’t come from staying inside the field of education. It comes from reading broadly—books that stretch our sense of perception, that challenge what we think we know about human nature, that invite us into relationships with the more-than-human world, and that immerse us in imagination, ambiguity, and even humor. 

When we read this way, we can’t help but become more reflective and less certain, more curious and less controlling. We’re better able to recognize the invitations children are constantly offering us, and less likely to fall into the trap of unsolicited instruction. In short, we become better at creating environments where real learning can happen. 

I have put together a list of books that have done that for me.

None of the books on my list are “how-to” guides for teaching, but they all made me a better play-based preschool teacher. This is not a list of my favorite books. It is, rather, a list of books that I return to again and again in my work as an educator. Seven of the books are fiction, including a pair of picture books. The other nine are non-fiction, books about history and science mostly, although there are two essay collections on the list. I don’t think of myself as a particularly avid science fiction reader, but there are three books on this list that fit (loosely) the category. Maybe that’s because these authors show us a vision of the future, and at the end of the day, that's what we do: build the future through our work with our youngest citizens.

These are all books that have expanded how I understand people, knowledge, and the world itself. And that, in turn, has transformed how I show up with children.

If you're interested in checking out my list of 16 Books that Transformed My Work With Young Children, along with the reasons I included them, download by clicking here. 

I'm not saying you should or will feel the same way. In fact, I found putting together this list such an enlightening exercise that I can heartily recommend that you make your own list of books that transformed your work with young children. I found it an interesting filter through which to consider the thousand lives I've lived. Many of the books I consider to be among the greatest ever written are not included. Most of my favorites didn't make the cut. But every book on this list -- these 16 lives -- made a direct and last impact on my work as an early childhood educator.

What will you do with your summer? How about living a few more lives?

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in way that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, 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!

All Work and No Play

I spent an evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's short form for "What to you do for work?" Boiled down, it's the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 16 years. I've recently gone back through the nearly 5000 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!