Comforting The Afflicted And Afflicting The Comfortable

Around the turn of the last century, while discussing the proper role of the press, author Finley Dunne wrote, "(I)t is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." In 1997, Harvard professor Cesar A. Cruz applied the notion to art, saying that it should "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." That is to say that the purpose of journalism and art, indeed all forms of truth-telling, is to challenge the status quo. The same, I assert, goes for education.

Much of what passes for journalism or art these days has fallen under the control of the "comfortable," the large media corporations that dictate much of what we see and hear, and because truth disturbs them, they tend to turn it all into entertainment, stuff that might shock, titillate, or excite, but rarely disturbs or afflicts them in their role as gatekeepers.

The same thing is happening with public education, as large corporations and Wall Street backed charter schools have descended upon our classrooms, places that should be cauldrons of democracy. Our schools have never been perfect, of course, and the powerful have always inserted themselves in anti-democratic ways, but the drive to narrow the focus of education by reducing it to test-taking focused almost exclusively on literacy and mathematics, things that are easily measured, while pushing aside the more uncomfortable disciplines like art, philosophy, and the humanities has accelerated over the past couple decades. The comfortable are disturbed by the sorts of critical thinkers that emerge from a real education. They are afflicted by those of us who ask a lot of questions, challenge their authority, and stand up for our beliefs. And so the schools they seek to create are ones that focus on questions of how rather than why; schools that seek conformity through standardization; schools that are activity centers more than places of real learning.

Education is upsetting, it digs into the gray areas and asks difficult questions. An educated person always has doubts. An educated person is never fully satisfied. An educated person afflicts the comfortable.

The American author Ray Bradbury was a largely self-educated man, opting for libraries rather than university. In his 1951 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, he conceived of a dystopian future in which books have been banned in the name of keeping the peace. His protagonist, Montag, is a fireman, although instead of putting out fires, his job is to burn the books. He meets a young woman named Clarissa, a kind of free-spirited throw-back to the olden days, who sparks doubts. As he begins to grow increasingly disillusioned, his chief attempts to explain why their work of book burning is so important and why people like Clarissa are so dangerous:

"You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say . . . Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs. The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. 

"Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot of what you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle . . . The family had been feeding her (Clarissa's) subconscious, I'm sure from what I saw of her school record. She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead . . . Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none . . .  

Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the Theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."

Bradbury was writing nearly 70 years ago, writing about the future, the place we now occupy. When I read this passage I see that he was, of course, wrong in some details, but right about too many for comfort. And I worry that the essence of his predictions are closer now than they have ever been. In an earlier passage in the book the chief explains that it wasn't the government that originally banned books, but rather the people themselves, who simply quit reading them. The more I reflect upon this, the more I think Bradbury is right: reading books, a lot of them, and especially those that make us uncomfortable, and then acting upon our discomfort, is the only way we can ensure that his dystopia remains fiction. And as educators we can never forget that much of our job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

Everything Human Must Be Maintained

We’re in New York City right now, here to celebrate our daughter’s graduation from college. The city has become a sort of second home for my wife and me these past few years as we’ve regularly visited our girl, and I expect that won’t change as her plans are to continue living here for the time being pursuing her career in the theater.

Yesterday morning I met my parents, who are also here for the ceremonies, at Vessel, a recently completed landmark building/work of art constructed as the centerpiece of the Hudson Yard redevelopment. It’s a new, shiny thing, a feat of human creativity and industriousness, and whatever you think of its artistic merits, there is no doubt that it stands, like the rest of this city, as a bold statement about things we human beings can do.

After taking our photos, we walked back into the city, dodging our way through the barriers and caution cones that are there to protect we pitiful pedestrians from the massive amount of construction taking place in this area as it revitalizes. It reminded me of my own neighborhood back home in Seattle with its skyline of tower cranes and maze of closed sidewalks. Later on, we walked under some of the ubiquitous scaffolding of NYC, evidence that this or that building was receiving its facelift; roadways were being dug up as crews worked on underground infrastructure; planters were being weeded and watered; sidewalks pressure washed and swept; every block, it seemed, presented at least one temporary obstacle made necessary by the need for something to be repaired or maintained or created anew.

It’s easy to become frustrated, to be brought down a bit by the noise, dust, and ugliness, but, of course, it’s a necessary part of any vital city: everything human must be maintained. And that doesn’t just go for cities. Farms and villages, cars and bicycles, gardens and parks, art and science, indeed anything created by humans carries with it the obligation of maintenance, even including, perhaps especially including, such human things as our relationships, our mental and physical health, and love. Without our constant attention, all of the things we hold most dear begin to erode, to come apart, to fray around the edges, just as the brand new Vessel has already begun to do.

In fact, life is about waking each morning, maintaining, repairing, and improving things, only to arise the following morning to find we have to do it again. It is relentless, which is why we need to find ways to step outside of it, if even for a moment. Meditation, alcohol, video games, reading, or simply spending time in nature (where maintenance is not required), it seems to me, are examples of ways we try to temporarily remove ourselves from the never-ending obligations of maintenance. It occurs to me that this is also one of the blessings of spending our days in the world of young children, humans who have not yet been taught the lessons of maintenance.

It gets to all of us at times, even overwhelms us, but there is none but temporary escape if we are to fully engage this world as humans. A city that is not maintained is one that is dying: an unmaintained life is likewise one that leads to despair no matter how much we wish it otherwise. And so we rise each morning, wrestle life back into shape, then rise the following morning to do it again. It’s true for each of us. Whether to embrace or fight it is up to us.      

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

“And They All Got To Be Friends”

To those who weren’t part of the process, it probably looked like nothing much: a bunch of boxes, some children’s drawings, a few stuffed animals. If it wasn’t for the chairs set up in rows and the slightly raised bit of flooring that reads as a stage, few would have known that they were in a theater. 

This stage was set for our play, one our four and five-year-olds have been working on for the better part of five months, starting in January, “writing” it one line at a time. For weeks, I would set myself up at a corner table with a clipboard and pen, taking dictation from whatever children stopped by. Sometimes they worked alone, sometimes in groups, layering their ideas one upon the other, brainstorming, creating plot lines and characters, trying to make one another laugh. Occasionally, they would ask me to read the entire script to them, usually declaring it “too short,” before adding more.

My father-in-law was an English professor and once told me that he preferred Victorian novels over contemporary ones, complaining, “Traditional novels have satisfying plots; modern novels just seem to be one damned thing after another.” This script was definitely of the modern variety, as knights and mermaids and ballerinas and ninjas joined with cats and snow plows and ice skaters and birds to race about, fight, discover, play, defeat bad guys, clear roadways, build robots, adventure, and make friends, while offering the audience three separate all-cast dance parties. 

While the first draft took place around a table, the real “writing” happened as we rehearsed, and boy did we rehearse. This is the 18th time I’ve helped children create a play for their end-of-year celebration and I’ve never had a group so eager to practice, often demanding it when I had other plans, like playing in the sunshine. During the rehearsals, kids would call out to me, “Take that part out!” They would decide to change their character in the middle of a scene. Better ideas replaced the old ideas in the blink of an eye, and my job, as director, was simply to keep up, recording their wishes as accurately as possible.

As we got closer to the end of the school year, and the final form of our show began to come clear, we began to work on our sets and props. So often, when parents come to see their preschoolers perform, this is where the adult hand is most evident, but just as we managed to leave the script and rehearsals to the children, this too was fully a product of their collective creativity. I would say, “We have lots of bad guys in this play, but none of you want to be bad guys. What should we do?” And they responded, “We should draw them with markers.” When I said, “Right now, we’re just pretending there is a castle. Do we need a real one?” They responded, “Let’s build one out of boxes.” And this is how we created, each detail, no matter how small, the product of our collective, creative, dialog.

Word-by-word, character-by-character, set piece-by-set piece, prop-by-prop, and damned thing-by-damned thing, our play came together, and on Tuesday we performed it. It was a delightful, chaotic, mess of a performance, the kind of thing that could have only come from the minds of these children; it was a piece of art that we presented on a stage for an audience at a given time on a given day, but that has already existed for months and will continue to exist far beyond the brief moment when we allowed the wider world a peek of who we have become, together. The final line of this play said it all, “And they all got to be friends.”

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

Truth And Beauty

My wife, Jennifer, was lately marveling at how joyfully our dog, Stella, rolls in whatever grassy lawn she comes across. All of the dogs we have ever adopted have done this, and we've long speculated that it's because they have found something particularly "stinky" and want to take the perfume of it home in their fur, with of course "stinky" being translated into dog language as "heavenly."

The theory of natural selection would suggest that there is something useful, or adaptive, about dogs acquiring particular odors, perhaps indicating that they are strong hunters or that their rolling about joyfully is evidence of their superior health, both traits that perspective mates might seek to pass along to their offspring. But there is also the chance that natural selection has nothing to do with it. It could be that wearing particular stinks is purely an aesthetic choice, one that has no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. Indeed, even the great Charles Darwin himself proposed that ornamentation may have evolved separately, through a process he called sexual selection:

Females choose the most appealing males "according to their standard of beauty" and, as a result, males evolve toward that standard despite the costs. Darwin did not think it was necessary to link aesthetics and survival.

We don't have a lawn at our school, but when we take children to one of the nearby public lawns, they behave in many ways like Stella. They tend to fall into the grass, rolling in it, digging in it, grabbing at it by the handful, and, naturally, picking any little wildflowers they find, collecting them into bouquets they deem "beautiful." Now one could argue that since flowers are often harbingers of food in the form of fruit, that humans have evolved to be attracted to flowers for utilitarian purposes, and that collecting them to carry home might even be a way to communicating the location of said fruit to the rest of the tribe, but scientists are increasingly coming around to Darwin's long neglected notion that animals sometimes, if not frequently, develop traits, like magnificent plumage or resonate voices or the tendency to roll in stinky stuff, simply based upon the fact that they have, as a species, determined those things, like those wildflowers, to be beautiful.

According to the theory of sexual selection, the expression of one aesthetic over another is largely arbitrary. A female that favors a mate due to a certain look/scent/sound/dance over another might not do so for any discernible reason other than that she digs it, which tends to lead to offspring that feature, or favor, that particular trait, meaning it gets passed on even if it doesn't have anything to do with "survival." It is the creation of beauty, apparently for beauty's sake.

I used to jokingly divide the books in my home library into two general categories: truth (non-fiction) and beauty (fiction), and while I meant it whimsically, we do tend to behave as if there is some sort of natural tension between the two. Literacy and math, for instance, a pair of more utilitarian aspects of education have been elevated in our public school curricula while the arts have been dramatically reduced, or even in some cases cut entirely, being deemed unnecessary, even frivolous. But this is a false comparison: truth and beauty are in equal measure manifestations of life's purpose, which is to seek to understand itself.

Truth is how we try to understand the external world, while beauty is how we try understand our internal one. Expressions of beauty, be they the feathers of a peacock, the splay of a sunflower blossom, or the layers of an oil painting, are how living things express the part of reality, of ourselves, created from within. As soon as we are capable, we begin to create beauty. I'll always remember how our newborn daughter played with a kind of gurgling sound in the back of her throat for weeks, sounding something like, "Agggggguuu." She did it over and over in her contented moments, making that sound both because she could, but also, it seemed to me, because she liked it, creating beauty for its own sake.

Beauty is not frivolous, even if it is also arbitrary. Indeed, it appears to be one of forces that define living things: its pursuit a companion to our quest for truth. It is not mere ornamentation, but rather something fundamental to life itself and any education that places truth over beauty is one that neglects half of what makes us human. Be it gathering flowers into bouquets, expressing ourselves through dance, or passing it along in our genes, it's only by engaging beauty that we will ever understand the world within ourselves.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

I Do It Because It Is Fun

The unexamined life is not worth living. ~Socrates

Scientists no longer ridicule the idea that the Earth is alive. There is even evidence that the entire universe is conscious. These are theories that are not proven, of course, and probably can never be proven, but they, for me at least, pass the sniff test to the degree that they have become concepts that I take joy in entertaining, if for no other reason than that it is fun to consider what that would mean for me, for us.

When I conceive of a living universe, I imagine myself a part of it, a small part. Indeed, an infinitesimally small part, one that is so small that I can never fully see or understand the meaning or machinations of it all. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm insignificant (although that's also a legitimate conclusion, just one I find less enjoyable to entertain). I often imagine that we humans are perhaps some sort of nerve-ending, here to react to sensations, to convey some tiny bit of information back to the greater consciousness, like the way our own fingertips convey information to our own, comparatively simple, consciousnesses that something is, say, hot or rough or wet.

And then, if this is true, it's not unreasonable to speculate that my body's nerve-endings have their own kind of consciousness, just as incapable of understanding the meaning or machinations of it all, but there to convey some tiny bit of information back to my own greater consciousness.

I sometimes think that my purpose might be to, in my very, very small way, help the universe better understand itself, and that would mean that the entire universe is forever examining it's own life, which, if Socrates is right, is what makes life worthy of its name. Indeed, the unexamined life is no life at all. So if the Earth is alive, if the universe is alive, one of the essential elements of that life is perpetual examination, evidence, I assert, that not knowing, and striving to know, is essential, not just to we puny humans, but to everything.

Of course, I'm just goofing around here, playing with ideas, not knowing, but striving to know. I'm probably wrong, assuredly wrong, but being right is not the point, it's never the point. I do it because it entertains me, it's fun, and that, I imagine, is what the universe is doing as well.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

A "Mommy Bottom"

Take it hip to hip, rocket through the wilderness. ~The B52s

Yesterday, we were out on a neighborhood ramble. We started by rolling in the grass and picking dandelions and other wildflowers at a relatively new park called the Troll's Knoll, which was, of course, followed by a clamber on The Troll himself. After this, we hiked to "the Dump Playground," called that because it was built adjacent to and as part of the recent updating of the solid waste transfer station, which we also visited to watch the garbage trucks vomit their loads of rubbish.

As we returned home, we passed the global headquarters of the Brooks running gear manufacturer which features a stylized, over-sized statue made from what appear to be old medals. It's clear to me that it's meant to represent a powerful, athletic woman, but I've discovered over the years that this isn't always so evident to the children. A group of us stopped to admire her as we waited for our slower-walking friends to catch up. Someone referred to her as a "guy," but a friend disagreed, pointing out that she had a "mommy bottom," patting her solid hip to make the point. This settled it for the kids.

I was reminded of a project from many years ago when a group of four and five-year-olds set themselves the task of creating a giant Nutcracker statue. They had wanted to use a pair of cardboard tubes for the legs, so running with that theme, I collected several other cylinders -- cans and tubes -- that I suggested we could use. In demonstrating my thinking to the kids, I had selected a large can that I imagined would work as a nice masculine chest. I laid the entire figure out on the floor to show them how I thought it would come together. They liked the general idea, but objected to my arrangement: the large can, they told me, would be better used as hips since this was going to be "a girl Nutcracker," the result of which you can see in the picture at the top of this post.

When I shared this story with one of the parents who had joined us on our ramble, she replied, "Well, they do spend a lot of their lives riding on their mothers' hips. They're important." Of course, women's bodies come in all shapes and sizes, but children are nevertheless keen observers. I suppose if it had been up to me, I'd have suggested something artistically clumsy like adding obvious breasts by way of feminizing our Nutcracker (or categorizing the Brooks statue), but the children, as they often prove themselves, are much more subtle and observant than I.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

"Houses For People"

I had an agenda. In fact, I've found it's almost impossible to not have some sort of agenda for our preschool days, even if it's just an idea about how the kids will engage, say, the art supplies or sensory table materials. It's okay for adults to have an agenda. The trouble comes when we don't set it aside the moment the children show us their better one.

My agenda was that I thought that after a weekend of marches (Women's, MLK), the kids might enjoy staging marches of their own. I supplied tag board, markers, craft sticks, and masking tape, then as the kids gathered around I explained what I was doing while making a sample sign. Not wanting to force my agenda on them, I didn't talk about what they should do, but rather I talked about what I was doing, offering it as an idea rather than an instruction. "This is my sign for the march. It says, 'More Love.'"

A handful of kids said they wanted to make signs too. These were three-year-olds. A few of them are beginning to form letters, again, not according to my agenda, but their own. Most made scribbles or drew simple pictures, then taped their sticks on the way I had done. Once we had a handful of signs made, I expressed my own agenda again, "Now I'm going to march." Several of the kids said they were going to march too.

We started up the hill, I chanted the way people do at marches, "More love . . . More love . . . More love . . ." The kids joined me, chanting and waving their signs. When we got to the top of the hill, the kids started talking about their signs:

"Mine says my name."

"Mine says, 'I like foxes.'"

"Mine says, 'Stop.'"

So we took turns march up and down the hill, chanting in favor of one another's signs. Other children joined us. One them told us that her sign said, "No hitting," one of the rules to which we have all agreed. Then we started working our way down our list of agreements, marching first against hitting, then against taking things from other people, then against pushing, then against pinching. It was a thrill for me, not just because the kids seemed to have taken my idea and made it their own, but because some of them seemed to be genuinely understanding this important democratic concept: the idea that sometimes we need to take matters into the streets. The boy with the "Stop" sign even acted as a sort of counter protester, meeting us along the way with his command for us to "Stop!" which caused us to pause for a moment before continuing about our business.

We weren't exclusively against things. We staged one march in favor of "More candy," for instance, and another for "More Peace." Actually, I had suggested the slogan "No candy, no peace," as an echo of the standard chant of "No justice, no peace," but the kids thought their idea was better: "More candy, more peace."

It went so well that I made the same materials available for the older kids when they arrive in the afternoon, again role modeling the making of a sign. More of these children are able form letters and others dictated their slogans to adults. Then we marched, chanting our slogans.

At one point as we worked on our signs we began to discuss homelessness, a topic that comes up fairly regularly at our urban school in a city that is home of dozens of tent encampments, one only a couple blocks away. A girl suggested that we march with the chant of "Houses for people." As we marched, she said to me, "We shouldn't just march around the playground." She pointed toward the gate, "We should march out there where people would hear us. Then maybe they would build real houses for people."

They had made it their own. They had made it our own.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->

Using Just The Right Amount

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 even the usually more powerful, "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.

One of my favorite lines from all of literature is this one from 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 glitter onto it, I no longer see waste. In fact, I know she is using just the right amount.

I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

-->