The First Thing Preschoolers Ever Taught Me

I first started running regular preschooler circle times as a 14-year-old baseball coach. It was an experiment by the Corvallis, Oregon Parks & Rec Department. They called it Snoopy League and I, along with another young colleague, were to "coach" four- and five-year-old baseball players.

They gave us oversized plastic bats, tennis balls and a spare field in one of the parks. It was summer so they also gave us a plastic tarp and told us that we could use a garden hose to make a "slip-and-slide" on especially hot days. That was pretty much all the instruction.

I was hired, I think, because I had experience with baseball, but also because I had a fairly extensive babysitting resume due to a dearth of willing 12-16 year-old girls in our immediate neighborhood. That had paid $1 per hour while this baseball gig was going to fill my pockets at the rate of $3.15 per hour. Woo hoo!

I'd never coached before, but I had been coached since I was eight, so I had an idea of how it worked. Within the first five minutes, however, I learned a lesson that has stood me in good stead for over half a century, especially when it comes to young children: man plans and god laughs. 

When I commanded my 20 or so players to warm up by running around the bases, they pretty much scattered all over the field. It took quite a bit of time and effort to round them back up. They had interpreted my instruction as some version of "run around amidst the bases."

From this I learned that four- and five-year-olds, with a few exceptions, might not understand the finer points of baseball, but they very much enjoyed running around on a grassy field.

When I told them to play catch, few of them could throw with any kind of accuracy and even fewer were capable of catching. From this I learned that most 4-5 year-olds, with a few exceptions, were not developmentally ready for the kind of throwing and catching necessary to actually play the game.

When I called them in to gather around for a little instructional or inspirational coach talk, they talked back, asked questions, changed the subject, and, with a few exceptions, didn't seem to really care about baseball as much as they did just being outdoors with other kids, in a park, on a warm, sunny day.

My colleague was likewise a 14-year-old, but she had no experience in either coaching or babysitting, so, by default I was the unofficial leader of the Snoopy League.

In today's world, this program would never fly. Not only would the Parks & Rec Department be sued for the use of the "Snoopy" trademark, but we 14-year-olds would likely require adult supervision ourselves. 

There were no fences or walls to mark the boundaries around the field. Had a child wanted to, they could have easily dashed into the street or down the block, an eventuality that never occurred to anyone, even the children, as far as I could tell. A few parents lingered around in the nearby playground with their even younger children, but they didn't really interact with us except during drop-off and pick-up.

With my plans and dreams for this coaching job dashed, I decided that I would just get paid to have fun with the kids.

We would start our days by taking a run, which was basically the children chasing me around the field. Then I might show off how far I could throw a tennis ball, which would result in a race to fetch it, while others showed off how far they could throw balls. 

For the kids who wanted to try out batting, I'd lob balls. 

My colleague and I demonstrated how to play catch. Some of them tried it out. Others invented their own ball games.

We often invented baseball-esque games using the equipment.

We talked about the names of the bases and the various player positions, but we also, and equally, talked about grandmas, ice cream, spiders, cuts and bruises, TV programs, and whatever else was on their collective minds. 

And, of course, that impromptu slip-and-slide featured prominently, although on most days they were happy with me just spraying them with the hose.

There were, as you can imagine, tears. I don't really recall how I dealt with injuries or emotional situations. I'd been given a first aid kit, but no training. I know I used quite a few bandages. No one scolded or blamed me about these minor childhood injuries. I likewise had no training in psychology, so I have no idea what I did about hurt feelings or broken hearts other than to let them cry until they were done. 

Our supervisor stopped by occasionally to check on us, but they stayed out of the way.

In essence, Snoopy League evolved that summer into a baseball-themed play group, with 20 preschoolers and a couple of young teenagers in charge.

Of course, what I didn't know at the time, was that since long before William Shakespeare invented the "teenager" (the concept, not the word) in Hamlet, this was one of the key roles of teens: to play with, and care for, the younger children. This is part of what is meant by the expression, It takes a village to raise a child. Young adults (and 12-13 is considered the beginning of adulthood in many traditions) along with grandparents, served as extra arms, legs, and hearts to provide relief and support for parents. Looking back, I realize that this daily two-hour session provided exactly that for 20 young mothers in Corvallis.

Not only that, it gave young adults a crash course in what young children are really all about. It gave them the opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge that they would need to be parents themselves. It gave them experience with genuine responsibility. And I know, for me, it felt good to be trusted by not only my bosses, but also the parents who entrusted me for two hours a day with their precious children.

And Snoopy League succeeded precisely when we stopped trying to make the children ready for baseball and started making baseball ready for the children.

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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 ways 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!

Children are Not Nouns. They are Verbs.

"To garden," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "is to engage in a form of coevolution -- not just with plants and pollinators but also with roots and fungi, microbes and microfauna, sun and soil."

Our garden in the center of our preschool playground is a place to play. The plants are there to explore with our fingers, our eyes, our noses, and our tongues. We discovered one year that we enjoyed eating radish seed pods more than the radishes themselves, which we had neglected to harvest, making it possible to experience those pods. 

We tend to think of farmers as people who "work" the soil, who tend and harvest radishes and other plants as food, ripping them by the roots, leaving only a few to serve as seed stock for the next crop. But "to garden," I think, is a wholly different thing: it is a process of existing with these plants, pollinators, fungi, microbes, microfauna, sun and soil. That is to say, to play with them, or put another way, to co-evolve.

When children play together we see them adapt to one another through an ever-moving process of agreement, negotiation, and bickering. Sometimes it all erupts in a kind of supernova of impossibility, everyone scattered, everyone briefly on their own as they seek others with which to play. Other times it dwindles to an end. But if the game is to continue, everyone must find a way to get their own needs and desires met while creating the space for others to get their needs and desires met. This means it must change, must evolve, or die, like everything.

We tend to talk about evolution as something that happened over millennia, or as a competition, or as a climb toward some higher state. When children play, however, they are simply doing it.

They are not nouns, but rather verbs. They are both shaping the process and being shaped by it. They are in the midst of the process that connects us with one another, and with everything. It's a process without beginning or end or purpose other than to sustain itself by becoming something else.

A game of chase becomes a game of fighting becomes a game of "let's pretend" becomes . . . And so on. Play, like learning, like gardening, like living, is a process that interacts with other processes. Children too are processes, not products. 

So much of conventional education treats childhood as a manufacturing operation whose product is a particular kind of adult. School readiness. Kindergarten readiness. College readiness. Career readiness. We're forever evaluating children according to what they're going to become rather than attending to what's happening right now. It's like we see ourselves as farmers producing a crop rather than gardeners tending a garden.

When we're gardeners -- to garden -- we don't have to teach children to understand the assignment. We don't have to get them ready. When they are playing, making art, wondering, talking, building, destroying, rebuilding, running, pretending, they aren't producing things, they are making connections. They are engaged in co-evolution.

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't that we've failed to teach children how the universe works, but rather that we persist in interrupting them while they're already doing it.

******

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 ways 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!

The Recurrent Problem of Civilization

 

"The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough . . ." ~Margaret Mead

"Man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary." ~Margaret Mead

As a man in a field that is overwhelmingly women, I've often been asked, "Why aren't there more men in early childhood education?"

My knee-jerk answer has typically been that it's about money. 

It's a defensible surmise given that preschool teachers are notoriously low paid ($38,140 a year/$18.34 an hour) and men (in heterosexual couples at least) are still the primary breadwinners. Indeed, the only reason I've been able to work in this profession all these years is because my wife has out earned me. 

That said, the pay gap has closed dramatically in recent decades. Today husbands are the primary income earner in barely over half of all marriages (52%), so that means my answer is shakier than it once was. 

For one thing, there's the chicken-or-egg question of what came first? After all, every profession in which women dominate, tends toward the lower end of the pay scale. And there are few professions with more of a gender imbalance than those that involve working with young children. In other words, do men stay away because the pay is low or because it's "women's work"?

I'm thinking about this because I recently came across Celeste Davis' piece on her Substack: "Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?" It's a short, thought-provoking piece about the startling fact that 60 percent of today's college students are women. When I was a boy, men enrolled in college at double the rate of women. Davis writes, "Scholars, journalists, college presidents and reddit thread philosophers have all come to the table to add their particular offering to the buffet of reasons why fewer boy are going to college," but the thing they all "skirt around" is the one thing that has actually changed: "an increase in girls."

She argues that across the board, when the presence of women reaches 60 percent in any profession the men "make a swift exit and other men stop joining." Among the professions in which this has happened are veterinary medicine, biology, interior design, psychology, social work and, of course, teaching, all of which were not so long ago were predominately "male" professions. 

The medical profession is currently 60 percent men, but 55 percent of all medical students for the past seven years are women. In 2024-25, over half of all new residents were women. Will medicine be the next profession to reach the 60 percent tipping point? And even more interesting will be watching to see if this historically well-paid profession becomes less so as women fill the ranks. 

Clearly there is more at work here than mere economics. It seems that many men and boys (especially heterosexual men and boys, although gay men aren't immune) don't want to be associated with "girly" jobs, often even when it means taking lower pay to work in a "boy" job.

Davis calls it "male flight," comparing the phenomenon to the "white flight" that tends to take place when Black and Brown people move into the neighborhood. As an institution becomes associated with women and femininity, men increasingly avoid it. Her larger argument is that the modern idea of masculinity teaches boys to avoid anything coded feminine. 

In other words, the answer is not the sort of glib, easy answer of "low pay," but rather something more complex and important. I don't think this is as simple as boys being afraid of getting girl "cooties," although I wouldn't dismiss that entirely. The deeper question, I think, is why and how are we socializing young boys to believe that to be masculine, they must reject nurturing, caring for others, and teaching?

In her book How to Raise a Feminist Son, Sonora Jha writes, "In many cultures, we rob boys of the range of human emotions and connection . . . And how are boys often trained in "masculinity"? By distancing themselves from femininity." The irony, she points out, is that what boys most want is to "fit in, and to connect" and they do that by showing that they don't care for connection." "Stoic" and "aloof" isn't what boys are made of but what they are made into."

Poet, essayist, and controversial founder of the so-called "mythopoetic men's movement" echoed Margaret Mead by asserting that the "fundamental problem in the continuation of a decent life everywhere in the world is the question of the socialization of young males." He went on to say, "It is not women's job to socialize young males. That is the job the older men."

In his view, we've entered a vicious cycle in which modern men find themselves "half-adults," who never fully mature, making it impossible to take on those traditionally "masculine" roles, including being a father, which has become a kind of vicious cycle. Essentially, Bly asks, How do we properly socialize boys into masculinity? 

We continue to hear this argument today, but I think that's the wrong question.

In her book, Jha cites the "Man Box" study, an ongoing, multi-country research effort looking at rigid societal expectations of manhood, its effect on young men, and the people around them. This "Man Box" is a collective set of beliefs and pressure society places on men to conform to rigid, traditional standards of masculinity, including such things as self-sufficiency, acting tough, physical attractiveness, adherence to rigid gender roles, heterosexuality, sexual prowess, and aggression used for conflict resolution. I have certainly had to deal with all of these pressures.

But the real question this study raises for me is, Why are we so determined to socialize boys into this definition of masculinity in the first place? It's not a particularly attractive set of traits. I mean, at first blush "self-sufficiency" sounds good, but to a young boy, it often sounds like "Don't ask for help" or "You're on your own" or "It's weakness to need others." Acting tough? That's just another way to drive people away. And ultimately, it's acting. Attractiveness? I mean, who doesn't want to be attractive, but at what cost? And we all know that gender roles, sexual shaming, and sexual conquest all deny ourselves and others their essential and unique humanity. And aggression and violence are simply not valid tools in the modern world. 

The mother of one of my students once told me, "I've never told my father that his granddaughter has a male preschool teacher. He would assume you're a pedophile." This is part of the "Man Box." I know there are many people, both men and women, who make this assumption about any man who would choose to work with young children. Indeed, before accepting my first job, I consulted with a mentor, a man, and asked him point-blank, "What do I do if someone accuses me?" He shook his head, "You would have to move to Bimini." Stepping outside the box can have real, harsh, and unfair consequences.

And as controversial as Bly is, he makes a point. “How can we expect boys to understand nurturing, connection, and non-violence as masculine possibilities if they so rarely encounter men performing those roles in the institutions where they grow up?” I know for a fact, that many parents chose to come to our school because I was a male teacher, just as some stayed away. When I asked why, the answer was typically something like, "I want my child to have a male influence," or "Men just have a different energy than women." It's the same sentiment behind the question, "How can we get more men in early childhood education?"

And we're back to another chicken-and-egg problem: We want more men in nurturing roles but without men in nurturing roles, many men will never imagine it for themselves. And so it goes.

When our daughter was born our circumstances made it logical and possible for me to be a stay-at-home parent. I worried about those "Man Box" pressures. I was concerned that I, along with our daughter, might find ourselves outsiders among all those women. I wondered if I was going to be judged and diminished as a man.

As a young man my father was focused on his career, which involved long hours and lots of travel. He was, however, an involved father. He played with us. He volunteered in his community. He tried new things. He was even our Cub Scout leader. But one day he said to me, "Tom, I think you're the luckiest man alive. I feel like I missed a lot of your growing up. You get to be there with your daughter." He was a conscientious, competent, curious, and caring man. I know that he sometimes felt trapped by the box, but what he taught me was that masculinity was ours to define. (Maybe that's the advantage of being "unnecessary.") And that's the man I still try to be. 

Mead asserts that "the recurrent problem of civilization" is what to do with the men? Maybe the problem is simply that civilization insists on trying to define what that is.

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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 ways 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!

The Trouble With Being Right in a Wrong World

In the country of the blind, goes the proverb, the one-eyed man is king.

In his 1904 short story "The Country of the Blind" H.G. Wells writes of a sighted man named Núñez who finds himself in exactly this position. Instead of being crowned king, however, the concerned citizens find his claims about "seeing" to be delusional and propose removing the organs that are clearly the cause of his mental illness. The story ends with Núñez fleeing into the wilderness where he presumedly dies in the effort.

The message is clear: possessing an ability (or knowledge or genius) that nobody recognizes is more likely to cause others to see you as defective rather than superior. 

For instance, there are those, like Thom Hartmann, who assert that their ADHD is his superpower. The big idea behind his "Hunter/Farmer hypothesis" is that traits we label as distractibility, impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, hyper focus, rapid shifting of attention and risk-taking, would have been quite valuable to hunters, while the modern classroom and workplace only tend to reward the steadier "farmer" traits. Hartmann says the genesis of his theory was an attempt to give his ADHD-diagnosed child a less-disempowering story. "It's only a flaw," he concludes, "if you're in a society of farmers."

In a similar vein, several of my autistic adult friends and colleagues have at various times confessed that they often feel themselves superior to us "normies," especially when it comes to understanding things like complex systems or accurately remembering details.

None of this is to suggest that neurodivergence doesn't come with challenges, only that it cannot be viewed only as a deficit.

Thirty-five years after his short story was first published, Wells extended it with a new ending. In the revised version, Núñez escapes into the wilderness, but looks back to "see" that a catastrophic rockslide is about to destroy the country of the blind. He returns to warn them, but they don't believe him precisely because his warning depends on this delusional thing called "sight." Núñez escapes, but the rest are crushed under the rocks.

In the original version, the tragedy is Núñez's alone, while in the retelling the tragedy is everyone's.

There is, of course, an irony in using blindness as a metaphor for deficit in a story about the dangers of deficit thinking. Wells was writing more than a century ago, and his metaphor carries assumptions about disability that I don't share. What's interesting, however, is the deeper question his story raises: Who gets to decide which human capacities count as gifts and which count as defects?

Modern schooling is focused almost exclusively on defining and "fixing" the perceived deficits of children. We shame them. We tell them disempowering stories. We cast their superpower as a delusion, a flaw, and an illness. The one thing we rarely consider is that maybe it's us who must change.

This is one of the great promises of play-based (or self-directed) learning. When children are free to play, we aren't compelled to measure them against any single standard of what a child ought to be. There is a place in our country for the child who can't sit still, the child who becomes obsessed with a single idea, the child who takes risks, the child who notices what the rest of us cannot "see," the child who thinks and communicates and connects in ways we don't immediately understand.

Our job isn't to "cure" children of the things that make it difficult for them to thrive in the world we've made. Maybe our job is to join them in remaking the world in which there are no kings.

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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 ways 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!

Toward Wisdom Rather Than Mere Education

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US. Currently, there are 32 active "large" fires burning, not to mention the dozens of smaller fires or the 50 or so large fires currently burning in other regions of the US.

The whole idea of a "season" during which destructive fires burn out of control is a modern invention. Up until the late 19th century, Indigenous people across the US, but especially on the West Coast, regularly engaged in prescribed or cultural burning as a tool for tending the landscape. These intentional small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged grasses and other useful plants, improved forage for game, maintained open woodlands, made travel easier, stimulated plants used for basketry, and reduced insects and disease. And, of course, one of the consequences was that these small burns done during cooler, wetter months, consumed the fuels that otherwise accumulate and feed the catastrophic fires we today experience every summer.

When Europeans began colonizing North America, they thought they were "settling" pristine, untouched, wilderness, when, in fact, for thousands of years, the native population had been responsibly working cooperatively with the land, not just with fire, but in countless other ways. Europeans missed it because it simply didn't look like the sort of clear-cut and plow methods of "dominating" or "subduing" nature employed back home. They missed it so badly, that they criminalized Indigenous fire practices, creating the "fire season" that is currently destroying thousands of acres of precious forest and filling our air with toxic smoke.

Every species shapes its environment at least as much as its environment shapes it. Beavers are a famous example. They have been at work engineering and shaping the planet's surface for some 8 million years. 

And it's not just animals. Plants also "tend" their environments. "When grasses emerged between 100 and 70 million years ago," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "Rather than rely on robust and elaborate defenses (as did their plant predecessors), certain grasses negotiated a symbiosis -- an ecological partnership -- with large herbivores. These grasses offered grazers endless fields of tender green leaves that quickly regenerated when shorn (or burned). In exchange for this perpetual sustenance, mammoths and the megafauna trampled, ate, and otherwise deterred the grasses' main botanical competitors, such as shrubs and trees, and fertilized the fields with their copious dung." 

Humans seem to be unique in that we are able to be conscious about our efforts to shape ourselves and our environment, both for good and bad. 

Cultural burn practices emerged over centuries during which conscious humans observed and experimented with fire, not as a destructive force to be feared and fought, but rather an essential aspect of a thriving environment. It was an ongoing process of learning to, not manage, but live reciprocally with a fire-adapted landscape. 

This process led to a kind of collective wisdom that wasn't just passed down from generation to generation, but rather continued to grow and evolve, through the conscious practices of observation and experimentation.

In our rush to fill our children's heads with "knowledge" in the name of mere education, we continue the colonizer's practice of domination and management. So much of what passes for schooling is the intellectual process of clear-cutting and plowing in order to plant the crops we think we prefer. When a child isn't compliant, when a child is incapable of being a docile empty vessel to be filled, we treat it like an emergency, a fire to be doused or a weed to be eradicated. Many of the mental health and other challenges our children face today, are the result -- the wildfire -- of this approach.

The practice of observation and experimentation, however, causes us to ask, "What is this child telling us?" The practice of observation and experimentation leads us to explore how we can work with children rather than attempt to somehow manufacture them. When we place observation and experimentation at the center of our work, we discover that the children are likewise observing and experimenting: adapting and tending, which is the essence of all human wisdom. 

At the core of this wisdom is the awareness that there is always more to learn from observation and experimentation. It's the process of living, one that cannot be undertaken alone, but in cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity with the other people, animals, and plants, not to mention the earth, the wind, and the fire.

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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 ways 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!

Motivated By Belonging and Doing

Not long ago, one of our toilets stopped flushing: the chain that connects the tank lever to the flapper had broken. I cycled to the hardware store and located the replacement part I needed. Back home, I turned off the water to the toilet, flushed the tank dry, removed the old part, installed the new one, and turned the water back on. Then, although I was confident I'd set things to rights, I gave it a flush, taking satisfaction in watching the tank empty and refill as it ought to.

I've made this simple repair a number of times in my life. I remember my roommates and I panicking a little when it first happened in college. We were all slightly afraid of our landlord, professional plumbing repairs were not in our budget, and the internet didn't yet exist, but between the five of us young men we figured it out. I've not asked any of them, but I expect that the world is today populated by dozens of flappers that we have collectively replaced with our own ten hands.

I'm not a plumber, but I've learned to repair a toilet. I can also snake drains, replace faucet handles, and know when to put my tools away and call in a professional. 

As a boy, I admired my elders' knowledge about the world. They knew how to fix things, cook meals, drive cars, grow vegetables, chop wood, fold laundry, and operate lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and can openers. They inspired me to want to do those useful things myself.

Rudolf Steiner, the founding philosopher of the Waldorf school pedagogy, built his approach upon the idea that young children ought to be be immersed in environments in which they are surrounded by adults engaged in practical day-to-day activities and projects. Rather than assigning tasks to children, the adults' role is simply to go about their business of living, including children when they wish to be included and answering questions. Not only do children learn the basic skills of life in this way, but they also see that participating in practical day-to-day activities and projects are desirable acts of belonging, of community.

Parents often complain that their children refuse to tidy up their rooms or help out around the house, something most of them do, even eagerly, around our preschool classroom. I expect that's because we so often expect them to do it alone, which is unnatural, or we treat it like something undesirable, chores to be done grudgingly as an interruption to, rather than as a part of, our lives. 

As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." I'm happy to be an adult who can do things for himself, but that was never my goal, nor is it the goal of our youngest citizens. They are motivated by belonging and doing which is what makes life worth living.

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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 ways 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!

"May I Dump This Bucket of Water Over Your Head?"

There are three broad categories of things about which we adults know more than the young children in our care: safety, schedules, and courtesy.

The rest is trivia. Yes, I may know more about Elizabethan novels than the typical five-year-old, but they know more about, say, Kpop Demon Hunters, so that's a wash.

Safety is obvious. Indeed, it's our number one job. None of us will last long in this profession if we're regularly sending kids home with major injuries. We say, "My job is to keep everyone safe. That's not safe. I can't let you do that." Then we don't let them do that.

Schedules can be inconvenient. We do what we can to minimize interruptions to the children's play, but the reality is that most of us have some sort of schedule to which we must adhere, even if it's just a matter of getting everyone ready when it's time to go home. We say, "My job is to make sure we're in the lunchroom at 11:30. It's 11:30. Now is lunch time." Then we usher them into the lunchroom.

Courtesy may not at first blush seem to fit with these other two, but this is where I see "consent" living. I don't expect children to align their behavior to the etiquette formulas with which many of us grew up (e.g., Emily Post), but I can't let them, say, dump a bucket of water on someone's head without first checking to make sure it's okay. I mean, it's only basic courtesy.

I once watched a boy sneak up behind a girl and dump a bucket of water over her head. He was shocked when she burst into tears. Later, as we discussed what he might have done differently, he asked, "Why is it funny when it happens on TV?"

The difference is consent. I explained that those people on TV are actors who have agreed to have water dumped on their heads, even if they pretend they didn't like it. Obviously, this kind of thing can be confusing for preschoolers and it's why they need our help to tease out the difference.

I remember when the Miss Manners column began appearing in our local newspaper back in the 1978. What made her advice different from what came before her was her insistence that etiquette wasn't about arbitrary rules, but rather about making social life work while preserving everyone's dignity. Courtesy is the answer to the question: how do we behave toward other human beings so that we respect their autonomy while still making it possible to live together? 

Young children might not grasp that concept exactly, but by the time they're three or four, most children are capable of understanding the concepts of consent and agreement. And this requires dialog, even going so far as to ask the question, "May I dump this bucket of water over your head?" then respecting the answer.

The Golden Rule is often offered as a kind of catch-all guide to living with others, but its weakness is that it allows us to judge the autonomy and dignity of others by our own sense of autonomy and dignity, rather than, you know, actually asking them how they feel about it. It's only basic courtesy.

A boy one time spent an entire morning asking his classmates if he could shoot them with his finger-gun. I admired his sense of fairness even as I found his line of inquiry unsavory. One after another, the children told him they didn't want to be shot. At some point he complained, "No body wants to play with me."

I answered, "Well, no body wants to be shot. I know I don't want to be shot. But maybe they'll play a different game with you."

He didn't like that idea. "But I won't really shoot them," he moaned, "It's just pretend."

"Maybe they don't know that."

He thought about this for a moment, then approached another child, "Do you want to be pretend shot?" Before long, half the kids were joyfully blasting each other with their fingers, everyone's dignity and autonomy intact.

******

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 ways 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!

We Laughed Together Subversively

I looked up to see a familiar face. For a moment, however, I couldn't place it, but then recognized my friend who I'd not seen since he was five-years-old.

"I recognize you!" I blurted before his name came back to me. He was standing with his mom, pressed into her legs shyly, a posture I didn't recall from a couple years ago when we had seen one another almost every day. But, of course, he would feel that way. For a young child, two years is a very long time, long enough to have completely forgotten his old preschool teacher.

Yet he hadn't forgotten me. He was here because he had told his mother he wanted to visit me. When she asked if it was okay, I'd said to feel free to drop by any time. I've always had an open door policy for alumni.

His mother nudged him to respond, "Hi, Teacher Tom."

I'd met Duncan as a two-year-old who was enthralled with his older sister, often coming to class wearing her old clothes, sharing stories about what Bella had done or said, drawing pictures and making paintings to take home to her as gifts. As he got older, he turned his attention to "great apes," which he taught me included chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. He wore our classroom gorilla costume almost every day, which included an anatomically correct backside that he would shake to make the rest of us laugh. During the three years that he and I were together he took himself along a wandering path of self-directed learning that carried him from Bella to the great apes, then, in a progression that made sense to him, on to dinosaurs, arachnids, outer space, Star Wars . . .

He intuitively signaled his changing interests by changing costumes, using dress-up as a way to embody his current driving passion. And through it all was woven an abiding interest in connecting with the other children, often bringing them along for portions of his journey.

In other words, he was a kid who always made the most of our days together.

I used my standard line that I use on visiting alumni, "Hey, I used to know a kid who looked a lot like you, but he was a lot smaller."

"It's me, Teacher Tom -- Duncan."

He was taking an afternoon off from first grade to be here. As much as I wanted to spend more time with him, I had other responsibilities so I left he and his mother to nostalgically go through the arrival routine of signing in, hanging up his jacket, stashing his backpack, and washing his hands. We later reconnected up by the cast iron water pump, which his mother had mentioned as something he particularly remembered. By then he had warmed up.

"This pump seems a lot smaller," he said. "Everything seems smaller. My school is huge."

"Yeah, well you got a lot bigger," I answered, "so you need a bigger school. Is your teacher bigger too?"

He thought about it for a second, not hearing it as a joke, then answered, "She's not bigger . . . but she's meaner."

"Oh, come on! She can't be that mean."

He conceded, "Well, she's not mean, but she made a rule -- no costumes except on Halloween."

"That's too bad."

"And she always wants us to tell her math facts."

"Wow, you know math facts? That's pretty cool."

"It's not cool, Teacher Tom. It's stupid."

"I hate doing stupid stuff."

"Me too, but did you know that I'm the smartest kid in my class?"

"I didn't know that."

"I know all the math facts. None of the other kids know all the math facts."

"That must make you feel good."

"It doesn't," he answered while lazily pumping water as the younger kids scrambled to dig channels in the sand into which it was flowing. The kids are always hoping for someone to pump the water for them and Duncan was obliging. "It makes me feel bored, but Bella told me that school is always boring. She's in fourth grade now."

"I'll bet Bella knows even more math facts."

He nodded earnestly, "She even knows more math facts than me. And she gets really good grades, like As and Bs. I also get As and Bs."

"And that's good?"

"Miss Herring says it's good," he answered brightly before glumly adding, "but I can do better."

I thought of the fully engaged boy from a couple years ago. "Good" and "better" and "smartest" and "bored" were not words anyone could ever attach to his learning. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, that I've seen how this system we call school had taught yet another of my young friends to focus on competing, ranking, rating, and jumping through hoops rather than simply engaging the world through their own curiosity.  

I knew that this was why he had remembered preschool, however, and why he had wanted to return. I also knew that this was why his mother had pulled him out of school for a visit. As he reengaged with his self-selected project of being the big kid pumping water for the little kids, I stepped back to stand with his mother.

I asked her about the family and specifically about Duncan. She told me he was miserable at school. I sympathized, then repeated some of what he had said about math facts and grades. She replied, "Oh, he's doing fine. The school work is easy for him. It's this," she said, waving at arm at the playground, "that we're missing. I want that boy back . . . Look at him!"

He was down on his knees in the mud, taking charge of building a proper dam as the little kids swarmed around this big boy, everyone playing the trail-and-error game, the research technique that underpins most play.

"I won't be able to take him back to school now," she laughed. "They won't let him in the classroom covered in mud. I packed a couple of towels in the car just in case."

We stood together watching Duncan in his element for a long, silent moment, before she added, "But it's still in there, you know? All that time with you is still in there. I know that's why he needed to come back. Thanks for having us."

We send them off into the world, us play-based educators, knowing that while life itself is ultimately self-directed, while schooling stands starkly apart as a place of pleasing adults, competition with your peers, and learning to game the system. It is a kind of battle they will be compelled to fight, one that pits their natural instincts and curiosity against tests, homework, and grades. We can only hope that we've fortified them for it. What gives me hope for Duncan and the other children I've taught is that "it's still in there." And because we're a cooperative school, it's still in their parents as well. 

Later, I found Duncan standing in front of our classroom costume rack looking disappointed. "I'm too big," he shrugged, "None of them fit me."

"Yeah, you always liked our costumes. Too bad you can't wear any at school."

"Actually, I do."

"But I thought you said your teacher has a rule."

"She does, but she doesn't know that I wear Darth Vader underpants every day!" We laughed together subversively.

******

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 ways 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!

We are Plural

Cry contagion, or contagious crying, amongst human infants is a well documented phenomenon, one that anyone who has worked with groups of young people has learned about first hand. One infant's crying triggers nearby infants, especially during their first year of life.

This response tends to be much weaker when babies hear recordings of their own crying or other loud sounds. It seems to be specific to the cries of other human babies. Researchers don't think this response is mere imitation, but rather a display of emotional resonance, a manifestation of the fact that our nervous systems are inherently interconnected at a level beyond any previous relationship or even awareness of the other individuals. As humans mature, this connection transforms into the empathy and compassion that drives us to help one another, which is how our species has always moved forward.

In other words, we are born aware at a basic level that we're part of something greater than what is typically thought of as our individual selves. 

At the same time, it's estimated that only about half the cells in our body actually contain human DNA. The rest "our" body is made up of the bacteria and other microbes that are essential to digestion, immune health, and other functions. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, this means we aren't "singular, each of us, but plural, a cooperative community."

Of course, we have been taught to perceive ourselves as individuals, but in everything we do, there is an entire civilization, both within our "selves" and without, with which we are inextricably intertwined

We are born enmeshed in our world, yet it seems we go out of our way to deny this. Our schools, for instance, tend to be set up as competitive arenas in which children are ranked, divided, and scolded to keep their eyes on their own work. Even "cooperative" activities result in individual grades.

The "genius" of play-based learning is that it's part and parcel of a cooperative community, one in which "success" isn't judged by an authoritative adult, but rather by how well the play sustains itself. In other words, the reward is that the game continues, moving from one thing to another as individuals adjust, adapt, compromise and negotiate. Too often adults show up in the context of play as the killjoys, as the ones who scuttle the ebb and flow of the games, often intervening just when it was "getting good." 

When we allow ourselves to step back, to observe, and to intervene only when necessary, we find ourselves in a natural world in which cooperation and connection, not competition, stands at the center. A place where "we" is greater than "me"; where we are plural. That is, and always has been, the glory of our species.

******

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 ways 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!