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.

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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.

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The Two Knucklehead Theory

The boys were giggling amongst themselves, huddled together like conspirators. Earlier, I had tried to approach them, but when I got near they clammed up, not exactly feigning innocence, but they definitely had something going on between them that they wanted kept to themselves. Young children today have so little opportunity to exist in unsupervised spaces that I tend to leave them to their impish secrets. I imagined they were cracking each other up over butts or poop or something else that adults might label "naughty" or "inappropriate." They shut up because they didn't want me ruining their fun. Respect.

I knew the two boys as solid citizens within our community: curious, engaged, friendly, and eager to cooperate. What had interested me more than their secretiveness was that I'd never seen them play together before, not like this. They had often been part of the same play groups, but this was the first time I'd noticed a one-to-one social connection. Being present for these moments is one of the joys of being a preschool teacher. 

After a while, they included another boy, then another, sharing their naughty joke. The four of them were feeding off one another. The volume was rising, but we were outside so it was nothing out of the ordinary. I was thrilled by how their conspiracy was spreading. They all seemed so delighted, even a little wild. Every now and then they would all fall to the ground, roaring with laughter. They were so absorbed with one another that I could now move nearer without being noticed. That's when I heard what it was that had them all in stitches.

The boy chanted:

Big fat baby walkin' down the road

Big fat baby hoppin' like a toad

Big fat baby about to explode

BOOM!

Big fat baby everywhere!

Then they all fell to the ground, red faced, united in their naughtiness. 

Businessman and professional basketball team owner Mark Cuban once said, "A team can have one knucklehead. You can't have two. One knucklehead adapts; two hang out together."

It's an idea that's been around for quite some time in basketball circles and is often referred to as the "two knucklehead theory."

Of course, the idea isn't original to basketball coaches. We've all heard the 17th century proverb One bad apple spoils the barrel, which expresses a similar idea. Although more often than not, in the modern world, it's left to dangle, "One bad apple . . ." Police chiefs and other apologists tend to use it this way when talking about a rogue cop. Formulated this way, it tends to imply that the bad behavior is an isolated incident . . . In other words, just one knucklehead . . . But we know there's always at least two.

"Mutiny needs at least two men."

"One man may start a quarrel; two keep it going."

In the language of modern organization psychology it's often phrased as: defiance becomes stable when it becomes social.

In the early years, we're are all familiar with this phenomenon. One disruptive child can be absorbed into the group, but when two or more start connecting with one another around a project, disruptive or otherwise, a new social center of gravity is created. Of course, this phenomenon isn't limited to disruptive behavior. It's what happens in any society. It's the driving force behind trends, fads, cults, and social movements. One person doing something is just behavior; two makes a movement. 

I imagine that a lot of educators would have scuttled the boy's chanting game. I mean, it was insulting, crude, and its punchline was violent. (Kind of like my use of the word "knucklehead.") And they knew that. That's why they kept it amongst themselves. I let it ride without comment, however, because, firstly, they weren't hurting or insulting anyone in particular. But secondly, one of the foundational principles of play based learning is that children must be free to explore all aspects of the things and concepts that are in their lives. How can you understand light without knowing about dark?

But even in a play based program, this phenomenon can lead to disruptive behavior.

The philosopher and godfather of modern educational theory John Dewey argued that behavior isn't just individual, it's social, a product of the group. When a child finds a partner in disruption, the behavior stops being a momentary impulse and instead becomes a shared activity. "Children's behavior is shaped through the social life of the classroom, not just through individual discipline." In other words, "misbehavior" becomes more stable and sustainable when a child (knucklehead one) recruits another (knucklehead two) into it.

In standard classrooms, "misbehavior" is a relatively low bar. Talking too much with a friend gets labeled that way. The way to deal with the two knucklehead phenomenon in these settings is to "separate" the troublemakers. When I was in elementary school, we were always disappointed in the seating chart: our teachers never put us next to our best friends. I now know, of course, it was their way of nipping the knucklehead phenomenon in the bud.

On the other hand, in a play based setting, we don't see this as something to scuttle. After all, we don't see "socializing" as a problem. Indeed, it is one of the key aspects of why our work is so powerful. Two children together can sustain behavior or a project that neither would maintain alone. And that behavior or project might well be mischief.

The boys mischievous chant was approaching the edge of acceptable, and that's a fascinating place to explore with your friends. How far do we dare go? Sometimes the knuckleheads go over the line. For instance, when the game becomes shoving other people to the ground and running away giggling, it's clearly time for the adult to step in to show them where the line is, to let them know that in the name of safety, we "can't let you do that." It's a line that we walk with children every day. How far is too far? Scolds often insist that "children crave boundaries." That's true. But they also crave experimenting with the limits. Every child in a two parent household knows which parent to go to when they want to stretch, say, the limits of bedtime or cookies. They also know that if they can get their sibling on board, the boundaries are more likely to expand.

Going too far isn't the goal, but rather a way to answer the question, "What happens when we do?"

The boys were still giddy with their shared naughtiness when we came indoors and gathered on our rug for circle time. One of the original boys immediately raised his hand, "I have a song we can sing!" He looked around at his cohort, who were assembled around him, grinning like Cheshire Cats. 

I knew what was coming. As a cooperative, the room was full of parents, some of whom I knew would be appalled by the song. But I knew that very often the only way to get beyond the knucklehead phenomenon is through it, so I said, "Let's hear it!"

He began robustly. A few of the other boys joined him at first, but dropped out after the first couple lines, leaving this boy alone to finish "BOOM! Big fat baby everywhere!"

The children were all looking at me. What would I, the adult, do or say?

I said, "You made that up yourself."

"We did."

Then I said to the group, "Should we sing it?"

There was a general consensus that we should give it a go. I had the boy repeat it one more time, then we went together, creating hand gestures to illustrate it. We chant-sang it again and again until our enthusiasm was sated.

When we were quiet, a girl said, "I don't like that song. I don't like exploding a baby."

Other children shared their own thoughts. "It's mean to call somebody fat." "Babies can't even walk." "It would kill the baby!" Some of the boys who had been part of it on the playground shared their own reservations. In the end, even the two boys who started it all agreed that it wasn't "a nice song." Although, one of them insisted, "I still think it's funny." 

But by now this particular boundary had been established, as determined by the children themselves, acting together in a way that no one of them could have sustained on their own, not arbitrarily as adult imposed boundaries often are, but for real, considered reasons that everyone now understood.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Hive Mind Switch

Several years ago, while walking in downtown Seattle, I turned a corner to find a group of people looking up. I looked up too. We seemed to be looking at the rows of balconies of the Warwick Hotel. I couldn't figure out why we were looking up, so I looked again at the people with me on the sidewalk. That's when I noticed that they weren't just looking up. They were looking up, then back to the street, where an ambulance with flashing lights blocked the roadway as paramedics were preparing to lift a stretcher with a covered body into its open doors. 

We were all alternating between looking up, then at the body, but we also just as frequently looked at one another. If we didn't make eye-contact, we followed the gaze of our fellow onlooker. If we did make eye contact, we widened our eyes at one another. We pointed. We shared observations, thoughts, feelings. Together, we were assembling the story of someone who and fallen or jumped and, at the same time, we were creating a kind of impromptu community of compassion around a stranger's calamity. In that moment, none of our differences mattered as much as this exclusive club of which we had all just become members. 

Normally, we can only guess what the strangers around us are thinking or feeling, but in that moment we were thinking and feeling as one. There were no barriers between us. I suppose you could argue that this was just me, but I was there. I know that this random collection of strangers -- business executives, street people, and preschool teachers -- were there together, thinking and feeling as one.

I've had similar experiences in my life. I've been on sports teams that were capable of acting as one. I've been at concerts or political rallies in which the crowd was thinking and feeling as one.

Most often, this phenomenon comes to our attention when a "mob" goes on a rampage. We tsk and tut over human nature in these cases. We accuse "them" of being sheep, of turning off their brains, of giving in to their worst instincts, and we aren't entirely wrong. 

But just because the uplifting version of this phenomenon doesn't typically make the news, that doesn't mean it isn't real and isn't important. It happens in churches, in workplaces, in stadiums, and on street corners, every day, all the time.

The greatness of our species, the reason we have survived, even thrived, is that we have evolved to think, feel, and act collectively.

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind, "By one year of age, a baby will reliably look in the direction of an adult’s gaze, even absent the turning of the adult’s head. Such gaze-following is made easier by the fact that people have visible whites of the eye. Humans are the only primates so outfitted, an exceptional status that has led scientists to propose the “cooperative eye hypothesis” — the theory that our eyes evolved to support cooperative social interactions . . . “Our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen,” notes science writer Ker Than . . . We feel compelled to continuously monitor what our peers are paying attention to, and to direct our own attention to those same objects. (When the face of everyone on the street is turned skyward, we look up too.) In this way, our mental models of the world remain in sync with those of the people around us."

Paul goes on to point out,  "Membership in a group can be a potent source of motivation — if we feel a genuine sense of belonging to a group, and if our personal identity feels firmly tied to the group and its success. When these conditions are met, group membership acts as a form of intrinsic motivation: that is, our behavior becomes driven by factors internal to the task, such as the satisfaction we get from contributing to a collective effort, rather than by external rewards such as money or public recognition. And as psychologists have amply documented, intrinsic motivation is more powerful, more enduring, and more easily maintained than the extrinsic sort; it leads us to experience the work as more enjoyable, and to perform it more capably."

The place where I'm most aware of this phenomenon is during preschool "circle time." The rest of our days are about children freely choosing what they will do and with whom, but once a day, we gather together around whatever the children want to talk about. Some days, of course, it's just every child for themself, but on others the children come together on a topic or idea or challenge. 

I had one group, for instance, that got into giving one another "compliments." We had, collectively, defined compliments as anything you can say to another person to "make them feel good." At least once a week, someone would say, "Let's do compliments!" and then the group would spend twenty minutes or so taking turns giving and receiving good feelings. In practice, what this meant was children saying "I love you" to one another, then hugging. At some point we began keeping track of how many "compliments" we had given. We did this by using a set of plastic chain-links, adding a link for each compliment. This was called "the compliment chain," which we hung from the ceiling, adding to it over the course of weeks and months.

One day, the kids decided to no longer take turns, but rather leapt to their feet as one in a frenzy of hugging amidst a flurry of "I love you." Every child participated, not just for this day, but every day for weeks on end. 

"A host of laboratory experiments," writes Paul, "as well as countless instances of real-world rituals, show that it's possible to activate the group mind -- to flip the hive switch, as it were -- by "hacking" behavioral synchrony and physiological arousal. The key lies in creating a certain kind of group experience: real-time encounters in which people act and feel together in close physical proximity. Yet our schools and companies are increasingly doing just the opposite. Aided by technology, we are creating individual, asynchronous, atomized experiences for students and employees -- from personalized "playlists" of academic lessons to go-at-your-own-pace online training models. Then we wonder why our groups don't cohere, why group work is frustrating and disappointing, and why thinking with groups doesn't extend our intelligence."

It begins with "shared attention," which is what happens when we focus on the same objects or information at the same time as others, in the way that my "club" of onlookers did outside the Warwick Hotel. And that's what happens at our circle time as well. I don't come in with a plan, but rather open the floor with "What should we talk about?" A child might tell us, for instance, that their grandma is visiting, and we're off as we bond over grandparents or relatives in general or sleepovers or wherever it leads. A child might say that someone hit them earlier in the day, that they didn't like it, and we bond over that. A child might want to teach us a song or ask a question or do a silly dance. Sometimes, as I said, it leads nowhere, this is not an exact science, but often, and increasingly as a group gets to know each other, as the habit of flicking the hive mind switch develops, it happens more and more.

Of course, the "shared attention" occurs at other times as well. There was the time we all, and I mean all, watched for 15 minutes as a raccoon cautiously climbed out on a skinny branch in quest of a bird's nest, which, we all guessed, had eggs, or even baby birds in it. We all stopped to reflect together on a photograph of civil rights protesters being dispersed with fire hoses. We all race to the parking lot when the local fire station brings their engine by for us to inspect. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault saw this phenomenon in terms of power, a form he called "normalization," in which, he asserted, our souls are imprisoned by the expectations and standards of the group, but looked at from the perspective of an "extended mind" as Paul does, we can see it clearly as a form of intrinsic motivation: when we think together, we become larger and smarter than ourselves.

This human superpower emerges when we share attention, when we are all securely part of the club, when we all turn our heads to look up together. And yes, it's often abused. Charlatans and other evildoers, dictators and cult leaders, have managed to flip the hive switch toward nefarious ends. But the media only reports on the riots. The historians falsely conclude that our ancestors were savages because only their forts and weapons have survived. Our educational system fears children in groups making their own decisions because we forget that The Lord of the Flies is a work of fiction. But research demonstrates that most of the time our behavioral synchrony primes the pump for cognitive synchrony in which a group, thinking together, does so at a higher level than any one human can ever hope to achieve on their own.

Together we're a genius. Our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen. 

I often find myself wondering how so many people, so often, can be misled by charismatic leaders. Maybe it's because we've not had the chance to practice, in school or at work, the habit of flipping the hive switch. We've been taught that competition is a virtue and that we must rely on our own minds, and only our own minds ("No looking at your neighbor's paper!"), rather than tapping into the network of minds that is the real power of human thought. We worry that the charlatans will usurp our common sense, but that can only happen to people who have not enjoyed a lifetime of coming alive together.

In many ways, this is all we do in our play-based preschools. When we set the children free we find them turning their heads together, attending together, thinking together. It doesn't always go well, of course, sometimes the hive mind buzzes into a mess, but I'm beginning to think that this might be the only way to inoculate ourselves against would be dictators. 

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Technology is Destroying Our Minds

It feels like everyone has their hot take on 1) smartphones and 2) AI, most of which fall into the category of "they're destroying our minds."

I have no doubt they're destroying our minds. That's what technology does. It enhances our lives by taking over some aspect of what our minds (or bodies) once did for themselves.

For most of human history no one knew what time it was. Around 1275 mechanical clocks were invented that could chime to let people know the hour. That's as precise as it got. The minute hand didn't appear until the 15th century with in-home grandfather clocks becoming widespread around 1675. And personal clocks -- pocket watches -- didn't really become widespread for another 200 years . . . Followed by the second hand.

The clock with its relentless tick-tock-tick divided up our days into smaller and smaller units, externalizing the pace of our days from our minds to machines, making us slaves to efficiency and punctuality. They disconnected us from the natural rhythms of life, the arc of the sun, the phases of the moon, the cycle of the seasons. Clocks destroyed the easy, individual pace of routines with standardized schedules, making us more machine and less human.

Today, just 250 years into the mechanical clock experiment, most of us can't conceive of life without clocks. And we definitely don't see how they've destroyed our minds. We wear them on our wrists, carry them in our pockets; they're on our microwaves, computer screens, car dashboards, and beside our beds. There's hardly a moment of our lives when a clock isn't measuring our progress, prodding us, chiding us, making us products of the Industrial Revolution.

But it's not just clocks.

The phonetic alphabet destroyed our minds.

The printing press destroyed our minds.

Television destroyed our minds.

Smartphones are destroying our minds.

And it's only a matter of time before AI destroys our minds.

I'm not saying I want to get rid of or stop any of it, only that the entire point of technology is to externalize something that was previously a function of our minds and bodies, theoretically freeing us up for "more important things." We no longer have to use our minds to memorize Homer because it's been written down and printed onto pages and bound into books . . . Where few of us ever read it. We no longer have to waste our time going out in public because we can bring "the public" into our homes. We no longer have to navigate our way around the world, look things up in the library, or write our own essays.

In his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams conceived of the Electric Monk: "The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

The real question isn't what technology is doing to us, but rather what we are going to do with our minds and bodies now that they are freed up to do other more important things. 

That's the cruel joke of it, of course. It typically only takes a generation for us to forget what things were like before our minds were destroyed because we fill up our minds and occupy our bodies with things that aren't really that important. Anthropologists estimate that our hunter-forager ancestors worked 20 hour weeks. They spent the rest of their time inventing things like dance, music, art, storytelling, community, and yes, technology. What they did with their free time is, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, fart around. Today, the average American works more than twice that, and most of us aren't farting around at all in our free time, let alone inventing anything. We let our technology do our farting around for us as we scroll and veg out.

This is something those of us who work with young children see more clearly than the rest of the world. We spend our days with humans whose minds have not yet been destroyed by literacy, clocks, smartphones, or AI. They spend most of their time doing what comes most naturally to humans whose basic physical, social, and emotional needs are met, which is to say fart around by exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing. That's what play-based learning is all about and it's why most people simply can't grasp it: their minds are too far gone to comprehend the world in which our youngest citizens exist, a world without all those technologies that have usurped parts of the human mind.

The encroachment of the technology of "academics" into preschool is destroying our children's minds. When we drill two-year-olds on phonics, we are destroying their minds far more completely than any smartphone. Am I exaggerating? I don't think so. One of the main things we moderns use our "freed up" minds for is to fret and worry. Mental disorders are at crisis levels. But most disturbing to me is that we are today experiencing anxiety and depression in preschoolers at rates never before seen. Nearly 10 percent of our children are on medications to treat their mental illnesses. I'm not exaggerating.

We're not going to stop technology, but we can fortify our youngest children, these original humans, with a time during which we allow them to know what it means to fart around, which is to say, to play.

The antidote to childhood anxiety, indeed, the antidote for anxiety in general, is to be free to fart around. It's when we're farting around -- exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing -- that we are truly free to be ourselves, to follow our curiosity, and, most importantly, to make our lives personally meaningful; to find our own, unique, and wonderful purpose, to witness wonder and awe in our lives. This is the foundation of what it means to be human.

The unfulfilled promise of every technology is to free us up for more play, which is to say, to come alive. The world needs more people who have come alive. And if they have any hope of ever coming alive, our youngest children need us to protect them from technologies that will destroy their minds, including the technology of academics.

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The Truth Will Make Me Free

The Truth Will Make Me Free

by Mister Rogers

What if I were very, very sad

And all I did was smile?

I wonder after a while

What might become of my sadness?

What if I were very, very angry,

And all I did was sit

And never think about it?

What might become of my anger?

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believed that the more we are deceived, the less we are free. Free will, he asserted, is predicated upon education and information, yes, but also, importantly, self-reflection.

Where would they go, and what would they do

If I couldn't let them out?

Maybe I'd fall, maybe get sick

Or doubt.

The longer I've lived, the more suspicious I've become of this idea of objective truth at least when it comes to finding something that is true for everyone all the time everywhere. It's quite obvious that this kind of external truth, the kind of pursued by scientists, simply isn't part of reality. Truth is always a matter of perspective. There is always one more way to look at something, one more thing we haven't considered, which is why truth is never a destination, but always a journey of discovery. It's a journey that takes us beyond our current selves, transforming us, but it always begins with self-reflection because more often than not we have deceived ourselves. We've convinced ourselves that we're not really angry or sad.

But what if I could know the truth

And say just how I feel?

I think I'd learn a lot that's real

About freedom.

Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which is a call to regularly question our beliefs, actions, and assumptions about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. It takes courage. Reflecting on "exactly how I feel inside of me", for instance, is often painful and frightening because it demands that we face our self-deceptions and accept that things are not as they once appeared.

No one ever said that freedom would be easy. For most of us, most of the time, we are our own worst jailor. This is why we need other people to help us in learning to tell the truth. The term "self-reflection" suggests a solitary journey, but it's virtually impossible without the help and support of others, especially those people we love, if only because from their perspective our self-deception is far more obvious than the perspective from within where it looks like truth.

I'm learning to sing a sad song when I'm sad.

I'm learning to say I'm angry when I'm very mad.

I'm learning to shout,

I'm getting it out,

I'm happy, learning

Exactly how I feel inside of me

This is the struggle. It is the struggle of education and of life. We all know people who have stopped growing, who have determined that they possess objective truth and anything, any perspective, that challenges that, is a threat. We know these people are sad and angry, even if they don't. They are both the perfect prisoner and the perfect jailor. And we know we cannot help them be free unless they want to be helped. These people tend to not be children. Indeed, they tend to be old, which is why we must remain vigilant as we age, but of course there are plenty of exceptions that prove the rule.

Young children have the advantage on us if only because every day shows them new perspectives that they must puzzle into what they already think they know. Their capacity for delight and curiosity is less restrained by the certainty of the incomplete truth of their current perspective. They are more likely to trust their senses and, when necessary, abandon the illusions of perspective that keep us from discovering the truth that will make us free.

I'm learning to know the truth

I'm learning to tell the truth

Discovering truth will make me free.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Building a "Junk House"

Yesterday, I shared a small "learning pile." Today, I'm sharing a big one and a few more thoughts on what it means.

One Wednesday, a couple of kids in our 4-5's class decided they were going to remove the walls of the playhouse. It's designed for this, giving kids the ability to create windows and doorways wherever they want them, an innovation of one of our grandfathers. Before long, their enthusiasm had drawn in another handful of kids. It's not easy to remove the boards that make up the walls: they have to be slid up and out and often get stuck when they become askew which happens quite easily.

There was a lot of struggling and teamwork and when they were done opening up those walls, they weren't ready for it to be over so they moved on to filling the lower level of the playhouse with anything they could move: planks of wood, car tires, traffic cones, rocks, logs, furniture, gutters, shovels, pails . . . Whatever wasn't nailed down got shoved in there.

They were calling it the "junk house" and they were quite proud of it, cautiously climbing atop the pile, their heads touching the ceiling. Over the course of their project, their collective mood went from industrious to a kind of rowdy mischievousness, continually calling out to me and the other adults to "look," as they chuckled. I think some of them half expected to be scolded or at least be told they were "making a mess." The only "correction" they received from me was when I discovered that the wireless speaker we use to play dance music for the stage went missing. Figuring it was at the bottom of the pile, I used my smartphone to play a song and sure enough, we heard the frenetic strains of Everything is Awesome!!!!! from under the rubble.

Other than to ask them to dig out the speaker, my calm, non-judgmental demeanor belied what was going on inside. Normally, I wouldn't have cared, but in this case I was fully aware that on Thursday night we were hosting several dozen parents for a summer program orientation meeting, people who had signed up to allow their "babies" to play on our playground for the summer, many of whom were new to our school and more than a little nervous already. Our junkyard playground has a certain edgy charm when all the odds and ends are spread out over the space, but when presented as a big, tippy pile like this, something that could easily result in heavy objects sliding off and landing on the noggin of an unsuspecting two-year-old, I can imagine that it is somewhat less charming. In other words, while the kids played, I was thinking about marketing.

I finally told myself that it would be okay: either I would tell the story of how the junk house came to be as an illustration of the sorts of thing their kids might get up to during the summer, or (the option I was leaning toward) taking advantage of the two hours between the end of school on Thursday and the start of the meeting that evening to take care of it myself.

The following morning, the kindergarteners were, as usual, the first to arrive, and they were not happy with the junk house. "Did you see what the little kids did to the playhouse, Teacher Tom?" I told them I had, then suggested that the might want to "fix it," a hopeful suggestion that they did not take up. Later that morning, however, our 3's class had the playground to themselves. They too had complaints about the junk house. When I suggested that they fix it "because we have a meeting tonight," one of the parent-teachers asked, "Do you want me to start emptying it out?"

And so she began to methodically remove planks and tires and cones and rock and logs from the playhouse. Her work drew in another adult and then several of the kids who spent the next half hour un-doing the work of the older kids from the day before. When the kindergarteners returned to the playground, they joined the effort. When the playhouse was empty, they "washed" the floor by dumping several buckets of water on it.

As they worked, I found myself humming the late, great Tom Hunter's song, Build it Up and Knock it Down. The ancient Greeks had their myth of Sisyphus, a character condemned to an eternity of repeatedly pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again. So much of what we do in life is like pushing that boulder: we make our beds each morning only to unmake them at night; we go to work, return home, then return to work again; we fill the trash can, throw it out, then refill it again. It's easy to see it all as meaningless repetition, but when I play with children, I don't feel that at all. On the contrary, filling it up and emptying it out, turning it on and turning it off, pushing it up and letting it roll back down, makes up the core of what children do all day when left to play as they see fit. Adults unlearn it, I think, as we become brainwashed into the cult of productivity and progress. We learn instead to find it, at best, boring. Children, however, never tire of it. "Build it up and knock it down and build it up again/Knock it down and build it up and knock it down again."

The philosopher and author Albert Camus wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus. The concluding line has stuck with me for decades:

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

This is what the children know. And I won't have to imagine them happy because I know, in their way, they will be.

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