Love Wins

“Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.” –MLK

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." –MLK

When I was in 2nd grade at the Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, SC, there was one black boy in my class. He and I called one another “best friends”. We played together at recess. We were the two fastest runners in our grade. He never saw my house and I never saw his. That was 1968, the year Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Two years later the courts ordered Columbia to desegregate its public schools. Most of our neighbors chose to send their kids to private schools, but my parents put me on the bus to Atlas Road Elementary, a run-down facility in the heart of an all-black neighborhood. One of my friends’ moms prepared me for my first day by telling me that she’d seen people “defecating in the roadside ditches” along Atlas Road. My parents, however, had taught me that we were all the same inside and I was thankfully young enough that I took them at their word.

I’m pretty sure my “three R’s” education was sub-par that year: to this day South Carolina’s public education system ranks near the bottom. But that wasn’t the point of desegregation. The point was to have black and white kids grow up together so that they could learn through experience what my parents had taught me: we’re all the same.

In fact it was economics more than race that marked the year for me. I was disappointed almost to tears when we exchanged Christmas gifts (each child brought one gift to be randomly distributed) and I wound up with a pair of socks that appeared used. And race certainly didn’t stop Shirley Jeffcoat from having a very embarrassing public crush on me. We were just kids together. We were all the same, except some of us were a lot poorer than others.

When I spoke to my Pre-K kids about Martin Luther King yesterday, I told them about segregated restaurants, schools, and water fountains and they agreed it was unfair. Katherine, in particular nodded along with me. She looked like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. When I said, “And today we try to be fair to everyone,” she looked relieved. When I said, “Martin Luther King’s dream has come true,” she blurted out, “It did!”

I believe that we have solid of evidence that his dream has come true. Racism has not been eradicated in our country, but it’s in full retreat. Racists are decisively in the minority and polls indicate that it’s an ever-shrinking one. And it’s only going to get better because our children are growing up in this world we’ve created, not the one in which we grew up.

The experiment of desegregation and civil rights worked and I’m proud that my parents had the courage to make me a part of it. It’s no accident that just as the “desegregation generation” comes of age, we elect our first black president. I am aware of no other nation in the history of the world that has elected a member of an ethnic minority as its supreme leader.

This was the final battle of the Civil War. Non-violence and love win.

Love is not “emotional bash.” I’m more confident today than ever that love is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. As MLK said, “I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.”

As we celebrate today, we should feel good about ourselves. We have cut off one chain of hate and evil. But racial justice is only the first part of the mission MLK set before us. The poverty I glimpsed in that 4th grade classroom is still with us, and there are still too many who think war is the solution.

Poverty and peace are next on our nation’s agenda: problems just as impossible to solve as overcoming racism in America. When the bus pulls up in front of our home, we must have the courage to put our children on it. We must fight evil with love. And we must not despair that we will not win in our lifetime, but maybe, just maybe, our children will see the promised land.

Don't Freak Out

Last night our parent community heard from sex educator Amy Lang, who spoke on the topic of how to talk to children about sex.

This is an important subject if only because it has been done so poorly by so many parents over the years. I relied on my own parents, especially when my daughter was younger, for much of what I know about parenting, but this was an area in which I had neither a confident role model, nor a willing resource. Since it's really not a solid plan to just let the other kids on the playground fill in the gaps, educators like Amy are providing a bridge for parents to learn to one day be a role model and resource for their own children.

One of the things she spoke about was natural, healthy sexual exploration among children. She emphasized that we are born sexual and that we shouldn't freak out if we catch our young kids engaged in innocent play.

Several years ago, I stuck my head in the bathroom and noticed four sets of boys legs in one of the toilet stalls. From where I was standing in doorway I couldn't hear the specific words being used, but it sounded like a normal conversation between the boys, punctuated by giggling. I let it go for a minute or so, but when it didn't break up on it's own accord, I said, "Hey guys, what's going on?"

The stall door opened and the four boys spilled out into the bathroom, "Franky" leading the way. Without a hint of shame, he said, "We were just matching butts and penises." It was clearly an example of age-appropriate, one-off, consensual exploration, which is what I told their parents when I later shared the story with them, emphasizing that if they chose to speak with their kids about it to not freak out.

It's of course best to never let your child see you freak out about anything sexual. I know that my own parents' clear and extreme discomfort about sex caused me to avoid the topic with them altogether, which left me to rely on other adolescent boys, not the most reliable source. You might be churning inside, but if you want them to keep talking to you, it's important work on presenting a calm exterior. Keeping that line of communication open from an early age is the number one defense against things like teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. And talking honestly and frankly with our children about sex is the best way to insure our children grow up to have healthy, satisfying sexual relationships as adults.

Living Forever

Each year on the first Tuesday of the New Year I challenge my Pre-K class to come up with a project that they can do for the “whole school.”

My first year as a teacher, the children decided we needed a birthday throne. That particular class was already elbow deep in paper mache paste so we decided to use that medium to create the yellow, sparkly throne we continue to use 8 years later. Each time I get it out, I tell the story of those children, now in 6^th grade, who made it for them. We can even recite the names of the children written on the back: “Calvin, Kaye, Noah, Vlasta, Eric, Jace, and Jasmine.”

The following year my Pre-K kids were all about drama, and wanted to perform a play for their classmates. We started from scratch. We wrote the play, made our own costumes, sets and props, and rehearsed for at least two months, editing as we went. At least part of each of our Tuesday afternoons together for the next 5 months was spent on the production. I had foolishly assumed that we were doing all of this as a framework around which to build our Pre-K curriculum for the rest of the school year, and ultimately for the entertainment of our 3-year-old classmates. But when I escorted the cast into the gym for the performance on the last day of school, we were stunned to find an audience that filled the room, each wielding a camera.

To their great credit, the children overcame their awe of the crowd to knock it out of the park, and thus a legend was born.

On the first day of school the next fall, Ana, who had been in the audience for that initial performance, walked through the door and without saying hello, asked, “When do we get to do our play?” And this is how the community’s memory has been passed on to this day.

This year, we brainstormed a list of things we could do together for the “whole school,” but it was clear from the start that we were doing a play. So we spent a 15-minute session getting the opening scenes down on paper. The first draft writing process will probably take a few weeks. After that we will start trying it out on the stage, where the real editing begins. It’s a chaotic, creative process where we figure out that some of our ideas aren’t going to work (like the advent of a character no one wants to play), or that we want to beef up our own character’s role, or that there aren’t enough dance scenes. It’s during this process that we decide what props we’ll need to make and what the sets should look like. All the key decisions will be made on our feet, on the fly, as part of the process.

Rehearsals will be so crazy and distracted, including our dress rehearsal, that the adults (myself included) will be convinced that this is the year that the play will be an utter disaster. But it won’t be. The children will have internalized their play by then. After 5 months it will be a part of their collective being, and like the Pre-K kids before them, they will hit it out of the park.

The children are fired up, to say the least. They left school buzzing. But it was a bittersweet day for me because I’m cursed with the knowledge that this is the beginning of the end of my time with these 11 kids, all but one of whom I’ve been teaching since they were 2-years-old. They’ve spent more than half their lives playing with me at Woodland Park. Just as the play will be a part of them, we are all by now a part of one another.

They’re getting themselves ready to move on from here, most of them could already thrive in a kindergarten class, but they’ll leave a part of themselves behind as well, living forever in me and in our community’s memory. This is the best part of teaching.

Preschool Poets

One of our favorite activities at Woodland Park involves children telling stories that I transcribe by hand, then read aloud at circle time. If you’re interested in the details of how the process works, click here.

Several people have suggested that I tape record these stories, if only to save myself the hand cramps. Doing the mental experiment of thinking this one through leads me to the conclusion that this would involve hours of extra work on my part. I’m not a lazy man, but just the thought of sitting at my keyboard, doing the secretarial work of getting all those words (and believe me, there would be a lot more words if they didn’t have to pause occasionally) on “paper,” leads me to conclude that those recordings would just collect dust somewhere, making me feel guilty.

Besides, this is about “writing” for an audience, not journaling, free association, or stream-of-conscious rambling. By its very nature, writing is a slower more thoughtful process than simply speaking. I like that the children are compelled to slow down.

Kids often start to race ahead of my ability to write, but when they realize I’m trailing them, they stop while I catch up. I’ve usually heard much of what they’ve said and could probably recreate it if necessary, but when I look up to let them know I’m ready to start writing again, rarely do they use the same words as they did the first time. An editing process takes place during that short interim. Typically, the sentence after a forced pause is more concise, relates more directly to the arc of the story, or reflects a change of mind. When a child is in a particular hurry, I take advantage of pauses to re-read what they’ve dictated up to that point, giving them a clearer picture of where they’ve been in the hopes of helping them figure out where they want to go next.

These pauses create a rhythm to our storytelling process, one that reflects the realities of writing. The more experienced of our storytellers are so accustomed to the pauses that they to do it on their own, speaking a sentence, waiting for me to catch up, then speaking the next sentence. At its most fundamental level, that’s what writing is. We start with words, which we use to create sentences, which we then build one upon another into paragraphs and beyond. At least, this is the process of writing prose.

The process of writing poetry obviously shares a great deal with prose, but tends to be much more focused on rhythm and how the words actually appear on paper. Our preschool writing rhythm is an irregular beat to be sure, forced upon us not only by the limitation of my ability to keep up, but also the reality of a room full of distractions. It’s something that doesn’t show up when I present their work here, so I sometimes like to rearrange their stories as poems as a way to convey this sense of rhythm.

Once there were a bear
And it was cooking food.
And then it bites himself,
But then he didn’t fall down.
He bited two times.
He found a worm to eat.
–Jack

It’s about a Angry Princess.
And the Angry Princess went along
and it said, “Goo, goo, gaa, gaa.”
And the Angry Dragon came along.
It was a scary pet.
The silly people walked on her head.
–Katherine

A piglet.
A girl came in and get her
and flew away.
Then a lady bug come.
Then a Thomas came.
Then a elephant came and get water on him.
With the trunk.
Then a sheep comed.
Then a vitamin came.
And then a doggy came.
–Charlie B.

There once was a sad kitty cat.
And then the kitty cat bumped
into a wall
and got better.
Then she bumped
into two more walls
and she got hurt again.
Then she walked around and bumped
into a loose head.
And then the cat jumped over the cat.
The cat jumped over the cat.
And the cat wobbled
to the cat.
Then she wobbled
to another cat.
Then she danced
around and wobbled
into another cat.
Then she bumped
into a baby dog.
–Josephine

One time a monster truck was in a race.
Then the monster truck crashed
into a monster truck
and then a monster truck came
and drived a monster truck.
Then another monster truck came
and run into
another monster truck.
And then the jets came and crashed into them.
And then one of the firemen came.
And then a tank shot up the fireman’s truck.
And then three more jets
crashed
into all the other jets.
–Finn V.

A dark night.
And then a ghost comed.
And then a broke the handle.
And then a dragon comed
and farted.
And then a bad skeleton comed.
–Lachlan

If you’re interested in reading more of the children’s stories, here are the links in order of appearance:

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories 2

There Was A Bad Dream In My Bed 

Where The Wild Things Are

Stories From The Edge

Short, Smart, Sweet And Silly

A Muddy Puddle Of Morality

Wearing His Cape Every Day

One Thing At A Time

And Now For Something Completely Silly

I'm Thinking Something To Ella

Then A Monster Truck Came

Inspirations And Influences

Squirrel Stories (So Far)

"Mentsch Tracht, Gott Lacht"

When my daughter Josephine was born, we were living on the 24^th floor of a condo in the heart of downtown Seattle, only a block from the famous Pike Place Market.

We went to the market almost daily, first in a stroller or Baby Bjorn, and later on foot. I love that place and the former chamber of commerce manager in me wants to provide a tour of the highlights right here, but I’ll fight that urge and instead point you to their website. As my wife eased herself back into her consulting work, I took on the responsibilities of primary caregiver, considering these forays into the market to be a quintessentially Seattle and relatively uncommon way for my uncommon baby to learn about her world.

The mornings were the best, just as the vendors were setting up. It was a little quieter than usual, the street musicians would start later, but there was still enough shouting and banging around to make it lively. The briny scent of the fish stalls mingled with that of the bakeries, the musty underground spaces, and the original Starbucks, forming an ad hoc potpourri signifying a place like no other. I craved the misty maritime air on my skin and was proud that I was exposing my baby to it.  I couldn’t wait for Josephine to get older so that we could share the produce samples being offered by vendors from the edges of their sharp knives. As we passed through this richly textured place, I imagined how the movement, colors and shapes of the market were embedding themselves deeply into her developing brain, shaping it in ways that would later shape her entire life.

One of my favorite stops was the live crab tank in front of Jack’s Fish Spot. I’d park the stroller in front that visual feast, lean back in a café chair and watch my girl’s little hands and feet as they seemed to reach out toward those shellfish, and listen to her use her baby words to excitedly “talk” about what she was seeing. I was the best damn daddy in the world. The fact that she would often wind up crying inconsolably made me think she was just over-stimulated and needed a nap. When she started shouting, “No, no, no!” as we approached the tank I finally got the idea that there was something amiss in my idyllic little scenario. Her all-things-sea-creature phobia became so pronounced that we developed special routes through the market in order to avoid the fish mongers – no easy feat in this place more or less known for its fish mongers – and eventually quit going altogether. To this day, the presence of crab or lobster, alive or cooked, makes her nervous.

Who knew?

This wouldn’t be the last time my expectations as a parent would be thwarted by the actual, real live, one-of-a-kind human being I was helping to raise.

I worked really hard to create a tomboy, but from the moment she could express a preference it was for pink, fluffy, and sparkly.

I bought her a Hot Wheels set and was incredibly proud of my bad, non-gender-stereotyping self when she and her girlfriend spent an afternoon playing cars. That is, until I realized that the game they were playing involved all the cars getting married to one another and setting up house under the track.

I figured that, at least, I would be raising an athlete, but while she’s fond of volleyball, swimming and other sports, she’s made it clear that if she’s going to be in front of an audience, it’s going to be as a singer or actor.

This isn’t to say that my big picture parenting objectives aren’t being met. She has a lot of friends, is confident, has interests that compel her to learn, and takes on new challenges with enthusiasm. Now, a decade removed from the specifics of my new parent expectations, I see that she’s exactly where I hoped she would be as a teenager, but seems to have arrived there by a path I could never have plotted for her.

As the Yiddish proverb goes:

Man plans, God laughs.

There is no circumstance where this is more applicable than as a parent. I’m pretty sure god wants us to laugh along with him.

Catapulting Mud

There is never a shortage of mud in Seattle and the Dennis the Menace style cliché of kids playing with the stuff doesn’t seem to cause even a moment’s pause in the children’s pursuit of it.

With the rainy season fully upon us, the kids haven’t failed to notice that our rain barrel (which contains water redirected from the roof) is now perpetually full, meaning the self-imposed rationing required by our dry fall is over. There have been dozens of mud soups, mud pies and mud puddles, but the big communal outdoor pursuit during this first week of the year has been to mix up large batches, then to use shovels to “catapult” it against the wall of the school, creating results like this:

This is only shows a small portion of our mud art. I couldn’t figure out how, for instance, to photographically portray that there are splats of mud as high as 15 feet up the wall. The boys (and the catapult-ers so far have been mostly boys) are not always as accurate as they hope (another cliché about the broad side of a barn comes to mind) which makes our garden area a hazardous place to be these days. Hazardous at least in terms of choosing the time and manner of one’s own besmirching. This has naturally caused some conflict that, so far, hasn’t been satisfactorily handled.

Just at the end of play yesterday, our lead catapulter, Thomas, suggested that we need to set up a “safety perimeter” using caution cones the way we did when we used our dangerous tools to help along our decomposing pumpkins. We’ll probably also need a group discussion during circle time on Monday to sort out some of the rules around mud flinging.

All that aside, however, one of the best things about this entirely child-motivated project is that it’s caused the adults to avoid the garden, leaving the children out there, under our eyes, but not within reach, to guide one another. There’s been a lot discussion among them about how to best do what they’re doing, especially on the topic of getting it up to the second story windows. And there’s been a lot of laughing into one another’s faces, which to me is an act of pure love.

Just on the other side of our garden fence another group of artists, inspired I think by the catapulters, has taken on their own, less muddy outdoor art project using wet sidewalk chalk to create this beauty:

Several years ago, we were the lucky recipients of dozens of jars of very old powdered tempera paint from an artist who was cleaning out his basement. We’ve been feeding off this supply for years and are now down to the browns and blacks. I wanted to try extending the mud play inside yesterday, so cut the side off a washing machine box and put it on the art table. We then used our boxes as tables to set up a mixing station where the children found bowls of brown, black and white powder, spoons, small scoops and buckets of water. On the cardboard we had out various tools used by plasterers and masons for scoring concrete and creating texture and patterns on walls and floors. It was a huge mess (special thanks to our art parent Aya) tons of fun, and mostly a project of the girls. It had the added sensory element of filling the room with the old style odor of egg tempera.

This is our masterpiece:

You can’t really tell from the photo, but it’s about 5’X3’. You can probably see that we wound up adding some other colors as well.

Here are some close-ups of the details:

I love rich texture like this. It's the reason Van Gogh remains my favorite painter.

As we were working on it, I said, “When it’s dry we should hang it on the wall.”

Ella stopped what she was doing to look around the room thoughtfully, “Maybe we should hang it on the ceiling.”

Brilliant! One of the problems with our space is that it tends to be a bit acoustically challenged. The parent part of the community started the year by discussing the idea of installing some sort of sound absorbing apparatus on the ceiling. I can think of nothing better than cardboard covered in children’s art and the installation will probably require nothing more than mounting tape. We’ll have to see how it dries, but we have seven more sides of appliance boxes at our disposal . . .

Even More Carved Books (And A Bonus Owl Photo!)

In addition to being a preschool teacher, I’m also an artist, examples of which I’ve shared with you here and here.

The holiday season was a productive one for me, resulting in several sales (could the economy finally be turning around?), and the completion of three new pieces. Not only that, but my show at the North Seattle Community College library continues to spark interest, so I’m kind of walking on clouds these days.

Here is my most recent one:

Playing Cards

I mentioned in my last post on the topic that I was working on a commission. This one was a Christmas gift for an avid golfer:

Golf Is A Four Letter Word

And the idea of making art out of this ubiquitous little bartender’s guide made me laugh. As a friend pointed out, it’s a little like those paintings of dogs playing poker or Elvis painted on black velvet:

Mr. Boston’s Deluxe Official Bartenders Guide

Bonus Photo: Teacher Tom As An Owl

In my post about our Winter Solstice Feast I mentioned that I was wearing my owl costume, which was described but not depicted photographically. Apparently, that didn’t satisfy some people so I’ve been waiting and waiting for one to surface so I can share it with you. So without further ado, here I am in my owl costume:

Yes, I know, my headdress is made of peacock feathers which kind of wrecks the whole look, but look how tall it makes me, and besides, it’s the only part of the costume I made myself. I acquired this from the Seattle Children’s Theater, which auctions off several costumes each year as part of its fundraising efforts. This one is from their production of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

(Should I confess here that we have four rolling racks of adult-sized costumes in our basement?)

Okay, I'm done boring you with personal stuff. Back to preschool posts tomorrow.

Observation And Reflection

I'm a belly on the floor, face full of spittle, "C'mon everybody!" type of teacher. I wear holes in the knees of all my jeans, go through much of life paint besmirched, and often forget to go to the bathroom. On my best days, the time I spend with the children almost doesn't exist and I'm genuinely surprised it's already time to go home. Yet, when the door closes on the last child and I take a moment to look back on the day, it feels so full and exciting, it's hard to believe we fit so much into so little time.

I think of it as my greatest strength as a teacher, this ability to enter this state of being fully present, bobbing on the ripples created by the actions, emotions, and interests of the kids, letting them lead me as much as I lead them.

As a teaching style, the downside is that it doesn't leave much room during the classroom day for observation and reflection. I sometimes remove myself from the action to check things out from the other side of our one-way mirrors or stand inside the classroom to watch the outdoor play, and I learn from those moments, but it ain't where my body and mind want to be while the children are around. I get restless and have to get back in there (or out there, as the case may be).

This explains why I never remember to take photos of the cool stuff going on in class. Not only do viewfinders make me feel a step removed from the real life going on around me, but by the time I realize something cool is happening, we're already on to something else.

Still, observation and reflection are important teaching tools. One of the reasons I started this blog was as an aid in this effort, and while I'm clearly writing here with an audience in mind (my years writing for money make it impossible for me to write otherwise), there is a journaling or diary-ing quality to the act of putting the words down in these daily posts.

Another opportunity I have for "observation" and reflection is when I'm distributing the children's art into their cubbies to take home. I sometimes feel guilty for how long it takes to move their artwork through this process -- it often stacks up for weeks before I finally get it expedited -- but I want to make sure I have the time to look at each piece before sending it home. They often reveal things I was not aware of in the moment they were being created.

Not long ago, I wrote about our glue collages. A few days ago, I finally got around to taking a reflective look at the work of our Pre-3 class.

I remember that Sena spent a lot of time at the art table that day. I could tell by how I found these pieces on the drying shelves that this was the order in which she created them. I love the progression. She started with just glue:

She had the choice of a rainbow of colors and shapes, so the three yellow triangles were definitely a conscious choice. I'm guessing that they started off in the center of the cardboard, but slid to the side as the wet glue shifted:

This next piece shows more work in the area of color and shape classification, but notice she's still using so much glue that the pieces floated on her:

The next piece in the sequence wasn't by Sena at all, but rather this one by Remick, who was the first of the children to work vertically by standing the marker caps on end:

He had clearly inspired her, because Sena's next piece looked like this, and notice how her glue use is more judicious:

This was followed by this colorful piece by Charlotte:

Sena's final exploration of the day is truly a masterpiece, bringing together all the things she had learned through her own experimentation (again, note the lighter touch with the glue) as well as her observations of the work of her friends:

And I'd be remiss if I didn't share Cora's work. She only made two pieces that day, but I love the strength and consistency of her artistic vision, not to mention her precise use of glue!

Rain Painting

I awoke yesterday morning to a steady, drizzly rain, the kind of precipitation for which the Pacfic Northwest is known. I’m a veteran of “weather wishing,” having been a baseball coach who never wanted a weather cancellation, and a teacher who wants the kids to get at least a couple snow closure days each year. Yesterday, I was hoping for the rain gods to just hold steady through the morning because conditions were perfect for the absolute, bar none, very best preschool art project in history.

Rain painting!

It’s simple. All you need are markers and white paper (we used the backs of the pages of old hard copies of parent handbooks that had become obsolete in the computer age).

It’s free form art. The children draw whatever they want.

It’s large motor. The children grab their pictures and race outside into the drizzle where they place them on a table in the rain, hurry back inside using careful feet to adjust for the increasingly slippery floor, then climb onto one of the wooden boxes arranged under the window so they can watch what happens. (“It’s like TV,” I said, “only better!”)

It’s science. As the drizzly rain begins to dot their artwork, the colors slowly start to bleed and run together. We had the perfect level of rain yesterday in that it took a minute or two for results to begin to show up. Many children returned every few minutes to check on the progress, often predicting that the picture would eventually wash away entirely long before it actually happened.

It’s social. There is nothing better than all those children standing there peering out the window, shoulder-to-shoulder, no room for big-bodied adults, talking about what they’re observing.

It's sensory. There are few things more elemental than running in and out into the cold, getting wet, then coming back inside to get warm and dry.

It took a little cheerleading at first, but once the ball got rolling, once they realized it was okay to go outside without their coats, once they realized that there was an amazing process in which to take part and observe, once they made it their own, there was no stopping them.

Most of the children let their artwork wash away to blank paper. Annabelle took a long time making a very large, brilliant orange pumpkin. She was proud of it and was at first reluctant to turn it over to the elements (which was, of course, a choice she was free to make). The rain first turned it into a “polka dot pumpkin.” After several minutes it had become a “firey sun.” Later she called it “a blob.” Then it was “all gone.”

Anjali treated her artwork almost like a pie she had baking in the oven. She would check it every few minutes until it met her satisfaction, then hurry back outside to bring it in. Most of the “finished” work either went home with the kids or wound up in the recycling bin (since it was just soggy, blank paper), but here’s one she left behind:

Some of the kids really became masters of the process, creating drawing after drawing, racing outside, coming back in, then making more. Max and Ariya teamed up, holding hands as they took their pictures into the rain, discussing where they should place them, carefully removing the artwork that had fully washed away, and bringing it in to be recycled, still holding hands.

I’m sitting here right now, hoping that the rain picks up a bit so the 2-year-olds can try it this morning (which will be a whole different adventure, I’m sure).

Best preschool art project in history.

Squirrel Stories (So Far)

The children do quite a bit of storytelling at Woodland Park, much of which I post here for your entertainment and edification. (If you’re interested in reading more of the children’s stories scroll to the bottom for links.)

Last year Alex told what originally seemed like the same story over and over, but it wasn’t until I sat down last summer to transcribe them that I noticed its subtle evolution over the course of the year and how, taken together, they told the larger story of how this 3-year-old was trying to make sense of a challenging moral issue. It was this experience that made me want to stay on top of transcribing the children’s stories this year.

Isak, like Alex, has been sharing more or less the same simple story with us this year. This is how it’s evolved so far.

This is the original story:

The squirrel eats flowers, plants and mushrooms.

Here he’s added a storytelling convention:

Once there was a squirrel and he eats flowers, plants and mushrooms.

Here he’s giving us a little more information about the squirrel’s feelings:

The squirrel eats flowers, plants, mushrooms. The squirrel felt full.

This time he’s gone back, word-for-word, to the original story:

The squirrel eats flowers, plants and mushrooms.

And this is his most recent version:

The squirrel eats pumpkins with flowers and plants inside it.

This iteration represents for me a change in what he's done up to this point. Both when he told it to me one-on-one and when I read the story aloud at circle time, Isak laughed, making it clear he was telling a joke. It shows me that he’s getting comfortable with the storytelling process, understanding that what he says to me is going to later be broadcast to his friends. This type of writing is not the same as journaling or diary writing in that it is specifically created to communicate something to an audience. I’ve noticed that he really has a good time laughing at his friends’ silly stories and it seems he wanted to take a crack at creating that experience for them.

Here are links to other posts about the children's storytelling.

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories 2

There Was A Bad Dream In My Bed 

Where The Wild Things Are

Stories From The Edge

Short, Smart, Sweet And Silly

A Muddy Puddle Of Morality

Wearing His Cape Every Day

One Thing At A Time

And Now For Something Completely Silly

I'm Thinking Something To Ella

Then A Monster Truck Came

Inspirations And Influences 

Using Elastic Yardsticks, Part 3

(Note: This is the third and final of my series of posts on academic testing, and specifically the high stakes standardized testing that is increasingly coming to dominate the educational experience of the kids and teachers in our public schools. Part one is here, and part two is here.)

Thomas Jefferson was the first American leader to propose public education in the U.S., right around the time the first phase of the Industrial Revolution was getting underway. His concept, an idea that was shared by most of the founding fathers, was that democracy required a well-educated citizenry in order to thrive.

This was the beginning of the historical era we now call the Age of Enlightenment, a time when reason came to be understood as the only legitimate source of authority rather than traditional and more arbitrary things like birth, religion, or military might. The American Revolution was a direct result of the Enlightenment as was the Industrial Revolution. These two progressive and revolutionary tracks evolved in tandem, ushering in an explosive era of intellectual and economic growth not seen in Western society since the Renaissance.

As mass production grew as a share of the economy, more and more trained workers were needed on the factory floors and industrialists came to look at public schools as a convenient institution for quickly and effectively converting the largely agricultural population into the type of labor needed to work on their assembly lines.

This tension between the competing needs of democracy (which requires well-educated citizens) and industry (which needs well-trained workers) continues to be an underlying dynamic in public education in the US and, indeed, much of the rest of the world.

In case there is any question, I believe that the economy is here to serve “we the people,” not the other way around, yet increasingly we see our public educational system, which is vital to the continued survival of our democracy, being shaped to serve the needs of business, a process that has accelerated over the past three decades.

I’ve already written (here, here, and here) about how our schools increasingly emphasize math and science at the behest of economic interests, leaving humanities education (the basis for educating properly functioning citizens) to founder.

And in my recent writing about multi-age classrooms I pointed out that the single-age model of education is based upon assembly line manufacturing techniques imported to the US by way of Prussia.

The very structure of public education, with its hierarchical, top-down organization, concentrating power in the hands of politicians, superintendents and school boards, is a direct reflection of how business organizes itself.

And standardized testing, with its false promise of producing relevant data, is exactly the kind of solution one would expect from number crunchers.

Schools are not businesses. Education cannot be measured in terms of balance sheets. The purpose of business is to earn a profit. The purpose of public schools is to produce well-educated citizens. The business model cannot succeed in education any more than my preschool’s model can produce an economic profit.

Yesterday I wrote about the Perry School study which is finding that the most important thing for schools to teach in order to produce successful citizens are skills like motivation, sociability, and an ability to work with others. These are not things that can be measured by standardized tests, nor are they skills that can be produced on assembly lines like widgets. To an economist, anything in a business that does not contribute to earning a profit can be considered waste. To an educator, anything that does not contribute to developing these skills (like high-stakes testing) can be considered a waste.

One of the most distressing side-effects of this “businessification” of schools is that instead of students, teachers, parents and administrators coming together as a community of learners, we find the kinds of competitive adversarial relationships characteristic of the business world. I’m going to stick to my area of knowledge here, leaving the goodness of competition to the business-types, and the application of these principles beyond elementary school to those who work with older kids. But every model of early childhood education I’ve ever studied holds at its core the idea that children learn best in nurturing environments where teachers, parents and facilities (a category under which I include management) function as a kind of three-legged stool. It’s a cooperative endeavor, not a competitive one.

Advocates of standardized testing are generally standing on the ground of “accountability.” They have the idea that these "slothful," unionized teachers are somehow trying to get away with something and they must be compelled to do their jobs. Administrators, even in the best of times, are in a financial pinch and are forced to choose between math/science and the humanities, saddle their teachers with ever larger classes, and resort to imposing assembly line educational methods. Parents are stuck in the middle, not really knowing what’s going on their child’s classroom, seeing the flaws in our system, yet feel helpless to do anything about it.

So what can we do?

I don’t know what to do.

But it seems clear that there are four fundamental things we must strive for if we are going return public education to its proper function of educating citizens:

1) Put real educators in charge of curriculum, measurement, and accountability, while reducing the influence of business interests.

2) Provide administrators adequate funding to have smaller classes and offer a complete education that includes humanities, arts, and physical education.

3) Give parents a more influential voice in how our public school systems operate by bringing them into the center of their children’s educational lives, and

4) Empower our teachers to teach.

How we get there is up to all of us and nothing less than our democracy is at stake.

Using Elastic Yardsticks, Part 2

(Note: This post is a continuation of yesterday’s post about my personal experiences with academic testing, and my skepticism about such testing in general, especially the standardized type. Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of new readers have been visiting over the past couple days. Please be assured I’m not always so pedantic. I sometimes write about light, fun and funny topics as well, such as this and this.)

As a preschool teacher, I’ve never been involved in testing my students, although I’m constantly observing and evaluating skills and progress. I do have a long check list of social, cognitive, expressive and motor “objectives” (developed by Tom Drummond of Descriptive Cue Sequence fame) that I use when a parent requests a written evaluation of their child, but this can’t be considered “testing” in the sense I’m discussing here because the child has no idea he’s doing anything other than the kinds of things he normally does at school. Mostly, I’m just collecting data to make sure I’m on track as a teacher.

As a student who had highly developed test-taking skills and an eye on the prize (i.e., good grades) my academic life mostly took the form of cramming, testing, then blissfully forgetting. I’m sure some of the information stuck in there somewhere, but it’s an all too familiar pattern designed to reward those of us with the ability to quickly store tons of information in our short term memories. I guess it’s a form of learning, and I’m not exactly disappointed with the education I received in school, but wonder what’s lost when we emphasize test scores and grades to the extent we do.

And we continue to up the ante, especially when it comes to standardized testing. In 1965, the federal government, concerned we were falling behind the Soviets, mandated standardized testing in public schools. The 2001 “No Child Left Behind” act tied school funding to these tests, making it a virtual life-or-death matter for already struggling school districts. Public school administrators have had no choice but to pressure teachers to “teach to the test,” compelling them in many cases to set aside what they know is best for their students in favor of what is best for the financial well-being of the school. This might be a good model for the perpetuation of the institution, but deeply flawed when it comes to education, as almost any teacher will tell you.

Although evidence of standardized testing can be found as early as China’s Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), it didn’t become a part of the Western tradition until the 20^th century and the advent of the I.Q. test which purports to measure innate intelligence. The underlying theory behind these tests is that we are born with a certain amount of intelligence and that, in turn, largely determines how successful we will be in life. In the late 1950’s an educator in Michigan named David Welkart had the radical idea of improving the academic performance of minority students by essentially inventing preschool as we know it today. You can read the full story here, but the bottomline was that the Perry School Project experiment boosted I.Q. scores dramatically, leading directly to the federal preschool program called Head Start in 1965.

An interesting thing happened, however. These initial I.Q. gains in the Perry School study faded after only a couple years, a result that was later verified by Head Start. While critics of Head Start used this to attack the program as a failure, the Perry School research continued. While the intelligence of students who had attended preschool, as measured by the standardized I.Q. test, was no longer greater than that of their non-preschool peers, they continued to show greater academic achievement, were less likely to be assigned to special education classes, and showed fewer behavioral problems. This phenomenon was tracked through high school, with those who had attended preschool not being “smarter” than their peers, but continuing to do better in school by every measure. Now in their 40’s the test subjects are more likely to be employed, make more money, have healthier relationships, be involved in their own kid’s lives, and are less likely to be involved in crime. All of this without any measurable I.Q. advantage; the only identifiable difference between these individuals and the control group being two years of preschool.

In other words, whatever was being measured by these standardized tests, it didn’t seem to have any bearing on achievement.

The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. (Nobel Prize laurete economist James) Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls "non-cognitive" skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.

These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work - and in life.

Every teacher, in her heart of hearts, already knows this. These are the skills we're here to teach. And these are skills that will never be measured by a standardized test.

(I didn’t intend for this subject to stretch out over 3 days, but I’m having fun writing about it. Tune in tomorrow for what I hope will be the final post on the topic.)

Using Elastic Yardsticks, Part 1

Last night I was talking to a woman named Lucy whose son is a good student, but struggles when it came to taking tests, especially the multiple-choice parts.

As a student, the opposite was true for me. My grades were decent, but my scores on the standardized tests were always higher, sometimes significantly higher, than one would expect based on my classroom work. I especially loved taking multiple-choice tests. It was like a strategy game to me. By the time I was a sophomore in college I had boasted about my skills so much that a friend challenged me to take his biology test, a subject I’d never studied at the college level. It was one of those anonymous 200-person survey courses so an extra body wouldn’t be noticed, and since the results were being tied to social security numbers and run through a computerized grading system we figured we could get away with it. I didn’t beat my friend as I’d threatened, but my 81 put me in the upper fifth of that class of students who had presumably attended the lectures, read the books, and studied.

When I offered to teach Lucy’s son some test taking techniques, she laughed and said that they had already hired a “testing tutor” to learn some strategy.

As a guy who enjoys games, puzzles and sports, I’ll never find fault with learning to think strategically, but obviously there’s something wrong here. As I understand it, the fundamental purpose of academic testing is to assess and benchmark the acquisition of knowledge. Clearly the multiple-choice test is, at best, a flawed measuring tool if some bonehead journalism major can ace a biology test and there are people making careers out of coaching kids to pass them, regardless of subject. They're like using elastic yardsticks.

But to be honest, I didn’t just game the system on my college multiple-choice tests. I also figured out that when a professor is faced with grading a stack of essay tests, she places a high priority on things like organization because a well-ordered piece of writing, whatever the content, is simply quicker to grade. I found that I could almost always raise my grades by as much as a full letter, simply by writing what appeared to be a tiny outline in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. It would look something like this:

I.     Intro.
II.   (Buzzword lifted directly from the question)
III.  (Buzzword lifted directly from the question)
IV.  (Buzzword lifted directly from the question)
V.   Conclusion

This gave my teachers the impression of an orderly, well-considered answer right off the bat. I also made a point of not just regurgitating the key words, phrases and concepts I remembered from lectures verbatim, but also underlining them to make it easy for the grader to find them. I’m pretty sure there were some professors who never even read my essays, but instead just put checkmarks by these convenient highlights and scrawled, “Well organized!” across the top of the page.

My test-taking strategizing was all-inclusive. For instance, I rarely participated in my classes unless it was explicitly required. As I saw it, every time I raised my hand to answer a question, I was giving something away to my competition. After all, we were being graded on a curve and it could only hurt my grade to share knowledge with my classmates. If I had a question, I always saved it for office hours so that the professor’s answer only benefited me, and not the rest of those yahoos against whom I was being judged.

None of this had anything to do with education, of course, but rather about running up the score. Since the lion’s share of my grades were based on testing, my college grade point average went up sharply over what I’d done in high school, where more of my grades had been calculated by a teacher’s far more meaningful and accurate personal evaluation of what I’d actually learned.

Fortunately, during my junior and senior years I was in smaller classes that didn’t rely so much on testing and actually learned something.

I continue to be a skeptic about testing of all kinds and especially the standardized, high-stakes academic testing being used in our public schools. I know they’re probably out there, but I’ve yet to meet a teacher who doesn’t resent these tests, especially when the scores play such an disproportionate role in the academic lives of their students, as well as their own careers. If the people I talk to are representative, the phenomenon of “teaching to the test” is a real one, causing great teachers to forego what they know is best for their students in favor of becoming glorified “testing tutors.” Teachers know that doing well on tests is to a large degree a kind of trick that can be taught, but doesn’t really have much, if anything, to do with actual education.

I’ve never met a teacher who got into education for the fame or fortune. Every single one of us chose the profession because we genuinely believe we have something to offer to children. Our political and governmental leaders keep telling us that public education is broken and they’re right, but more testing, incentive pay, charter schools, and the rest of those business-style solutions are not the answers.

(This post is already too long. Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story.)