More Nerding Out Over Lady Bugs!

Last month, I told you of how I was nerding out over the lady bugs I'd discovered living and breeding in the potted plants on our balcony, ending with the discovery of two clusters of tiny yellow, football-shaped eggs.

In the meantime, the first generation I'd "raised" since discovering them as larva are all gone. Of the 9 I'd counted in my census, one, as I mentioned in that post, failed to make it to the pupa stage. It appeared to me as if it had died waiting for a pupal shell that never came. Seven emerged as fully formed adult ladies, living relatively sedentary lives, preferring the topmost outposts on our sunflowers, where they seemed to sit day after day until they were gone. It can get windy out there on the balcony: in fact, most days find the wind kicking up in the late afternoon to the degree that it's impossible to read a newspaper. Could it be they grew tired finally of hanging on and let themselves be carried away? They had never known a world in which the wind didn't blow, so I think that unlikely. I find it more probable that they, one-by-one, experienced the urges that drive lady bugs, spread their new wings, and took themselves off into the world.

This is my poor lady 4-legged mutation that simply failed to make it to its final form.  I can't help but worry that my "help" somehow caused it.

If you did the math, you'll know already that there is one lady bug still unaccounted for. This was the "lost soul" I featured in the last nerding out post, the larva I'd found far away from the pots, crawling on its own across the concrete, and had picked up on a leaf and carried to the grass. I finished that post writing about it's efforts to leave its pupal stage behind:

. . . I sat and watched as it tried to give birth to itself, pushing, pushing, pushing its way out into the sunlight. It made it about halfway before the temperature dropped as it went dormant for the night. I haven't noticed any movement yet this morning, but it's going to be a warm day, so I'm expecting big things.

All that day, this half-born lady bug continued to struggle, and the next. It seemed unable to free itself fully from its shell. I began to worry about it. This was not going as it should. I'd plucked the blade of grass upon which it had fastened itself to move it to a place where I could more easily observe it. I worried that this act had caused what was happening, changing the mechanics, removing some necessary leverage the insect needed in order to free itself. When I saw it's legs churning, striving, I took to holding the blade of grass in place with my finger, serving the role of the roots I'd negated, but it didn't seem to make a difference and I hadn't really expected it to. I then retrieved a bamboo skewer from the kitchen and attempted to use it to help pry the poor thing from its shell, gently lifting its body up and away, but careful not to detach the shell from the grass, figuring the lady bug would be doomed to carry that shell on its back forever if it didn't have at least that to pull back against. As we began to enter our third day together, I suddenly thought to have a look at the underside of its body and there I found that it had only 4 legs.

After the last post, reader wrote describing the larva as "tiny dragons," a more than apt description.

This lady bug was never going to extract itself from its shell because it had failed to fully form, it's front part adult, it's rear still pupa. I don't know if lady bugs suffer. When I was a boy, experts told me that dogs do not experience emotions like we do, and I now know that's a lie: dogs feel exactly the things we feel. A man I know once went into the street where a wild rabbit lay twitching after being hit by a car, putting it beyond misery with a quick motion of his wrist, then carrying it gently to a roadside ditch where he buried it. I'm not that brave, I guess, because I couldn't simply squash the deformed lady bug, although I've squashed thousands of bugs in my time. Instead, for better or worse, I chose to free the shell from the grass and, in my arrogance, "give it the chance for a life." I was happy to see it begin to crawl around like the other lady bugs had done, apparently happy to no longer be stuck in place. It found a stalk and, awkwardly, made its way onto a leaf where it stopped, just as the other 8 had done on their first days of freedom.

I went on to other things for awhile and when I returned it was gone. Certainly, it hadn't flown -- that was not a possibility because its wings formed a large part of what had been unformed. I searched the grass below, finally finding my pet struggling back upward. I decided I'd given it all the "help" I could. I've not seen it since.

Side-by-side pupae. Will one emerge to eat the other? I know there are plenty of aphids on the sunflowers to feed an army of lady bugs, so lack of proper food wouldn't be a credible reason for cannibalism.

After the last post, I'd found a third cluster of eggs, bringing my total count up to around 50. I checked them every day, until I began to see itty bitty larva "dragons." They were too small and ultimately too lively to count in the beginning, but by the time they were a couple centimeters long, I was able to consistently find around 35. I don't know if this is a good survival rate or not for lady bugs, but I was feeling pretty good. As they entered their pupa stage, I counted 29. Considering that there may be a few down in the grass, hidden from view, I'm estimating, from past experience with this particular genetic population, in this particular environment, that around 3 in 5 of the original eggs are going to result in adult lady bugs.

If you look carefully, you can see the tiny, just hatched larva.

Strangely, I've found one pupa attached to the white wall of my apartment, far from the pots, much closer to where I picked up the ill-fated "lost soul." I've left it alone despite my wife's protestations. I'm taking it as a second chance to just let nature run its course.

Something I hadn't noticed in the first generation of lady bugs, were these translucent "under wings." I've spotted several of this generation, still yellow from being newly born, spreading these out from under their outer shell. I suppose these are the actual wings they will eventually use to fly. I'd always thought they flew using on red wings with black spots.

Yesterday, was a big day, with several lady bugs emerging. The people who speculated that the spotless orange and yellow ladies would later "get their spots" were right. I've now found that most start out as blank canvases, then duck under leaves for a couple of hours as the dark places form.

One reader, sharing her own lady bug nerding out experiences after the last post, mentioned that she had witnessed cannibalism. I don't know if I'm seeing that or not, but it did appear that one newly "hatched" lady was going after one of its pupal siblings.

Cannibal?

Today, I find our sunflowers crawling with a couple dozen lady bugs, with more on the way. As we stand on the verge of breaking all known records for the most number of consecutive rainless days here in rainy Seattle, I'm hoping for one more round of eggs. These I'll take into the classroom for the start of the school year and hope to make a few lady bug nerds of my students.

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Why I Teach The Way I Do (A Final Word)

I've been writing for over a week now under the title "Why I Teach The Way I Do." Frankly, I'm exhausted. I think I've made a few good points. I think I've fleshed out some of my ideas. I know I've failed to follow any kind of direct or logical course, and left many things out, but I will nevertheless over the next few days, and upon reflection, especially focusing on the many thoughtful comments and questions from readers, try to pull it all together into a single comprehensive (but shorter) post that I hope will serve in future as my "go to" piece when those from outside our progressive education bubble show up here confused and angry at the things I've written.

Here are the other posts I've written in this series "Why I Teach The Way I Do," in order:

Philosophy and Obedience
Rules
Learning To Be Equal And Free
"Enforcing" Rules
Fairness
Morality
What Schools Should Teach
Civil Disobedience
Mistakes

As I've thought about where I've arrived in this process of blogging without a net, I feel that I still haven't really gotten to the most honest core of why I teach the way I do. I started the first post attempting to respond to reader Ryan who was very intensely opposed to some things I'd written in an admittedly breezy post (which has since gone mini-viral) in which I was preaching to the choir. Ryan shared with me his professional (he's a therapist) reading of my "pathology" and "woundedness," connecting it to my own childhood. And while, of course, he knows nothing of my childhood specifically, it is true that my own childhood stands very much at the center of the reason I teach the way I do.

So to finish up this series, I thought I'd simply go there, providing a sketchbook of childhood memories of unsupervised play and let it stand as my final word.


A Final Word

One of the earliest things I recall is standing in the driveway of my family's new home at 134 Wembley Street in Columbia, SC. I believe the moving van was still there, or perhaps had just left. The excitement of what was happening at our house had brought John Azar from where he lived a few doors away to stand in the street at the end of the driveway to watch.

John looked to be about my age: 4 or 5-years-old. I watched him watching us for a time. I was intrigued by the men's dress shirt he had buttoned around his neck, short-sleeved, pale blue, dangling behind him in a fashion I understood to be a cape. I was entirely unaware if I had a reputation for being reserved or not, but it only seemed natural after 10 minutes of looking at each other from a distance to walk out to him and say, "Hi, I'm Tom."

He answered, but not clearly, as if he had something in his mouth, so I asked, "What?" Then more carefully, he replied, "I'm John."

"Are you playing Superman?"

"I'm playing Batman." I'd never heard of this Batman of which he spoke and thought maybe I'd misunderstood, just as I had his name. "What?"

"Batman," he answered more clearly.

"What's Batman?"

"He's on TV at 4 o'clock." I was invited to his house to watch it sometime. Soon I'd begged an old shirt from my dad.

It turned out that John had a sister, Pheobe, a year older than me, while John was a year younger, and my brother Sam was a year younger than John. The four of us with Johnny and Chucky Beale, the Wieble, Broom, and Cozart kids, John Sain, and later Will Jordan from Chistopher Street and Jeff Short from over on the more busy Winston St., came to make up the core of our neighborhood "gang."

I went to school, eventually, a private kindergarten because the public schools didn't start until 1st grade back then, and then I attended the newly constructed Meadowfield Elementary, to which I could ride my bike. I'm sure those experiences laid a solid foundation for my future academic life, but I honestly have precious few memories of anything but the playgrounds and the other kids.

I do, however, have very concrete memories of the things I learned playing with John and Pheobe and the rest of the neighborhood kids, roaming from yard-to-yard, barely conscious of the idea of private property. Every now and then someone would lean from their window to "yell" at us for messing around with their rose bushes (we were fascinated by the thorns) or for jumping in the piles of pine needles they'd just raked up. We'd say we were sorry, then, as time passed, conjure stories about how we'd, in fact, been threatened by a "knife," spinning cautionary tales we told to wide-eyed kids who had not been there.

In the summer, we ran everywhere barefoot, testing our soles on the blistering hot pavement or by trying to cross sections of lawn that were known for harboring blackberry starts, what we called "stickers," or dog poop, stepping in which was a real-life horror that made you pariah until you could find a garden hose with which to wash it off. We made "booby traps" with straight pins we'd found in kitchen junk drawers, sticking them menacingly straight out of the dust, intended for "bad guys," but inevitably embedding them in our own calloused heels.

Pheobe, being oldest, met me each morning one summer in the Sain's front yard, calling me "Tarzan" when I turned up with no shirt or shoes. I can still summon up the sting of disappointment when one day she said nothing. I asked, "Aren't I Tarzan?" And she answered, "Your shorts are too long." I never wore those shorts again.

There were climbing trees and pine cone fights and "dangerous" kids who lived on other streets. We made up games we called soccer and football and hide-and-seek, often playing through the dusk into dark, howling like wolves and barking like dogs and making up songs about the things that interested us the most: underpants, death, poo, and flying faster than the wind.

After thunderstorms we would race outside to play in the streams that formed in the gutters that lined the curbs of our cul-de-sac, floating pine needle boats that we'd guide through rapids we created from pebbles, following the course until it was lost through the iron gratings that lead into the mysterious maw of the storm sewers. There were few things more exciting than when someone's dad would spend a weekend pruning pine branches, then pile them over those gutters where they would often wait for weeks for the irregular curbside pick up. That's where we built forts and hideouts, getting sap and splinters in our hair and under our fingernails. Later, as we got older, and bicycles made us more mobile, we found roadside ditches farther afield in which we discoverd frogs, turtles, and insects: bugs that could walk on water and mosquitoes the size of our palms.

There were still a few undeveloped parcels in our suburban neighborhood that we called "woods" and where we would spend hours creating adventures. One time Jeff Short and I decided to play with matches, lighting small fires, then stomping them out until one nearly spread out of our control. We panicked as we stomped, sweating, crying, images in our heads of the entire neighborhood burning to the ground, the echoed voices of adults with their tut-tut warnings, "Never play with matches," suddenly poignant. I prayed so hard as I stomped that I suffered from a headache that lasted for hours afterwards. It wasn't until I was a teenager than I again had the courage to strike a match. Thirty years later, this is the story I told my own daughter instead of simply commanding her to be careful with fire.

We sometimes rode our bikes into "Hampton's Land," a vaguely menacing wooded place marked off by tattered "No Trespassing" signs, owned by one or another of the vaguely menacing Hamptons who stood for us as the faceless symbol of ultimate power and wealth. In there we found places we named "The Clay Pits" and "The Sand Pits" and "The Dessert," and where we imagined ourselves cowboys and army men, uncovering evidence of other kids who had been there before us, ancients who had left behind bottle cap and candy wrapper relics for us to muse over. Sometimes we'd actually meet those kids in those places, who always seemed rougher than us, cruder. One time, however, there was a boy smaller and younger than us. He played the tough guy, threatening us, standing with his legs apart and hands on his hips. We found him amusing and began to taunt him, mocking his bravdo. Once, twice, then three times I snuck around behind him, then shoved him to the ground, laughing at how I'd sure shown him. Finally, he ran off. Thinking we'd won something, we Wembley Street kids claimed "The Clay Pits" as our own, until we saw him returning through the trees, this time with adults in tow. Not waiting for the consequence, I ran like I'd never run before, leaving my bike in the shrubbery, running over stumps and through brambles that tore my flesh. I ran with fear in my heart, with anguish over the cruelty I'd perpetrated upon the younger boy who had only wanted us to think he was something mightier than he was. Tears tracked through the dust on my cheeks as I ran, faster than ever, farther than ever, all the way back to my house where I slammed the door and spent the afternoon pacing in front of the windows, watching the street, fearing the appearance of that boy and those adults who never came.

This race home was echoed some weeks later when Jeff Short, in a peak of anger and cruelty, put his heel down on a favorite toy of mine, crushing into the mud. I ran all the way home then too, tears for both myself and the boy I'd treated with similar cruelty. Both times mom saw I was in anguish, but didn't pry, instead letting me be with my grief and with her love. I suspect she later learned of both incidents through the neighborhood grapevine, but never said a word because, I guess, she knew I'd already learned hard lessons and it was not part of her love for me to make them harder.

Other times we stuck around our homes, playing in garages, digging through boxes of junk, handling our father's tools, assembling contraptions we called race cars that we mounted on wagons. Ours was a neighborhood of few hills, so the best we could do was find someone to push us around the driveway, but it was exhilarating nevertheless, risking life and limb to our own handiwork.

One summer the city dug a huge trench down the middle of our street, at least three times as deep as we were tall. They were replacing the small concrete storm sewer pipes with much larger concrete storm sewer pipes. After the workmen went home each day, no one told us not to play there, so we did. There was nowhere else we would have rather been than down in that amazing rubble bestrewn hole, climbing over "boulders" and upon the small digger they left parked on its edge, daring one another to go just a little bit farther into the dark tunnel they were constructing. And when it was done, they paved the whole thing over with a strip of new black asphalt on which riding bicycles was the smoothest of pleasures.

There is so much more to tell, so many more memories of endless hours of unsupervised play out in the world with the children and things we found there. Moments that put joy in our hearts and hearts in our throats.

Of course, knowing what I know now, it probably wasn't as unsupervised as I recall through the sepia tones of memory. Naturally, there were mothers in all those kitchen windows, keeping an eye on us, only showing themselves when necessary, making sure we weren't being too mean or too careless, feeding us bologna sandwiches when that time rolled around, keeping the other mothers informed when the Wembley Street kids were playing in their yard. I know that's how it worked, but it sure felt like we were on our own as we conducted our experiments, made up our stories, figured things out, engaged in our debates, pretended in our capes, made our horrible mistakes, and enjoyed our magnificent triumphs.

I don't know if parents can allow their children this kind of freedom to roam any more.  Probably we could, but we don't, if only because there's so much more traffic. So maybe this is why we need schools like Woodland Park.

I've spent many days now writing about why I teach the way I do, but at bottom this is it: because I wish all this for the children who come my way.

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Why I Teach The Way I Do (Mistakes)

In this series entitled "Why I Teach The Way I Do," I've now written about what I think it means to be a citizen in our society and our proper relationship to the institutions we've created to help us manage how we are to live together as equal and free people. In doing so, I've written about the role of obedience, rules and their "enforcement," fairness, morality, what I believe children should actually be learning in school, and the role of civil disobedience.

Today I write about mistakes.

I've written a great deal so far in this series of posts about how we attempt to infuse democratic principles into our preschool classroom in the interest of beginning to prepare young children, through their education, for the rights and responsibilities of self-governance. Very often, however, when those who live outside our progressive education bubble hear about our practices, their response is to envision a sort of chaotic mob rule, in which children are allowed to run wild. They warn of devastating consequences, of children who will grow into criminals or sociopaths, and that what we are doing will lead to a sort of tyranny of the children in which Hobbesian brutishness rules the day.

These are, of course, very similar to the arguments that have always been made against democracy, and by some accounts (but by no means all) these fears did come to pass to some extent when the ancient Athenians attempted to govern themselves through direct democracy, a form in which there is a danger that the will of the majority will trample the rights of a minority. Our founders were, of course, aware of this potential for "tyranny of the majority" and so when choosing what form of government to embody in our Constitution, they went with a republic in which representatives are elected democratically. In other words, instead of government directly controlled by the people, it is indirectly controlled: what dictionaries at the time defined as a "representative democracy." Encyclopedias have been written, and will continue to be written, discussing the nuances of the republic vs. democracy debate, one that I'd rather not engage in here, except to say that however you define our form of government, we are, together, attempting to self-govern with democracy as the centerpiece, and that, as it has been from the onset, is a grand experiment.

Similarly, our little cooperative preschool democracy is an experiment, one not bound by a Constitution, but rather by the presence of loving adults. This is not, as some fear, an exercise in laissez fair parenting/teaching, but rather a laboratory in which we provide the space, tools and autonomy in which children experiment with what it means to live among one another as equal and free citizens.



Mistakes

When a reporter asked Thomas Edison how it felt to have failed over a thousand times in his quest to invent the light bulb, he famously answered, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps."

Traditional education is largely concerned with "correct answers," and is therefore structured so as to guide children as efficiently as possible to them, which is why so much of it is based upon the practices of direct instruction and rote practice, in which the teacher's role is primarily to tell children what they are to know and then to drill them until they are able to "prove it" on a test. This approach starts with the assumption that the teacher is a kind of dispenser of knowledge and that everything else along the way -- friendships, staring out the window, chewing gum, being silly -- is a distraction that must be controlled by rules, if not threats and force. Certainly, teachers in this model attempt to be gentle and understanding, even loving, but no matter how sing-song, a command to "Sit down," is still a command, and in the beeline path of direct instruction, anything that stands in the way must be knocked down.

Progressive education, on the other hand, is largely about making mistakes, thousands of mistakes, and is therefore structured so as to allow children to discover "correct answers" on their own through a process of their own choosing. In fact, progressive education does not even pretend to know what a child should learn except in the most general sense, assuming that the innate curiosities of children will lead them, through the instinct to play, to the discoveries that will come to form his unique education. It is through these processes, and the mistakes and struggles encountered, that he learns to be creative, flexible, and resilient. She is motivated by virtue of the fact that he is following her own passions. And he learns to work with others because he is a member of this community of equal and free citizens each pursuing his own grand experiments.

So yes, it does sometimes appear chaotic as we shape our own community through our mistakes, and, as I discussed in the second post in this series, our own rules which are more often than not the direct results of the lessons learned through these mistakes: rules that are intended not to simply clear a path for direct instruction, but rather to protect the rights of individuals and minorities as we each seek to clear our own path of self-directed learning. It may appear chaotic, as indeed democracy often appears chaotic, but it is a far cry from running wild or mob rule.

Many worry about our reliance upon the teaching power of "natural consequences," insisting that we must protect children from at least some of their mistakes. And, of course, this is true. Of course, when it comes to choices that threaten to cause grave injury, the adults in the room must step in, but not as an authority issuing commands. Rather we take a role that is more akin to a safety device, as an active part in the boundaries I discussed in the fourth post in this series. We say, "I can't let you do that," because it is our job, in just the way an electrical outlet cover's job is to prevent inexperienced children from inserting a paper clip, until they are developmentally capable of asking, "Why?" and comprehending our answer.

But beyond matters of safety, do young children always make accurate choices? Informed choices? Choices absent of cognitive error? Of course not. And indeed no human does: every one of us fails every day. Mistakes are a central tenant of the human condition. Mistakes are necessary because making them is how we learn almost everything worth knowing. A parent's or teacher's job is not to "save" young children from making mistakes, but rather to create environments in which mistakes can be made without an undue risk of maiming or death -- this is where our adult experience comes into play. Our job, in my view, is not to command children "for their own good," but rather to provide them with the facts and honestly held opinions that help guide them in making their own decisions, which still may or may not be "good decisions," but are after all their own decisions, choices from which they reap the natural consequences and rewards.

Outside our bubble, there are those who insist that it's possible to command children to not make mistakes and that when those mistakes are made "loving" punishments must be imposed. This can, in fact, "work" if the goal is to have children learn to obey a certain set of rules: or at least it appears to work as long as the authority imposing those rules and doling our those punishments remains present. (Or, as law enforcement professionals know, if the punishment is so debilitating that the one being punished is "broken," which I hope no one would do to a child.)

We cannot prevent children from making mistakes, we can only, at best, push those mistakes off into the future.  No one has ever succeeded in preventing one human in a free society from doing what she really wants to do. Ever. I've known families who have successfully prevented their children from watching television for years, only to find that the moment they are in a televised environment, they immediately over-indulge. I've watched families who have successfully prevented their children from eating refined sugar for years, only to watch them engorge themselves the moment they are confronted with an unsupervised candy jar. I've known families who have successfully prevented their adolescents from drinking alcohol only to have them head off to college and years of binge drinking.

When we use authoritarian methods, even when excused by our superior "experience," to secure the obedience of others, be they adults or children, we rob them of the instructive power of mistakes, forbidding them the most important thing of all: practice in making good decisions.

Experience is the name we give our mistakes. ~Oscar Wilde

It's true that our school is sometimes a chaotic place, but it never becomes the sort of brutish place that those outside the bubble fear. From these many voices, from these many pursuits of happiness, from this environment of mistakes and natural consequences, our classroom becomes a place in which we learn that we must be willing and able to make agreements (which always involves compromise), it becomes a place in which codes of fairness and morality always emerge, and it is a place in which we learn to be creative, flexible, resilient and motivated because that is what naturally fills the void left when the authoritarian methods of direct instruction are removed.

This is the true experiment of democracy, the one in which we all engage every day as we do about our lives as equal and free citizens.

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Happy Labor Day!

(I'm taking a bit of a break from the blog and my current series of posts, "Why I Teach The Way I Do," today by re-running the piece from last Labor Day. Have a happy, loving and safe one.  --TT) 

It's odd celebrating Labor Day in this country given the war being waged against labor by many of the most powerful members of our society, and the outright vitriol coming from elected representatives who malign working men and women as nothing more than selfish, lazy, union thugs. At the beginning of summer, on Memorial Day, you will find no shortage of people stepping to the front to wave their flags in honor of soldiers who gave their lives. But at the end of summer, on Labor Day, these very people actually become the "selfish, lazy, thugs" they condemn, enjoying a three-day weekend of picnics and family time, ignoring the thousands who gave their lives so that they can enjoy a middle-class privilege, brought to them by unions.

Indeed the middle class exists because of the Labor Movement, although it's not surprising that so many Americans are unaware of this fact, and can be so easily manipulated by politicians with anti-union agendas, because most public schools have relegated this vital piece of our civic history to a few paragraphs in text books, if it's taught at all.

And just because you don't belong to a union, don't think that your life is not better because of the long fight in which labor has been engaged on your behalf.

The very weekend you are currently enjoying has indeed been brought to you by people who fought and even died because of the radical notion that families should have time to be together, that children should not burn up their tragically short lives in sweat shops and coal mines, that mothers and fathers should expect workplaces where they won't be maimed and killed, that they should not be beaten, have their wages arbitrarily withheld, or be forced to work 61 hour weeks (the average in 1870, meaning many worked far more hours than that) with no hope of a day off. Oh, these were great times for business owners, but they were hell for everyone else.

You can thank labor for your employer-based health care coverage, your living wage, your paid sick leave, vacations, and holidays. Without a Labor Movement you would not have workers compensation for on the job injuries, unemployment insurance, pensions, anti-discrimination laws, or family medical leave. You would have no "due process," living at the mercy of your employer, who may well be a good guy, but just as likely is not.

Wages and the standard of living, even for non-union workers, in states with laws that support unions are higher; states with union-busting laws have lower wages and lower standards of living. That is a simple fact.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow anti-capitalism (as if that's an inherently bad thing). Of course, I see how a strong union might cut into corporate profits (which are currently, even in this horrible economy, among the highest in the history of the world, in real dollars) but from where I sit unions are pure capitalism. Why can't individuals with a service to sell, be it teaching or steel working, ally themselves together to negotiate the best deal possible? I mean, it's certainly democratic. And isn't that what corporations do all the time with their mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships? If capitalism is just for those with capital, then it's clearly and fundamentally anti-democratic and should have no place in our society.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow selfish. I find that a singularly silly assertion. Really? Selfish? People getting together for the common good, sticking together, sticking up for one another, acting in the best interests of "we" instead of "me." That's selfish? Yet somehow a corporation seeking to  squeeze every nickel out of the hide of it's most lowly worker isn't selfish? Please.

I've heard people use anecdotal arguments that union workers are somehow lazy. I have no doubt that there are actually lazy union workers, just like there is laziness in every aspect of life. But you've got to do better than anecdotes to convince me. The actual research shows that unionized businesses are made more productive through reduced worker turnover which leads to lower training costs and more seasoned workers, which results in not only higher productivity, but better quality. Actual research shows that higher paid workers forces managers to actually do their jobs of more effective and efficient planning.  Actual research shows that employers who involve union workers in their decision-making process see an almost 10 percent increase in productivity. Companies like Costco with a high percentage of its workforce unionized enjoy 20 percent higher profits per worker hour than anti-union bottom feeders like Sam's Club. Productivity statistics put the lie to the claim of laziness.

And as for the argument that union workers are thugs. Look at the history of the Labor Movement and tell me who the real thugs are.

I'm writing about this on my education blog because of the hits teacher's unions have been taking lately, in places like Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, but really right across the country. In fact, more than just hits, they are under full-on assault, and not just from politicians, but by the corporate "education reformers," who seem to find, without any evidence, that those rotten union teachers are the cause of our "educational crisis" (which in itself is a myth made up solely to serve their agenda of high-stakes testing, privatization and the de-professionalization of the teaching profession).

I am not a union member, nor have I ever been, but I'm waving my flag today not only for abused and hard working teachers, but for all of my brothers and sisters who work for a living, who continue to fight for their fare share of this democracy, and who envision a better more egalitarian and democratic future for our children.

Union!

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!

Why I Teach The Way I Do (Civil Disobedience)

In this series entitled "Why I Teach The Way I Do," I've now written about what I think it means to be a citizen in our society and our proper relationship to the institutions we've created to help us manage how we are to live together as equal and free people. In doing so, I've written about the role of obedience, rules and their "enforcement," fairness, morality, and what I believe children should actually be learning in school.

Today I write about civil disobedience.

Civil Disobedience

We live in a time when there exist committees of men and women who come together to decide what our children should learn: what they should understand from the literature they read, what kinds of equations they should be able to solve, what scientific processes they'll need to know, which dates and important battles they must recite. These men and women in their collective wisdom, pick and choose from the infinite universe those bits and pieces that will define what it is to be educated in this school or that school, in this district or that district, in this state or that state, and (I'm quite confident the effort is underway in this era of internationalization) in this nation or that nation. These committees determine not only what children are to learn, but by when they are to learn these things.

This committee-created standardization is then enforced through a system of "benchmarks," measured through high-stakes standardized tests that, bizarrely, focus almost exclusively on the even narrower areas of literacy and math. It's a system of dog-eat-dog competition, pitting teacher against teacher, school against school, district against district, and state against state in winner-take-all cage match for funding and jobs.

It's happening, of course, with a propagandistic veneer of benevolence, even philanthropy, promoted by the promise of "serving students," a faux outrage about old methods that are failing us, the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism, and with the strangest sight of all in our times, apparent political bipartisanship, bought and paid for by for-profit education corporations that have only just begun to raid the money that we the people have quite rightly set aside for the purpose of educating our children.

I could go on, and have, but I've tried to make this introduction as concise as possible because I've already dealt extensively on this blog with what those of us in the progressive education bubble deride as "corporate education reform."

Needless to say, I do not believe that this situation "serves children," let alone democracy, which as I complained of before is never mentioned in any of our public discussions: these efforts to impose an anti-democratic, top-down corporate-style super-hierarchy on our schools is quite explicitly an attempt to turn public education into a lucrative system of vocational training.

One of the main reasons I teach the way I do, and write about it here on this blog, is that I want parents to be dissatisfied and suspicious of what is being planned for their children who are so much more than the rhetorical "workforce of tomorrow." I want teachers to feel frustrated and even outraged that if they are to truly serve the student in their classroom instead of the theoretical student proposed by these committees, they must do so subversively, and at the real risk of finding themselves on the street. I don't know what form it will take, but increasingly it looks to me like the push back will ultimately need to take the form of civil disobedience: a student's rights movement lead by parents, teachers and the students themselves.

That's right, one of the reasons I teach the way I do is because I'm a rabble rouser.

The history of progress in our nation is one of rabble rousing, of civil (and sometimes not so civil) disobedience. Thomas Jefferson correctly predicted that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract our notice, we could be relied upon to set them right, from the American Revolution right through our various civil and labor rights movements.

And I try very hard to not be a hypocrite about this. It's my hope that as a teacher-servant to the families and children of Woodland Park, that I avoid the kind of top-down curriculum I decry. I see my role in our play-based curriculum, not as the arbiter of what the children ought to learn or by when, but rather as an administrator of invitations to explore. Most of us in the preschool world are familiar with the idea of viewing art as a "process" rather than a "product," and I strive for this to hold true for everything we do. I provide materials, information, circumstances, challenges, and sometimes even examples, but so long as the children stay within the confines of the rules that we've agreed upon together, what, or even if, they learn is entirely up to them as individuals and as a community.

This leads often to a messy, noisy process, one that "borders on" or appears to be "controlled" chaos, but just as often it results in a circle of small heads bent over a single shared mote, discussing minutiae. That's what democracy always looks like, whatever our age.

In fact, democracy, when it functions as it should, is itself a play-based learning process, one in which we all engage or not, bringing our own wisdom, knowledge, perspectives, and temperaments to the table. And together, through the process, we can be counted on to set things right, chaotically perhaps, slowly perhaps, difficultly perhaps, but without rebellion.

I've written before about civil disobedience in my own classroom, about times that the children have risen up against me as I attempt to impose my will upon them against theirs. People outside the progressive education bubble very often envision our school as an out-of-control, law-of-the-jungle kind of place, a Hobbesian dystopia, but that is not how it plays out, unless, of course, I chose to not listen to the will of the people. And then it is not the children who are subject to correction, but me. When I, for instance, attempt to hold the children at circle time beyond their attention spans or patience, the "rabble" lets me know it, first on the fringes as children begin to squirm and fidget. I know it is beginning to happen when I hear myself repeating things like, "I'd like you to sit on your bottom." When it's just one or two children, I may keep going forward with the things I've planned, things I hope we can explore together, but if my invitation doesn't compel the rest of of them, if I've overstepped my authority and tried to make their bodies or minds do something for which they are not ready, if there is something else they would much rather be learning, I better wrap things up and move on unless I'm prepared to deal with a full-on rebellion.

This is not misbehavior. This is democracy. This is not a "problem" in our classroom, but rather an important part of how the children learn to be in charge of their own learning.

I don't know if we've yet reached the moment for civil disobedience when it comes to the corporate education reform. Maybe we can still afford to be "polite." Maybe there are still "proper channels" that need to be explored. Maybe there are hidden allies somewhere among our elected representatives who have listened and are preparing even as we speak to take a leading role. Maybe. Right now, however, I worry that we are being drowned out by the well-financed corporate reformers who control the microphone, that our objections are merely bouncing off the insides of our bubble, echoing back to us, creating the false illusion that the rabble is more roused than it is.

But every day, every day, I hear from parents or teachers who are angry, or desperate, or confused, people who know that schools can and should do so much better than turn a greasy profit and prepare children for corporate jobs; schools that "teach" the skills we know the future, and democracy, will demand: creativity, flexibility, resilience, motivation, and the ability to work with others. If it were my circle time, I'd be thinking about starting to wrap things up, but it's not. It's ours and only we can decide what must happen next.

In the meantime, I will keep attempting to rabble rouse by teaching as I do and then writing about it.

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Why I Teach The Way I Do (What Schools Should Teach)

In this series entitled "Why I Teach The Way I Do," I've now written about what I think it means to be a citizen in our society and our proper relationship to the institutions we've created to help us manage how we are to live together as equal and free people. In doing so, I've written about the role of obedience, rules and their "enforcement," fairness, and morality. 

Today I write about what I believe children should be learning in school.

(I really intended to write more today, but my morning and afternoon just got filled up with appointments that call me away.)

What Schools Should Teach

Man plans, God laughs. ~Yiddish proverb

Outside of my life as a preschool teacher, I live mostly among entrepreneurs, my wife among them, a class of people who peer constantly into the future. They know for certain there's a lot of money to be made there, if only they can accurately predict what shape the future will take, what niches will open up, what unfilled demands there will be, what knowledge and expertise they will need, what will be plentiful and what will be scarce. Some of them have become quite wealthy, while others are still working for the big payday that may never come. Few of them ever stop being entrepreneurs in their hearts even if they do occasionally take refuge for a time in a mere "job." All of them have left a string of "failures" behind them: ideas that were a little ahead or behind their time, ideas that just missed, ideas that others executed better, ideas that had the rug pulled out from under them by an unexpected paradigm shift brought on by new technologies, macro-economic conditions, or other unforeseen difference-makers.

They are people who are familiar with the sound of God's laughter as they plan. These are people who live the Robert Burns poem:

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 

In proving foresight may be vain; 
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men 
Gang aft agley, 
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 
For promis'd joy! 

Predicting the future is an impossible task, as even successful entrepreneurs will confess. They may be deservedly full of their own glory, but when they tell you their stories, they are tales of ups and downs, exultation and misery, of mid-course corrections, mistakes made, and sheer luck. What these women and men will tell you is that they made it through hard work, of course, but when you dig deeper you find what that "hard work" is made of: creativity, flexibility, resilience, motivation, and an ability to work well with others. 

In the first post in this series I rejected the idea that the purpose of education is to prepare children for a future "in the military or (on) a factory floor or any other institution organized as a pyramid with all the power concentrated at the top," because, after all, we are a democracy.  If employers need workers well-versed in the habits of obedience or any of the other non-democratic skills, then they should be prepared to train them themselves because the proper role of schools is to prepare citizens for the challenges of self-governance, not in working for "the man."

Traditionally, when we think of schools, we think in terms of subjects like math, English, and science, which are all important and valuable, but the way we've gone about teaching them has largely reflected the top-down hierarchical model that is anathema to our democratic ideals. And, in fact, I would argue that this system of lectures and desks and textbooks and tests undermines the teaching of the only things we know for certain that the future will demand: creativity, flexibility, resilience, motivation, and an ability to work well with others.

And let me tell you, no one has ever learned these skills from a lecture or book: they are only learned through sharing the experiences of ups and downs, exultation and misery, mid-course corrections, mistakes, and a little luck, all in partnership with others. Experience may not be the only teacher, but she is the best teacher, and just as I want my school (and all schools) to provide children with experience in the skills and habits they'll need for self-government, I want also for schools to provide experience in the skills and habits they will need for an unpredictable future.

There are some who would have us prepare children for the world as it is and nothing more. That seems a rather impoverished idea for education. That is certainly not what our founders envisioned for the role of education in our democracy, but neither does it serve our children, especially young ones, who are still decades away from stepping out into the world entirely on their own -- a world that will be unrecognizable to them if we are only preparing them for the present. Better is to prepare children for the future, one about which the only things we know for certain is that creativity, flexibility, resilience, motivation and the ability to work with others will be at a premium. 

I want us to have a bigger idea for education, one in which it is more than a mere servant of the status quo, but rather a transformative force, both for individuals as well as society: one in which we don't prepare children for the world as it is, but rather for the world as it ought to be.

How we do this is what this entire blog is about, but in the coming days I will attempt to lift out specific examples of how we teach everything that is important through our child-lead, play-based curriculum.

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!