Thank You, Teachers, For Fighting For Our Democracy

Los Angles public school teachers recently went on strike, demanding, among other things, pay increases and smaller class sizes. Despite the fact that the district pled poverty, the money was ultimately found to do both. There has been a wave of teacher strikes across the country of late, most of them more or less following the same pattern, with strikes in Denver and Oakland in the offing. For the most part these strikes have been successful because they have had the overwhelming support of parents whose children attend those pubic schools. According to a Loyola Marymount study, some 82 percent of parents supported the teachers in LA.

That said, public schools are genuinely in a financial bind in the US. No matter how much lip service elected representatives give to the importance of education, they have been reluctant to adequately fund pubic schools for years, which is why we continue to hear stories of classrooms with 40 kids and teachers being forced to work second and third jobs to make ends meet.

While pay and class size issues make the headlines, there are other important matters causing teachers to walk out. In the case of LA, they fought for nurses and librarians in every school, while fighting against random searches of students and the proliferation of high stakes standardized testing. In other words, they are fighting not just for themselves, but also the children they teach, which is, I reckon, why they have enjoyed such widespread support despite the millions being spent by anti-union billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Koch brothers to demonize them.

One of the most overlooked drivers of our current problems in public education are these billionaires. In state after state they have sought to introduce "free-market" style capitalism into the mix by promoting things like charter schools which are designed to siphon money away from traditional public schools. All charter schools do this "whether they're opportunistic and for-profit or presenting themselves as pubic, progressive and enlightened" (click the link for a full accounting of the damage charters are doing to public education). Economic competition may have it's place in our world, but when it comes to education it is destructive: our children should not be made to work in test score coal mines in order to provide profits to school owners. Across the country, the charter movement is slowly undermining public school systems with the state of Michigan being a prime example. The LA teachers, seeing the damage charters are doing to their schools and their students, won a commitment from the school board to call for a cap on new charters in their district and a statewide review of the role and impact charters are having on public education. From the Los Angeles Times:

The state's law authorizing the creation of charter schools has been around since 1992 and legislators have made it easier during the ensuing years for such schools to open. In L.A. Unified, their growth has been explosive: The district now has 277 charters, most of them independently run, though they receive pubic funding. Most are non-union. They enroll close to 140,000 students -- about one in five in the district. Their growth is responsible for about half of the declining enrollment in traditional pubic schools that has sapped the district's finances over the last 15 years.

This situation is not an accident: it is an intended consequence, as detailed by Diane Ravitch in her book Reign of Error. The plan is to create a crisis by starving schools in order to open the door to full-on privatization. A plan by billionaire education "reformer" Eli Broad was recently leaked in which he is proposing that half of LA students to be in charters within eight years. In Michigan, many school districts have already been completely privatized via charters which has lead to the state's schools to fall from the middle ranks nationally as a place to get an education to one of the worst. At least one school district was left entirely without public schools when the private charter operator shut down citing lack of profits.

Our public schools are imperfect, but they will not be made better by starving them. Our public schools are imperfect, but they will not be made better by making them less democratic. Our public schools are imperfect, but they will not be made better by subjecting our children and their teachers to the dog-eat-dog competition of corporate-style capitalism, through charters or vouchers or whatever they come up with next. I'm grateful to our nation's unionized teachers for bringing democracy into our schools and for standing up to the billionaire "reformers," not just for themselves, but for the children they teach. We must stop this insane practice of underfunding schools, then blaming them when they fail. Like all democratic institutions, our public schools must be guided by an open, fair, and transparently democratic process, not the mythological "invisible hand" of competition.

As the great John Dewey wrote: "Democracy must be born anew with each generation and education is its midwife." This is about the children, but it is also about all of us. Thank you, teachers, for fighting for our democracy.

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

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“I’m Looking At You”

"Teacher Tom, look what I made!"

"I'm looking at what you made."

I strive for Woodland Park to be a place where children are as free as possible to create, explore, study, and play with as little adult judgement as possible. I am not there to critique their work or to teach them tricks, but rather to be the resident expert on safety, schedules, and courtesy, while providing the time and space for children to ask and answer their own questions about their world.

When a child says, "Look what I made!" most adults respond as if it's a request for judgement and offer some sort of knee-jerk praise. "It's beautiful!" we might say, placing our benign stamp of approval on the child's work. I was taught that a more appropriate response is to instead focus on the effort (e.g., "You worked on that for a long time") or to simply stick with the facts before you (e.g., "You used red paint and some bits of string"). It's the difference between children learning to be motivated extrinsically versus intrinsically. Our constant critiques, even when offered as praise, teach children that their value is in the eyes of others, and in particular those with power, while our goal, I hope, is to teach them to judge their work for themselves, to be guided by their own internal light.

Even though most of us already know this, it remains challenging. It's hard to not want to praise children. And, especially as parents, it's even harder sometimes to avoid criticizing them, especially as they get older and we fear they are headed for pain and heartbreak or, if we are honest with ourselves, embarrassing us. I have been trying to train myself in the art of speaking with children for a couple decades now and it is still hard for me. I still catch myself making mistakes daily.

When I'm at my best, however, when I'm truly creating a place in which children can practice thinking for themselves, it's when I am unhurried enough to take a moment to collect myself before speaking. I've found this to be a key for me: that pause to make sure I am saying what I want to be saying. And I've noticed in recent years that even the words I'm saying, when I'm at my best, are even less intrusive that those comments about effort or a factual description of what I see before me.

When a child says, for instance, "Look what I made!" I find myself responding directly to her words and nothing more, "I'm looking at what you made."

"Teacher Tom, this is for you." . . . "This is for me."

"Teacher Tom, I fell down." . . . "You fell down."

"Teacher Tom, look what I can do." . . . "You can do that."

"Teacher Tom, I'm here." . . . "You're here."

It's as if I'm a mirror for the children, a surface upon which to reflect. Most of the time this is enough, the child just wants to know that he is heard, even though some children then proceed to tell me what they want me to know rather than having been directed into a channel dug by my adult assumptions. Perhaps they will then describe what it is they've made, or share that they were or weren't injured, or detail the process by which they achieved whatever it is they've achieved. Most often, however, they simply smile in recognition of having been heard, then go back about their business, turning away from the mirror of me, and returning to the inspiration coming from within.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Building A Wall

The two of them, a boy and a girl, built a wall. They had the entire checker board rug to themselves, they had all the baby wipe box blocks to themselves, and they decided together to build a wall to, in their words, "keep the others out."

The goal was to build it so high that "no one could get over" and for quite some time no one even tried. They used all the blocks and had all that space.

A classmate finally came to examine the wall.

"It's a wall to keep people out," they said, "You can step over it and come in." When that first friend accidentally kicked part of the wall down in the process, they decided they needed a door.

More friends joined them, using the door in the wall built to keep the others out. Soon there were a half dozen of them inside the wall. Someone said, "This is our new play area."

There were no other toys in the walled play area and the blocks were all incorporated into the wall. All they had was one another, the checker board rug and that wall that was not really keeping anyone out.

They decided to make it a place for dancing. I put on some West African marimba music. They danced within the wall in their own spaces and in their own styles.

One boy found a box full of small, plastic rainbow people and brought it inside the wall. He began arranging them along the top of the wall saying, "These people are our audience." Some of the kids helped him arrange the rainbow audience while the others danced.

As is usually the case with four and five year olds, it isn't enough to play together without also touching one another. The dancers danced together until it evolved into a kind of pig pile under which one of them was trapped. She didn't cry, but they saw pain in her face and decided to play more gently.

Amazingly, after a good 45 minutes, the wall with it's precariously balanced rainbow audience was still standing. By now there was at least a dozen kids inside the wall that had been built to keep the others out, the wall in which they had built a door, a wall inside which they had danced and grappled and empathized and compromised.

Then, as is every wall's destiny, they kicked it over with such an eruptive suddenness that it alarmed us all. I had walked away just prior to that moment and returned, worried that they would somehow need big, responsible, adult me in the aftermath of that wall coming down, but I saw only smiles on beet red faces as they made rubble of that wall that could no longer even pretend to keep anyone out.

Moments later a cry went up, "Let's build a tower!" And together they did.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Helping Them As They Play

Humans are born knowing how to learn. It's called play. And when left to their own devices, young children are unsurpassed in understanding what they need to learn. That's evident in how they choose to play. I'm there for when they can't reach things, when they require something from the storage room, when we need to purchase something, when they are searching for the right word or concept or perspective. I'm there for when their emotions get too big or their conflict too intense. In other words, my job as a teacher in a play-based preschool is not to help children learn, but rather to help them as they learn.

I have long recognized that I am my best self when helping others, which shouldn't be a surprise because helping others is a foundational tenant of every major religion or philosophy. It's not really help, however, when I'm imposing myself on others, offering unsolicited advice, for instance, or using whatever authority I have as a teacher or as an adult to insist that my help be accepted "for your own good." Far too much of what passes for teaching in a child's world amounts to this sort of paternalistic approach to helping, which isn't really helping at all.

The common idea that the teacher's job is to help children to learn very often falls into that category. It suggests a top-down power dynamic, one that only works when the child is sufficiently obedient, sufficiently docile, sufficiently distracted from their own interests. To make it "work," children must stop playing (that is, stop learning) in order to pay attention to what the adult has decided they must know, whether they want to know it or not.

This pushing water up hill model of education is not about helping others: it is about controlling others. When I make the mistake of turning down that path, when I make up my mind about what I want the kids to learn, then set out to teach it, I invariably spend my day scolding, coaxing, and commanding. At the end of the day I always look back to see that I've not been my best self. In contrast, on those days when I remain focused helping the children as they learn, as they play, I am the person I want to be: a true helper.

Humans are born knowing how to learn. It's call play. And my job is to help them as they play.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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In Between

"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." ~John Lennon

Ten years ago, I was spending at least two hours a day as a commuter, that's ten hours a week, forty hours a month, and nearly 500 hours a year. Part of my motivation to move from our southend neighborhood into downtown was to "reclaim" those hours. It seemed like such a colossal waste. I wanted to spend my life being here or there rather than between here or there.

Of course, that's not how life works. Even though my daily commute is now more like 15 minutes, I still spend nearly all of my time "in between." Mister Rogers famously said that love is an active noun, like "struggle." I would say the same goes for life: the concept of "here and there" is always theoretical, while the commute, the struggle, or (to be cliche about it) the journey is all there is and the degree to which we anticipate our destination or cling to the places we've left behind is the degree to which we aren't fully alive.

We've had a couple of snow days to start this week. My wife is out of down with the dog. My daughter is in school in New York. I've been trying to treat these days for what they are, gifts of time. I've lit fires. I've taken a few walks. I've read a good book. I've cooked my favorite meals. To be honest, I've been a little bored, and there have been moments when I've had to reason away a nagging sense that I'm wasting time. That said, in a couple days, I'll look back on these lazy, cozy days and wish to be back there in my bathrobe having yet another unhurried cup of coffee.

Instead of treating these snow days like something to hurry through, I've tried to live them for what they are: life itself. It takes conscious effort, discipline even, to remain here or there. Indeed, I'm finding it impossible because it is in the nature of life to be continually emerging. In fact, there is no here or there. There is only this "in between" which is where life happens.

Young children already know this. Even if they can't put it into words, you can tell by how they embrace this moment. Adults can waste time, but young children cannot. That is perhaps the most remarkable thing about spending day after day with them. Not a single second is wasted. There is struggle, there is love, there is doing and being, while here and there are relegated to the realm of theory where they belong.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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To Work Toward Agreement

The Alaskan Way Viaduct has been a feature of Seattle's downtown since it was completed in 1959. In hindsight it was probably an ill-advised project in that the elevated, double-decker concrete thoroughfare effectively cut the city off from its waterfront. Civic boosters have long wanted it to come down and after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake even those who argued for its functionality and spectacular Elliott Bay views had to agree its time had come. Thus began a long, expensive, contentious process of figuring out what and how. We finally settled on digging a car tunnel under Alaskan Way, while repairing/replacing the sea wall in the process before dismantling the viaduct, a project that begins in the coming weeks.

This is not the solution that I would have favored. Personally, I thought we might be best served by just tearing the thing down and see what that did to traffic. I didn't think we needed a tunnel at all and that a beefed up mass transit system could handle things. I got frustrated when monied interests put their thumb on the scale. I said "I told you so" when Bertha (the giant boring engine that dug the tunnel) broke down causing significant cost over runs. Nevertheless it was a relatively transparent, relatively democratic process that included ample opportunity for public input. It was, as all human processes are, an imperfect one, but I now accept the results.

Indeed, I've been excited about it. In the intervening 17 years, our family moved from South Seattle where we drove the viaduct almost daily, to an apartment downtown only a few blocks away from where the new tunnel surfaces. I've taken impromptu tours of the project at least once a month for the past year or so to check on the progress, often chatting with the workers who seemed genuinely proud to be part of such a major undertaking. Sometimes I would just stand there overlooking the site, imagining how traffic will flow and merge; how it will exit into my neighborhood and trying to figure out what that will do to conditions on the streets surrounding my building. I've fully set aside my reservations about the project and am now genuinely excited about it.

The tunnel opens this morning, but over the weekend, people were invited to walk and bike the new tunnel, take a final tour of the old Battery Street tunnel, and, the biggest lure for me, to make a final stroll along the length of the viaduct's upper deck. It was a party, a festival, and a parade. Tens of thousands of my fellow citizens ostensibly came to say goodbye and/or good riddance. It is still an open question whether or not the billions of dollars and years of sometimes acrimonious public debate will result in an improved city or not, but the die is now cast.

As I wandered back and forth, weaving through the crowd, enjoying the views, taking in the performances, examining the temporarily installed artwork, and running into (and hugging) dozens of people I know from all aspects and eras of my life including many of my current and former students, I found myself looking forward. I got the sense that we all were; the troubles of the past a memory. It's as if we had come as citizens to push off together into an exciting and unknown future. There will be more arguments, of course, but on this day, everyone seemed allied in looking ahead.

No one ever said that democracy would be quick or easy. That is the nature of compromise and agreement, which should always stand at the heart of democracy: a good compromise leaves no one entirely happy. It is from our agreements that our future as a democratic society emerges even if the process can sometimes make us want to throw up our hands. The story of the Alaskan Way viaduct and its replacement tunnel is a good example of how this works, warts and all. I'm sure there are still some who remain bitter about it, but over the weekend, at least, we the people set that aside and pledged through our presence, together, to continue to work toward agreement.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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Why I Never Gave My Child An Allowance

I don't claim to be a parenting expert, although my wife and I have managed to raise a child into adulthood who is self-motivated, who collaborates happily with others, who works hard, and who knows how to be a good friend. 

Someone recently asked me about my own parenting. Among her questions was, "When did you start giving Josephine an allowance?" My answer was, "Never." Or rather, we may have tried giving her an allowance for a week or two, but generally speaking, when she needed money we gave it to her. 

That flies in the face of the conventional idea that an allowance gives a child the opportunity to practice budgeting and saving and whatnot, skills she's going to need in adulthood. It's a perfectly valid notion, but being a paymaster didn't sit well with me. Our family's money has never been my money, but rather our money. Josephine never asked to be born, that was a choice my wife and I made, and part of the obligation I felt as a parent was if we were going to bring a new life into this world, we owed her, without reservation, an equal claim to all we own, as a family. I could never buy into the "I worked for this money so it's mine" approach.

This isn't to say that we handed over a third of our discretionary income to her, but rather that purchases beyond the day-to-day necessities required discussion. This is how my wife and I already did it, consulting with one another before spending, considering together if this was how we wanted to use our money, so it only made sense to include Josephine. In the same spirit, we didn't make a secret of our wider financial situation. When things were tight, she knew about it. When we were feeling flush, she knew about that too. So when she wanted a new toy, for instance, it was against this background of full knowledge that we had our discussion. Sometimes we decided that it was a good way to use our money, but more often than not we wound up coming to an agreement that it wasn't, at least not today. She may have still felt disappointment, but at least there was understanding there as well.

As a young adult, I would say that she manages her money at least as well as I do, and certainly better than I did at her age, and I was a product of allowances. Indeed, she is proving to be something of a "hustler," willing and able to get out there an cobble together the money she needs.

As I said, I'm not a parenting expert. Mine is the story of one family trying to sift through all the advice and find our way as best we can. It's an approach that suited our personalities, our lifestyle, and our values. There are no cookie cutter ways to parent any more than there are cookie cutter kids. That's both the challenge and beauty of it all: we get to make it our own.

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

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

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