This is Not Every Other Profession

I wish we could all tell the truth about education, that it's really the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

I wish our profession wasn't in a fight for its life against deep pocket foes with a political or economic agenda, because this simplicity is really its beauty and joy.

We've learned to protect ourselves with an armor of jargon like every other profession as a way to sell ourselves in this sell-or-be-sold world.

But this is not every other profession. I'm not even sure it is a profession as much as a calling. Because when we strip all that "professionalism" away, we see that the core of what we do is to love the children: every one of us knows that. And when you love, you listen. That's what we do.

It's when we listen with our ears and eyes and hearts that we can access not only their genius, but our own.

Professional greatness is not a rare thing, I don't think, but it's hard for others to see because it takes place in intimate moments when we're down on our knees, face to face with the children, ears, eyes, and heart wide open. And then to try to talk about it after the fact, to try to satisfy the demands to make learning "transparent," we wind up wrapping the moments of genius in words that detail techniques and strategies that describe only the surface manifestation of what happened because to say, "We connected," sounds too hippy-dippy and namby-pamby.

This is not a complicated thing, but it does take practice, lots of it, every day with lots of different kids, and even after ten or twenty years there's still a new thing to learn every day, its profundity often lost in its simplicity.

When we play with children, we engage them as they engage with their passions and curiosities, and when we listen with our whole selves, we notice instantly when that moment comes around, and then it's just a simple matter of making a statement of fact, or asking just the right question, or sitting quietly in the knowledge that that is what this child needs right now. How much better that is than to assume they are all ready for this particular knowledge at this particular time delivered in this particular manner by virtue of being more or less the same age -- what Ken Robinson calls their "manufacture date" -- then bang heads against the wall in frustration that many of them just don't get it.

To be a "gifted" educator is really just possessing the knowledge that children are people and proceeding to treat them like people, loving them and listening.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

"This Vested Interest In The Children's Incompetence"

As a child, there were certain adults who I instantly liked, whereas there were others for whom I would take an immediate dislike. It generally came down to how they treated me. If they looked me in the eye, spoke in their normal voice, laughed at my jokes, not my mistakes, and refrained from such intrusive things as patting me on the head, pinching my cheeks, or picking me up without my consent, then they were one of the "good guys."

Most adults in mixed-age social settings would just ignore me, which was fine, because I would likewise ignore them, preferring the company of my fellow children, but there were always some who would loom at me, smiling too widely, speaking too loudly, sometimes even descending into a kind of baby talk. They might have been well-intended, but I resented their insipid, prying questions, questions they would never dare ask an adult they didn't know: "What are you going to be when you grow up?" or "Are you a good boy for your teacher?" They would look around at the other adults as I obediently replied beaming condescendingly as if they were a confederacy of superior beings deigning to include the cute, precious, innocent child for a moment.

To this day, there are few things more certain to set this early childhood educator's teeth on edge than adults who condescend to children. As a boy, the irritation was with their obvious phoniness and their clear, insulting assumption that I was some kind of baby. Now, however, I understand that it is even worse. These are adults, and there are more of them now than ever, who see children not as an individual humans, but rather as an idea, a stereotype. They don't see actual people, but rather their concept of children as incomplete adults -- simple, unformed, incompetent, and so so so charmingly innocent. It is okay to command or control them, to even lie to them, just so long as they can convince themselves that it's "for their own good."

Many of these people are in charge of schools and curriculum. Many are teachers. There are even parents who start off with this attitude only to spend the next couple decades mourning the loss of their vision of what a child is as their own child proves to be an actual human being. These are the parents who think they are doing their child a service by protecting them from learning about sex or racism because they are too tender and dear to be exposed to such things.

John Holt writes, "It is condescending when we respond to qualities that enable us to feel superior to the child. It is sentimental when we respond to qualities that do not exist in the child but only in some vision or theory that we have about children . . . Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn to do, and do well, the things they see being done by bigger people around them. This is why they soon find school such a disappointment; they so seldom get a chance to learn anything important or do anything real. But many of the defenders of childhood, in or out of school, seem to have this vested interest in the children's incompetence, which they often call 'letting the child be a child.'"

We are born into the shock of light, cold, and sound, then must spend our first days learning to live with it. From the moment we come into this world, we are fully aware that there is pain, fear, and that life is often unfair. We are never innocent in this life: the idea of childhood innocence is really just adults romanticizing ignorance. Our children do not need to be protected from the hard lessons of life, even if that were possible. They do not benefit from our theories about what children are and are not. They are here on this earth, like all of us, to learn what it means to be alive and our responsibility as important adults in their lives is to be fellow travelers, consoling them when the lessons are hard, helping them when the tasks are difficult, but most of all loving them as the capable, competent humans they are.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

Play-Based Educators Are In The Business Of Learning, Not Teaching

As play-based educators, we are in the business of learning. Many of us interpret that to mean "teaching," but the longer I've been in this profession, the more I've distanced myself from that because I've found that it very often gets in the way of the learning.

Oh sure, if I choose the subject (or have a subject determined for me by a pre-packaged curriculum) then lecture, explain, demonstrate, and assign in just the right mixture, I can compel this or that child to repeat what I consider to be the correct answers on a test, and this is a kind of learning, I suppose. It is learning that relies on lower level cognitive processes like repetition, memorization, and pleasing an authority figure. And because I've imposed correct answers and test scores on the children as objectives, most of this learning will be of the short-term variety, because it is unconnected to the child's life outside the confines of school. Of course, a good teacher will strive to make the subject matter relevant to this or that child by causing them to somehow experience it, but because that manufactured experience is an abstraction from life (as is most of what we call school), it's a hit or miss (mostly miss) process.

In this model, we see the active adults choosing, compelling, imposing, and causing, while the child is seen as a passive receptacle.

This approach is, to my mind, completely backwards. As an educator, I've found that if I focus on the actual thinking, creating, and understanding, when the child is the active one, the one doing the choosing, compelling, imposing, and causing, we find ourselves in an environment in which higher level learning can take place.

This is the kind of learning that involves the actual thinking, which, as Eleanor Duckworth points out, is indistinguishable from learning. "The development of intelligence is a matter of having wonderful ideas." Rarely does a wonderful idea emerge from "teaching," except perhaps as an act of rebellion, because wonderful ideas are the product of higher level thinking.

And thinking is the process of trying to understand.

When we observe children at play, which is to say choosing their own course of "study," we are witnessing  self-motivated learners engaged in thinking about relevant subject matter. We see that thinking is not merely a process of the brain, but rather one that is so fully engaging that it involves the entire body. There is no need for adults to "get" the kids to do things or to "impose" or "cause" things to happen, but rather to be alongside the child, observing, researching, and supporting them, minimally. An educator, as opposed to a teacher, trusts the child's natural instinct to think and understand, not what the adult wants them to know, but whatever is relevant to that child.

But then they will only learn what they want to learn. What about all the stuff that they need to learn? 

Setting aside the hubris in this question, I would assert that a child who has been free to think, to understand, and to pursue their own answers to their own questions, will be well-equipped to learn those things when and if the need actually arises. In other words, when this or that trivia becomes relevant, when not knowing stands in the way of knowing, the child will have the self-motivation and skills to more readily learn it.

Literacy, the Holy Grail of the adult-directed model of learning, is a classic example of this. Increasingly, we are "teaching" two-year-olds how to read. Then we teach them when they are three, then four, then five, then six, then seven when, for many of them, they finally learn it. The self-directed model requires that we wait until the child themself recognizes that reading is relevant to them, which for most kids is around seven or eight years old (although it obviously varies by child). In other words, all that "teaching" was, at best, a waste of time (although research shows that children who receive formal literacy in preschool tend to become teenagers who read less for pleasure and with lower comprehension). When the child is the active agent in the learning, self-motivation and actual understanding make reading a task of a few months rather than years. 

But what if they think "wrong" thoughts? What if they are "teaching" themselves things that are not true?

Play-based educators know that learning is not about correct answers, but rather the thinking, which is indistinguishable from learning. When we are free to think our own thoughts, to follow our own curiosity, and to strive to understand, we will, like any scientist, develop theories that we must test, through our self-selected activities. This might involve living with a "wrong answer" for a long time before it becomes relevant to reassess.

Generations ago the right answer to understanding a thunderstorm was that all that rumbling was the sound of superhuman gods at battle. Now, most of us reduce these storms to concepts like friction, sparks, vacuums, and imagined banks of burly air smashing together to make the noises. Neither of these conceptions are, in fact, the correct answer to what is a thunderstorm. In both cases, we're thinking in metaphors that feel familiar, which is to say, that make us feel as if we understand.

Educators know that correct answers are a moving target, changing as our metaphors change, and those metaphors are the product of thinking, often with our whole bodies . . . Which is indistinguishable from learning.

And play-based educators are in the business of learning, not teaching. 

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

What I Learned From Learning To Ride A Bike

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life. ~Susan B. Anthony

I recently watched a neighbor teaching his grandchild how to ride a bike she had received as a Christmas gift. It got me thinking about me own journey as a cyclist.

My first bicycle was a red Western Flyer. A few of the other neighborhood kids my age were managing two-wheelers so my parents agreed with me that it was time to learn.

Dad was going to be out of town on a business trip, but he promised to teach me how to ride when he returned which meant I had several days to get to know my exciting new bike before I was to receive proper instruction. There really wasn't a trick to riding a tricycle -- just jump on the seat, put your feet on the pedals and go -- but the bike proved to be much trickier. I could straddle the bar with my feet on the ground. I could even lift my bottom onto the seat and get one foot on a pedal, but, of course, when I lifted my other foot off the ground I fell over.

At one point, I figured out how to lean the bike against a tree trunk in such a way that I could sit on the seat, with both feet on the pedals, but there was no way to move forward from this position. I got pretty good at sitting on the seat with one foot on the ground, then rocking the bike to the other side where I caught myself with the opposite foot. I spent at least an hour playing with my bike in this way, but as for forward motion, as for two feet on two pedals, I was stumped.

Mom, witnessing what she must have interpreted as my struggles, gave me a tip: "Get a foot on one pedal then push off with the other foot to give yourself some momentum." I'd never heard the word "momentum" before, but in context I understood it as you have to get going a little bit before you can get going a lot. It made a certain kind of sense, but it also struck me as something of a paradox. How do you get going before you get going?

When Dad got home, he took me to a little used, unpaved, dirt road that ran along behind the newly-constructed elementary school that I was destined to one day attend. His idea was that since I was likely to fall a few times, the dirt road would offer a softer fall than asphalt, while grass, although even softer, was too uneven for a beginner. Mom had told him that I'd been practicing, so he asked me to show him what I'd figured out on my own, which to my mind wasn't much. I showed him how I could sit on the seat properly if I leaned the bike against a tree. I showed him how I could rock back and forth. And then I attempted Mom's "momentum" move, giving it my all, resulting in my falling into the dirt. 

As he dusted me off, he said, "You already know everything you need to know to ride a bike. You know what it feels like to sit on your bike. You know how to take your feet of the pedals to catch yourself if you start to fall. You know how to balance a little. And you know how to fall."

He said, "Okay, so let me be the tree." He held the bike upright as I climbed on, putting both feet on the pedals. "Now I'm going to rock you back and forth a little bit and you use your feet to catch yourself." We did that a few times. "Now I'm going to help you with momentum. I'll push you a little bit while you pedal." And that was the moment that I really understood what that word meant. He held the back of the seat as I moved exhilaratingly forward. It was a sunny day and while he was behind me, I could see his shadow on a dirt, connected to the shadow of me on my bicycle. I then forgot about Dad for a moment, turning my attentions to the road ahead. 

When I looked back for his shadow it was gone. I was riding on my own!

I felt a surge of thrill and panic as I wobbled and fell. We tried it again, but this time I started with one foot on the ground while Dad again helped me with momentum. This time he let go almost right away. I felt the momentum right away. I was riding again! As I got farther and farther away from Dad it occurred to me that I didn't know how to stop. I knew the bike had "coaster brakes." Like with the concept of momentum, I understood that I was to pedal backward in order to slow down or stop, but I couldn't get my body to do it. Indeed, I couldn't stop my legs from pedaling forward, so I steered toward a patch of roadside grass and leapt for it, leaving my two-wheeler to careen along without me until it lost momentum and fell.

It was time to head home for dinner. Dad promised me that he'd teach me how to properly stop the following weekend.

Not knowing how to stop seemed like a very minor problem to me. After all, the riding was the important thing. And besides, I did know how to stop. It involved leaping into the grass and every house along our cul-de-sac had grass lawns. I could leap off anywhere I might want to go, which is what I did all week. One of the older kids called me "James Bond," which I took as a cool compliment even though I had no idea who James Bond was. It wasn't long before several of the other kids had adopted my dismount technique. We even started competing to see who could get their bike to continue the farthest without a rider.

The following weekend, I showed Dad what I could do. I figured out how to use the brakes to slow down, I showed him how I had figured out how to steer and how I could go really fast. And I showed him my James Bond dismount. He congratulated me, saying, "You've learned to ride a bike."

I don't remember learning how to stop and dismount properly, but at some point along the way, I obviously figured that out as well. 

What I didn't know until I watched my neighbor putting his grandchild in the position to learn about momentum, balance, braking, stopping, speed, practice, falling, and freedom, was that I'd also learned a lot about teaching. I'd learned about the importance of letting go a little before the learner thinks they're ready. I learned that teaching is indistinguishable from loving. And I'd learned, that instructions and concepts are mere words until they are put into action. 

Or as the late great Bev Bos would say, "If it hasn't been in the hand and body, it can't be in the brain."

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

Finally, We Can All Agree To Hate Teachers

Yesterday, Chicago public school teachers voted overwhelmingly to begin the new year with remote learning in the face of the most recent Covid surge.

Elected representatives from both political parties, policymakers, media personalities, and business leaders took to the airwaves and social media to bash teachers. My Twitter feed was filled with the angry, vitriolic opinions of plumbers, homemakers, Uber drivers, small business owners, accountants, and candle-makers who piled on throughout the day.

"Fire all of them!" was a common theme, as was, "Those selfish teachers don't care about the children." There was a lot of union bashing and teacher bashing, all wrapped up in pearl clutching over those poor children whose teachers clearly hate them.

In other words, a whole bunch of people who know next to nothing about education, children, schools, or teaching beyond their own narrow experiences were popping off, many dangerously so. Most of these critics haven't spent a day in a classroom since they themselves were students. Indeed most of them have organized their lives in such a way that they have limited contact with children, even their own. They send them off in the morning, harass them about getting their homework done when they return, then send to bed. Indeed, most American adults spend their lives in a world where children are more conceptual than actual facts, and where schools are relatively safe places to stash them during the day.

These are the people who are calling professional educators "lazy," "uncaring," "selfish," and even "anti-American." I want to emphasize that from my informal Twitter feed survey, these education dilettantes and critics appeared to come from both sides of the political aisle. So yay, I guess, bi-partisanship at last. Finally, we can all agree to hate teachers.

To be clear, remote learning is really remote instruction, and it sucks, especially for younger children. The kids I know who have been experiencing it for the past couple years feel like it is mostly a waste of time in the sense that they are learning "almost nothing." But, cynically, they're passing the tests and jumping through the hoops set before them, much the way they're expected to do during in-person instruction. So it sucks, but much of what makes it suck is the way we do schooling itself, not remote instruction.

Teachers, of course, know this better than anyone. Like the children, they have been thrown into it, they've made the best of it, and some have even figured out how to make it work, but few professional educators would choose the remote option over an in-person option unless they felt it was in the best interest of the children.

And that's the point. These teachers, as professionals, as the people with the most experience and expertise, and as people who know full well the downsides of remote instruction for both the children and themselves, believe that this is the best course at this moment, in this school district. People can disagree, but accusing teachers of being "lazy," "uncaring," "selfish," and "anti-American" is pure hate-speech. 

From the union's statement: "This decision was made with a heavy heart and a singular focus on student and community safety." 

I'm not here to argue about Covid or public health policies or vaccines or masks or any of that. I'm not even taking a stand about the decision of Chicago's teachers, but I do respect their professional judgement. I'm writing today to shine a spotlight on the vitriol and hatred. If I were a young person today, there is no way I'd consider becoming a teacher (or a nurse, for that matter). We're already facing a teacher shortage in parts of the country, especially in early years, and the current climate of hatred will not help. I mean, if the city of Chicago were to take the advice of Twitter and fire all the teachers, there simply won't be school at all. The school district next door would be thrilled to fill their vacancies with professional educators.

I know not everyone hates teachers and I'm sure that some of the anger is just a knee-jerk reaction to unions in general, but when I look at the current landscape, when I consider that our profession is relatively low-paid and widely disrespected, it's really hard for me to imagine our current system can survive for much longer. And as teachers leave the profession in droves, the education dilettantes are increasingly inserting themselves into our schools, making them even worse places for children. If we lived in a society that genuinely cared about what is best for children, this moment in history would call for the whole system to be up for reconsideration.

The hatred hurts all of us. It hurts our profession and it hurts the kids. That said, this pandemic has continuously highlighted the fact that as things stand today, we might be weak as individuals, but together educators could be one of the most powerful forces for change in America. Think about what we could accomplish for children, for education, for America, if we stick together. And I wonder if maybe that's what much of the hatred is about.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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

The "Girl Team" For The Win

Charlotte was one of those kids who had been coming to Woodland Park since before she was born, arriving first in our classroom in utero to drop off and pick up her older brother, then continuing on her own behalf until she was five. If I've ever known a student, it would be Charlotte, and among the many things I know is that she is not conflict averse: she will stand up for herself, and for righteousness in general, like few people I've ever known, whatever their age.

To say she knew her way around the place would be an understatement. When we began making our classroom agreements early in her third and final school year, she took the lead in creating a short, but very workable list, including the vital ones of "No hitting," "No kicking," "No biting," and "No taking things from other people." We would, of course, add to this list in the coming days and weeks, but could in theory function as a community quite well with these dozen or so rules we had created to get started.

The following day, we played with our catapults. The kids fell on them enthusiastically. It was wild at first, although I was proud of how well the kids -- most of whom were just getting to know one another -- figured out how to share the five machines without any input from me. 

Naturally, they quickly began targeting one another with the ping pong balls. I was trying to stay out of the way, observing, and helping to retrieve balls that had gotten under furniture, waiting all the while for a signal from the kids that we needed to consider a new agreement: "No shooting other people with a catapult." It wasn't a problem yet, but I simply assumed that it would become one before too long and we'd soon have to figure out something else to "target," such as the alphabet blocks that I had handy for the purpose. This moment never came, at least not that day.

At one point, a group of four boys allied themselves as a team, "the boy team," leaving Charlotte all alone as "the girl team." She had her back against some shelves, in possession of one catapult, while the boys were arrayed with their catapults in an arc aimed toward her. The boys boasted to me about their potential fire power, talking about "doubles" and "triples." A couple balls were launched Charlotte's way, which she ducked, then grabbed before they bounced back to the boys. I checked in with her. While she didn't seem particularly happy, she also didn't seem upset. There was a determined look on her face. I asked, "Do you like this game?" She made it clear she didn't need me, so I went back to hunting for lost balls.

Moments later, however, she objected loudly, "Hey, no taking things!"

I asked, "Did someone take something? We all agreed: no taking things from other people." I pointed at where the freshly made list of rules hung on the wall and all eyes followed my finger.

That's when a boy complained, "But she has all the balls!" 

That's when I noticed that Charlotte indeed had a large collection of balls between her knees. Reluctantly abiding by our community agreement, the boys returned the one ball they'd snatched from her, this girl who'd figured out a way to even those apparently insurmountable odds. 

I couldn't help observing, "So you guys have all the catapults, and she has all the balls." 

While Charlotte sat upon her stash, the boys, still in their semi-circle, were dumbstruck, feeling, I suppose, how one feels when one has been checkmated. Maybe I should have kiboshed the boy-girl divide earlier. Perhaps I should have been more assertive in getting to the "No shooting each other" discussion. I could have handled it all differently, but at the same time, I really couldn't help but be proud of "the girl team." She had used her knowledge of the rules and her experience as a younger sister to masterfully work things around to a kind of victory that must have been satisfying to her. It sure was to me.

The stand-off lasted for several minutes, with the boys idly flipping their empty catapults while Charlotte stood her ground. A couple of the boys started hunting under furniture for balls, but without luck.

Finally, Archie crossed over to Charlotte and asked as politely as possible, "Could I please have one ball?"

With that Charlotte sat up and pushed the whole pile of balls toward the boys. Game over.

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

"But Why Does It Have To Be The Damned Transformers!"

A person lives not only his own life as an individual but also the life of his epoch. ~Thomas Mann

Very early in my teaching career, a parent requested to meet with me to discuss her daughter. Her main point of concern was that they did not have television at home, her daughter had never seen television, and she wanted to keep it that way. No problem, I told her, we won't be watching TV at school, but then she took it up a notch, "I'm also hoping that you can keep the other kids from talking about TV." 

I couldn't promise her that, but the conversation did sensitize me to classroom conversations around television, which, for any younger readers here, is what we had in those days instead of the internet. It was, back then, still somewhat possible to "protect" one's child from TV, at least during the early years. Indeed, most of the families in our school had adhered to the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of no TV viewing before the age of 2, but these were 3-4 year olds, many of whom had older siblings, so television was by now a part of their lives. 

One boy would wear a red cape to school every day and his play was full of references to cartoon television characters. He was particularly enthralled by The Transformers. Of course, this girl was attracted to his games and before long, she too was speaking authoritatively about The Transformers, a development that appalled her mother. 

What fascinated me the most, however, was that the boy, according to his father, had never once watched The Transformers program. He had, however, once seen a toy Transformer on the shelves of a local drug store and that had been enough. "Now he sees Transformers everywhere," the father complained, Everything is Transformers." By the end of the school year, despite having never seen the program, most of the kids in the class were playing Transformers, capes and all. And this girl who I was to protect from the influences of TV, as an early adopter, was the most enthusiastic Transformer "expert" of all.

Like it or not, "protected" or not, our children are born with an amazing capacity to absorb the cultural values they experience around them. It's an adaptive trait, one that has served, so far, to help assure our species' survival. It was hard not to see our classroom Transformers fad as a beautiful thing. It drew the children together, it gave them a kind of specialized language, a way of being together, a common identity, a common purpose. But as this mother asked me one day in exasperation as I was trying to get her to see what I saw, "But why does it have to be the damned Transformers!"

I got it, of course. The Transformers were everything that's wrong with children's entertainment: violent and flashy, male-dominant, and inextricably attached to a whole host of merchandise, like the toy the boy had coveted. 

But that wasn't the game they were playing. There was a great deal of tough-guy posing, of course, and boasting about powers, but our classroom transformers also had families, homes, and spent most of their time in domestic pursuits, like cooking, going to bed, and caring for babies. In other words, when we looked beyond the superficial layer of transformers, we could see deeper, more profound cultural and family values at work. There was love and listening and caring and cooperation. There was joy and helping and laughter and compassion. 

They were doing the work of every generation, which is to take in society's values, then, through their play, transform and re-transmit them, making something new from what prior generations have left for them. These children weren't simply living the life of their epoch, but rather, as humans have always done, they were creating it.

******

 

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

"Ready for a book that makes you want to underline and highlight? One that makes you draw arrows and write 'THIS!!!!!' in the margin? Then you are in for a treat." ~Lisa Murphy, M.Ed., author and Early Childhood Specialist, Ooey Gooey, Inc.

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!

How To Live A Meaningful Life

In 1979, Douglas Adams, in his novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, revealed the definitive answer to life, the universe, and everything. It is 42. This is significant in that it is absolutely the correct answer, but you would have to be something other than human (with our limited ability to perceive life, the universe, and everything) in order to understand it.

Adams wasn't the first to put the question of the meaning of life to rest, nor will he be the last. Indeed, in 2017, Emily Esfahani Smith published her book entitled, The Power of Meaning.  However, she left the domain of 42 to itself, focusing instead on how we humans construct meaningful lives. She identifies four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. 

The more connected we feel to our family, friends and community (belonging), the more we are motivated by positive long-term goals (purpose), the more skillfully we can weave a narrative from the threads of our life (storytelling) and the more we focus our energies on something larger than ourselves (transcendence), the more meaningful our lives are.

As important adults in the lives of young children, it seems to me that one of our highest responsibilities is to help them in this project, not so that they will, in the future, have meaningful lives, but so that they are free, right now, to live meaningfully. We often consider Adams' answer of 42 to be a kind of a joke, especially when we learn it took the greatest computer ever built 7.5 million years to compute it, but when it comes to children, we nevertheless assume that it will take decades of blood, sweat, and tears for their lives of meaning to finally emerge. It's the assumption behind the drill-and-kill, adult-directed model of education, the one that values answers (such as 42) over questions.

The world needs more people who know how to live lives of meaning. These are the people who have, no matter what their age or stage, come alive in the world for a day, a week, or a year. It begins with belonging, or what we in the ECE world usually call "connection." Sadly, most American children will be returning this week to schools that go to great lengths to prevent connection. They will be scolded or even punished for playing or even talking with their friends, except during specific, usually limited, scheduled moments. Their interactions with one another will be proscribed by curricula that they did not choose. They will be judged not by their contributions to their community, but rather as individuals against whom they will be ranked.

In a play-based program, young children are, within the context of community, free to dream, to ask and answer their own questions, and to set positive goals for themselves both alone as as a member of something greater. They are self-motivated because it is their purpose. Sadly, most American children will  be returning this week to schools where their "purpose" is imposed upon them and where their teachers, therefore, must go to great lengths to motivate them.

It is from playing within the context of community that children begin to tell the story of themselves, to understand who they are, and how they fit as they pursue meaningful lives in a world of people also pursuing meaningful lives. This, I imagine, is the world in which most of us would want to live, one in which my purpose and your purpose can not just co-exist, but must merge together into a single, magnificent narrative of belonging. This collective storytelling has always been the work of humanity, yet sadly, most American children will return this week to schools that arrogantly presume to tell their stories for them, that label them, that judge them, and that shame them when their story doesn't fit the approved and pre-determined narratives.

Belonging, purpose, and storytelling: when children are free to play together this is exactly what they spend their time doing. They are creating their lives of meaning, which is what the world needs more than anything else right now. In the future, their community might change, their purposes will most definitely change, and new chapters to their stories will be written, but they will have learned how to create a life of meaning. That is everything. It is from this, and only this, that transcendence, the awareness of something larger than ourselves, can emerge.

So please know that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is, without doubt, 42, but the answer to how to live a meaningful life is different for everyone and it comes through playing in a place where we feel we belong. This isn't something to be pushed off into the future. It could and should be happening right now.

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