Why We Laugh As We Play

If people are laughing, they are learning. True learning is a joy because it is an act of creation. ~Tyson Yunkaporta

Most of the actual work I did as a classroom teacher was preparing for the arrival of the kids. And by "work" I mean the kinds of things I'd rather not be doing: the stuff for which I'd wave a magic wand if I could. Once the kids arrive on the scene, however, it's pretty much all play for me. And by "play" I mean the part of my day I'd not wish away for anything. 

Indeed, sometimes we adults need to deal with certain aspects of cleaning or snack prep or bodily functions that we might identify as "work," but really, if we're going to be a play-based classroom worth its salt, everyone in the room should be playing, children and adults. A roomful of shoulder-to-shoulder learners is one of the key features of our play-based curriculum.

Much of what play-based learning is about is making connections, discoveries that come from putting things together then comparing the results to the things we thought we already knew. This is why the exact same environment, the exact same classroom set-up, serves as a learning environment for humans of all ages. We might be starting with the same stuff, but we're not all starting from the same place. A tool, a shovel for instance, may be used by a 2-year-old to make discoveries about the properties of corn starch mixed with water. That same tool may be used by an adult to make discoveries about the properties of that child or children in general or interactions between children and herself in relation to them.

As a child struggles to pull, say, a dinosaur from a cornstarch and water muck, she's experiencing adhesion, leverage, angles, emulsion, tension, moisture, suction, and the flexing of muscles. This is like the mud she found in the same place last week -- damp, gooey, possessing properties attributable to both liquids and solids -- but different as well. And as she plays, connecting what she knows with what she doesn't yet know, the adult makes her own connections between this child and the others she's known. This is like the child she found in the same place a few minutes ago -- persevering, testing, talking -- but different as well. And these connections, these examinations of similarities and differences, the interplay between what is known and unknown, shake the foundations of our metaphors, creating new ones, opening our eyes to mysterious places within ourselves, other people, and the physical world.

We discover there are always new connections to be made: that the more we know, the more there is to know.

When a child crosses the ground from the art table where he's been driving cars through paint and down ramps, hands slimy with red, he shows us all a newly connected world, opening up avenues into the very things we just thought we'd figured out. And as children begin to run back and forth to carry their own fists full of paint to where we're playing, we adults laugh with them from the joy of our own epiphanies, wondering at their wonder. They, the adults, look up at me, their eyes sometimes more than the children alight with the joy of connection, of discovery, "He made pink! We're making pink! Now the dinos are pink!"

And the kids are saying, "Ghost dinos! Pink ghost dinos!" as metaphors take shape, new scaffolding erected, the world changing before our very eyes.

Then someone else comes over from the work bench, still clutching the Duplos he found over there, drawn by the sounds of discovery, and from that curiosity, we then all learn what happens when we drop a block in the pink goo.

I think about connections as I go through the "work" part of my day, trying to anticipate the paths it will take, and every now and then I get to experience the euphoria of being right, of having my best guesses proven in the real world of play-based learning. But that's a rare treat, one I enjoy, but no more so than the ones we all share when we play here together, connecting. Discovery is always unexpected. It's why we laugh when we play.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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A Poor Replacement For A Fully Functioning Brain

The nucleus basalis is a collection of large neurons located in our forebrains. Neuroscientists believe that this part of our brain is essential to our ability to form sharp memories. Studies on non-human brains indicate that nucleus basalis cells promote sustained attention, learning, and recall in long-term memory. As researcher and author Tyson Yunkaporta writes, "This is the part of the brain, in essence, that makes learning so effortless for small children."

For a long time, we believed that this part of the brain, sometimes more generally referred to as the "pre-frontal cortex," was something that naturally calcified or even degenerated as we aged, leading to a decline in mental function and even, ultimately, to such conditions as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. This is part of what lead many educational fear-mongers to insist that we must urgently cram little heads as full as possible in the early years before the "learning window" closed forever. This has resulted in our current heightened obsession with academics and other intrusive "enrichment" at younger and younger ages. This, in turn, has lead to a spike in rates of childhood mental illness like anxiety and depression.

Meanwhile, we have come to understand that our brains, including the nucleus basilis, can and should be activated (i.e., continually producing new cells) throughout our lives, a phenomenon called "neuroplasticity." The mistake that lead scientists to believe that our brains naturally stop producing new cells was that their studies were performed on apes in captivity. When they began to look at apes who had been freed from their cages, they discovered that neuroplasticity is a lifelong phenomenon. 

Likewise, we now know that after about three or four years of standard schooling, the nucleus basalis, like in the caged apes, falls into disuse, which means it stops producing as many new cells. Studies of humans who have not been subjected to standard schools show that they don't experience this.

We all want to point to brain science as the basis of what we do in education, but the sad truth is that it typically takes decades for the latest scientific knowledge to find its way into the classroom, if it ever does. You can still find current articles and books, written by "experts," that posit the outdated assumption that the learning windows will close if we don't hurry up. We've known about neuroplasticity since at least the 1940's and it came into common scientific usage during the 1960's. It began to be "common knowledge" during the 1980's, yet here we are nearly a half century later, with school systems that are set up in ways that actually turn off a vital part of how our brains are designed to learn. We are still treating our children like those apes in cages.

The good news, as Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk, is that the damage can be undone: "(N)europlacity research has shown that damage to the nucleus basalis can be reversed by reintroducing activities involving highly focused attention, which results in a massive increase in the production of acetylcholine and dopamine. Using new skills under conditions of intense focus rewires billions of neural connections and reactivates the nucleus basalis. Loss of function in this part of the brain is not a natural stage of development -- we are supposed to regain and even increase it thoughout our lives. Until very recently in human history, we did."

When he writes "very recently in human history" he is talking about the past couple centuries and the rise of Western-style schooling. And when he's writing about activities that involve "highly focused attention" he means self-selected activities undertaken voluntarily and motivated by curiosity rather than the system of obedience, punishments, and rewards that modern schooling uses as a poor replacement for a fully functioning brain.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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 Is Ancient Wisdom

Victorian novelist George Eliot insisted, against the "science" of her era, that if science could see freedom, it would be evident in the mind's ability to alter itself. The mind "is not cut in marble -- it is not something solid or unalterable," but rather as "active as phosphorus," engaged in a continual process of becoming. She was writing about this 150 years ago, a phenomenon that scientists have only recently confirmed and named as neurogenesis. Neuroscience did not "discover" anything, nor did Eliot for that matter. It is ancient wisdom that can be found in the mythologies and stories of Homo sapiens around the world.

Today, scientists are breathlessly telling us that we've been wrong for so long: emotions are not products of the brain, but rather the body. Our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of the thinking process. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tells us, "The mind is embodied . . . not just embrained." Of course, this is exactly what poet Walt Whitman was writing about when he wrote "I sing the body electric," again more than a century ahead of the science, but also behind the ancient wisdom.

These aren't exceptions. It's very rare for a scientist to "discover" something that hasn't already been discovered by methods other than the scientific one. Much of what makes our science is simply modern humans planting their flags on territory that is already occupied by ancient wisdom. When colonizers first encountered the farming practices of native farmers on the contentment of what we today call North America, they perceived them as lazy: they didn't bother to till the soil, they didn't plant single crops in straight rows, they left potentially productive fields fallow, they never harvested the entire crop. Today we see that the modern farming methods introduced by Westerners have destroyed and depleted our farmland, which now requires increasing applications of chemicals in the form of fertilizer and insecticides in a vicious cycle. Scientists are only now, four centuries later, coming around to understanding that the Native American approach was the only sustainable one and are now, desperately, trying to persuade farmers around the world to go back to the old ways. 

Only now are scientists "discovering" that food is medicine.

Only now are scientists "discovering" that our fate is tied up with fate of the planet.

Only now are scientists "discovering" that we are not somehow special, but rather equal partners in the web of life.

Scientists still haven't "discovered" the essential nature of such vital forces as energy, consciousness, and spirit. These things are not unknowns, but rather ground that has already been covered by the ancient stories.

Science is one method for knowing. It has the virtue of being replicable. It is an attempt to identify "truth" as it exists for all humans. It is a process of taking things apart to see how they work. It is obviously a fruitful avenue for understanding our world, but it can only address those things that are replicable. It can only find truths that are universal. It can only examine those things that can be taken apart. It is a method that has come to dominate our educational systems, while adults, equipped with out-of-date science (because the latest knowledge is always still in laboratories), seek to "teach" this narrow, Johnny-come-lately curriculum of "facts" to the "ignorant savages" who are, naturally, resistant to being colonized.

The scientific method as applied to education creates the sort of hierarchy that simply isn't found in nature. It requires separating ourselves from the world to view it from the outside, an entirely unnatural perspective. Its pride in "discovery" causes us to dismiss everything that came before. Indeed, the history of colonization is one of actively destroying any wisdom that is not approved by science.

Of course, science has its place in human knowledge, but the evidence is clear: wisdom is at least equally found in art, in storytelling, in emotion, and in connection. These are the real teachers because they teach without the hierarchy and detachment of direct instruction. They "teach" from within the web of life, which is the only natural place for humans.

The longer I've worked with young children, the more I've come to understand that there is very little we can "teach" people. We can provide example, we can offer counsel, we can nurture, protect, and provide, but we really can't teach anything, not in the sense dictated by science. That's because we are designed to learn through connection, not data or information. It is the connections we make and our experience of those connections that teach us pretty much everything worth knowing.

This is the ancient wisdom. It comes to us through the Duwamish and Ojibwe and Tlingit. It comes to us through the Māori and the 400 some peoples we today refer to as Australian Aboriginals. It comes to us through the Maasai, Berbers, and Pygmies of the African continent and the Tibetans, Bhils, and Hmong of Asia. It is ancient wisdom that has probably lived within us since before we evolved into Homo sapiens. 

It is wisdom we acquired, not from taking the bird's eye view, not from dismantling, but rather from connecting with what we today call "nature." Science has caused us to forget how to learn from nature, even as our children are born knowing it. We see it as they strive, from their first breath, to connect, through play, with anything and everything. We see it in the breathtaking rapidity with which they learn impossibly complex things like how to walk and talk and understand their world. 

Nature doesn't instruct: it connects. It communicates with us by its being. Connection is how we learn about what it is, what it does, what it can give us, and what it requires from us. That's the part that science cannot see. We may be capable of learning through instruction, data, or information, but none of it will ever make any sense unless we start and end with connection.

For the past couple decades, when I look back on my journey as an educator, it is one of connection with the "ignorant savages" we call children. They are born knowing nothing of science, but they know everything about what the rest of us have forgotten. They know that the imperative is to connect. That is why they snuggle into our laps. It is why they roll in the grass. It is why they delight in a shadow or twig or the wind in their hair. This is education. This is ancient wisdom.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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!

A Resolution For 2023

When our daughter was little and frightening news of the world got to her, I would try to put things in perspective: "Most people, most of the time are having a fine day." That this has been true throughout all of history, even when great tragedy is unfolding in one part of it. (And indeed when is it not?)

Maybe it's not a great day, although someone is also always having one of those as well, but a fine one, because most things involving humans are like that -- a little high a little low, a little hot a little cold, a little smooth a little rough. Both the optimists and the pessimists are right: it could always get better and it could always get worse. 

I suspect that most of us are pro-optimism, even if we're pessimistic by nature. It's hard not to be when you're working with young children, who themselves are generally having fine days. Their youth shines for us like a light into the certainty of a better future. And even if we can't help but regret in advance the equal assurance that they will suffer, it just seems that optimism is the proper stance when it comes to the young so we pull ourselves together and say, "It will heal," "The lights will come back on," "The worst is behind us."

Around the time of the Winter Solstice, I tried this out on the grown-ups, saying things like, "This is as dark as it gets, now we can look forward to more light," or "It all gets better from here!" Most thanked me, accepting my invitation to look forward with hope, but many drew back in mock defensiveness, bubbling back, "I love the dark! I love the long night!" denying my assertion that there could be anything wrong. I understand that they were looking into the dark with the certainty of their optimism, wearing it like a shield against doubt.

Hope and fear are the two sides of this coin and both are legal currency in the marketplace of the future. There are those that claim that we create reality through our attitude, that if we anticipate success we make it more certain, while the same goes for failure. And I expect there is some truth to that, although probably a lot less than the pop philosophies would lead us to believe. In her book Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, inspired by her struggle with breast cancer, Barbara Ehrenreich, calls this faith in the determinism of attitude "the new Calvinism," seeing a world in which we are all ultimately and personally responsible for the evils that befall us, be it cancer or unemployment, casting every set-back as a personal failure, having nothing to do with the pernicious randomness of disease or outgoing tide of economic recession.

Optimism is a magnificent thing. I hardly think I'd want to go on living without it. However, living hopefully does not call for optimism of the blind variety, but rather the eyes-wide-open knowledge that this sure as hell can work given what I know to be true about the world and myself. Optimism backed up by thoughtfulness, experience, and confidence is always justified, but when worn merely as a prophylactic against fear, it sets us at the roulette wheel feverishly spinning away, doomed to go bust no matter what our attitude.

Pessimism gets a bad rap and I understand that. Relentlessly pessimistic people are hard to be around unless they're able to temper it with a cynic's humor, and even that wears thin after awhile. That doesn't mean that the fear at the heart of the pessimist isn't justified. It could always go wrong. The future is full of pitfalls: we count on our wary pessimists to point them out. Whose investment advice would you be more likely to take: the optimist or the pessimist? The pessimist's, of course, after all if he's willing to place a bet on the future, you can be darned sure he's done his homework and is not relying on the vagaries of "good thoughts."

Young children don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism, especially the very young for whom the future really doesn't exist, let alone with enough concreteness to evoke hope or fear. And sure, as they get older they quite reasonably adopt the cloak most appropriate for the occasion; dressing for instance in eager anticipation of the holidays or in fearful anticipation of the doctor's needles. Rational responses both, ones that belie the reality that the presents are rarely as incredible as one hopes nor the pain as bad as one fears. Our attitude, be it hope or fear, may not alter reality, but it does help to temper our experience with reality in a way to prevent the highs from being too high and the lows from being too low.

I'm thinking of all this today in the first days of 2023 because as I reflect back on the ill-reputed year now past with all it's obvious downs and surprising ups, I can't help but think of the "curse" that is usually attributed to the ancient Chinese: "May you live in interesting times."

And indeed, I have been cursed; we have been cursed. The brilliance of this curse, of course, is that it can just as easily be a blessing, because really, who would want to live in boring times? And indeed, I have been blessed; we have been blessed.

I'm going to try this year, as a resolution, to approach the future more like a child, setting aside the dogmatism of optimism and pessimism. I will let my feelings flourish, learn what I can from them, then wearing them on my sleeve, I'll seize the day while worrying about tomorrow when it comes.

When I succeed, I will credit those who hugged me when it was dark. When I fail, I will shrug and not heap all the blame on myself, knowing that I have no control over the weather.

There is a companion curse that goes along with the famous one. It's one we habitually evoke for one another this time of year as a blessing, so take it as you will: "May your wishes be granted."

In the meantime, however, I wish you a fine year.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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!

It Needs To Be Enough

There was a time when I kept a collection of styrofoam around the place, but over the years I disposed of it and not just because it takes up a lot of storage space. Sure it's engaging to stick or hammer things into it, like golf tees, but that idea invariably and ultimately turns into a festival of breaking, then shredding, leaving those static electricity filled tiny toxic balls all over the place, which is a mess worse than glitter and not nearly as festive.

Still, when someone from our community purchased new electronics or something that came with large pieces of the stuff, they often thought of us. I didn't even know where these pieces came from, but I'd spotted them stashed where the kids couldn't reach them on the playground so decided to make use of them for a day.

My idea was to combine the styrofoam with pipe cleaners. It was not the first time we'd done this and while there are usually a few kids who get into the process, it's not generally one of the most popular things we did at the art table. This particular day, however, there were even fewer takers than normal. The parent-teacher assigned to the project did her best to role model playing with the things, but the station evolved into a game in which kids were placing "orders" for things like pipe cleaner "bracelets," "flowers," and "glasses," which the adults then manufactured for them. It's a fine activity, I suppose, and I guess the kids had found a way to make it fun so who am I to judge?

That's how things stood when my friend took a seat at one corner of the styrofoam and pulled a container of pipe cleaners toward himself. If he had taken note of what the others were doing, it wasn't apparent. He started by successfully sticking one end of a pipe cleaner into the styrofoam, then another, then another. As he worked, he began to twist the fuzzy wires, bending the pieces together, weaving them together, purposefully tangling them. He didn't say a thing as he worked, concentrating fully on his creation.

I was tempted to sit beside him to narrate his process in the hopes of attracting more kids to the project (because everyone wants to be part of our classroom's ongoing stories) but I didn't. Instead, I left him to his solitary work, a man with a vision. I stopped by several times over the course of the next half hour as his magnificent tangle became increasingly complex. When he was finally finished a half hour later, he pushed himself away from the table and didn't look back.

I gave some 40 kids the opportunity to play with the styrofoam and pipe cleaners over the course of the day, most of whom declined the invitation and even those who accepted it tended to treat it like a kind of drive-by activity, something not worthy of their full engagement. But one boy did and that's enough for me to call it a success.

At the end of the day, we carefully uprooted his sculpture from the styrofoam and put it in his cubby to take home. I'm sure from his mother's end, it just looked like he had simply crushed and twisted a collection of pipe cleaners in his fists, the work of a moment. Most preschool art goes home this way, a product that can't by itself tell the story of how it came to be. I've described the visible part of his process here. I can make guesses about what he learned. I could question him. I could even, I suppose, devise some sort of pre-test and post-test and compare the results to produce "data," but at the end of the day no one but this boy will ever know what questions he asked and answered while creating this purposeful tangle of pipe cleaners stuck into styrofoam. 

It needs to be enough for us to know that it engaged him until he was ready to walk away.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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!

Not Just Their Right, But Their Responsibility

If there is one lesson I have always wanted the children in my life to learn it is to question those in authority, like their teachers and even their parents. This is not the same as saying defying authority, but rather the intellectual and social practice of doubting those in power when they say or do things that don't match what the children already know about the world. Indeed, I want them to know it's not just their right, but their responsibility to do so.

And any authority figure who denies someone's right to question them does not deserve to have authority over others.

One way I try to teach this lesson is to intentionally be wrong . . . a lot. I will hold up a plastic pig figurine and make it say, "Moo." For most children, this comes off as a joke, even if I'm saying it with a straight face. They laugh and saying something like, "No, Teacher Tom, the cow says moo!" Others just look at me like I'm crazy. 

I might insist it's raining when the sun is shining. Or that the hand drum I use to signal transitions is actually a banjo. Or that the carrot I'm eating is candy. 

I want the children to listen to what I'm saying and if what I'm saying defies the evidence before their own eyes and ears, I want them to know that it is not just their right but their responsibility, as a member or our community, to call me on it. 

This might sound risky to some educators and parents, but the alternative, which is to learn that authorities are to be believed and obeyed, no matter how irrationally they wield their authority, is far, far more dangerous. We know that the habits we develop when we are young tend to carry forward into adulthood. If we teach children to be obedient and unquestioningly compliant, how can we possibly expect them to grow up to be critical thinkers? Do as I say, not as I do and Because I said so are lessons in bullying authority that defy our essential humanity. 

I choose to rely on mutual respect instead. And when I respect someone, I must make room for them to question and challenge me.

As political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." Or as George Orwell writes in his dystopian novel 1984: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears." If the ideal subject of totalitarianism is someone who relies on others to tell them what is true and what is false, then the ideal citizen in a self-governing society is one who has learned to seek truth in their own lived experience and to challenge those who would tell them otherwise.

Perhaps the best way to prepare children to resist those who would wield power over them in the future is to leave them alone to experience the world before them, to shut up and free them to from their own ideas, theories, and understandings. This is exactly what a play-based curriculum does. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Orwell's Roses, "direct observations and firsthand encounters in the material and sensory world (are) acts of resistance or at least reinforcements of the self who can resist. To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way to step out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up."

Play is how we offer children the kinds of direct experiences they need to see through lies and illusions. Sadly, we live in a time when we must fight for the right of children to play, if only in the name of their mental health. Increasingly, our children are growing up in a world in which all truth comes through authority figures, educators and parents, who are telling them what to do and when to do it. Play is the way we break this cycle. It is how all of us can re-learn how to trust our own eyes and ears and resist those who would command us.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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!

That Is What Makes Learning Joyful

Spelling tests loom disproportionately large in my memories of elementary school. That's probably because it was the first, and for many years only, thing for which I had to "study." That is to say, our teachers would hand us a list of spelling words at the beginning of each week expecting us to be ready for the test at the end of the week. This memorizing was to be done on our own time, otherwise known as homework.

My technique was to ask mom to read the words to me. I would make my best stab at the correct spelling, compare the results to the word list, then do it again and again until I was nailing it. I honestly don't know how other kids studied for these tests, although I imagine that many of them didn't have access to an adult willing to help them. These kinds of spelling tests are classic examples of rote memorization, one of the bedrock principles of modern education.

This process is one of storing discrete facts into short or mid-term memory, destined to be eventually forgotten unless the drills are regularly repeated over a long period of time. When it came to the multiplication tables, for instance, we were regularly tested from grades 3-6. The "game" of it was to shout out your answers without hesitation. Any pause, any delay, was seen as evidence that you still hadn't "learned" it. Of course, in real life, hesitations and pauses are usually seen as as evidence of actual thinking. Today, if you ask me to solve 9X6, I have to take a second to think. I still get the right answer, but I do it by remembering that 9X3 is 27, then doubling it. 

Indeed, one of the lessons this kind of rote learning teaches is to not think, but rather to simply react. The other lesson it teaches is that math and spelling are boring. They are also incredibly inefficient ways to force facts into long-term memory, which is, I assume the ultimate goal. (Although most of us learned that the real goal was passing the next test so short and mid-term memory was just fine.)

If you give two groups of people a spelling list of long, unfamiliar words and ask one group to memorize the spelling while asking the other to simply look up the definition in the dictionary, the second group always out-performs the first. That's because, instead of merely memorizing, the second group is actually creating meaning. When we break the world into discrete and separate parts, when we remove them from their context, like we do with spelling tests, we strip them of meaning and it is very, very hard for humans to learn meaningless crap.

On the other hand, narrative or storytelling provides the most direct access to long-term memory. When we can connect information to metaphors, places, people, and cause-and-effect, we are more likely to be able to recall it when it's needed, in context. 

For instance, I never mistake the word "principle" for "principal" because a teacher once told me, "The principal is your pal." I'll never forget that 8X7=56 because my sixth grade math teacher told me that if a kid knew that one, she didn't need to test them on the rest. And, of course, in the meantime, the world has developed calculators and spell check to help me with the rest.

Rote memorization can be an effective way to pass the next test, but without narrative and context, it will be very difficult, inefficient, and tedious to move it into long-term memory. An education separated from life itself is no education at all. The creation of meaning is what human learning really is all about. That's what makes learning joyful.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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

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!