A Green Room Spring Update

With spring fully upon us, I thought it might be time for an update on our "green room."

Last year, at about this time, a University of Washington design/build team completed a green house for us. We have now had a year to experiment with this new addition to our teaching team. She sat relatively fallow last summer as we all dispersed and we hadn't made appropriate plans. In the fall we found ourselves dealing with rats who were interested in what food we did try to grow. Then winter hit us with its cold, short days, but as we approached spring we had figured things out: adding a grow light, purchasing some heated pads to encourage germination, and, most importantly getting the kids more involved. We've found that squirt bottle watering, refilling one's own watering can at the rain barrel, planting new seeds, transplanting, and snacking are the most popular activities.

Now, it's a real growing concern. We still have a lot to learn, especially about rotating crops over to the "grazing garden" on the playground side of the school. And we'll be much better about timing things next year, but we're currently looking at a healthy crop of tomatoes, kale, lettuce, snap peas, pole beans, and nasturtiums. Indeed, we're already on our second crop of kale. 

There are herbs like rosemary, lavender, sage, thyme, mint, chives, and basil.

We spouted radishes, carrots, brussels sprouts, beets, broccoli, zucchini, cucumber, and celery. We're experimenting with jalapeño peppers (the kids' choice: they all wanted to grow them for their dads), artichoke, snow peas, sweet potatoes, and a pumpkin that we transplanted from where it took root in our worm bin.

We are fast developing into a community of garden grazers. We're having trouble keeping leaves on our leafy green things, which is just fine given that we will have replacement plants from the green house ready once those are gone.

This is just the beginning. We still have a lot to learn. My personal short term goal is see just how much we can produce, to fill the green house and its surrounding outdoor beds with so much green it's hard to move, all with food hanging from every branch and stem. I'm shooting for a significant, even overwhelming, autumn bounty when we return at the end of summer. I'd really love to have so much that we can make donations to local food banks.

And I'm looking forward to keeping everyone updated on our progress.

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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Start Your Journey: That's Enough

Back in January, our kindergartners dragged home a couple of Christmas trees that had been left at the curbside by neighbors for trash collection. We've done a number of things with them, including decorating them with impromptu ornaments, but mostly we've used them as material upon which to practice our sawing.

There was a time when we didn't use saws at Woodland Park. I don't think it was a matter of considering them too dangerous, exactly, but rather that we simply didn't consider using them at all. The whole idea of preschoolers engaged in woodworking was alien to us. Oh sure, once or twice a year, I would set up a "safety zone" and invite the kids one at a time to enter it for a turn pounding nails, but it was a project in which I engaged with a great deal of planning and trepidation and I made a show of the safety measures we were taking. Even so, there were parents who forbid their children from taking a turn and I didn't judge them.

Today, we have a permanent workbench where we use tools of all sorts -- hammers, saws, drills, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, glue guns. We supervise and support the children, but otherwise engage in what I consider to be common sense caution. We have a few workbench rules, such as we don't use tools while feeling emotions strong enough to make us cry or yell. We strive to keep the ground clear of toys and other debris. Tools stay at the workbench. And we wear eye protection. There are some logs and other large items arranged in such a way that the workbench area is a bit separated from the rest of the outdoor space in order to prevent the sort of pell-mell entry into the area that could jostle or otherwise distract someone at work with a tool.

The main difference, however, is the attitude of the community. This type of play, over the course of several years, has become normalized at Woodland Park. We have enough experience now, as a community, to know that preschoolers can be trusted to assume this sort of responsibility. Indeed, I've witnessed dozens of children who typically exhibit the high energy lurch-iness of a golden retriever, settle into a studied focus with a tool in their hands. It takes everything most children have to hit a nail on the head or guide a saw through a tree branch. For many children, it's a calming activity.

I've had the opportunity to speak to dozens of audiences of both parents and teachers over the course of the past several years, usually telling a few stories from the workbench. Invariably, at the end of the talk, someone will approach me, say that they wish they could introduce this kind of activity, but worry that their superiors/licensors/parents won't allow it. Let me tell you, had I attempted to introduce our workbench as it now exists, whole hog, I too would have confronted overwhelming pushback. Getting where we are today, on all sorts of child-led things (not just using tools), continues to be a journey at Woodland Park, a process whereby we've confronted our adult fears in small increments, learning about both ourselves and our children in the process.

I sometimes get frustrated at the world: witness yesterday's post. I look around and find a place in which children are not respected or trusted, where adults still tend to dictate to them from dawn to dusk, where children are generally considered to be incomplete and incompetent. I'm impatient. I want things to change right now. I want every child to have a childhood that includes a workbench. But then I reflect upon our own story, my own story, and see that it's been a journey, one full of milestones and thresholds that once seemed monumental, but now from my current perspective, look like all the other steps along the path.

There are communities farther along the road than us toward a truly child-led  education and we are farther along than others, and like all journeys, all of us started with but a single step. So I suggest that you do what you can, today. Start your journey: that's enough. Tomorrow will take care of itself.

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"You're An Idealist"

Whenever I write about corporations and individuals lining up to make a fast buck (or a fast billion) off the labor of our children in school, people I respect, both online and in person, tell me they agree that while "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children is a bad idea, they actually support the Common Core standards. One parent who is a public school teacher and whose daughter is currently in public school kindergarten, told me that she had read the kindergarten standards and found them an improvement over what was there in the past.

I've never read any of the Common Core standards for any grade. My criticisms of this federal curriculum is the secretive, un-democratic manner in which they were developed; that professional educators were largely excluded from the process of their development with no early childhood professionals input at all; that none of the standards were field tested in any way before being foisted upon our children; the intentional injection of greed and private profit as the driving force; the inextricable marriage between Common Core and standardized testing and the use of these tests to make high stakes decisions about funding and individual teachers' careers; and the galling fact that no matter how good or bad the standards are, no matter how developmentally appropriate or inappropriate, and no matter what professional educators discover and learn in the process of using them, there is absolutely no mechanism for feedback, changes, alterations, or re-writing. 

That is, the only avenue for input available for teachers, parents, and students is protest and civil disobedience, such as opting out, walking out on tests, and rallying in the streets, which is what we're doing.

My friend agreed with most of my criticisms, but felt that if the standards could be separated from the all the crap, they were better than what came before them. This is a common theme among supporters, they want to separate the "standards" themselves from the rest, but that's not possible in the real world, or at least not so far.

And it might be true that the Common Core standards, magically separated from all the negatives that go with them, are better than what came before them. In fact, I'll stipulate to that. I told my friend as much as she left, adding, however, that I'm opposed to any educational standards in which adults tell children what to learn and by when. She replied, "You're an idealist."

I suppose I am an idealist, at least in the sense of thinking we can change our societal view of children and education so dramatically that we might one day offer a child-led, emergent, play-based, democratic curriculum in all of our K-12 schools. But this is where the research points us. In fact, the adult-lead, top-down, learning-on-a-schedule approach that has come to define schools around the world is one of the most difficult ways for anyone to learn anything. This is what independent research tells us. Oh sure, those who support adult-lead education can point to their own research, but everything they cite to support their position are studies on how children learn in schools. It's like claiming to understand tigers by studying them in the zoo; it's like studying orca whales at Seaworld.

If it is idealism to follow science, then I'll confess to idealism. Research that is focused on how children learn the most and the best, those that look at the tigers and orcas outside of captivity, always points to a child-led, emergent, play-based, democratic curriculum. And that is what this blog has been about since the very beginning. For those who need to see the research for themselves, I will simply point you to the endnotes of researcher Peter Gray's book Free to Learn.

"I've come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit." ~John Steinbeck

Teaching is an art and a science, yet we continue to try to turn it into a job along an assembly line. Indeed, this is always the end result when you put one group of humans (in this case adults) in charge of determining when, what, and how another group of humans (children) are going to learn.

The purpose of public education in a democracy isn't vocational training as so many insist; it isn't so that we can "beat the Chinese." The purpose is to create good citizens. Beyond that, however, there is a higher purpose for education and that is to assure that each child has the opportunity to become a masterpiece of his own creation, an individual who is inspired, motivated, and passionate about life. This is the rational approach to education because it is the surest path to each of us reaching our potential.

I've always approached teaching as an artist, even when I didn't know it. The way I teach has been shaped as much by the media with which I work -- individual children and families and environments -- than by any specific educational theory or philosophy or technique. My highest goal as a teacher, always, is to create a relationship with each child who walks through our door, what I sometimes refer to in verbal shorthand as "getting us on the same bandwagon." The process of doing this is different for each child. Some arrive already pulling a bandwagon, so I just jump onto it and let them drive. Others look to me to offer a spot on my bandwagon. Many need time to warm up to the idea of a bandwagon. Everyone of the hundreds of relationships I've had with children has been unique because each of the children, in mind and spirit, are, like great art, the first and only one of their kind to ever exist. And while experience helps, the moment I begin to approach children as products to manufacture rather than people I want to get to know, is the moment I should retire.

When we start with relationships, we don't need a pre-packaged curriculum because the children are the curriculum. Each of them brings their own interests, passions, and abilities to the table. I don't need to force specific knowledge on them on a schedule, but rather create a space, a canvas, a relationship in which we can, together, explore and answer their own questions.

And this is what stands at the bottom of my visceral reaction to efforts to standardize education. It's why standardized testing and text books and anything that is pre-pacakaged and sold by education corporations strikes me as not only anti-education, but at a deeper level, anti-child. Children are not predictable, programmable widgets that need to be told what to learn and by when. They are fully formed human beings with their own minds and spirits. You can't manufacture education: it is something that is created through our relationships.

When I suggest that this child-led approach should even continue beyond preschool, all the way through high school, skeptics want to know how this would work, for instance, in higher level math. Of course, I'm not a high school teacher, but as a preschool teacher, I can tell you that math is something young children do for pleasure, spontaneously exploring patterns, sequencing, and sorting. Democratic free schools, like the Sudbury Valley School or the Albany Free School represent models for what a child-led approach looks like for older kids. Researcher and author Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, writes that American children report that they come to dislike school, and math in particular, more and more with each passing year, starting in about sixth grade. Children in democratic free schools report the opposite, saying that they like school in general, and math in particular, more and more with each passing year because what they are doing is directly applicable to their lives, their interests, and their passions, which is so much more motivating than ciphering on paper and memorizing formulas.

Indeed, math and literacy, the shining stars of the corporate education reform movement, do not belong at the center of education. Reading and ciphering are tools to help us with our real education, perhaps equal to, but certainly not superior to the arts, physical education, dance, social studies, economics, political science, wood shop, history, home ec, car maintenance, or anything else for that matter. The way we do it now, making math and literacy the core around which everything else revolves, is like spending 13 years learning how to use a hammer without ever actually building anything.

And this is the greatest strength of a child-led approach to education. It taps directly into the most powerful educational tool known to mankind: motivation. When we are motivated, learning is easy; indeed, it's a joy. Standardization sucks the inherent joy right out of learning and no amount of gold stars or threats of losing recess will inject true motivation back into the process. When we start with the child, when we start with our relationships, when we understand that we are working with a mind and spirit unlike any that have ever existed, then we begin to create masterpieces.

Of course, corporate education "reformers," aren't concerned with any of this because their stated goal is to get all the kids "career and college ready," and all of this child-led motivation doesn't necessarily feed the school-to-cubicle pipeline they imagine to be the future. Setting aside the fact that these guys are most assuredly wrong about the future as most soothsayers are, the future is not theirs to create: the future belongs to those who must live it. I will not be part of robbing children of that fundamental human right. Just because these guys think they'll need a certain number of worker bees in the future doesn't mean that's what they'll get. If the next generation decides they all want to be dancers, well then, we'll just have to build our little money making enterprises around dance rather than crass consumerism.

People accuse me of being an idealist. I see myself as a realist. We are designed by nature or God to learn through play, through our own curiosities, and to be motivated to answer our own questions. This is what education is, even when the majority of our society see it as something else. The goal is not jobs or math skills or any other kind of success. The goal is a meaningful life and I cannot tell anyone what that is. It's a question only we can answer for ourselves. I can, however, pick up my paint brush and help you get there. That's what a teacher does.

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Mean Girls And Aggressive Boys

Have you ever seen one of those prepubescent beauty queens? You know, the ones whose moms dress them up like adult women, bouffant their hair, and give them make-up to make it look like they have 18-year-old heads on 5-year-old bodies? We're appalled. It's both grotesque and sad. We pity the little girl and scorn the mother, blaming her for sexualizing her innocent child.

We don't, of course, accuse the girl herself of being "sexy." We all know that she's been taught to go through some motions that are otherwise meaningless to her. A girl that age is incapable of being sexy, but she is capable of imitating a set of behaviors she's been taught are aspects of being female, at least within her sub-culture.

Young children do a lot of things without an inkling of the adult connotations of their behaviors. When my daughter was a 4-year-old preschooler she was part of a gang of 4-5 girls who spent their days playing together, sometimes to the exclusion of other girls, fairly typical age-appropriate behavior. At about this time a couple of the moms from our school were reading a book entitled Reviving Ophelia, a fantastic, insightful book by all accounts about the toxicity of our media culture to adolescent girls, an aspect of which was the whole "mean girls" phenomenon. These moms decided that my daughter, my 4-year-old daughter, was a "mean girl," discussed it among the other parents and even went so far as to take their concerns to the teacher, all of this without speaking with me. This is likely a good thing for them because I'd have shown them what mean is really all about.

Reasonable people know that words like sexy or mean are not appropriate words to use to describe children. Frankly, it's the worst kind of vicious, back-biting name-calling. So why do so many feel it's okay to describe young boys as aggressive? A 2-year-old boy who hits a friend knows no more about what he is doing than those sad little beauty queens. A 4-year-old who experiments with his power by shouting fiercely at a playmate is no more an "aggressive boy" than my daughter was a "mean girl" simply because she experimented with the powerful feelings that come from excluding others. The same goes for the word violent. A young boy may engage in behavior that adults perceive as violent or aggressive, but he no more knows what he is doing than the little girls who parade across stages in bikinis. At some level, they have been taught that these behaviors are aspects of being a male in our culture. You personally may reject these behaviors (in fact, most of us do), just as you may reject the ritualized sexual behavior of adult beauty queens, but believe me, the kids are just trying things out and they have no idea, or a very twisted idea, of what it means.

Labeling young boys as aggressive or violent is in itself a kind of aggressive, perhaps even violent, behavior. Try this mental experiment: what do you think it would do to a little girl's future if she was repeatedly labeled sexy? Only a cruel or perverted adult would do that. Yet this is what happens to our little boys with the words aggressive and violent. Words matter.

Our job as important adults in children's lives is to help them understand what their behaviors mean, not to label them. And we don't do that by treating them as we would aggressive, violent adults, but rather by engaging in rational conversation, by honestly discussing our own opinions and values, by helping them come to an understanding of how their behaviors might be perceived by others, by pointing out the difference between cartoons and real life. You know, just as we would with our girls when they experiment with sex appeal or exclusion.

Please stop using the words aggressive and violent to describe young children. You are wrong and you are doing damage. And please point it out when others do it. They are wrong and they are doing damage.

Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

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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Spot-On, Developmentally Appropriate Lessons

Earlier this week, on the bus ride home from a field trip, a couple of us got into telling jokes. One guy was taking particular delight in some of the corny ones I recalled from my own childhood, so the following day I pulled out the classic, Bennet Cerf's Book of Riddles, a copy of which I've retained since my own childhood.

I brought it to the playground and read it to whatever kids chose to gather round, then handed it over to our resident riddle master, who proceeded to re-read it to his classmates. Most of the children in our 4-5's class, of course, don't read, nor do we expect them to, but there are always a few who have taught themselves because that's how learning to read usually works: everyone figures it out at his own pace, just like walking and talking. Most are still a couple years away from hitting what we must learn to consider a developmental stage (as opposed to something that needs to be drilled into them), but there are always going to be outliers on both ends of what can still be considered normal. Many researchers, for instance, put the "normal" window for starting to reading between 5 and 10 years-old.

As I stood back and watched the children politely surround their friend who was reading to them, I noticed that they were following along on the page, focusing far more intently, it seemed to me, than they do when I read to them. Another of our early readers stood over his shoulder, occasionally helping out with a word. It was team reading, with children of all abilities participating at exactly the right level, each taking from the experience what she needed to take from it.

Of course, in traditional school we're so often scolded to "do your own work," but in a play-based curriculum, this is how learning is meant to happen: children coming together of their own volition to pitch in where pitching in is needed. And shouldn't it always be this way? Indeed, it's what most of us spend our lives doing whenever something needs to be done, be it at work, church, neighborhood, or home. When CEOs of corporations are surveyed, they always place "teamwork" and "collaboration" at the top of their list of attributes they look for in employees. When something needs to get done in our neighborhoods, concerned citizens come together to make it happen. When political change is necessary, we the people come together, each doing our part. It might not always work that way, but we all know it's the way it should work.

Even as one clutch of children gathered around our book of riddles, there were others collected around a girl who was not afraid to pick up a spider, holding it gently, but in such a way that her friends could see it. As they let their "brave" friend handle the arachnid, they shared their knowledge of spiders with one another, telling stories of other spiders they had known, discussing plans for this particular spider, spontaneously putting together a spot-on, developmentally appropriate lesson on spiders.

This is the way learning looks when we allow it to happen according to our god-given education instinct, which is, after all, made manifest in our urge to play. It's how we are made to learn: I wish we could just trust that.

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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Our New Library

I don't know if this is going on where you live, but for the past decade or so, little curbside lending libraries have been popping up all over the north Seattle neighborhoods. 

As a man who loves books and spent many years as an avid collector (my catalogued collection once topped 3000 books), I highly approve, even if I've not always been willing to release my own books into the wild. But that's what should happen with books: they need to be read not curated on dusty shelves.

I don't know if the day of the book is coming to an end or not. I still see plenty of folks reading them and while the small independent bookseller is almost non-existent and even the large national chains are shutting down due to the competition from online sellers like Amazon, I find it difficult to believe that the book will ever really go away. Yes, I know that some of you enjoy your e-readers, but it's hard for me to see how they're an improvement over a technology that already exists in a perfected form. Sure, I appreciate that one can carry a virtual library with you on your morning commute, but you can only read one book at a time, TSA doesn't require you remove a book from your luggage to go through airport screening, and leaving an electronic device behind on the train is a much bigger deal than a paperback.

But that's neither here nor there. What I do know for certain is that used books have become a cheap and plentiful natural resource. It's one of the reasons that many of us have taken to using them to make art because otherwise they are heading for the recycling center or landfill.

But even better is when used books can be put back into circulation, so it was a no-brainer for the Woodland Park Cooperative School to have its own curbside library and what a library it is! Lisle's dad Jared created this wonderful piece to stand by the street and hold a couple dozen children's books. He finished it on Saturday, just in time for our annual Garden Festival fundraiser. I filled it with what I call "junker books." It's not that they are junk books, per se, but rather books that show up as "excess," getting lost on the shelves and therefore never being read. Worse, I often feel that they are just in the way as I'm searching for the books I tend to read with the kids again and again.

It was a joy to see clusters of children sitting on the lawn reading those books even during a sunny day party with dancing, treats and games. Even more delightful was Sunday afternoon when I stopped by the school to putter around in the green house. During the two hours I was there, at least a hundred people stopped to check it out. Those with children almost all took a book with them. I refilled it at least five times.

These are books that were destined to never be read again, but now they're back out there in the world. Maybe they will only be read once more, but that's something, and I'm proud we've become part of it.

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The Things We Most Want To Know

"Hey, Teacher Tom! Guess what? I can whistle!"

I remember arriving at that milestone myself. I was older, nearly in first grade. I'd been able to make a whistling sound between my teeth for some time, but everyone knows that it's not really whistling until you can pucker up and blow.

"Hey, Teacher Tom! Look! I'm pumping!"

Figuring out the forward and backward rhythm of swinging is another of the timeless achievements of childhood. We might claim, before figuring it out, that we are swinging by ourselves while enjoying the ever-slowing momentum of a push, but it isn't until we can make ourselves go higher and higher that we're really swinging.

"Hey, Teacher Tom! I can snap my fingers!"

"Hey, Teacher Tom! I can make a bubble!"

"Hey, Teacher Tom! I rode my bike!"

"Hey, Teacher Tom! I climbed this tree!"

These are the important things for kids to accomplish this summer, all of which are the sorts of things that children, for the most part, teach themselves when left with plenty of unstructured time in which to perform their own experiments. Not only were these important milestones for me, but for my parents as well, and theirs before them. I recall all of them vividly, far more so than those other achievements, the ones where adults set hoops before me through which to jump.

Last night parent educator Katie Becker lead a year-end meeting of the parents of our 3's class in which she left them with two main messages for summertime: allow your children plenty of unstructured time, preferably outdoors, and, perhaps even more importantly, let them get bored, because more often than not, it's within the vacuum of our boredom that we are most free to teach ourselves the things we most want to know.

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The Language Of Our Collective Psyche

From an introduction to a collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales written by W. H. Auden in 1952:

Miss Margaret Mead tells me the the traditional stepmother, which in Europe is a psychological euphemism for the mother in a malevolent aspect, is here (in America) a source of misunderstanding because there are too many actual stepmothers; one suspects, too, that in a society where the father plays as minor a role as he plays in America, the fairy-tale giant is a less frighteningly important figure than he was to those of us who grew up under the shadow of a paternal discipline . . . Broadly speaking, and in most cases, the fairy tale is a dramatic projection in the symbolic images of the life of the psyche.

I own a nice edition of the fairy tales Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected as part of their research into old German and Scandinavian languages, mythologies, and literature. Among them are such well-known stories as "The Golden Goose," "Cinderella," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Rapunzel," "The Sleeping Beauty," "Hansel and Gretel," "Tom Thumb," "The Bremen Town Musicians," and "Little Red Riding Hood." Most of us are familiar with at least some version of these European folk tales, especially the ones that have been made into animated Disney films.

The Grimm brothers, who were meticulous in their effort to produce the definitive versions of the old stories, insisted in 1812 that they were thousands of years old, a notion that was dismissed by contemporary critics, but recent phylogenetic analysis suggests that the Grimms were correct. At least some of these fairy tales can be traced back to the Bronze Age (around 3000 BCE).

Nearly every day, children in 21st century Seattle evoke the ancient names of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Every one of them knows that a girl in a read hood is Little Red Riding Hood. We all know not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. These fairy tales, these myths, come right out of the dawn of human kind and are still as fresh today as they have ever been. I mean, there's even a weekly drama on TV called Grimm. These stories are in a very real sense the closest connection we have with our most "primitive" ancestors.

I sometimes debate with the children, telling them that they don't know the real story of, say, Cinderella. I sometimes threaten to bring in the "real version" and read it to them, but I never have. I considered it a few weeks back, but then took an evening to remind myself of the original Grimm brothers' text. Cinderella is a story of incredible cruelty, with a truly wicked stepmother (and stepsisters), bloodletting, and an ending in which the magical birds who came to poor Cinderella's aid exact revenge on her behalf by pecking out the eyes of the stepsisters "because of their wickedness and falsehood." The other stories are similarly raw.

And despite that, to my mind, any human thing that survives 5000 years must be important, even if there are aspects our modern minds find less that savory.

These stories are not, nor have they ever been, intended for children. Fairy tales, like all mythology, are true folk art in the sense that they belong to the folks and they are about the nature of life: and that includes wickedness, blood, and revenge alongside goodness, love, and forgiveness. This, I reckon, is why we still tell these stories five millennia later. And the truths found inside our myths are for all humans, children included, but perhaps not yet, at least not just because their teacher is motivated to know how they would respond to the original tales. In this case, mine is a researcher's curiosity, I think. Would they defend their better-known versions? Would they like this one better? What kinds of conversations would we have? But, my own curiosity is not enough to subject the children to experiment and so I'm not going to read the Grimm versions to them unless they ask for it. And for now they seem happy with their familiar versions.

I have often let the children know that there is a "real" version, but none have taken me up on it. Until and unless they do, it's not up to me to expose them to the awful truths. They will reveal themselves on their own, all in due course, believe me. I'm not interested in rushing it unless I come across children who let me know they are passionate about exploring the darker things. My own child was one such seeker.

I hope, however, that when the children are ready, they will remember a teacher who told them that there is a "real" version, and that they seek it out, and read it, and that they then come to understand the wisdom of what playwright Mary Zimmerman calls our "mythic side":

It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of the enigmatic things: the irrational and ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.

I like the idea of these ancient stories, these tales that we tell to understand our own actions even when they are irrational and ambiguous. Having survived for 5000 years, these stories are clearly important; maybe that's because they are the language spoken by humanity's collective psyche.

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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