Cruel Systems

A few years ago a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and made the hard decision to have a double mastectomy. My wife Jennifer was there as she regained consciousness after surgery. Predictably, she was in pain. The doctor had left instructions to start a morphine drip, the nurses stood ready to alleviate their patient's pain, yet no pain medication was administered for 45 minutes, a period during which our friend wept and moaned and suffered.

It seems someone has developed a system for Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington, a presumedly state-of-the-art system, a system designed, as I understand it, to prevent the theft of controlled substances like morphine. Apparently, the hospital's pharmacist is the only one with the "key" to the morphine cabinet and that person, for reasons that were never explained, took 45 minutes to open it. The doctors wanted it opened, the nurses wanted it opened, the friends and family demanded it be opened, but the system was in charge. 

If there are any children in the room, cover their ears . . . That is one f**ked up system. Here is a woman in what is one of the worst physical and emotional moments of her life, and some bean counter's system, in a hospital, a place supposedly operating under the principles of "do no harm," viciously and cruelly put her through 45 minutes of entirely unnecessary agony. 

Systems: I have systems in my life, routines and processes that I've devised to make my life easier or more efficient or more effective. I always put my keys and wallet in the same place, for instance, so that I can find them. I have a system for brewing coffee in the morning, followed by another whole system that gets me set up for the day. I like my systems because they are an extension of me, of my personality, of my way of thinking, but what is most important about my systems is that when they stop serving me, I can tweak them, over-ride them, or just dump them altogether.

Systems like the ones at the hospital, systems imposed hierarchically, systems that cannot be over-ridden by doctors or nurses or patients in extreme pain are the worst kind of evil, because they force good people to take part in it. On a TV show, the hero doctor would have grabbed a tire iron from the trunk of his car and smashed his way into the morphine cabinet, damn the consequences, but this system is so incredibly cruel that it required someone not in any way involved in the human suffering to remotely activate that morphine dispenser. They've made it immune even to heros.

It's the kind of system that could have only been devised by a cost-control specialist or loss prevention manager or any one of the hundreds of other corporate operatives employed for the sole purpose of tending to the bottom line.  Of course, I don't know who it was who devised this system, but I'm confident in asserting that it wasn't my friend's doctors or nurses, the actual healthcare professionals responsible for her well-being. No, it was created by people whose only concern is not wasting even a drop morphine. It was created by people who don't trust doctors and nurses to, you know, make their own decisions about the practice of medicine.  It was created by people, in fact, who suspect that these professionals may be secretly plotting to steal or abuse this medicine because they are potentially nefarious, or lazy, or otherwise less perfect than their system.

This is a mentality that is pervasive within a certain segment of our society, this idea that amoral systems are, perhaps because of their amorality, superior to human beings. It's the kind of system corporate reformers are actively seeking to impose upon our public schools, with people who haven't been in a classroom since they themselves were in school, creating a standardized system of tests and curricula and schedules and assessments and procedures that are there to over-ride not only a professional teacher's best judgement, but everything research tells us about education. Children are in agony, education is suffering, but damn it, we aren't going to waste a moment of our teaching time, we will drill and kill them, and we won't have to rely on those nefarious, lazy, over-educated teachers who are less perfect than our amoral system.

I have no doubt that the people who devised Overlake Hospital's morphine system would have been mortified had they been forced to sit in the room with our friend as she unnecessarily suffered for 45 minutes on the worst day of her life. But that's how systems maintain their amorality: the human element is removed. The professionals, loved ones, and even patients are placed in service to the system, which has no interest in curing the patient, only in pinching another penny.

We live in a time in which those with their hands on the levers of power, those who sit atop hierarchical pyramids, don't have to witness the pain of patients or the suffering of children, where, in fact, news of this pain and suffering is just treated as further evidence of nefariousness and laziness. Rigid systems imposed upon the lesser humans, on the other hand, never complain. The best judgment of people, their knowledge, their experience, is immaterial within these systems. No one can even play hero as the system remains, as always, focused on the bottom-line. 

These systems are perfect in their cruelty.

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Love Literacy

As a boy I remember certain "art" processes that seemed like a kind of everyday magic. Fold-over paintings were one of those, as were cutting out snowflakes. At certain points in my childhood I put in significant hours experimenting with them, always slightly surprised at the results, even as I came to understand how the process worked. I guess it had to do with the mystery of not knowing exactly what you had created until unfolding the paper.

Cutting paper hearts is another of those and it's why we traditionally spend a session or two on it during the run-up to Valentine's Day. We start with the adult drawing lines to guide the kids' cutting, but typically they take that part over as well. Our younger children give it a go, but I've discovered that 4-5s seem to be the particular sweet spot, with many kids producing dozens in the spirit of my own childhood experiments.

As I've written repeatedly here, we don't engage in developmentally inappropriate literacy training, choosing to instead stick with what research and experience tells us, which is that formal literacy education should be saved for first grade and beyond, if it is ever needed, when reading and writing tend to naturally begin to emerge in most children. Of course, this isn't to say that it doesn't begin to emerge in many children at much younger ages, only that a play-based curriculum in a literacy rich environment with lots of dramatic play is the developmentally appropriate way to support children's earliest efforts.

At some point in the process of manufacturing these magic hearts, the subject of valentines always comes up with much of the discussion swirling around who is going to be the lucky recipient of their most personally satisfying creations. Children, when not bombarded with messages about receiving, almost always prefer giving. I usually finish the day with a nice stack of construction paper love, but many more are designated for moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and other relatives who are not present, which then leads to a need to mark them appropriately.

Some of the children are perfectly satisfied with allowing an adult to do the writing, perhaps saving their own name for their own hand, but those who are ready, those for whom writing is beginning to emerge, want the pens in their own hands, only needing an adult to coach them through the process of inscribing their hearts with personally meaningful words. And, of course, in every class there are one or two who have already moved on to invented spelling, foregoing adult support entirely.

This is how literacy looks in preschool. This is what giving looks like in preschool. This is what love looks like in preschool. We support them when asked, but otherwise, it's always best to allow children to explore mysteries as they see fit. That's how magic happens.

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We Love Our Children Too

I can imagine nothing more challenging for a parent than to learn her child has an illness or condition that threatens his life. I've been blessed to have not been confronted with this, but I've been close to many families who did. 

This weekend, KUOW.org, Seattle's National Public Radio affiliate, ran a story about one of my former students, a boy named Owen, who was diagnosed with leukemia as an eight year old. I wrote about him here on the blog as he set out on three years of chemotherapy and other treatments. The Weinert family has been quite public about their gut-wrenching journey, one that no parent should have to take with a child. They always hope they are out of the woods, but must live in fear that they aren't.

One of the side-effects of chemo treatments is a suppressed immune system, such that patients become susceptible to contracting diseases against which he has been immunized. People like Owen count on what's called "herd immunity" to protect them from contagious diseases like measles, the idea being that if (as in the case of measles) 92-94 percent of a population is immunized, then those who cannot be, or whose immunizations have been rendered ineffective by something like chemo treatments, are protected. According to the article only five of Seattle's 69 public elementary schools meet that threshold.

Also according to the article, most of those who have opted their children out of vaccinations have done so due to a "personal belief" about vaccinations. This is the tense dividing line in our national discussion about vaccinations.

My own child is vaccinated, although I did resist the chicken pox vaccination when my daughter was young. It wasn't so much a principled position as a memory of having contracted the disease in my own youth. This was the 1960's, just as vaccinations were becoming common place, but I recall that some of our neighbors urged mom to hold a "chicken pox party" so that all the neighborhood kids could contract it at once. She declined. Our pediatrician was not happy with me. He told me stories about horrific chicken pox deaths he had witnessed and urged me anew with each passing appointment. Like I said, it wasn't really a big issue for me, one that didn't even rise to the level of discussing it with my wife, so when she one day found herself in the pediatrician's office, she agreed to a vaccination without batting an eye.

A couple years later, as chicken pox spread through her elementary school, she contracted it nevertheless, albeit likely in a milder form than she would have otherwise experienced. I don't know the  statistics, of course, but given the population with which she goes to school, I reckon she wasn't the only chicken pox vaccinated kid to contract and spread the illness. I've read that many of those who contracted measles in the recent California outbreak were likewise vaccinated. At the time I was mostly irritated that the chicken pox vaccine "didn't work." Today, I'm grateful that a child with a compromised immune system, like Owen, wasn't exposed.

I'm not going to pretend that I can speak for those who either refuse to immunize their children with vaccinations other than to point out that this is a very emotional topic on both sides because it has to do with our children's health. I understand that a large minority of parents have become convinced, for a variety of reasons, that there is great risk in immunizing their children. I've read the articles, I've listened to the reasons, but I remain convinced that vaccinations, despite their flaws, have saved thousands of lives. I'm happy my own child has been immunized both for her sake as well as the sake of the herd. I've also come to the realization that there is really nothing I can say or do to change their minds, so I'm staying out of that part of the back-and-forth. 

What I will point out is that the anti-vax message has succeeded to the point that we are reaching a threshold, like the one that has been reached in Seattle's elementary schools regarding measles, at which once rare diseases have an opening for a resurgence. This is why parents like the Weinerts are now starting to rise up and push back: we love our children too. I have been silent on this for too long, not wanting to offend parents who, honestly, are just doing the best they can. I don't wish anything bad upon them, but I also know that my silence, the silence of the majority, has allowed matters to proceed to this point. It's time to get this moving back in the other direction: that's how democracy works.

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Stronger Than Death

"Death and love -- no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don't go together. Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."  ~Thomas Mann (from The Magic Mountain)

I can't recall the last time I missed work due to illness. It's been at least a decade, but here I am sick at home. I wasn't able to pull myself from bed until about 4 p.m. yesterday and while I'm a little better today I'm probably not going to leave the house.

Most teachers who are at it for any length of time develop pretty hearty immune systems. I was sick for months on end during my first few years in the game, first as a parent of a preschooler in a cooperative when my child and I caught everything together, and then as a teacher. By now, after 17 years of plunging myself into what a friend once described as a "pit of pink eye" day after day, my body knows how to handle most of the crud that goes around. Irritatingly, this flu is one for which I was unprepared. Classroom attendance has been down for a month or more, not just at our school, but right across the system of cooperatives that operate under the auspices of North Seattle College. I was once again proudly pounding the chest of my immune system, when it got me.

Parents have rallied to hold classes in my absence, which is part of the beauty of the cooperative model, yet I still can't completely fight down these feelings of guilt and shame about not being where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to do. I know these feelings are "wrong," but they are part of the reality I face whenever I'm not fulfilling my obligations.

I'm terrible at being sick. I tend to be mean to my loved ones, bridling at their solicitousness. I don't want to engage in conversations about symptoms. I don't want chicken soup. In fact, I just want everyone to leave me alone to wallow in my misery. What makes it worse is knowing that everyone who reaches out is doing so out of genuine concern yet I appear constitutionally incapable of acknowledging it. 

When I'm feeling healthy, I sometimes see the romance in the idea of a day in bed: reading, snoozing, and watching movies. One of the greatest novels ever written, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), by Thomas Mann, is set in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps where patients spend large parts of their days bundled up in blankets with low grade fevers dangling thermometers from their lips while discussing art, philosophy, politics, and love, while snow falls outside. The idea is appealing in its cozy simplicity, but the reality is that my body and soul rebel at that sort of confinement. My joints begin to ache, my head to throb, and feelings of self loathing come to plague me.

The only thing that helps at all is to get out of bed, to drink some coffee, to take a shower, and to put on some clothes. Although I could barely breathe, I cleaned the kitchen and tidied the bedroom. That helped a little. But those feelings of guilt and shame still hound me. 

The guilt is the easier one to get my mind around: it never feels good to let someone down and even when they are sympathetic, not showing up to teach my classes is to let someone down. The shame is another matter. There ought not be shame in illness, but there it is nevertheless. I would rather that you not know. There is a part of me that lives outsides my consciousness that cringes, I guess, at the perception that this is a moment of my weakness. I don't like being weak: I like being strong. I'm forced to admit this even as I fancy myself a post-machismo male. I accept weakness in others, I think, or at least I try to, but not in myself. It's probably this groundless shame that makes me such hell on my loved ones.

I will return to health. I will be back at school on Monday. I will be strong again. I know this, like I know that the guilt and shame are "wrong" emotions, yet it's hard in the midst of illness to dwell on anything beyond illness except, perhaps, death.

One of the themes of Mann's masterpiece is that all higher health must have passed through illness and death. We know this is true of the human immune system: what does not kill us makes us stronger. The novel's protagonist startles himself with the speculation that "disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body," and I experienced that on Wednesday night as I literally moaned through my respiratory agony. I didn't wish for death, of course, but among the few fevered thoughts I recall from the long night included the notion that death would certainly put an end to my suffering, and in that thought I felt no aversion. If you had asked me to pick in that moment, life or death, I could have gone either way.

"Severed from life it (death) becomes a spectre, a distortion and worse. For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the spirit of man is prone."

I know this sounds overly dramatic, and I was genuinely no where near death's door, but that's where I've been in my illness, wracked not just with fever, but the ghastly aberration of my spirit and "wrongness" of my feelings.

The fever has broken now. I'm reconnecting to life. I'm touched beyond measure by the email chain that tells the story of how our families rallied. There is a "get well" poster on the wall of the classroom awaiting my return. My wife, who knows what kind of sick person I am, has left me alone, yet taken care of me. My daughter as well. I feel loved. Without a doubt, it is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

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"It Won't Break"

"I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken." ~a joke I learned from Dad.

"Teacher Tom, will you help me?" I'd observed this newly minted three-year-old boy wrestling with the plastic cover of an electric fan we dismantled several months ago. He was attempting to get it to the upper floor of the new playhouse, but it was simply too large to fit through the opening. I said, "Sure," and slid it through the railing.

He climbed the ladder, then positioned the fan cover over the opening, saying, "It's a door."

A friend following him up the ladder objected, "I can't get up!"

"It's a door. Open it."

"I can't."

"Use your head. It's a head door."

This struck them both as funny and they laughed as he moved the "door" out of his way with the top of his head. When they were both upstairs, they moved it back into place.

I said, "If you walk on it, it might break and you'll fall through the hole." I'm not really sure why I said it, neither boy is a daredevil. At least I didn't say, "Be careful. I guess it was one of those moments of catastrophic thinking that creep into our heads even when we know better. In my effort to warn them, I'd merely given them an idea.

They looked at their door for a moment, obviously thinking about standing on it. Finally, one of them said, "It won't break."

"You're pretty heavy." I envisioned him plunging through the hole and prepared myself for making a rescue.

"Watch," and with this he carefully stepped on the edge of the plastic mesh where it overlapped the floor, avoiding the part that covered the actual opening, keeping himself safe while proving me wrong all in one maneuver. His buddy, in turn, proved me wrong as well. They've only been at Woodland Park for a few months, but they've already learned to question my authority, not defiantly, but as a matter of course. Teacher Tom is too often wrong to take at face value. That's pretty cool.

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Teaching Her Father

Our daughter Josephine is a  now a high school senior, in the midst of a year of "lasts." She already knows where she will attend college and next fall she is moving away. I was recently digging in the deepest parts of the archives here on the blog and came across this one from 2010. I'm republishing it today because in everything but the specifics it all still holds true.

*****

Today was my daughter Josephine's Bat Mitzvah ceremony.

She stood before her congregation and taught them about dreams.

When a father looks at his daughter, he sees in her every age she has ever been. Yesterday, as she ran through her d'var Torah in her final rehearsal, the first time for me to hear it, when I saw before me what an accomplished, intelligent, poised, thoughtful, and beautiful young woman she's grown into, I felt as if I was offered a glimpse into every age she will ever be. I used to think that she was a girl upon whom a light always shined, but it has become clear that the light is her own, one that will make the world a brighter place as she now steps forward in the tradition of the Jews and accepts the full rights and responsibilities of life in her tribe.

Those who know me understand that I'm not temperamentally suited for sitting in churches, mosques, or synagogs no matter how much singing and dancing we do. Since I was a child, I spent my time in the pews with my eyes on the windows, imagining myself out there. I am a spiritual person in my way, but I've never been able to get my mind around the idea that some guy behind a lectern or some dogma can tell me anything more about the condition of my soul than I already know. I am a communal person in my way, but I've always found that spiritual connection with my fellow humans in other places, like amongst the families of our Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool. I'm a reflective person in my way, but I find being alone with the dogs in the woods to be the proper place for meditations.

That said, I've made a mistake in all of this. When Josephine first began talking about her Bat Mitzvah over a year ago, she did so with a certain amount of ambivalence. As she learned more about all the work it entailed, she confessed to me at least that she didn't want to do it at all, that she felt compelled, that she didn't have a choice. I take comfort in the knowledge that we're all stupid parents sometimes and with the pride of an idiot I took that to mean that she wanted me, her father, to save her. I had made my escape from organized religion, she was my daughter, of course she would want to join me on the other side of those windows.

With my help she was able to stand up and say, No, I will not do this. And it was only once she stood there before God, family, and the world having said No, I think, that she felt free to make this decision for herself.

Within a few days of having her No accepted, she turned around and committed herself fully. Maybe I thought that her occasional griping meant that she was going to change her mind again and she would need me to be waiting right where I had always been. But that was part of all the ages my daughter had ceased to be. The young woman she has become is one who makes commitments and sees them through no matter how hard the path or how easy it would be to give up. That was my mistake, seeing only my little girl and not this powerful woman, this daughter who teaches her father.

I'm excited for her and incredibly proud. She is the greatest gift in my life and I love her more than she will ever know.

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"Mom, Why Can't They Make School More Kid Friendly?"

A couple weeks ago, a former Woodland Park parent whose son is in kindergarten this year shared the following:

Waking this morning with a (thankfully rare now) hateful vehemence toward going to school . . . M dropped all kinds of 6 year old expletives. Later on the ride in to school he sighed, "Mom, why can't they make school more kid friendly? I hate it." Me: "Do you mean like let you play more?" Him: "Yah! Like we only get two short recesses and the rest is just work work work."

Up until a couple of years ago, every former student to whom I had spoken reported to me that kindergarten was "better" than preschool. In just a few short years, that sentiment has become quite rare. In fact, in just the past two weeks, three former students have told me they wished they could come back to preschool. It breaks my heart. Kindergarten is broken and it has been broken by the ignorant dilettantes who hold the reigns of education policy in America. Kindergarten has been broken by Common Core and a generation of our youngest citizens are suffering. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this is child abuse.

No where is the Common Core more abusive than in it's emphasis on early literacy, expecting kindergarteners to "read emergent-reaer texts with purpose and understanding," ignoring the fact that many, if not most children, are simply not developmentally capable of learning to read at such a young age. In fact, both researchers and professional educators agree that the window for reading is quite broad, many perfectly normal children not really picking up the basic skills until they are seven or older. Indeed, most experts conclude that if formal literacy education should happen at all, it shouldn't even begin until children are at least seven.

This isn't to say that some children can't read at an earlier age. I've known two-year-olds who were teaching themselves to read and many who were reading quite well by four, in the same way that children learn to walk and talk at different ages. But the majority are simply not ready to begin reading and won't be for several years. Yet, the dictates of Common Core are relentless, leaving no room for the kind of individual variation for which young children are notorious, and punishing schools and teachers who cannot succeed in forcing their students to "read."

From the introduction to a scathing joint report issued by the Alliance for Childhood and Defending the Early Years:

(T)he pressure of implementing the reading standard is leading many kindergarten teachers to resort to inappropriate drilling on specific skills and excessive testing. Teacher-led instruction in kindergartens has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based experiential learning that children need based on decades of research in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience.

This is what has motivated the parents of Woodland Park to start it's own, developmentally appropriate kindergarten for the 2015-16 school year. Young children should love school. There is simply no excuse for the abuses of Common Core.

I urge everyone to take a look at the report. If you don't have a lot of time, this Washington Post piece sums it up quite well. I leave you with this short video:

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The Weakness Of Direct Instruction

We recently took a field trip to the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture to take in their Washington state geological exhibit, the highlight of which are the dinosaur skeletons. It's always a good experience if only because most of the kids are familiar with it, interested, and like to show off their knowledge.

Our guide was excellent, with a strong pedagogical understanding of how to engage young children, and she created a series of opportunities for the children to construct their own knowledge. The kids did their part as well, keeping their voices and bodies within the expected parameters. In the heart of the exhibit is a "classroom." This is the hands-on portion. It helped that we all knew it was coming.

As the children minded their proverbial P's and Q's, I reflected on the fact that they are rarely expected to mind these particular P's and Q's at school, yet here they were not just stepping up to the challenge, but thriving. I was thinking about writing a post here about how parents and other grown-up people worry that children who have experienced nothing but a play-based curriculum in preschool will not be prepared for the unnatural rigors of following directions or sitting still or listening to lectures when they move on to traditional schools. I was going to use this experience to riff on the notion that if we've fed them well on play, they will naturally be prepared for the famines ahead.

Later, as we were sitting together examining fossils from various extinct animals, our guide held up a rather large one. After soliciting guesses about what it might be, we finally figured out it was the tail bone of a stegosaurus. It was larger than the fossils with which we'd heretofore been entrusted, so she gave us special instructions on how to hold it, directing the kids to put "one hand on top like this and one hand on the bottom like this."

Whereas the other, arguably less exciting, fossils, the ones handed over without direct instruction, had been fully examined with our hands, eyes, noses and whispered conversation, the children treated the stegosaurus tail to none of that deeper inquiry. Instead, as they had been instructed, they passed the fossil amongst themselves, carefully placing their hands where told, putting their entire focus on the "holding technique," few of them even glancing at the rare thing they held in their hand before passing it along.

The stegosaurus tail fossil raced efficiently through our group, winding up back where it started long before we were finished with our examinations of the fossils we had been free to fully explore sans the blinders of direct instruction.

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Creativity

Addison arrived in class on the first day of our school year talking about something called "Creativity." Given that last I'd seen him in the Spring he'd been a huge Harry Potter fan (the books, not the movie), I figured it was a new book series he was into or maybe some sort of role-playing video game. 

He worked hard to "sell" the idea, whatever it was, to his friends, once even taking the microphone (we have an old karaoke machine) to lecture us at some length about the mystery and danger and adventure of Creativity, but it was met with blank stares. I was feeling sorry for him, his excitement not getting through to the others, especially once I found out from his mom Jen that Creativity was, in fact, an entire world he had invented on his own, that it had "consumed most of his summer play" and was "very important to him."

That bit of knowledge in mind, I decided that I'd try playing along a little, since it didn't appear the kids were getting it.

I'd heard him talking about "portals" at some point, so as we hung out together in the outdoor classroom, I pointed up into our cedars and said, "I'm pretty sure I saw a portal into Creativity up in that tree."

He took it up, "Are you sure? They move around."

"I'm pretty sure it was a portal into Creativity."

"It looks like a swirling mass. Was it a swirling mass?"

"Yes. That must have been it. Maybe we should get the ladder and climb up there." I figured lecturing alone wasn't going to work to get the masses engaged, but I did know that anything involving moving our homemade ladder always draws a crowd.

I waited for his go-ahead and got it, "Good idea, Teacher Tom!"

Together we put out a call, "We need the ladder! We need the ladder!"

As the kids rallied to the cry, Addison filled them in on the portal we'd spotted in the trees: the portal that leads to Creativity. As the adult, the one ultimately responsible for safety, I wasn't particularly keen on how the ladder wound up positioned against the trees -- it was wobbly, there were a lot of kids jostling around for a turn -- so in the interest of not letting the excitement dissipate, I took responsibility for re-positioning the ladder, finally deciding, with Addison's agreement, that the portal had moved, and that the best place for the ladder would be against the fence.

Addison went first, climbing to the top then peering over the fence at the common, everyday world outside it. He pointed up into the branches of the large cedar that stands near our gate and said, "There it is, the swirling mass. I feel it pulling me in." Since he had been speaking directly to me where I'd positioned my body near the top of the ladder so as to catch anyone who slipped, I amplified his words to the line of children waiting their turn below, "Addison sees the portal in the tree. It looks like a swirling mass. He feels himself being pulled in." He then climbed back down the ground, throwing himself into the wood chips, shouting, "I've been pulled in! I'm in Creativity!"

It took a long time for each of his classmates to climb to the top of the ladder, to peer over the fence, and to "find" the portal. Some saw it in the tree like Addison did. Others, however, spotted the portal disguised as the garage door across the street, others spied it up in the clouds, and some couldn't find it at all, proving Addison's point that the portal into Creativity has a tendency to move around. I repeated each child's comments to the other kids below, then as they prepared to climb back down, I asked, "Do you feel it pulling you in?" Those that answered "yes" then threw themselves down on the ground in imitation of Addison.

Then an interesting thing happened, something with which I've never before had to deal as a preschool teacher. We gathered on our rug for circle time, the kids buzzing about Creativity. Several of the kids let us know that they'd seen the portal, the swirling mass, and had been pulled in, then Cooper, who was sitting directly beside Addison, said, "There's a magical forest in Creativity."

Addison was suddenly ashen, "No there's not!"

Cooper looked at him wide-eyed, "Yes there is. I saw it!"

"There's not a magical forest in Creativity! There are beasts! You have to watch out for the beasts!"

Cooper responded and the boys went a couple rounds of "Yes there is!"/"No there's not!" before I interrupted and managed to get us moved on. Normally, in such a clear, well-mannered debate, I'd have tried to use it as an opportunity to help guide the boys to some sort of resolution, but frankly, I lost my nerve in the moment, knowing that Creativity was a precious thing to Addison and I wanted more information before proceeding to do anything that might damage his own, personal dramatic play creation.

The following day, Friday, Addison stayed home ill, and I figured that was probably the end of it, at least for awhile: a day without him and a weekend would wash things away, but I was wrong. The children arrived at school and immediately launched into playing Creativity, this time without any of the "constraints" placed on us by its creator. Fairies and skeletons and airplanes and super heros and sharks began to appear. The kids positioned the ladder in a new location, organizing themselves to take turns looking for the portal, using the term "swirling mass," but also giving it colors and other characteristics not supported by the "original text."

Still, I thought the weekend would take care of things until we sat down for show-and-tell. Cooper had written and illustrated a five page book about Creativity, filled with an impressive amount of detail. This wasn't going away. Addison had succeeded in attracting other children to play his game, but now they were making it their own. Normal stuff for preschool with an emergent curriculum, but in this case it felt like we were dealing with a kind of "intellectual property." Certainly, he maintained some "rights" to his invention, yet certainly the rest of the kids maintained their rights to go where their own imaginations took them.

I wrote to Jen about how things were developing, suggesting that if all of this bothered Addison, I could work to at least convince the kids to change the name of our school's magical place to something else: reserving Addison's right to the name "Creativity." She had a discussion with him, and while he was excited and impressed that his friends were still interested in Creativity, he wanted to maintain some control. Together they came up with the idea that each of his classmates would have their own "property" within Creativity that they alone could control. She let me know that Addison wanted to make the pitch himself and was prepared to talk about it at circle time on Monday.

When we convened on the blue rug, I goofed around a little, then mentioned Creativity, before turning the floor over Addison. He did a very precise job of describing the plan, saying, "I control Creativity, but everybody has their own property that they control themselves."

Cooper didn't wait to raise his hand, "In my property there's a magical forest and a red airplane that flies the portal around!"

Addison answered, "That's great. But remember, Creativity is huge and everybody's property is miniscule."

There was silence. I was not going to define this word for the kids if I didn't have to, in the interest of avoiding an argument about "property size."

Then he continued, "In Creativity 'miniscule' means 'huge.'"

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Pushing The Pendulum

We often use a pendulum metaphor when talking about political issues, and while it's true that things tend to swing back and forth, sometimes even from one extreme to another, it's a flawed metaphor in that nothing changes unless people get together and push.

Last weekend, a group of committed labor and education activists pushed the Washington State Democratic Party to pass a resolution condemning the tragically flawed Common Core national curriculum. As author and activist Anthony Cody reports on his blog Living in Dialog:

This is the first time a statewide Democratic Party committee has taken a public position against the Common Core, and it happened in the back yard of the Gates Foundation, which has provided the funding that made the national standards project possible. This could signal a sea-change for the beleaguered standards, because up until now, political opposition has been strongest in the Republican party. (Link added by me)

There are not a lot of bi-partisan issues in our nation anymore, but opposition to the take-over of our public schools by the federal government and unaccountable corporations appears to be emerging as one of them, albeit perhaps for different reasons: politics often makes for strange bedfellows.

Speaking in favor of the resolution, state committee member Brian Gunn of the 31st legislative district said:

We have to take into account corporations are looking at our children as commodities. This is a moral issue. We're allowing corporations that produce these materials and sponsor these tests to treat our children as sources of income . . . a source of profit. And that source of profit is our own children . . . We have to see that as a moral issue, and not cede that responsibility away from the place where it belongs, which is hopefully our state schools and our state teachers -- and allow them to make choices about what the standards should be.

This should be happening in every state in the union, but it's not a free-swinging pendulum that will, according to the dictates of gravity, come back to those of us who want our children's education to be in the hands of professional teachers, parents, local communities, and the students themselves. We must get out there and push. It's how democracy is supposed to work.

Some of the activists who lead this effort have published a convenient article entitled "How to Get Your State Democratic Committee to Oppose Common Core."

And here is a link to the flyer they circulated to party delegates, the text of which I'm publishing below. Our children need us to save them from the test score coal mines. The pendulum doesn't swing on it's own.

Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors

Error #1: The process by which the Common Core standards were developed and adopted was undemocratic.

Error #2: The Common Core State Standards violate what we know about how children develop and grow.

Error #3: The Common Core is inspired by a vision of market-driven innovation enabled by standardization of curriculum, tests, and ultimately, our children themselves.

Error #4: The Common Core creates a rigid set of performance expectations for every grade level, and results in tightly controlled instructional timelines and curriculum.

Error #5: The Common Core was designed to be implemented through an expanding regime of high-stakes tests, which will consume an unhealthy amount of time and money.

Error #6: Proficiency rates on the new Common Core tests have been dramatically lower -- by design.

Error #7: Common Core relies on a narrow conception of the purpose of K-12 education as "career and college readiness."

Error #8: The Common Core is associated with an attempts to collect more student and teacher data than ever before.

Error #9: The Common Core is not based on any external evidence, has no research to support it, has never been tested and worst of all, has no mechanism for correction.

Error #10: The biggest problem of American education and American society is the growing number of children living in poverty.

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"Bad Guy Boys Only!"

Last summer I wrote about the new playhouse Audrey and Titus' grandfather built for us, one of the cool features of which is that he designed it to allow the kids to create doors and windows pretty much anywhere they choose. Lately, the kids in our 4-5's class have chosen to seal themselves in, leaving only one small window through which they can come and go. Yesterday, a group of guys raced outside ahead of me, and as they barricaded themselves inside, they chanted, "Bad guy boys only! Bad guy boys only!"

I sat on a stump near the one and only window. I said, "It sounds like you're telling the girls they can't play in the playhouse."

There was a pause in the chanting to hear me out. When the chanting resumed, not all of them joined in.

After a bit I asked, "Are you really bad guys?"

In the pause, one of them answered, "No, we're pretending."

And I asked, "Are you pretending to be boys too?"

"No, we're really boys."

"If girls want to play can they pretend to be bad guy boys?"

Their bad guy leader answered fiercely, "No, they have to be real boys." The chanting resumed, but now he chanted alone. The barricade was nearly complete. Only one small window remained.

I said to the air, "We all agreed, you can't say you can't play."

I knew I need say no more when one of the boys replied, "Like Martin Luther King."

As one boy resumed the chant, the others began, one by one, to climb out the window. One of them, in passing, said to me, "I like playing with girls." Soon there was only a single boy in the playhouse, chanting alone, "Bad guy boys only! Bad guy boys only!" He was loud at first, but then petered out. When he resumed, he was chanting, "Bad guys only! Bad guys only!"

Some of his friends returned, even while he was the only one still chanting. Then, without speaking, they started dismantling two of the walls, the ones that faced the art table where a group of girls were engaged. As the walls came down, the chant changed and other voices joined it. They were saying, "Everybody come in! Everybody come in!"

When the girls ignored them, they began to shout, "Free ice cream! Free ice cream!" By now the ad hoc group formerly known as "bad guy boys" had grown far beyond its original core. As some of them began to take forays outside the playhouse to ask people for their ice cream orders, others began to use the wall planks to build ramps and walkways to make it "easier" for people to get inside.

It was the American civil rights story experienced and surpassed in the span of ten minutes.

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