The Meaning Of Life

I suppose people everywhere have mixed feelings about squirrels. Many years ago, I was preparing to read a non-fiction book about these adaptable creatures to the class when one boy stopped me with a raised hand: "Squirrels are evil."

I sort of nodded my acknowledgement by way of moving on, when I saw another hand go up, this time from a girl who rarely spoke, especially in front of everyone at circle time: "Why are squirrels evil?"

This lead to more hands and a wide-ranging discussion about not how "evil" squirrels are. Not whether they were evil, but just how evil and in what manner their evil manifested itself. They were not sharing their own independently formed opinions. It was quite clear that these were things that had been overheard in their families, jokes and grumblings from homeowners who were tired of dealing with these cute creatures that seem to thrive alongside us in urban environments.

There are a number of squirrels that live in and around our playground. They have become particularly active this year. There are even a couple with the courage to race through our space while the kids are playing. Even the crows don't do that. All of this would be fine, except that more often than not, when we spy them, they're carrying peanuts in their mouths and littering the place with the shells. Obviously, someone in the neighborhood, someone who doesn't think squirrels are evil, is feeding them. This is a problem because we are a peanut-free school and there are at least two of our kids who are severely allergic -- even touching a peanut can send them to the hospital.

The adults in the community aren't really sure what to do other than to police the grounds for peanut debris, but the kids have been taking action. At first, they just chased the squirrels away, but lately they've been working on traps.

We started with simple holes in the ground, baited with things we thought might be attractive, but as our failures have mounted we've become increasingly elaborate and collaborative in our efforts. To the naked eye, many of our traps look like piles of junk, the sort of thing I've heard colleagues call "learning piles," but if you ask any of the kids about them, they can go on at great detail about how it's meant to work. Of course, what we're really building are experiences of joyful collaboration.

Among the classic "big questions" is "What is the meaning of life?" I tend to think the answer is this, building squirrel traps together. It's what humans do when not being goaded by the selfishness and greed of conflict and competition mongers. We come together around a challenge or a dream, sharing our best thinking, sharing our labor, sharing our failures and successes. It's all about working on projects with the other people. Some of our projects are the work of a lifetime, some of just a day, but in the end I'd say the time we spend working on projects with the other people are the times we come closest to the meaning of life.

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"You Want Mommy To Come Back"

Sometimes mommy has to leave and you don't want her to leave. 

When I started teaching, I was a distractor. In fact, I considered myself a master distractor. I had every confidence that I could calm any kid down in less than five minutes through a combination of goofing, enthusiasm, and "Look what those kids are doing over there!" Today, I'm more inclined to simply sit with a crying child, to listen to any words they might be trying to say, to show warmth and empathy, to assure them that mommy always comes back, and to allow them the full arc of their strong emotion. Most kids still stop crying in less than five minutes, but that's no longer the goal now that my priority is their feelings rather than my discomfort with their feelings.

So when mommy left last Friday, when he reached out to mommy as she walked away, when he screamed and cried and pulled himself from my arms, when he dropped to the floor to kick his feet in outrage, I sat there with him, blocking out the whole world but him.

I could hear he was saying words as he screamed, but they weren't at first discernible, so I said, "You're mad that mommy left," and "You're sad that mommy left." No one can truly tell another how they feel, but I was pretty sure I was close to the mark in this case. He was still saying the words through his tears, repeating them. Finally, I thought I made out, "I want mommy to come back."

I wanted him to know that he had been heard, that I understood and empathized, and I wanted it to be something that was true, so I said, "I want your mommy to come back too."

He shout-cried at me, "I want mommy to come back!"

I nodded. I worked on keeping my voice gentle. I said, "I want your mommy to come back too."

And he said back, "I want mommy to come back!"

We went back and forth like this several times. He seemed to really wanted me to know that he wanted his mommy to come back.

Other children tried to sooth him: one girl brought him a costume, another tried to hand him a construction paper fire truck. He didn't accept their overtures, although he was by now present enough to shake his head "no" at them rather than simply scream as he was doing at me.

By now he was very clearly saying, "I want mommy to come back!" And I was replying, "I want your mommy to come back too," to which he always shout-cried back, "I want mommy to come back!"

I continued to attempt to put a name to his feelings, using words like "mad," "sad," and "angry," as well as to state the truth that "mommy always comes back." But whenever I said, "I want your mommy to come back too," he shouted at me, "I want mommy to come back!" 

Then, finally, I really heard him. He said, "I want mommy to come back!" stressing the pronoun for his tin-eared teacher.

This time I answered, "You want mommy to come back."

He nodded as if to say, "Finally," and in one motion picked himself from the floor, stepped up to the art table, still crying, and got to work gluing construction paper shapes to a red fire truck pre-cut, his hands not fully under his own control. As he wadded and creased the paper, it looked almost as if he were wrestling with it, his fingers clenching and curling from the emotion that was still coursing through his whole body.

After a couple minutes, he became silent as he concentrated on manipulating the small pieces of paper, the last of his strong emotion going into this construction project.

I said one more time, "You want mommy to come back." This time he ignored me.

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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Viral Education

Last week, a parent asked me if we could use medical feeding bags, the kind used in hospitals for patients who can't feed themselves. I knew what she was talking about, but had never given them much thought, let alone wanted one for the preschool. My rule of thumb, however, is that if anyone wants to contribute 20 or more of anything we'll take them. She had 30 so I had no choice but to say "Yes."

They came in two large boxes, one of which I put on the workbench along with a couple of old tempera paint jugs full of water and for the rest of the afternoon we roamed the playground experimenting with them.

These kids are already experts on water and gravity, so it wasn't long before one of them figured out that the water only ran through the hose when the nozzle was lower than the bag of water. This knowledge went viral the way knowledge does in a play-based curriculum, where the children often teach one another.

As I watched the play unfold, I began to think of the virality of knowledge. In this age of the internet, we all know about videos and articles that "go viral" through the democratic process of sharing, but this, what the children were doing with the feeding bags, has always been with us. As I heard children urge one another with invitations like "Try this!" or "Look what I did!" I recognized that this is how humans have always educated ourselves, with one person discovering something, then excitedly sharing it with others.

In 1439, when Johannes Guttenberg invented the first printing press, very few people could read. In fact, if I understand my history correctly, it was primarily the domain of the clergy who needed the skill to read and create Bibles. But the printing press suddenly made printed matter widely available. With no notion of formal literacy education, Europeans were left to learn to read on their own, passing on the knowledge from one person to the next, from one generation to the next. 

Literacy rates steadily climbed for a couple hundred years, then surged around the time of the American Revolution when Thomas Payne's pamphlet Common Sense became a runaway hit, selling over half a million copies and 25 printings in it's first year. It's estimated that 2.5 million colonists read it, an astronomical number for the time. Historians credit this viral document with inspiring the 13 American colonies to ultimately declare their independence from British rule.

People wanted to read, they needed to read, so they learned to read. A similar thing has happened, albeit at a faster pace, with computer technology. I have a distinct memory of Dad buying an Apple II+, a machine that came with no software. Instead it came with thick instruction manuals that taught us how to write our own programs. You could take classes on "how to work your computer." Today, our two-year-olds are teaching themselves as these technology skills have gone viral. The idea of a computer class today is laughable, just as a reading class would have been laughable in 1776. 

As I watched the kids figure out how to use those feeding bags, teaching one another, I thought of other kids who are sitting at their desks over worksheets or tests or homework. There is no virality there. In fact, we call it cheating and you're reprimanded if you share your answers or peek over someone else's shoulder. That's why this sort of learning is so hard.

It's too bad because sharing is how good ideas get big.

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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Is There Any Wonder?

The reason I started this blog was to have a place to write. The reason I continue to write on this blog is to have a place to reflect. Words continue to be important to me and while I know that my method, which is to wake up each morning, write for an hour, and publish, leads to a higher number of typos than I'm happy with, I strive for it to be the best writing I'm capable of producing each day.

The reason I started taking photos at school was because I found them to be useful "bookmarks" for the things I wanted to write about. My relationship to photography has been an uncomfortable one. While I appreciate that photos document moments that are there and gone forever, I hate the idea of experiencing those moments through a view finder. I've tended, therefore, to use photography merely as a functional art. I'm perfectly satisfied using the camera built into my phone. I use an app that allows me to take pictures by tapping anywhere on the screen, which allows me, at least a little, to stay more present in a moment even as I record it.

I typically only take, at most, a handful of photos each day, but one day this week, I took a lot. Today, I wanted to turn this blog upside down and minimize the words and just share some highlights from my photo stream. It kind of amazes me how much we do in a single day.

And this is only a glimpse. We did so much more on that day. Is there any wonder I love my job?

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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