Your Child Is Not "Falling Behind"

What would you think if you saw a mother hovering over her two month old infant drilling her on vowel sounds? Or how about a father coaching his five month old on the finer points to walking? I expect you would think they were at best wasting their time: two month olds can't talk and five month olds can't walk, let alone be taught. Talking and walking are things children just learn. Now imagine that when these babies failed to acquire these capabilities that are clearly beyond their developmental grasp, these parents began to fret that their child was "falling behind." You would think they were crazy. If a doctor told these parents their child was "falling behind" we would think he was either incompetent or cruel.

Sadly, there are actually people out there doing things like this. I've written before about hucksters who assert that babies can be taught to read and there are devices on the market that purport to help babies learn to walk. The good news is that while there are some naive parents who fall for such gimmickry in the misguided attempt to somehow one-up nature's long, successful history of "teaching" talking and walking according to well-established developmental timelines, most of us know better than to worry about these things that virtually every child stressless-ly learns without any special interventions.

My own daughter spoke her first word at 3 months old, consistently saying "Papa" when I played and cared for her: she was putting together full sentences before 6 months. This same "advanced" child didn't crawl until her first birthday and wasn't walking until close to 20 months, a full lifetime "behind" some of her peers. Today, as you might expect, she talks and walks like the rest of the teenagers: if she was ever behind she caught up, and if she was ever ahead, the others caught up with her.

This unsavory practice of taking advantage of new parent insecurities in the name of profit is one that deserves to be called out wherever it rears its nasty head, and it's borderline criminal when they play the "falling behind" card, which is why I'm writing today.

I've had the opportunity these past few years to travel around the world to talk to teachers and parents. Every place I go I find myself discussing this bizarre notion of "school readiness." Often translated in the US as "kindergarten readiness," it is essentially code for reading. It seems that the powers that be in our respective nations have decided to sell parents on the snake oil that if your child isn't starting to read by five-years-old she is "falling behind." They are doing this despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done on the subject recommends that formal literacy education (if we ever even need it) not begin until a child is seven or eight years old. They are telling parents and teachers that children are "falling behind" despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done finds that there are no long term advantages to being an early reader, just as there are no long term advantages to being early talkers or walkers. In fact, many studies have found that when formal literacy instruction begins too early, like at 5, children grow up to be less motivated readers and less capable of comprehending what they've read. That's right, if anything, this "school readiness" fear-mongering may well turn out to be outright malpractice.

But the worst thing, the unforgivable thing, is the cruelty of the assertion that five-year-olds are "falling behind." It's one thing when commercial interests attempt to move their crappy merchandise by playing on fears, but when schools are doing it, when teachers are doing it, that's unconscionable. Listen, I'm a staunch supporter of my fellow teachers here on these pages, but I am calling my colleagues out on this one. Teachers should know better than to help these guys sell this stuff: it's bad for kids, it's bad for families, and it's bad for society. We are the professionals. Teachers need to put our collective foot down, point to the research, rely on our own experience, and if we can't refuse to subject young children to developmentally inappropriate, potentially harmful "readiness" garbage for fear of losing our jobs, the least we can do is refuse to take part in the crass abusiveness of "falling behind." If we can't do that maybe we don't deserve to call ourselves professionals.

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The Green Room

Last Thursday, we dedicated our new greenhouse. I showed you the plans about a month and a half ago and told you the story about how we got from there to here.

It was a warm celebration on a beautiful day, combining the Woodland Park School community, with the University of Washington architectural community, including the graduate students, their parents, friends, and faculty, and the Fremont Baptist Church community. Pastor Gay blessed the greenhouse with prayer, the children got their first opportunity to play there, and the rest of us patted one another on our collective backs for a job well-done.

The children, of course, enjoyed all the many chalk board surfaces.

There was food and drink and an ice cream truck. I got to cut the ribbon. It was an afternoon of congratulations.

These barrels (formerly used to store mint oil) contain water and retain heat to keep our greenhouse warmer, longer. This central table was designed so that one side makes it child-height, while standing on the other makes it adult-height.

This is a significant addition to Woodland Park's third teacher.

I went back, on my own, the day after the party, craving a little time alone with it. We're not accustomed to nice, new things at our school, generally preferring to cobble our space together from the re-purposing of cast-offs and refuse. 

Most of the "glass" is opaque, but there is a row of curved windows at child-eye height so they can see out.

Like most preschool teachers, I'm a middle class bag lady and being there alone in this gorgeous new space left me feeling excited, sure, but also a little intimidated.

Dozens of people have worked to make this happen, over the course of years, really. 

There is still a lot of outside planting/landscaping left for us to figure out. For instance, what should we grow on that trellis?

The goal is a world class urban preschool gardening program, to educate children about their food, to give them the opportunity to become intimate with the cycle of seed to table and back again into the soil. My dream is that our children eat something they have grown themselves every, single day, year-round.

This window leads into our classroom. Children will be able to view the greenhouse from indoors.

Now we just have to do it.

I'm not a natural gardener, so I'm going to need a lot of help making this thing work. I'm not too worried about this year and the next -- the momentum from this project among our parent community remains high. I suspect we'll have plenty of folks seeking to contribute in all kinds of ways. We even already have someone writing it all down, keeping records of what and when we can grow things, a record I'm hoping can be passed along, amended, and improved year after year, until our greenhouse, a place I'm already calling "The Green Room" in my internal dialogs, is something we can't imagine living without.

The work is finished. 

The work is just beginning.

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Never For Money; Always For Love

 

"Never for money; always for love." ~The Talking Heads

By the time our daughter Josephine was eight, she had already acted in several plays, but then she was cast in a production of Shakespeare's comedy All's Well That Ends Well. From that moment on she knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. By the time she was 14 she had performed in at least a dozen more of his plays, comedies, histories, and tragedies, and had picked out the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU as the best place to continue her studies after high school. In the Fall, that's where she's going, the only school to which she applied, and from which I'm confident she will emerge with a bachelor of fine arts degree.

People keep telling me that we're lucky parents, that they worry about their own kids because "they don't have a direction yet." I know a few parents of these directionless kids who have more or less told their children what they will study and where, not really consulting them about their own futures. Fortunately, there are only a few of those in my circle, even as I know that there are far too many aspirational parents who condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life.

Much more prevalent in my world are parents of teens, some of the very ones who have praised our luck, who have more or less told their children what they are not going to study, saying they won't support their pursuit of a higher education focused on music or medieval history or literature because, after all, they're going to have get "practical," code for "finding a way to pursue money." My own parents didn't go that far, but they did successfully urge me in that direction, steering me away from fine arts and toward journalism, where I studied advertising, convincing both them and myself that it was at least a creative profession from which I had a likelihood of earning a decent income.

To say I regret my choices would be to suggest that I would trade my current life for some other, but even though I hold a degree that says I'm qualified, I've never worked a day in advertising and it took me until I was closing in on 40 to finally discover what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I do think I'm lucky, but not because our daughter knows she wants a life on the stage, performing some of the greatest art that has ever been created. I'm lucky because very early on in my journey as a parent, I was exposed to the radical notion that my baby was a unique, fully formed human being in her own right, and that my role was to keep her safe and to love her. My only aspiration for her, therefore, is that she should do what she loves, to ask and answer her own questions about life, and through that to explore what it means to be her, this unique, fully formed human being. Will there be hardships along her road? Of course, as there are in every life, but at least she will be doing what she loves which is the currency with the highest value.

Among the 49 kids in my daughter's high school graduation class, 10 of them have been going to school together since they were five, and a dozen more have been together since about the time Josephine set out on her current career path. Most of them at one time or another have been at my house. I reckon that many will follow a journey similar to my own, "practical" paths that teach them through dead ends and long dark tunnels, places where they might pocket money while searching for the light. 

When I ask them about their futures, most do not tell me the story their parents tell, or at least not with as much conviction. To them I've been saying, "Never for money; always for love."

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"The Game Is Rigged"

As Diane Ravitch documents in her book Reign of Error, the objective of many in the corporate education reform movement is to fully privatize public education. When I've used the word "privatize" in the past, I've discovered that many readers are unfamiliar with that term, thinking it is a synonym for "private" schools. I have nothing against private schools. I teach in one; my daughter just graduated from one. Private schools offer an alternative to public schools and are paid for by the parents who enroll their children. And while the ultimate goal of neoliberal reformers may well be to eliminate public education altogether, privatized schools are essentially private schools, often for-profit, often called "charter schools," that are paid for out of the public coffers. In other words, privatization hands public funds over to corporate interests in the misguided faith that what privatizer in chief Bill Gates calls "powerful market forces" (and what I call "greed") will lead to better educated future workers.

The theory, a bedrock of neoliberalism (sometimes called "supply side" or "trickle down" economics) is that the private sector does everything better than the public sector: that business is always more efficient and effective than government. Emerging from the University of Chicago's school of economics in the 1950's as a rejection of the Keynesian model under which the United States grew the largest, most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, most of us were introduced to it by the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign and the eventual election of Ronald Reagan, which is why we sometimes refer to these economic ideas as Reaganomics.

After three decades of the neoliberal experiment, we find, not surprisingly, that corporate profits are at historic highs, while the middle class continues to shrink rapidly. Income inequality has never been greater: there has been a massive re-distribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest one percent. This is clearly not the result of those at the top working harder than the rest of us, but rather the systematic implementation of economic policies that favor the wealthy and large corporations. 

This is not the "free market capitalism" they are selling us, but rather a kind of oligarchic corporatocracy. As Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders says, "The game is rigged." In fact, it is so rigged that we the people, even in a time of historically high corporate profits, are actually subsidizing the largest corporations in America to the tune of trillions a year.

As Father John W. Cahill, former director of justice and peace for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington, wrote:

The recent decision of Los Angeles to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 (joining San Francisco and Seattle) is a wake-up call. It exposes hidden corporate welfare . . . By paying low wages, many corporations expect that their employees will survive by dependence upon . . . government subsidies for food, shelter and health care . . . I do begrudge those corporations and other businesses that are dependent upon taxpayers to subsidize their workforce.

Taxpayer bailouts of banks and manufacturers have made the headlines, but it's this sort of day-to-day sociopathic behavior, the knowledge that we the people are unwilling to allow our fellow citizens to go without the basics of food, shelter, and health care, the knowledge that we the people will clean up their messes, both environmental and social, that has allowed corporations and the wealthy to drive us into this ditch.

And now they're seeking to privatize our schools, another grab at a subsidy. They've already succeeded in fully privatizing the public schools in New Orleans, seizing on the disaster of hurricane Katrina in classic "shock doctrine" mode, with predictably horrible results. These guys aren't free market capitalists, because if they were, and they truly believed they could deliver higher quality education more efficiently, they would be out there starting their own private schools rather than coming to we the people for a handout.

Public schools do not exist to serve the economy, despite what our politicians say about those mythological "jobs of tomorrow." The reason we the people pay for schools, and why we should never turn that function over to privatizers, is that we need a well-educated population that can engage in the enlightened self-governance demanded by democracy. And the skills and habits of mind required for citizenship, like critical thinking, questioning authority, and contributing in ways other than the mere economic, are in many cases the opposite of those required by employees of corporations. We can't let our schools become simply another aspect of corporate welfare where taxpayers take on the expense of training tomorrow's workers while other corporations make a greasy buck off the labor of our children. Let them train their own damn workers: we have citizens to educate.

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And Get On With Your Life Of Doing

Let your feelings flourish and get on with your life of doing. ~Lao Tzu

Charlie was crying. I saw what happened. Dennis crawled down through our old climber head first – an impressive and challenging physical maneuver. Charlie tried to follow him a bit too closely and got his cheek in the way of Dennis’ foot. It was an accident.

I lifted Charlie from the climber partly to sooth him, but mostly to check his face. It hadn’t looked like a big deal, but it’s always good to check. The intensity of his tears abated almost instantly, although they continued to flow. I could detect no visible marks. As I walked Charlie a few feet away from the scene, I said things like, “That was an accident,” and “That must have hurt.” Within seconds, still crying, he started to wiggle his legs, indicating he wanted me to put him down.

The moment he hit the floor he was moving back toward the climber, still crying.

When he got to the climber, he clambered back to the spot where he’d been kicked, still crying.

He stood on the climber, still crying. He turned his head from side to side as if wanting to make sure we all heard him, as if making an announcement: I’m mad. I’m sad. I’m here!

Marcus’ mother Michelle started toward him, but I intercepted her before she could scoop him up. She said, “But he’s crying.”

I answered, “I know, but he’s also climbing. I don’t worry about children who are crying while they’re still doing stuff.”

Watching Charlie stand there on the climber crying, I was reminded of my own daughter Josephine, who used to actually get mad at me if I tried too hard to sooth her. After a few minutes she’d say, through her tears, “I just have to finish my cry!” which was my signal to back off and let her take care of herself. That’s what was happening with Charlie. He’d wanted his feet on the floor. He’d wanted to get back up on that climber. Against Michelle’s better judgment, I think, she watched with me.

Still crying, he again attempted the head-first maneuver. By the time he was back on the floor, he’d stopped crying.

I asked him if he wanted a tissue and he answered, “Yes.”

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We Are Designed To Help

When there are toys or other items scattered across the classroom floor, I say, for instance, "There are rubber bands on the floor," then stand there looking at the misplaced rubber bands. Sometimes I add the clarifying sentence, "They belong in the rubber band box." I don't start picking them up, I don't look around at the children imploringly, I don't ask for help. I simply phrase the situation as a statement of fact, and invariably children start to pick those rubber bands up and put them in the box.

When we're working puzzles, I pretend to struggle to get the pieces in their proper places. I don't ask for help, but invariably, a child, usually more than one, gets to work at my side fitting those pieces into place for me.

When we're counting, I get it wrong, "One, 2, 3, 5 . . ." The kids usually let me start over a couple of times in the effort to get it right, but invariably they take it upon themselves to correct me, to coach me through a proper count.

When we need to move something heavy, I say, "We need to move this heavy table," and invariably I'm swarmed with helping hands.

And I'm sure there are those of you who will call me rude, but I rarely thank the children because they don't need any external reward, the reward of helping others is built into the act.

There are social scientists (such as economist Adam Smith) and philosophers (such as Thomas Hobbes) and artists (such as William Golding) who insist that mankind is motivated primarily by his own self-interest. Author Ayn Rand even went so far as to call selfishness and virtue. And yes, if you manage matters so that resources are artificially scarce, or so that there is a strict hierarchy in which we must vie for money or status, or so that obedience is exacted through a system of rewards and punishments, we can manufacture circumstances in which humans behave in selfish competition with one another. But in the real world, in day-to-day life, this has not been my experience with human nature.

Not long ago a car drove past me as I walked on the sidewalk. The driver had left his briefcase open on the roof of the car and a cascade of papers formed a tail behind him. I was in the midst of crossing a street, but when I got to the other curb, I thought, "I should help that guy." When I turned to start picking up papers I saw a dozen other people with the same idea, men and women in suits and heels, already scrounging around the gutters. By the time the driver got back to us, we had gathered hundreds of papers into nice bundles.

Human beings, of course, can behave selfishly, but from my experience it's the urge to help our fellow humans, altruism, that is far more often the norm, unless we've specifically designed things to pit us against one another. And yes, I've met some broken adults, people whose life experiences have lead them to behave uncaringly, but I've never met a child who will not help me, without my asking, when he understands I need his help. We are designed to help one another, it's how our species has evolved, it's how our species thrives, and we do it until we're taught otherwise.

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Punishment Doesn't Work

I attended Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina. The worst punishment I recall being meted out was compulsory standing in the front of the classroom beside the teacher for some period of time. There were a few kids, mostly boys, who spent more time up there than others. I can see their faces now: ashen or red, downcast eyes, active with anxiety. They felt shame. 

There were a couple boys, however, who spent so much time up there, probably for typical 6-year-old boy goofing off, that they had either completely overcome their shame or were acting as if they had. One guy in particular, Chuck, even looked like he was having fun. He used his shaming punishment as a platform to be even more naughty, mostly by rolling his eyes or doing other small things that made it look like he was having fun. The rest of us knew enough not to laugh, although there was enough unsuppressed snickering that Miss McCutcheon suspected something.

I liked the cut of Chuck's jib. I thought I might like to try the experience and so, one day in a spontaneous blurt of a moment, I did something that I knew would result in the punishment.

I used my moment standing up there beside Miss McCutcheon to roll my eyes and engage in a little comical shrugging, one-upping Chuck, I think. I then proceeded to never stand up there again, a luxury of executive function that, sadly, many of my classmates hadn't yet developed. 

There was a second level of punishment at Meadowfield Elementary, at least if the rumors were to be believed. It was said that Mr. Turner, our principal, had a paddle in his office, one through which he'd drilled holes so he could "swing it faster." It was a topic of much conversation, although I never met anyone who had experienced the paddle first hand. Today, I suspect there was no such paddle, although it was a credible threat because most of us had experienced at least a little corporal punishment at home, some even suffering the pain of "Daddy's belt" or a switch cut from a tree.

I'm sure after posting this I'll learn that there are still some Dickensian schools where children are whipped for their misdemeanors, but for the most part, that particular threat is no longer part of school culture, even if there is still a sizable percentage of parents who spank their children. As I sat working a crossword at the airport last week, I heard a young mother of a girl who appeared to be about 18 months threaten spankings. At one point she even snatched up her little girl for some minor offense and carried her off to the bathroom, where, I'm afraid, a hitting punishment was administered. It sickened me, but the fact that the little girl returned as cheery as she'd left gave me hope that the mother couldn't follow through and was just making a show for the older relatives with whom she was traveling. Still, for the next half hour or so that mother several times warned her girl, "Do we have to go into the bathroom?" an echo of Miss McCutcheon's warning question, "Do you want to be sent to Mr. Turner's office?"

That said, I think it's safe to say that spanking is less prevalent today than it was back in the 1960's, and it's quite rare as an institutional punishment. More common, around here at least, are punishments in which privileges are withheld for "bad behavior," such as having to stay indoors while the others go out for recess or maybe some version of a "time out."

I'm not a fan of punishments of any sort, mainly because they don't work. Or at least they don't work the way we think they do. Yes, since I'm bigger and stronger than a child, I can bully him into doing what I want, but what I'm teaching him, no matter how many times I say "I'm doing this for your own good," is that bigger and stronger people, those with more power, get to tell the weak what to do. Even when children comply in the face of these threats, they aren't doing so because they've seen the wisdom of their ways, but rather because of the external "motivation" of punishment. I want the children I teach to be internally motivated to do the right thing, rather than to simply obey, and you just can't get there through punishment.

While I don't expect that I'll live to see a world in which all punishments have been relegated to the ashcan of history, I'm happy to know that corporal punishment appears to be, too slowly perhaps, falling out of favor. At the same time I feel I've seen an increase in another form of punishment, extreme versions of Miss McChutcheon's methods, that are gaining popularity: shaming. I suspect we've all seen it, parents who post pictures on Facebook of naughty children holding signs announcing their sins or parents who make their children do or wear humiliating things in public as a "consequence" for some behavior or other. I've heard adults chuckle over these kinds of things, but believe me, this is no improvement over spanking. Indeed, this sort shaming punishment can be far, far worse. 

A few days ago a 15 second video showed up online. It showed a young girl who appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old. She's standing in a room looking at the phone camera. She appears to be afraid. The camera then shows the floor where there is a pile of long black hair. A taunting male voice says, "The consequences of getting messed up? Man, you lost all that beautiful hair. Was it worth it?" The girl stares at her hair on the floor. She very quietly says, "No." "How many times did I warn you?" She almost inaudibly says, "Twice." He then says, "Okay," as if he has proved a point. The video ends.

Days later, this girl got out of her grandmother's car and jumped from a freeway overpass to her death.

When I read that heartbreaking story, I remembered Miss McCutcheon's classroom, not my own experience or that of Chuck, but rather the anguished faces of the other children for whom it was indeed shameful to be singled out for a punishment. How awful it must have been for them to be exposed like that in front of everyone for their inability to live up to some sort of arbitrary, adult-imposed behavioral code. Shame is a horrible, painful thing.

No one will ever know how large a role that shaming video played in the young Tacoma girl's suicide, but I don't think anyone can deny that it was a contributing factor, and it's impossible to not at least suspect it was a trigger. The father has since said he didn't intend the video to be uploaded to the internet, that was done by someone else without his knowledge, but shame was clearly his intent, and tragedy was the result.

Apparently, Child Protective Services has been called in, but as sad and angry as this makes me, I wish no additional punishment upon this father, he is already living in a hell of his own creation, an extreme natural consequence.

Punishment doesn't work.

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Are There "Natural Teachers?"

 





People have called me a "natural teacher." I like the sound of it. I even sense the truth of the statement, at least insofar as I can't imagine doing anything else with my days. I hold a degree in journalism, not education. In fact, I've only taken a handful of ed classes. Instead, I've spent thousands of hours working with children of all ages, stretching back to my days as a baseball coach during my teen and early adult years. And yes, it feels natural. It always has.

I had reason recently to reflect on my first day as "head coach" of a team of first and second graders. I was 16-years-old. I'd already, the summer before, served as an assistant coach to a team of preschoolers (which hadn't been baseball so much as a big daily play date with a baseball theme), but this was the first time I was on my own with a team. I was nervous, of course, but only before I'd opened my mouth for the first time. I sent them to run some laps, then we re-convened for some warm up exercises before launching into baseball skills. It was my first 9-5 job, one during which I coached teams of kids from 5-14, boys and girls, and it was glorious. I did it for 4 summers all told: outdoors, all day, playing baseball with kids. It was my first job and, I'm afraid, it ruined me for every "real" job I tried until I landed on my current one.

In a way it saddens me to realize that I wasted the next couple decades figuring out that this is where I belong, playing with children, thinking with children, learning with children. It's not everyone who falls into their perfect niche right from the start, but I was too young and inexperienced, and growing up in a time when early childhood (heck, teaching in general) wasn't considered a "proper" option for a young man. I just couldn't see it. I thought that the sense of joy came from playing baseball all day long, not the kids.

I do, of course, look back over the path I've taken and, to steal from the Grateful Dead, "I see now how everything leads up to this day." All the pieces fell into place, including those dark years during which I worked as a PR flack for corporate interests, to guide me to where I am today. Knowing for certain what you don't want to do is important too, I guess.

I reckon there are a lot of us in this profession who are natural teachers. In fact, I can't think of a single teacher I know personally who doesn't fall into this category. Admittedly, this is could be an aspect of the progressive play-based bubble in which I live. I imagine there may be some of us who just "fell into it," or who somehow felt there was no other choice. Maybe there are even some who are in it for the money. And perhaps there is such thing as a "manufactured" teacher, like the kind the corporate education reformers envision, but I just can't imagine they last for very long in a career that demands your whole self every day.

So that begs the question, what is a natural teacher? It certainly has nothing to do with teaching style, because we're all over the place when it comes to that. Much of what I do in the classroom derives from those years as a coach. There's a lot of, "Come on, everybody!" and "Let's all go check out the workbench!" You know, rallying large contingents of kids into common efforts, teamwork, cooperation. It tends to be loud. I tolerate more rowdiness than many teachers. But I know plenty of natural teachers whose classrooms aren't like this at all. And it's not really about pedagogy either: there are wonderful natural teachers working through all kinds of approaches, methodologies, and techniques, including not-approaches, not-methodologies, and not-techniques. I also don't think it has much to do with the creativity of the activities we choose, our classroom schedules, or any of the other superficial things we fret over on a daily basis.

No, you find natural teachers everywhere, creating all kinds of thinking communities. The common thread, however, the thing that ties us together, is that each of us, in our own way, has learned how to connect with children, both as individuals and as a community.

It begins with warmth. I love the children that pass my way, and in each interaction I try to find a way to express that unconditional acceptance to them. Physically that involves eye contact, smiling, active listening, and gentle touching. Emotionally that means setting my own petty feelings to the side, being with them of course, but not being subject to them, wiping my own emotional slate as clean as humanly possible, leaving a space in which I can understand the feelings of another untainted by my own. And spiritually it is about stillness; being present. Of all the things I do to express warmth, it's this stillness that is most vital. I don't always succeed, but this is what I'm after each time I drop to my knees and get face-to-face with a child.

This is the greatest gift we can give children because it's only when they know they are loved and accepted that they can fully engage with the world around them, without reservation and without fear.

Secondly, a natural teacher, I think, is someone who knows that she is teaching fully formed human beings. I will not be your master, nor will I be your servant. Perhaps at times I will be your guide, just as there will be times when you are mine. It's a stance that says, you are competent and respected; that you have the same rights and, indeed, responsibilities as the rest of us. It's an approach toward children that acknowledges that the most important things children are learning (as opposed to mere academics) are things that we adults continue to learn throughout our lives, and that we have no lock on profundity or expertise.

Thirdly, a natural teacher does not confuse her role with leadership. There are times, of course, when the teacher leads, but more important are those times when we let the children take over, when we understand that our role is to facilitate, to create the forum in which play and thinking takes place, but not to steer or coral or otherwise compel the children in this direction or that. One of the most common responses from people who learn that I'm a preschool teacher is, "I don't know how you do it." This is almost always said by those with managerial type jobs in which they are responsible for teams of adults. They reflect on how hard it is to get adults to do what they want, and imagine it is only that much harder to manage a bunch of little kids. A natural teacher understands that it's not about getting the children to do what she wants, but rather to help them figure out how to do what they want.

And finally, it seems, a natural teacher is one that constantly strives to balance the needs and desires of the many with the needs and desires of the few. For me, this is where my coaching background plays it's most significant role. That this is the work of everyone, all the time, throughout our lives, at least if we believe in self-governance, makes it perhaps the most important thing we do.

Implied in the notion of a "natural teacher," I think, is the idea that we are born this way, but I think that is wrong. Natural teachers are those of us who through our lives encountered people who were able to express warmth to us, who respected us and held us competent, who acknowledged us as equals without bossing or serving us, and helped us see that even as individuals our destiny is always tied to our community of peers.

Natural teachers are the product of natural teachers, those that connect with us and make us taller by letting us stand upon their shoulders.

 

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The Children Take It From There

The bones of young children tend to be quite flexible, and even when they do break, they heal far more quickly than those of adults. 

Their bones are no match for their skin, however, which mends itself astonishingly quickly. 

While bloody owies tend to linger on my flesh for months, theirs often heal overnight.

Their skulls are not fully fused, leaving room for their brains to safely jiggle and swell when they've bumped their heads.

Their teeth replace themselves.

They cry passionately into their pain, unashamed, no concern for what the others might think, an act that not only draws aid, but also, on a basic physiological level, reduces the actual pain.

Both their bodies and memories are short. The former keeps them close to the ground meaning they don't have far fall, while the later makes it possible for them to get right back up again.

We do not encourage risky play at Woodland Park. 

We don't even encourage play for that matter. 

We simply provide a slice of the world: space, a variety of interesting materials, and, of course, other kids.

The children take it from there.

They are designed for this.

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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