"We'll Just Fill It Back Up"

We have a problem with our two level sandpit, a relatively slow motion one of which the adults in our community have been aware since the day it was created, especially since we decided to place the cast iron water pump at the top of the hill. 

When our original truck load of sand was delivered three years ago, it was dumped from the parking lot above, creating a long, steep dune that amply filled the upper level, leaving the larger lower part mostly empty. The original plan, I suppose, was for some of us adults to help move it on downhill. We had arrived at the "work site" with shovels, but upon a moment's reflection we agreed that gravity, water, and playing children would, over time, do the work for us.

Over the past three years, we've watched the upper level act as a feeder to the lower, the former slowly emptying as the latter filled. We had taken to replenishing sand a few dozen bags at a time, emptying them, of course, into the upper level, but it never appeared to make much of a difference. By the time this school year started, the lower level was nearing the top of the rounds of cedar from which we built the sand pit. 

During the past three years, I've had many conversations with the other adults about ideas for creating some sort of conveyor or pulley system that would somehow motivate the children to move the sand uphill as part of their regular play, but we've not yet come up with the right idea. In the meantime, we've occasionally rallied the kids into sessions of filling the wheelbarrow and/or wagons for the purpose of countering erosion, but those have been projects for a day, hardly sufficient for dealing with a lower level that was, as of last week, piled more than a foot higher that that cedar rounds, meaning that a steady flow of sand was now beginning to invade our playhouse and garden areas.

Yuri's dad Bill has served as Woodland Park's repairs and maintenance chief for the past couple years and he and I have had any number of conversations about the situation. We had a work party planned for last weekend and had determined that one of the main tasks was moving a massive amount of sand back uphill. To support this effort, Bill took over the workbench during class time to assemble, with the help of the four and five year olds, a "track" for the wagons that would make hauling the sand uphill a little easier. It was no conveyor or pulley system, but it had the undeniable charm of being a solution that would actually work.

On Saturday, we probably expended, among ourselves, a good 12 adult work hours filling wagons with sand and conveying it back to the top. By the end, the upper level contained a heaping pile of sand that buried the pump's Rubbermaid cistern completely and reduced the most downhill section of the sandpit to a good foot below the tops of the cedars. 

Later that day, when Jonah's mom Larissa told him what we'd done, he said, "We'll just fill it back up." And he's right, of course. And, in fact, as children discovered the change in landscape this week, among their first missions was to fill the new big hole to make a "swimming pool."

Even as we hauled sand uphill, some of the kids were working on filling up the new "swimming pool." That pipe in the middle is the "drain."

Fortunately, on Saturday, Oliver and Mateo, brothers who stopped by on their way to a different park to play, wound up spending a half hour or so watching the adults at work on the weekend, and they had been part of the team that helped Bill construct the track in the first place. It had looked like something they wanted to try so their idea was to reinstall the track on Monday so the kids could continue the project.

So we did.

We're still noodling over a conveyor or pulley system, but in the meantime, we've figured out, for the time being, how we're going to pretend, as humans have always done, that we can "control" the forces of nature. They'll keep filling it up and we'll keep digging it out.

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"Don't Aim For Success"

Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally. ~David Frost

I didn't send my child to school in order that she would one day be successful. I certainly enjoy it, as a father does, when she is successful: those times she comes to me and says, "I'm proud of what I did," the only success that's worth a damn. But that isn't why I drove her to school on that very first day or nor why she puts herself on the bus each morning these days. I've changed my mind about a lot of things during my 18 years as a parent -- in fact, I've changed my mind about most things I thought I knew about being a parent before becoming one -- but this is a feeling that has only grown.

The idea of schools and their lessons that must be learnt by this day or that, their desks and walls and textbooks and grades and lectures and homework, their perverse insistence upon giving the tests at the back end of lessons instead of how experience, the greatest teacher of all, does it, by giving the test first and the lesson after, this all caused my insides to clench up, although I didn't have the knowledge then to put it into words. All I knew is that I didn't at all like the idea of my child spending the first couple decades of her life jumping through hoops for judges who would then tell her whether or not she ought to be proud. It has always been enough for me that she wanted to keep going back.

Education, of course, needn't come from schools and I knew it even as a new parent. I thought a lot about homeschooling or unschooling or spending a few years as a family sailing around the world, all best laid plans for a theoretical daughter. As I got to know the real person who is our child, however, I began to see that she was like her mother in that she genuinely craved the other people, that a small social world wouldn't hold her contentedly for very long, that she would soon outgrow any and every clique I was able to manufacture for her, that her passion for connecting with them would always grow bigger than every social life I attempted to cobble together. She would want, I perceived, especially as she grew older, a larger universe of people in her life than I was constitutionally capable of sustaining. Schools were where most of the kids could be found and I knew by the time she was ready that school was the right place for her. We chose school over the other educational options for social reasons, because that was what she most loved.

For 18 years, I arrived at parent-teacher conferences with only one two-part question: Does she treat her classmates well and do they treat her well? Beyond that, I let her teachers tell me what they want to tell me about how they see her strengths and weaknesses, interesting data points for a parent who still had to make a few decisions on her behalf and who no longer spent most of his days in her company. But more valuable were the subsequent discussions we had with her about those judgments, some of which she agreed with, some she rejected, and others she took under advisement. I've always been impressed by her ability to analyze her teachers assessments, minimizing both praise and criticism when she felt they are undeserved or off target, talking of steps she had already taken or would take when what she heard struck her as true. This is her passion, not the grades and tests, but the figuring out of people, learning from them, and building a life that is full of them.

There have been times over the years when we were tempted to use this passion as a kind of cudgel the way Tiger Mom types do; to ground her, to make her drop her after school Shakespeare group, to take away her guitar, until she could "better focus" on something for which she had no passion at all. But the few times we tried it were very short-lived because it made us feel as if we were cutting off her oxygen. Relationships, acting, music, these are the things that she loves: these are the things in which she excels because of that love. These are the reasons she wants to keep going back.

It has always been enough that she wanted to keep going back. The teachers who helped open our daughter's eyes to new passions -- to literature, to science, to math, to history, to sports, to language, to politics -- have been the ones who knew to do it through her foremost passions for creating relationships, acting, and music. They are the ones who have succeeded in helping her find new passions or to discover her bedrock passions in new and surprising places. 

She came to love volleyball in middle school because her coach understood that being a teammate was far more important than winning, losing, or even athletics themselves. She came to love the poetry of Robert Browning because her teacher was able to show her the music embedded in his verse.  She came to an appreciation for (I won't quite say love) for biology when her teacher stepped out the rigidity of subject matter to lay down some straight-forward older sister style truth about teenage life. She became passionate about politics when her teacher pulled their heads out of text books and got them up in front of the room, on a stage, to actually debate the issues. And, of course, her music and drama teachers just kept setting up challenges and next steps for this motivated girl, trusting that her passion would teach her what she needed to learn, building relationships with her, and fully understanding that their primary job was to keep her wanting to come back.

I don't send my child to school in order that one day she'll be successful, because in the most real sense of all, she already is. She has found things she loves, she keeps finding them at school, and her teachers have discovered how to use her passion to open up more and more of the world to her.  That's why she keeps going back.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

                                         ~ T.S. Eliot

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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The Community We're Creating Together

Last week I wrote about the importance of teachers and kids getting on the same "bandwagon" through the artistic process of creating individual relationships. Since then, I've been reflecting on another level of relationship: the one between children and the work of art -- the community -- we create together as we come to school each day.

By the time the children are four and five, that relationship is primarily the product of their friendships, the rocky love affairs they have with one another, but younger children, those approaching the cusp of figuring out what friendship means, it's largely about developing a concept of "we."

When the two year olds first walk through our doors, they are coming to "school" or "Teacher Tom's school." It's a largely alien place, but after a couple months, as they grow familiar with the space, the expectations, and the routines, they begin to call it "my school." And even if you don't hear those words come from their mouths, you can see the confidence of belonging and even ownership in their body language. They no longer insist that mom, that visceral connection to "my family," remain nearby, many quite literally commanding their parents to "leave now."

By this point in the school year, these kids who are one-by-one turning three, are keeping me on schedule rather than the other way around. Most don't need to be reminded that our day begins by washing our hands. Every day, a handful of children inform me when it's "clean up time." And when I look at the clock on the wall, I see their internal ones are set almost as accurately.  If we try to skip a part of our regular routine, there is a rebellion. Some begin to fuss in anticipation of the story I'm going to read to them, knowing that it signals the end of our day together and they aren't ready to go home.

When we put things away, they know where they belong; they put the toy plates on the kitchen shelf, the costumes go on the racks, the stuffed animals in the basket, the devil duckies in the box, and the play dough in plastic bags so it will be fresh for tomorrow. Sometimes we've moved the furniture around to accommodate our play. When I say, "Let's move it back where it belongs," the children, swarming together, know right where to push it.

Last week, Aza was the first kid outside after eating some snack, his classmates still indoors wrestling with their coats. He usually makes a beeline for the water pump and it looked like he was heading that way when he stopped to notice some planks of wood older kids had scattered on the ground the day before. He identified them as parts of the new playhouse; some of the pieces that allow children to fashion doors, walls, and windows wherever they choose. Before continuing on his way, he took the time to collect those planks one by one and stash them behind the windmill where I've made a habit of tossing the loose ones when not in use. I've never suggested that the children be responsible for this. I've never even suggested the parents do it. It's something I've just done myself as I putter around the place, but here was Aza, interrupting his play to take care of things.

This is what we do. This is our school. This is the community we're creating together.

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Our Pallet Swing

At some point during the December holiday break I read reference to something called a "pallet swing." 

There were no pictures or descriptions, but the idea for creating one was planted in those two words. 

I'm calling our pallet the "sharing swing" because unlike conventional swings there's room for several kids at a time.

We had just acquired a fresh new heat treated pallet and rope is plentiful around our place, so I rigged one up.

The children have been experimenting on how to use their bodies to get the pallet swing in motion.

A couple of the kids have really figured it out!

Yes, we still have swings at Woodland Park, a nice set -- two traditional single seats and a trapeze bar -- that came with the new place when we moved in three and half years ago. 

It's even more challenging when you need to work with two or three of your friends, in unison, to get the swing moving .

It's really a pity that so many playgrounds and schools are removing swings in the name of "safety." 

If everyone stands and cooperates, we've found we can get up to six kids on the swing at once.

Having lived with swings on an often crowded space for awhile, I've seen a few kids get knocked down, or topple from their seat, but we, as a community, have not judged them to be overly hazardous except, perhaps, when an adult is pushing a child higher than she would otherwise be able to go on her own. Adult pushing is something I discourage, preferring instead to see children pushing one another.

When you don't want to stand, the only way to get moving is to persuade a friend to help.

The pallet swing isn't the first alternative swing we've dangled from the crossbar. We've hung tire swings, rope swings, rope ladder swings, teeter swings, long swings and other temporary installations. 

This has become the most popular use of the pallet swing: twisting it up, climbing on, and letting it go.

It's important to hold on!

With each new thing, we've observed the same pattern of children cautiously exploring, alone and together, until they figure out what it and they can do, learning how to keep themselves safe by actually practicing safety.

For this "world record" attempt, adult help was solicited.

She decided she felt safer sitting down.

Wheeee!

This is infinitely more effective than the societal norm of adults scolding, repeatedly, "be careful," or worse, simply removing the swing set. No one learns anything from that.

I don't call any of this "risky play." I call it "safety play," because that's what they're doing: learning to keep themselves and their friends safe, while having a grand time.

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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