Learning How I Learn

The way most of our day works, children move freely about the place, engaging with the activities, objects, and people they find there. As a preschooler, my own child was a generalist, by which I mean she made a point of spending at least some time at each station each day, trying her hand at the art, sensory, construction, and other activities her teacher prepared for her. She wasn't always drawn to the activities per se, but rather the people, both the parent-teachers and her classmates. At the end of the day, at least, that's what we wound up talking about on the way home, the people.

Other children prefer to remain in the center of one activity or another for as long as our schedule allows. That might mean an hour of scooping and pouring water or playing princesses or driving cars on roads made from blocks. Parents sometimes worry about these kids, wondering when they are going to finally "move on." I hear them sometimes urging, "Don't you want to try the art project? It looks fun!" or "I see fresh, pink play dough over there." When these parents bring their concerns to me, I tell them that their child is just "going deep," which is, after all, what they are doing, mastering an environment or process.

There is no right or wrong way to do this, of course, and most, as they get older, tend to find more of a balance, perhaps not engaging with everything, but at least flowing from one thing to the next if only to remain close to particular friends.

And some kids come in knowing their passion, more or less demanding their needs be met.

I start each year by telling parents that I will not bring letters or numbers into the classroom, except as they occur incidentally, unless and until the children bring them in. A few years ago, a two-year-old boy did exactly that, entering the classroom in search of "the A-B-C's." Each morning, the first words out of his mouth, even before greeting me, were, "Where are A-B-C's?" I accommodated, of course, cycling through our alphabet blocks, alphabet cookie cutters, alphabet puzzles. As the year went on, I would sometimes "forget" the A-B-C's which caused him to hunt for them in books or packaging or by making them himself with pencils or play dough.

This year, I have a boy who is all about trains in much the same way, the difference being that he doesn't bother asking me. Instead, he brings trains into everything he does no matter what I do. He paints trains, he tells stories about trains, he chugs around outdoors playing engine. But mostly, I find him lining things up, making trains from whatever material comes to hand. I've seen book trains and bear trains and rock trains and trains made from fire trucks with their ladders lined up as tracks. Anything that can be sequenced, becomes a train or a train station or a train engineer.

Traditional schools, those that rely upon adults telling children what to learn and when to learn, give children very little choice in how they learn, starting from the false assumption that everyone is a generalist in search of a broad body of more superficial knowledge. This is particularly hard on children who instinctively "go deep." On the other hand, when the children themselves are in charge of what and when to learn, we take advantage of each child's intuitive knowledge of how they best learn.

In the end, learning how to learn, learning how I learn, is probably the most important "academic" knowledge there is. And the only way to learn this is through the freedom to figure it out.

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Public Relations Hacks

From a purely public relations point of view, the supporters of federally mandated Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and their attendant emphasis on high stakes standardized testing are losing in a landslide. Last week, a Fairleigh Dickenson University poll was released showing that only 17 percent of Americans approve of the standards while a full 40 percent disapprove, which is the category into which I fall.

Last week, fake news host John Oliver of Last Week Tonight spent 18 minutes on a well-researched and hilarious take down of high stakes testing. If you've not seen it, it's worth it:

The grassroots movement to opt out of high stakes standardized testing is significant and growing. The billionaire-funded corporate reform initiative is fighting back. Unfortunately for them, they're fighting, instead of listening. They see this as a public relations battle, rather than an honest disagreement about how we should be educating our children. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been saber rattling, trying, I guess, to show up as a strong leader, encouraging the troops, who are out in force right now to decry Mr. Oliver's viral rant, especially at Education Post, which appears to primarily publish material from corporate reform associated writers. If you must, here are a couple pieces, here and here, in which the writers outrageously suggest that those of us who stand against turning our schools into testing factories where our children labor for the profit of companies like Pearson Education are, in fact, elitist racists.

If you do click through, please make sure to look at the comments. I particularly enjoy that they are overwhelmingly from readers who disagree with the authors. It's interesting how both Education Post writers attempt to engage disagreement in the comments by first pointing out an area of agreement before disagreeing. I spent many years in public relations doing PR hack work: this is classic PR hack work.

Please take a moment to read Jesse Hagopian's response (which has been picked up by the Washington Post) to those accusing us of, if not racism, at least race and class insensitivity.

The ever-insightful Anthony Cody does an excellent job of responding directly to the paid corporate shills in a concise response over on his blog Living in Dialog, asking the simple question:

We have ruled our school system by the accountability system chosen by these reformers now since 2002. And where can they point to school systems that have been greatly improved?

Their answer, of course, has to be PR hack work, because the "accountability" regime, after more than a decade, has failed to budge the needle. Indeed, there is no evidence whatsoever that the billions spent so far on these corporate reform initiatives have done anything other than to throw our public schools in to disarray, making children, parents, and teachers miserable, and this is particularly true of children from poor and minority backgrounds over whom they pretend to wring their hands.

No, as Oliver points out, the only ones benefiting from the corporate reform drive are for-profit corporations and the army of PR hack workers they have hired to support them. Or as Cody writes:

(Billionaire) Eli Broad looked around and saw that there were hundreds of bloggers that are discrediting HIS project, and they seemed to have some strategy, they even met together in conferences. So thank goodness he had the funds available to hire people (like those at Education Post) to be his friends, and defend him and his fellow billionaires. I guess that is why rich people never have to be lonely for long, so long as they can find people willing to be their friends in exchange for some of their money.

With only a 17 percent approval rating and thousands of families opting out of their high stakes standardized tests and now apparently losing such opinion-leaders as John Oliver, the reformers must be feeling a bit desperate. Not long ago corporate reform poster-child Michelle Rhee was on the cover of Time magazine. Now she is responsible for a struggling anti-teachers union PR hack outfit called StudentsFirst. It wasn't so long ago that the movie Waiting for Superman debuted, a slick PR hack job that condemned public education as a failure, while holding up the corporate reformers as visionaries. Now we've learned that the successes touted in the movie were houses of straw, blown away by real world wolves when the movie cameras looked away.

They seem to think it's a PR problem. It's not a PR problem and they won't fix it with PR hack work no matter how many billions they spend. Students, parents, and teachers from all walks of life and from across the political spectrum are opting out because it is the only option they've left us. From the beginning they have designed their federal education policies to be all-or-nothing mandates with no opportunity for input from those most impacted. The only path they've left us is civil disobedience so that's the path we're taking.

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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Cameras And Photography

Last fall, I mentioned that we had purchased a pair of super tough, waterproof, shock-proof, freeze-proof cameras for use by the kids. The idea was to see what would happen if young children were given the chance to use these tools without adults hovering over them, worried they would break them. It was a two part experiment: the first being to see if these cameras really could stand up to a year in a play-based preschool, with the second being to see what the kids photograph if left to their own devices.

Our Panasonic Lumix (DMC-TS4) cameras have lived up to the hype. Nine months later, both are still in perfect working order, despite having been repeatedly dropped on concrete, down stairs, and from the branches of trees. They are still working like new despite having been lost outdoors for more than a week in the midst of winter, plunged underwater, and otherwise abused. 

We now have a rather large collection of photos, which I upload at the end of each day onto a computer donated by one of our families, which we use exclusively for this purpose, letting them run as a slideshow for the children and parents to view.

I would say that most of the photos the children have taken this year have been of the "accidental" variety, meaning that they are the result of kids just goofing around while figuring out how the cameras work. Whereas, I'm from the simple point-and-shoot school of classroom photography, the kids wound up playing around with all the various settings and features, not usually knowing what they were doing, snapping dozens of shots of their own toes and thumbs, the backs of heads, and such super close ups that they are a study in black. One of the most common comments about young children and technology is something along the lines of, "My two-year-old knows more about my smart phone than I do." This is why: they just play with it, unafraid of breaking it, deleting things, or wracking up huge bills, the way many of us might.

Of the intentional photos, the first thing that jumps out at me is how much more prominently we adults feature in the children's photography than the regular photo streams that emerge from our school. Obviously, adults tend to focus on the children and what they're doing, but these photos of moms and dads serving as parent-teachers in partnership with children are probably a much more accurate photographic representation of what our school is all about. 

More than one child has spent a classroom session documenting every square inch of his mother, her toes and ankles, the downy hairs on the back of her neck, the curve of her back, her ears, nose and fingers, every detail lovingly documented. It's rather touching to come across these impromptu and candid photo sessions.

Of course, that also brings me to one of the aspects of the experiment that I was concerned about going in: the kids are liable to take less than flattering, sometimes even embarrassing, photos. These intimate photo sessions, for instance, often include some images that might not pass Facebook's community standards. They are loving, yes, but also a bit revealing. These, I show only to the "model," allowing her to keep or delete them according to her own sense of modesty. And, of course, there have been a few sessions in which one or more kids skulked around the place gigglingly documenting everyone's butts, cracks, tattoos, underpants reveals, and all. After we've had our laugh, those get deleted as well.

That said, of the thousands of images, there are hundreds of "keepers," mostly portraits of friends and family that deserve to be preserved, but recently, I suppose because the cameras have now been with us long enough that they are not "special," I've been noticing more of what I would call "artistic" efforts. Last week, for instance, one of our boys, normally engaged in the center of activity and typically, then, the subject of photos, spent a day on the sidelines, being intentional about his efforts. Watching him, it was like watching a professional at work, carefully capturing moments, arranging things, taking and re-taking the same or similar images. I even heard him ask a friend to move because, "You're blocking the light."

The photos illustrating this post are some of his work.

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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Not Because I Told Them So

Disobedience is not an issue if obedience is not the goal. ~Daron Quinlan

As I wrote yesterday, I have never been interested in obedient children. They tend to either grow into rebellious teens who are a danger to themselves as they try to "make up for" all that time spent living under a regimen of artificially repressed urges, or perhaps worse, obedient adults who are a danger to the rest of us.

This is why the children at Woodland park make their own rules. This is why we adhere in to the law of natural consequences. This is why we strive to avoid bossing the children around with directives like, "Sit here," or "Put the blocks away." This is why I actively teach children to question authority and why we celebrate when they engage in civil disobedience.

I have no patience for people who justify their authoritarian approach to children by arguing that it works. If I'm bigger and stronger than you, if I have more power than you, if I have more money than you, I can use that strength, power or money to force you into doing my bidding no matter how hard you fight back. Of course it works if the goal is mere obedience. It's a lazy, short-term, adversarial approach, one that will ultimately backfire, but sure, in the immediate moment threats and violence shut the kid up and make him submissive.

What children learn from authoritarian parenting and teaching is that might makes right. What they learn is to follow leaders, not because they are doing something great, but because they can punish you if you don't. What they learn is that someone else is responsible for their behavior and decisions, that the powerful know best, and that knowing "their place" is their highest calling.

Adults who have internalized these messages make wonderful cubicle and factory employees. They are reliable votes for one political party or another. They are easy prey for cults and crazies. And when they do find themselves with an upper hand over someone else, like a child, they are far more likely to wield that authority abusively because that's what, in their experience, the powerful do.

As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to give away whatever power is implied by that title, to let the children be in charge of their own learning, of their own bodies, of their own small society. I want them to make the "right" decisions, not because I've told them so, but because they have learned through experience that it is the right decision. I want them to know that they are always responsible for their own behavior. I want them to know that their feelings, their thoughts, and their opinions are just as important as anyone else's.

I want them to know, most of all, that this is true even for people who are stronger, more powerful or wealthier. I want them to grow to be adults who make their own decisions and will not be pushed around.

And yes, it's often more work for the loving adults in a child's life, but man, it's worth it.

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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That's The Way It Should Be

Over the weekend, our family adopted a new puppy who we named Stella. Her paperwork says she's a one-year-old stray, probably a chow-golden or maybe chow-shepard mix. So far she's been an incredibly easy-going companion, not showing any signs that she was traumatized or abused. She must have spent some time with a caring person because she seems to be completely house trained and understood the "sit" command right away. In the past 36 hours, we've learned that she loves other dogs, is friendly to people, mouths us gingerly, and tends to jump up a little, but very gently, sort of standing on her hind legs waiting for permission to put her paws on you, and even then it's a light touch. She drops right to the ground if you say, "Off." She likes to cuddle in the bed with my wife, which thrills them both, but has chosen to spend her first two nights sleeping her dog bed, and hasn't been waking us early. 

Stella is here to fill the empty place that has been left during the past year by the passing of our standard poodle Athena and, more recently, her golden retriever sister Waffle. Those two dogs were in our lives to fill the space left by our chow chow Vincent.

As brand new dog people, we took training seriously. Vincent and I took numerous classes and we drilled daily. It was a frustrating experience for me in many ways because neither of us were really that into obedience. He loved me, but chows have a well-deserved reputation for being cat-like in their aversion for being told what to do. Sure, he sometimes attempted to please me, for instance sitting when I called "Come," as if to say, I'd rather not do that, but how about this? He could be motivated by treats, but despite our best efforts, he just never got to the point that he responded consistently to commands. 

Vincent was an alert dog, who liked other people in small doses. When we had house guests he would greet them politely, then, after about an hour, camp out near the front door as if to say, "This is the way out." Taking a walk with him required zen-like patience: if left entirely to his own devices he would take a half hour to go a block, stopping to sniff every square inch of ground, often backtracking, and if it was warm out he would sometimes just drop to the ground, panting, and have to be carried home. He once ran away (i.e., wandered off) and we found him a day later sleeping on our next door neighbor's back porch as if he was just waiting for us to find him. He didn't get the point of chasing balls, loved snow, hated water, and assumed the role of watchdog wherever we went. In other words, he was a character, a dog unlike any other, a member of our family.

Athena, like most standards, was a very smart dog. We started by trying to train her in the conventional way, but it didn't seem necessary. Within a few weeks, she was responding to regular conversation and I found myself talking to her the way one talks to a two or three-year-old. If Vincent had left me feeling like an inept dog trainer, Athena made me feel like a genius: she pretty much did whatever I wanted with very little fuss, cooperating more than obeying. She was super flirty with people, but something of a smart alec with other dogs, often teasing them until they chased her. In other words, she was a character, a dog unlike any other, a member of our family.

Waffle was a classic canine pleaser, not always "behaving," but always in favor of behaving. She was so big and lurch-y that we felt compelled to get her well-trained, a project that just never really happened the way one might have liked despite our best efforts. And while she often struggled to understand what we wanted from her, once she figured it out, she never forgot. On the other hand, she was a master communicator. Unlike our previous dogs who would often try to let us know what they wanted by such subtleties like staring at us pointedly, if Waffle wanted something, she would get our attention by hitting us with her paw or nose. If we didn't respond, she would do it again and again and again, even if we growled at her to stop, until we stood up. Then she would run to the door or the water dish or wherever, making her desires crystal clear. I often imagined her thinking, "I love these people, but man can they be dense."

As I've contemplated the advent of Stella, the whole idea of employing the classic obedience techniques doesn't seem like that high of a priority. Yes, we will teach her to be safe in the city, to come when called, to treat our non-dog guests with decent manners, and she already knows how to sit, but it's not something that motivates me. I really have no interest in a dog that does everything I want it to do, to obey, just has I have no interest in children that do everything I want them to do. What motivates me is helping others achieve their potential, to become the best them they can be, and while that may require cooperation, it doesn't require obedience. Obedience comes from commands: cooperation comes through connection.

So what I'll be doing with Stella is what I do with the kids, working on creating our relationship, loving her, and helping her become herself. She will not obey, but, like every dog I've ever lived with, she will be ready to agree, to cooperate, and that's the way it should be.

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 Core Of Who We Are

During the course of much of my adult life, I would have answered, "I'm a competitive person." I grew up with a younger brother and we were, much of the time, quite competitive. I played all kinds of sports throughout my youth and reveled in the competition. I loved nothing more than to have the highest score on a test.  I still enjoy winning at board games, cards, and even make competitive games out of routine activities. Up until quite recently, I regularly defeated teenagers at public basketball courts in one-on-one pick up games, I enjoy the back and forth of political debate, and strive to catch up to, then re-pass, cyclists who pass me. But I no longer answer, "I'm a competitive person."

A two-track slot car set up might at first appear to invite a classic invitation to compete.

Although I still considered myself competitive, playing both baseball and soccer, my transformation began when I hit the University of Oregon campus as a freshman thinking, "never again," never again would I allow myself to be sucked into the kind of icky social competition in which I'd become mired during high school. You know what kind I'm talking about; it's that rule-less competition in which you must constantly worry about being at the right party, hanging with the right people, dating the right girls, and wearing the right clothes. I'd been reasonably successful at this competition for coolness, I suppose, although I never enjoyed the satisfaction of success to counterbalance the heartbreak of losing, because winning in this sort of game has no definition, the rules are in constant flux, and there is never a moment when you put your hand on your worthy opponent's shoulder to say, "Good game." I was never able to get my mind around that kind of competition and so made a conscious decision to not participate. 

This was 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president with his message of free market competition. I was "all in" at the time, still considering myself a competitive person. I figured this brave new social Darwinistic vision for America would especially benefit me, having honed my competitive nature on the field and pitch, as well as in the grade-on-a-curve classroom. I'd read my Ayn Rand, a little Milton Friedman, and my 18-year-old self listened to the things the new president said, re-defining democratic freedom to mean the freedom of enterprise, worthiness as a measure of how much money one could make, and fairness as a new social contract in which we were going to let the invisible hand serve as umpire.

The way the children used it in our preschool classroom, however, it was an exercise

in turn taking, sharing, and cooperation.

Back then, competition was defended as a manifestly good thing, a character builder, an important part of growing up. It's how we learned about winning and losing, discipline, teamwork, and a certain type of focused fierceness. This was the common knowledge and for the most part I agreed, although my support was shaded by the knowledge that competition only worked for me when it had clearly defined rules (like in sports, board games, or this apparently tidy economic model of supply side Reagan-omics), when those who lost were not labeled as "losers," and when the people involved could, after the dust had settled, shake hands and thank one another for the effort.

Today, most developmental experts (and by that I mean those who base their views on research rather than nostalgia) turn a skeptical eye toward competition, at least for children under 10 or 11, especially when adults place too much emphasis on winning. There is still plenty of research out there that points to the benefits of competition for older children, such as learning about abilities and limitations, setting goals, handling loss, developing skills, working together, and enhancing popularity, indicating that organized competition with clearly defined rules, an emphasis on civility, and a concentration on best-efforts over winning, makes it beneficial for a certain type of child. But it also must be emphasized that competition is not the only, or even the best, way to learn these things. And there are always the potential pitfalls of competition, like physical and emotional injury, the humiliation of losing, the ethic of winning at all costs, the undermining of self-confidence, and the emergence of hostility and aggression.

We had to concentrate on the physics of the action and strategize in order to decide

where we were going to position those little yellow guard rails to help keep our

cars on the track.

So even while I maintain a fondness for competition, and still engage in it, we try to keep it out of the preschool classroom as developmentally inappropriate. As children get older, and competition becomes somewhat more appropriate (again, for some, but not necessarily all kids, and in limited doses) it remains important that it not devolve into a kind of free-for-all. Rules still must be clear and strictly enforced to ensure fairness, civility and sportsmanship still must be maintained, and effort still must be emphasized over winning (process over product). This is what I would call "healthy competition," a term that Alfie Kohn calls an oxymoron. (In fact, Kohn makes a strong case against competition altogether, both in this essay to which I've linked and in his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition.)

Our Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll talks a lot about healthy competition, how he wants his players to prove themselves on the field; may the better man win. I have no doubt that these young men compete both honorably and fiercely in practices for their "job," then again on Sundays as part of a team competing against an opponent. These are cream of the crop athletes, guys who've already learned lots of lessons about hard work, setting goals, and handling loss. At the end of the game you see them, helmets off hugging their opponents, smiling, chatting, thanking, congratulating, making plans to meet later for a drink.  There are, I'm sure, many unhealthy aspects of this professional competition as well, but mostly it works because rules are followed and sportsmanship is valued. Winning is important to these guys because, well, it's sports, but I assure you that none of them would be out there without having strong internal motivation that drives them to be their very best.

We fiddled around with the electronics to figure out how the system worked.

I'll tell you, however, that from where I sit, it seems that healthy competition in our society is more the exception than the rule. The Reagan Revolution has turned into little more than a bare-knuckled political and economic brawl, in which "survival of the fittest" is achieved by any means possible, rule-lessness (deregulation) is the goal, selfishness is a virtue, and civility is for losers. Corporations have become places in which human beings are merely another resource, in which tricking grandma Millie out of her retirement savings is rewarded, and the common good is not even an afterthought in their unhampered pursuit of profit. Government is a place of partisan stalemate, in which the "winners" get whatever they want at the expense of the "losers," and so-call leaders let shouts of "Let them die!" pass without comment while the audience cheers.

This isn't just unhealthy competition, it's a full-on cancer. It rewards viciousness and punishes kindness. It's war. Competition is a very shaky, unreliable, even evil, foundation upon which to organize a society. 

We could never have played with this toy if competition had been our guiding

principle. But with cooperation, teamwork, strategy, and compassion for our

friends, we were able to make it work.

Of course, it's not possible to eliminate competition from our society entirely, nor should we seek to. Like it or not, it's a part of human nature and like most of the things that make us human, it's a two-sided coin. Unfettered competition is without a doubt the maw-like gateway to the dark side. Competition with rules, however, designed to serve the common good, competition on a level playing field, competition that embraces fairness, competition that honors sportsmanship, can and does elevate humanity.

But competition, like NFL football, is really just a sideshow in the real course of human progress. An economy or government based upon Randian competition will inevitably kill its host, but only after years of suffering. We must find a way to turn this corner as a society. We must find a way to push back this cancerous revolution and replace it with the certain values of the common good, cooperation, teamwork, sociability, empathy, mercy, and love. These are the real American values: not this Johnny-come-lately fantasy of every man for himself competition.

I'm not a competitive person, but I can appreciate a little one-on-one basketball every now and then, if only for the exercise, to test my skills against those of another, and to prove to myself I haven't lost it. And if I sent those teenagers home with stories about the old man who beat them . . . Oh, who am I kidding, they never admitted it. But in the end it's only something I do as a pastime: it's not important. It's not the core of who I am. It ought not be the core of who we are.

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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