What A Teacher Does

Yesterday, Cole's grandfather Dick arrived at school with a bag full of caterpillars, lady bug larva, and a praying mantis egg sac. It's something he has done for the school for a number of years now, and for which we're all incredibly grateful.

I then did something I rarely do, as both our 2's and 4-5's classes sat down for circle time: I showed them the "baby" insects and briefly walked them through the major stages of the lifecycle we were going to witness play out over the course of the next few weeks. In the same way that Dick is motivated by his own enthusiasm to purchase these science "kits," I was motivated by my own enthusiasm, one that was sparked when I had the chance a few summers back to "supervise" three generations of ladybugs that had taken up residence on sunflowers I was tending on the balcony of my apartment.

When I tell people I'm a teacher, I think most of them assume that this is the sort of thing I spend my day doing, instructing children on "subjects" according to some pre-determined curriculum. After all, that is both the predominate denotative and connotative definition of the word "teacher." Reflecting on yesterday, I'm not really sure why I even handled the arrival of the insects the way I did. Normally, I would have simply showed them to the kids, said, "These are/is caterpillars/larva/an egg sac," making a simple informative statement, then leaving a silence for the children to fill with either questions or their own information. And the older kids in particular, as a community, already know the basics of what I presented. I guess I can only blame my enthusiasm, which, I think is a forgivable motivation for resorting to the usually weak tea of direct instruction.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I should stop calling myself a "teacher." I mean, if the goal of language is to communicate, the word, by and large, doesn't convey for most people an accurate idea of what it is I do. Most of my classroom day (as opposed to time spent in preparation for my classroom day) is spent in observing, making simple informational statements about the present, and leaving silent spaces for the children to do their own talking, thinking, and doing. I spend some time every day in helping children work through their conflicts and listening as they share their feelings. I keep track of our schedule. I have an eye out for hazards that I perceive to represent undue danger. I listen for violations of our rules and remind children when they have forgotten the agreements they have made with their classmates. Sometimes I even play with the children, but rarely do I engage in direct instruction which is what stands at the core of what most people understand to be the role of the teacher. 

I supposed I should also add, that I never test the children, which has sadly and increasingly become another aspect of the definition of the word "teacher."

Still, I think I'll stick with the word, even if it doesn't always mean to others what it means to me. The alternatives -- "facilitator," "guide," "games master," "coach" -- convey no more, and probably even less of the essence of what I spend my days doing than does "teacher." Those of us who work in evidence-based state-of-the-art play-based schools are part of a profession that has no true title. Perhaps someday we'll find a word to place before the real definition of what we do: "adults who spend their days hanging out with, listening to, and trying to understand and help children as they figure out their world."

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How The World Could Work

The scene appeared right before me, fully formed.

D, a four-year-old boy, and C, a four-year-old girl, were there at my knees struggling over a metal coffee pot that lives on our playground. There were no words being spoken, just tugging and fierce expressions.

When these children were two-year-olds, I would have taken hold of the coffee pot myself, holding it in place, not allowing either one to seize control of it from the other, but I've been teaching these kids for awhile. Instead, I took hold of it symbolically by placing two fingers on it. Both retained their hold on the pot, but were no longer pulling.

These stunning pieces by artist Ellen Forney can be found at the new Capitol Hill light rail station in Seattle

I said, "You both want that pot."

"I had it first."

"I need it."

They were looking at one another has they made their cases, although they were responding to me. I waited for several seconds and when it became apparent that neither of them had anything more to say, I echoed the words I had heard: "D said he had it first and C said she needed it."

"I'm using it."

"I want to use it."

"But I was using it first."

"I want to use it to make coffee."

My fingers were no longer on the coffee pot. There was some gentle tugging with each turn in the argument, more by way of being persuasive, I thought, than any real effort to wrest control of it.

D then said, firmly, "I had it first."

C mirrored his firmness, "But I need it."

A, a classmate, had been watching from the start. She stepped in authoritatively, "C, I think you should give it to him because he had it first. Then you can use it later."

The two stood holding the coffee pot between them for a moment before C said, "Oh, okay." She released her grip and walked to the playhouse. D took the pot to the garden where he dipped it into a bucket of water, filling it, then used it to water the peas we had recently planted. He then took it to the playhouse and gave it to C.

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Competition And Enmity: Cooperation And Friendship

I've just arrived home from China where I took part in an Association of China and Mongolian International Schools early childhood education conference hosted by the Nanjing International School.

While there, I gave a keynote address, ran two formal workshops, and one informal one. For the past several years, while illustrating the abject inability of our political leadership to understand the true purpose and meaning of education, I've been quoting President Obama: "We need to out-educate the Chinese." When I came to that place in my presentation, I paused for a moment, suddenly thinking how that would sound coming from an American speaking in China. I almost didn't say it, then did. North American, Australian and European teachers have usually responded with a scoffing chuckle and I was relieved that this group of teachers did as well, although I was aware of my own deep discomfort speaking this aloud to an audience that not only teaches many Chinese children, but also included in their number many Chinese nationals. I expect some of them felt a similar discomfort.

I typically follow up the Obama quote with something like, "It's as if they think of education as a competition," then go on to explain how I don't see it that way; how, indeed, it is a cruelty to our children to frame education in those terms, but I was aware this time of something far more insidious. It's not just that our political leaders seem to only think of education in economic terms (e.g., those mythological "jobs of tomorrow"), but that they persist in portraying the citizens of nations like China as rivals, if not outright enemies. 

On the flight home today (yesterday?) I watched the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I consider this to be one of the greatest movies ever made and as I watched the American generals obsess over those "commies" and "Russkies," the manufactured enemies that stood in the background of my own childhood, I couldn't help but compare that to the current American attitude of education as a kind of World War being fought, as all wars are, by children. This one, I presume is a war of brains rather than bombs, but, you know, it's far too easy for one thing to lead to another.

The truth is that you cannot teach children to be competitive and at the same time pretend you are educating them. An educated mind, a truly educated mind, will always recognize the destructiveness and futility of competition. Competition and war are the products of indoctrination, not education. An educated citizen is one who stands above indoctrination, who thinks critically, who thinks for himself; an educated citizen is one who asks questions and questions authority whenever and wherever it ceases to make sense to him; an educated citizen is one who speaks out even when those around him disagree; and an educated citizen is one who knows that he contributes to society in ways far beyond the mere economic. But most importantly, a well-educated person understands that a world of peace and prosperity emerges not from competition and enmity, but from cooperation and friendship.

The true enemies of humanity are not those upon whom our leaders attempt to hang that label, but rather, in fact, the very ones who persist in hanging those labels at all.

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Just Do What You Love

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, why she puts herself on the bus when she got older, nor why she gets up at the crack of dawn today to be on time for her college courses. I've changed my mind about a lot of things during my 19 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 (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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What Swings Are For

I worry that I represent the last of a dying breed: a child of the 60's and 70's, the end of what Peter Gray refers to as the "golden age of childhood play."

We were the ones who had television, but whose mothers, when wanting to get us out from underfoot would open the front door and shoo us outdoors where we played for hours, unsupervised, with other children and few toys. The limits to our roaming expanded as we aged until we would spend our days at the far ends of where our bicycles would take us.

This was not the world of the children of the 80's and after, people who today are having all the babies. I worry that they will never know what childhood could be like. Oh sure, there are places that still look a bit like this, but for the most part a mother who did what our mothers did would have Child Protective Services on her doorstep within hours. I'm not here today to argue about whether the world is really more dangerous than it used to be or if it just seems that way because of the fear-mongering of a mass media that thrives on the sensational. And I'm not here today to debate the very real dangers represented by the screen-based technology that has come to replace playing outdoors, unsupervised, with friends, few toys, and lots of time.

Today, I'm simply here to argue for the return of swings. They're being removed from playgrounds at an alarming rate, right across the country, under the irrational notion that they are unduly dangerous.

Swings are for flying.

Swings are for taking risks.

Swings are for hanging around.

Swings are for working together.

Swings are for invention.

Swings are for challenging ourselves.

Swings are for sharing.

Swings are for being alone.

Swings are for looking at the sky.

Swings are for being in the sky.

Swings are for experimenting.

Swings are for playing. Without swings, the world is lesser.

Next time we will discuss what concrete is for . . .

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 Least I Can Do

If you leave a hot cup of coffee on the table it will eventually cool until it is the same temperature as the surrounding room. As long as the room and that cup of coffee are left alone, the coffee will never spontaneously re-heat. It's the second law of thermodynamics at work:

(A)lso known as the law of increasing entropy or the "arrow of time." Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses . . . as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called "thermodynamic equilibrium," in which energy is uniformly distributed.

This is one of the bedrock concepts in physics and I've been thinking about it lately having recently read, and re-read, this Quanta Magazine article on the work of MIT physicist Jeremy England, who has derived a mathematical formula based upon the second law of thermodynamics that explains the age old question of why life exists. And while it's a new theory that's yet to be put through the rigors of review and debate, I'm convinced he's correct, not because I'm a scientist or a mathematician capable of proving his theory, but because I'm a regular guy who has long assumed that given the infinite nature of existence, life is not just inevitable put irrepressibly abundant in our universe. There is no way that we are all alone and now there is math to prove it.

As I understand it, the basic idea is that life is simply more efficient at dispersing energy than non-life, therefore whenever clumps of atoms are surrounded by a "bath" like an atmosphere or ocean life will emerge.

Another aspect of England's formula is that it seems to suggest that "replication," the fundamental characteristic that defines life, is also a likely outcome. It just makes sense because if you can replicate yourself you can disperse even more energy, which is what the arrow of time is all about.

I've just returned from the Play Empowers Pep Rally in Maryland, where a couple hundred early childhood educators got together and did not talk about literacy. We did not talk about math. We did not talk about preparing children for kindergarten or taking tests or college or careers. No, we talked about children, we talked about childhood, and mostly we talked about play. Not long ago I came back from the Play Iceland conference where early childhood educators from Europe and North America talked about children, childhood, and mostly about play. I've attended conferences in Australia and Canada and Greece where we talked about children, childhood, and mostly about play.

There is a lot of energy out there, all around the world, about play. We are thoughtful, passionate, loving professionals, people who are not driven by money, fame or power, but genuinely driven by a sense of urgency and even outrage at what is happening to childhood, not just in the US, but around the world. As Dan Hodgins said at our pep rally, "I'm worried." As he also said, "Let's try to not put a lot of energy into what we can't do."

Michael Leeman of the Roseville Community Preschool, who I met for the first time over the weekend, played this joke on me.

Our play-based schools are evidence-based state-of-the-art schools. This is a truth that cannot be spoken about the rote-based, top-down learning that is increasingly coming to dominate "traditional" schools, schools that function based more on habit and the pursuit of a greasy buck than anything else. As I listen to my colleagues tell me about the lengths to which they often must go to meet "standards" while still giving children a chance to play, I'm inspired by their commitment and strength. Good god, it must be hard to have to constantly justify something so manifestly good and necessary as play.

The "bath" in which they exist is so cold and there are not always other hot atoms with which to clump.

It's an imperfect metaphor, I know, but each time we get together like this, we re-heat and re-energize ourselves. It doesn't happen spontaneously, we need one another: we need these pep rallies, these places where we remind ourselves that we are not alone and that those of us who no longer dwell in a cold bath must do our part to inspire and support those who are doing the truly difficult work of holding up the banner of childhood and play in places where childhood and play still must be defended. If they can do that, certainly it's incumbent on me to disperse my energy in their direction, because they are the leaders right now, the vanguard, the folks who are making play happen within the cracks and crevices despite, not because of, the official curricula of their schools.

During our final session of the conference we spent our time sharing what we had learned and what we can do as we disperse back into the the world. Voices shouted, quivered, and quaked, just as they did at the end of the Play Iceland conference, just as they do at the end of every place I've been where play and childhood have been discussed. We declare to one another, This is what I'm going to do! then take that energy back to our colder baths in which we disperse it, raising the average temperature each time we do.

Probably the most personally gratifying part of this and every conference are the individuals who come to me with stories from their cold baths, telling of their victories within the cracks, their successes in gaining an extra hour of playground time for the kids, of getting rid of worksheets, of putting limits on homework, or even of convincing a single skeptical parent that her child is better served by time spent learning to get along, rather than ciphering out yet another developmentally inappropriate math equation. And then they thank me, which is both satisfying and embarrassing, given that they are the ones on the front lines, the heroes. People ask me how I can write here each day: honestly, it really is the least I can do.

Equally gratifying are those who have, with the help of others (it always takes others), managed to heat up their baths until their equilibrium is one in which play thrives, in which the children they teach are enjoying genuine childhood. They also thank me, sometimes saying that they ask themselves in moments of doubt, "What would Teacher Tom do?" I do the same thing every day, calling out to my mentors and inspirations, "What would Teacher Chris do?" "What would Tom Drummond do?" "What would Bev Bos do?" "What would Mister Rogers do?" This is how we replicate ourselves, this is how we become more efficient in dispersing our energy. And the most beautiful part is that these "replications" are never mere carbon copies, but rather unique clumps of atoms, life perfectly adapted for the bath in which they exist and thrive.

Since I've now stretched this law of increasing entropy metaphor to it's breaking point, I might as well keep going . . . This morning as I write this post, my slowly cooling cup of hot coffee at my side, part of my mind is already dreading the day ahead. I leave for Nanjing, China, a place I've never been. This sort of travel back and forth across time zones is grueling and there are few things I find more stressful than airports and security lines and making connections in strange airports. But there are some energized atoms out there who have asked me to come clump with them and it is the least I can do.

Play is our sun. There, now the metaphor is completely broken. That's the destiny of everything with which we truly play.

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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