"Go Outside"

When we moved into our current location at the Center of the Universe, we built our children a two-level sandpit with a cast iron pump at the top. Day-in-day-out, year-in-year-out, the pump at the top of the sand hill is where the action tends to be. Of course, we adults knew from the start that erosion was always going to be a challenge. At first we figured we could just purchase new sand as the old sand was washed down the hill, but we quickly realized that if that was our solution, the entire space would soon be blanketed in sand, an undesirable outcome.

So, two or three times a year, we break out the shovels and the adults meet on a Saturday and dig out the lower level, mounding the sand as high as we can in the upper, reinstalling the pump on top. A couple years ago Yuri's dad Bill, an engineer, built us a wooden track designed to accommodate our two little red wagons with the idea of expediting the process. We've used it a couple of times, including with the kids during class, but for the last couple digging sessions, including this past weekend, we adults decided it was more efficient to just use wheel barrows and take the sand around the long way.

This means that we have a large, well-built piece of useless equipment lying about the playground. And it has literally lay on the ground in a corner, too heavy for the kids to budge on their own, for the past 12 months.

On Monday, the kindergarteners decided they wanted to "use" it. I don't know how that came about, but the preschoolers found it braced against the newly formed sand slope like a kind of ladder. At least that's what the kids started using it for. As I explained to various folks that the original purpose of the track was for helping to convey the wagons up the hill, it suddenly struck me that it might be fun to try to ride a wagon down.

Yesterday, during the 4-5's class, Rowan's dad Terry helped me move it to a different, less extreme slope, one covered in wood chips rather than sand. This was me playing, not the kids. I really wanted to know if it was possible to ride the wagon down the track without killing myself. I was genuinely nervous as I launched myself, hanging onto the wagon's tongue in order to steer, just as we'd done as kids when riding our wagons down driveways. I made it all the way down to the art table without incident.

That's when kids started queuing up. I said, "Hey, I'm an old man! If you want to ride the wagon, you have to take it back up yourselves." Several of the most eager children raced down and wrangled it back to the top, where I lifted it onto the track. The first to try it couldn't figure out the steering and the wagon's wheels repeatedly stuck in the track, making it a lurching, not fun ride. The next two kids wanted to ride together. They tipped off the side of the track falling in a red-faced, giggling heap. After several other failed efforts, a pair of guys finally nailed it, careening smoothly down the track, onto the rougher wood chips (which I was counting on to slow them down), veering to the right, crashing into a table, tipping themselves over with the table landing on top of them. It was relatively slow motion so I had no fear of them being injured and they came up laughing and eager to try it again.

Their crash didn't deter anyone. Indeed, it attracted more kids. A clutch of them, after my initial prompt, took on the task of returning the wagon to the top. After a few goes, they realized that they didn't need me to lift the wagon onto the track, figuring out how to back the unwieldy thing up it from the bottom. It was also interesting that while the first few attempts had been "failures," most of the subsequent efforts found the kids successfully managing to make it to the bottom of the track at a speed sufficient to make them to want to do it again, viral learning at its best. Most of them, upon hitting the end of the track, then veered to the left or right and crashed into something (in the interest of full disclosure, I positioned Terry at the top while I waited downhill to catch or divert the wagon should its trajectory appear hazardous), but several managed to match or exceed my original ride down to the art table.

By the end of our session, it was running as one would hope, with the kids in charge of playing, experimenting, wrangling, debating, and organizing themselves, while the adults focused primarily keeping an eye out for hazards.

A couple days ago, one of the kids' grandmothers was visiting class. She asked me, "Do you have a philosophy of play?" I answered, "When we were kids and our mothers needed to get some work done or we were just driving them crazy, they would say, 'Go outside.' Remember that?" She did. "Then we would find the other kids whose mothers sent them out there and figure out things to do, on our own, without many toys and without much supervision. Now, parents can't do that: most have to resort to TV or video games to occupy the children while they get things done. If I have a philosophy of play, it's that our school should to be as much like the 'outside' we used to have as possible." We then exchanged a few stories of the things we used to do outside, with few toys, friends, and little supervision.

As the children bickered, commanded, requested, and queued, as they worked their process, their play, out for themselves, as they tested and failed and tried again, it looked a lot like the sort of thing we used to do in yards and driveways along my childhood cul-de-sac. That's what I had, without realizing it, role modeled when I played with the wagon.

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A Homemade Ethic

My goal has always been to make this blog seem as homemade as possible. I use a basic off-the-shelf template and the cheapest, most utilitarian platform available. I rarely engage in marketing, promotions or give-aways, I don't accept advertising, and generally speaking I steer clear of bells and whistles. I don't know if anyone else appreciates it, and well-intended people quite regularly give me advice on how I could make the blog snappier or boost my readership, and I'm happy for the free advice, but the amateur hour vibe is more or less intentional.

When I'm invited to speak at conferences, I strive for a similar thing: no Power Point presentations or videos or music. It's just me, in my jeans and hokey red cape, with a stack of notes, most of which are handwritten, some of which are in spiral notebooks. 

I suppose one could call it a "gimmick" or "style," this homemade-ness, but I tend to think of it more as an ethic, one that is full-blown at the place called Woodland Park, where parents come together to cooperatively make a school for their own children in the basement of a church. 

It's a place where we rarely buy new stuff, but rather finish using stuff others have cast-off, and where the playground shares much in common with a junkyard. When we do purchase something nice and new, like the fantastic Flor brand carpet, I worry that we're getting too fancy. 

I feel the same way about all those clean, crisp, purpose-built preschool facilities I've been in over the past several years: they're nice, and I even envy them, but I still have the urge to splash paint on the walls and tromp mud on the floors.

It's not that I particularly favor messiness or clutter or disorder (my apartment, for instance, tends to be a tidy, with everything in it's place) but rather that I am suspicious of slickness. 

Slickness is a trick, a way to hide the warts. It's the thing that separates the rest of us from Martha Stewart. At it's best, slickness represents a sort of unattainable ideal, but it also covers the cracks and dust bunnies that we all know are there -- that need to be there.

Like many of you, I spend a good deal of time on blogs and websites that deal in our preschool world, some of which you will find over there in the right-hand column under the heading "Teacher Tom's blog list." A big part of this is sharing "art projects," and all too often, we're lured in by slick pictures of slick activities with slick end-results and slick learning goals. 

For instance, I recently came across a particularly appealing article that employed one of my favorite art activities to "teach literacy." The idea, according to this writer, is for an adult to carefully write each child's name in white glue on a piece of paper. The child is to then carefully sprinkle salt onto the glue letters, shake off the excess, then use eye droppers to place dots of liquid watercolor on the salty-glue to create a sort of rainbow of their name.

These art materials -- glue, salt, and paint -- lend themselves to wonderful art explorations with the salt absorbing the paint while the glue holds it in place, and I reckon I could micromanage a child through this slick little process, correcting and coaxing along the way, but why? 

Even if I do hound the children like this, none will ever turn out as slick as the ones in the pictures that accompany this article, even the most obedient, careful child will dribble paint, smear glue and get salt stuck to her fingers. An experienced teacher, of course, already knows this, but that deceptive slickness is an intimidating lie, one that I fear leads many teachers and parents and even kids to frustration when the real world cannot match the pretty pictures of product-based art and dutiful children.

When we use these materials, I typically demonstrate the "right way" once, to the parent-teacher responsible for the project, not because I want them to teach it to the kids, but only because I want the adult to see what I think is really cool about using these materials in this proscribed way. I then always say, "The children will want to make it their own." 

Most of the kids do, at some point in their process, create the opportunity to explore the absorbency of the salt, the stickiness of the glue, and blending of colors, but they also must explore the properties of the glue bottle, the techniques of using a pipette, and effects of fists full of salt. 

They need to try using the pipettes as paint brushes, to empty bottle after bottle of glue, and to get glue and salt and paint all over their hands. The only limits we set are those of supply, but since we have glue by the gallon, salt by the pound, and paint by the case, we're prepared.

This is how process-based art works, this is how preschool works. It's a messy, free-form exploration of the universe, and there is nothing slick about it. The slickness is only a well-meant lie with no connection to reality that makes us feel as if we're doing it wrong. It's what I mean when I say that "homemade" is not a style, but an ethic.

Of course, I find our art "products" beautiful as well, those pages of tag board that take a week to fully cure, crinkling and curling and dripping on the floor. When I finally pull them out to send them home, mountains of salt crumble off, even as I try to balance it on there by way of honoring the child's intent, leaving much of it for the car ride home where it likely winds up all over the backseat. 

These aren't product at all, but rather homemade masterpieces, the kind of thing one simply can't do the wrong way.

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Bernie Sanders

There has always been a political aspect to my blogging here. Fellow preschool teacher Courtney Gardener once wrote this on Facebook, "Some people say they don't like Tom's political posts, but I don't see a difference." I was happy to read this because I don't see a difference either. I don't know any other way to be an advocate for children and education. Public policy has a direct impact on both and to the degree I can influence it, I try. We all should, frankly, and part of the way our process is built is that the only way forward is through debate, which usually translates as argument. 

I know many who refuse to engage in politics on social media because of how easily it can devolve into name-calling and general vitriol. And that's often the way it goes in self-governance. It always has. The thing is, if it's going to work, we all need to take that risk and do more than vote and a big part of that is what I think of as the "deep democracy" of talking to your friends and neighbors about the issues of the day. For me, there is no better place than in my online communities.

I strive to approach my arguments with a sense of goodwill and expect the same from you. First we are humans, then we are family or friends, then we are citizens. I'll try really hard to not insult your intelligence, play "gotcha," or resort to name-calling and I hope for the same from you. And I will never expect you to violate your morals, nor should you expect me to violate mine. 

That said, when you invoke your morals as a political argument, I will immediately concede that you have "won," and I understand that you will do the same should I invoke my morals. You see, there is no political agreement to be had when your morals are your argument: if you are morally against something, you simply cannot be swayed. I respect your moral stand, even if it is a dead end when it comes to the process of self-government because when either side can't budge, agreement is impossible. However, I'm always willing to have an argument with you in which there is the possibility that you might change your mind, even a little, because it's only when all sides are willing to accept less than perfection in service to the good, that agreement is possible. And agreement is the beating heart of democracy.

In a few weeks, the presidential primary season will be in full swing, with the Iowa caucuses taking place on February 1. I have been listening to candidates for these past many months in the hopes that they will speak about education. As much as it deserves to be, I'm not surprised that it hasn't been front and center for any candidate. To be as transparent as possible, I should let you know know that I'm a registered Democrat and, for reasons that have nothing to do with education, I intend to caucus for Bernie Sanders here in Washington state. I've not written here on the blog about him because he's not had a lot to say about public education other than to propose a plan to make state universities tuition-free to all who are admitted. So far, Hillary Clinton has had more to say on public education for both the better and worse, in my view. 

Last week, in a campaign meeting in New Hampshire, Sanders said:

I'm not in favor of privately run charter schools. If we are going to have a strong democracy and be competitive globally, we need the best educated people in the world. I believe in public education; I went to public schools my whole life, so I think rather than give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and we invest in public education.

No, this is not a full-fledged education policy, but it does show he understands the corporate-style education "reform" movement for what it is: an attempt to take over public education by the private sector, as detailed in Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error and Anthony Cody's book The Educator and the Oligarch among others.

Indeed, on his blog Living in Dialogue, Mr. Cody has written an convincing endorsement of Bernie Sanders from an educator's perspective, and calls on education advocates to join him. Beyond his comments on charter schools, Cody argues that Sanders' economic policies directly address income inequality and poverty, easily the most significant educational challenged faced in our nation. Sanders is also a well-known, life-long supporter of the union movement in general and teachers' unions specifically.

I've been listening to Bernie Sanders for more than a decade now and he has had me on his side since he announced he was going to run. If you're still on the fence, I urge you to click through to Cody's post.

And if you flat-out disagree with some or all of what I've written here, I invite you to tell me so in the spirit of family and friends. I'd prefer that you do that on the Facebook page, mainly because the comment aspect here on the blog is generally too cumbersome for dialog. Of course, if you just want to join the choir, I'd like that too!

Thank you for self-governing with me! It's only through our ability to agree as individuals that our nation's morality can emerge.

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"I Wasn't Really Going To Trap You"

Man, it's hard figuring out how to get along with the other people.

Earlier this week, I was approached by two four-year-old girls, one of them in tears.

M said, speaking haltingly through her sobbing about one of the boys in our class, "S said he was going to trap me and I didn't like that."

I said, "I looks like that scared you."

"It did."

Then I turned to her friend C, "And did S say he was going to trap you, too?"

"No," she replied, "I just came to help M."

I nodded, "That's a friendly thing to do."

I was quite certain that S had threatened to trap M because a group of boys were in the midst of playing a trapping game involving a couple girls who were willing to be trapped, then rescued, then trapped again. It was a variation on the classic preschool game of chase, involving, naturally, lots of running around. I envisioned how it had happened, S had been racing along when he came face-to-face with M and, in a mis-applied effort to invite her to join this obviously fun game, he had said, fiercely, because that's how you play trapping games, "I'm going to trap you!"

It was, at bottom, an un-artful attempt at friendship that lead to a misunderstanding. It's the sort of thing that happens all the time in preschool, not to mention our wider society. 

I asked M, "What did you say to S?"

She replied, "I didn't say anything. He ran away."

So, he had read "no" in her facial expression and moved on; you can't really do better than that. That said, his overture had made a classmate feel threatened. I said, "Maybe S doesn't know he scared you. Maybe we should tell him." 

M agreed and, conveniently, S was by this time standing a few feet away. I took hold of his arm, "S, M wants to tell you something." 

I felt badly for S who really had done nothing "wrong," in fact he had attempted to include her in his game. I felt badly for M who had been genuinely frightened by his unwanted approach. S asked, "What?"

M, her breathing still made erratic from crying, said, "You said you were going to trap me and I didn't like that!" 

C supported her, "I didn't like it either!"

S answered, "I wasn't really going to trap you. I was just pretending."

There was more discussion, but that was the key exchange. M almost immediately began to calm down. By the time they were done, her breathing had fallen back into a normal pattern and she was even smiling a little. S ran off to the swings, his trapping game apparently no longer possessing its savor.

This stuff is really hard.

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The "Learning Styles" Neuromyth

When people ask me for a quick-hit description of the sort of education we embrace at Woodland Park, I have a variety of answers depending on the circumstances, but my most common short-hand for what we do is "progressive play-based education." I then tend to go on to talk about the power of play, leaving the "progressive" part behind.

I'm not using the word "progressive" in its current political sense, as a stand-in for the word "liberal," but rather in the sense that the great John Dewey used it or, more contemporarily, Alfie Kohn. At its most fundamental, however, when I use the term "progressive" I mean to imply that we strive to be educators who do our best to follow what the research tells us about teaching young children and are willing to make changes when we learn that there is a better way.

I reckon a lot of us are "progressive" educators, even if we don't use the term. 

Of course, most classroom teachers are not researchers in the strict sense of the word, even as the job requires a ton of research of the trail and error variety. Nor are we consumers of research papers, if only because we already have full-time jobs and we are not all adept at sifting through raw data. No, most of us rely on "popularizers" to interpret and communicate the data for us. Folks like Peter Gray, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, and the aforementioned Alfie Kohn are vital communications links between the scientists and classroom teachers, along with the journalists and bloggers who distill key points into useful articles that at least point us in the right direction.

The problem with this system, of course, is that there is sometimes a breakdown in communication, something that seems to have happened with the whole idea of the importance of different "learning styles." I know that when I was searching for a kindergarten for my own child, that was all the rage. Everyone wanted to tell us about how their school accommodated "all" the learning styles, or alternatively, how their school focused on certain learning styles. There were workshops you could take and tests you could subject your child to that purportedly helped parents identify their own child's learning style. And it was our job as parents, for the sake of our kids, to match our child up with schools and teachers who understood their learning style. It was very stressful to me as a parent because I couldn't for the life of me figure out my own child's learning style. 

Honestly, as much as the idea of learning styles seemed to make sense, it has never been my focus as a teacher, if only because every time I turned around these learning styles had been redefined and re-categorized, leaving me to feel that it was an area of research that was still very much in flux. I guess I figured that I'd just wait until there was more consensus on the subject, counting on the notion that a play-based curriculum, with its emphasis on child-led learning, meets children where they are no matter what their learning style or temperament. And now it appears that it was good to wait:

Over and over, researchers have failed to find any substantive evidence for the notion of learning styles, to the point where it's been designated a "neuromyth" by some education and psychology experts.

It appears that the concept has been debunked, yet the idea of learning styles remains quite entrenched in our collective educator consciousness. So, as one of those folks who occasionally finds myself in the role of "popularizer," I'm writing today in an attempt to help bust this widely popular and inaccurate myth. If you don't believe me, I urge you to click through to this New York magazine article. If you're still not buying it, then follow it's links to the actual research. 

I hate when one of my cherished notions is found to be wrong, but it's part of the job. As Mister Rogers sang, "Discovering truth will make me free." This is what progressive education is all about.

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Before He Moved On

As the two-year-old boy tried to walk up a short, sand-dusted concrete slope, his feet slipped from beneath him. He fell forward onto the concrete. I saw it happen. He took a moment, still prone, to look around as if deciding if he was going to cry. When he saw me looking his way, his face wrinkled into a look of anguish and he let it out.

I walked to him. I usually walk in circumstances like this for the same reason I strive to maintain a calm expression: running conveys panic and the last thing I want to do is compound his pain with fear. Taking a seat on the ground beside him, I said, "You fell." Putting a hand on his back, I said, "I came to be with you."

When he cried louder, I asked, "Did you hurt your hands?"

He shook his head. I left some silence for him to fill with the details he wanted to share, but instead he filled it with crying.

"Did you hurt your tummy?"

He shook his head.

"Did you hurt your chin?"

This time he nodded, still crying.

I saw no mark on his chin, "It's not bleeding, but I can get you a bandaid."

He shook his head.

Another two-year-old boy had also seen it happen. He had joined us, looking from me to his classmate throughout the exchange. When I left more silence, this boy decided to fill it, almost as if showing me the proper formula, bending down and asking, "Are you okay?" This is what adults say to a fallen child, a phrase I've struck from my own lexicon figuring that an injured child will let me know soon enough if he's hurt without my planting of the idea with that question. In this moment, however, from a two-year-old's lips, I heard it as a courtesy, like saying "Please," "Thank you," and "How are you?"

He still cried, but not with the intensity of before, notching it down to a breathy, moaning, head up, his fingers tracing paths in the dusting of sand that had been his undoing.

Yet another two-year-old boy joined us. He had not seen what had happened, and asked me, "Why is he crying?"

I replied, "He fell and hurt his chin."

"I'm a doctor."

I asked the boy who had fallen, "Do you need a doctor?"

He shook his head. There were three of us now in a circle around our friend who was winding down his cry, finishing it.

The boy who had asked "Are you okay?" took what the older kids sometimes call "the easy way" up the short slope, a path in the dirt that circumvents the concrete part, intending, I thought, to go about his play. Perhaps that had been the plan, but he stopped and turned to check on his friend, saying once more, "Are you okay?"

This time his friend nodded. His cry had become a soft whimper. I said, "You're not crying now." He didn't respond. His fingers fiddled with the sand until they found a twig which he bent and twisted. I had been sitting beside him. I said, "I'm going to get up now," which I did. I had a vague idea that I was role modeling a possible next step for him, but he didn't immediately follow my lead. Instead, my place was taken by the doctor who sat, as I had done, silently beside him. We're always role modeling, but we can't pick what they will chose to imitate -- or even who will do the imitating.

I kept an eye on the situation from a few feet away. There was some conversation between the boys, but I couldn't hear it. The boy who had taken the easy way up, then climbed to the top of the concrete slide and slid down before circling back to the scene of the fall.

By now, the boy who had fallen had completely finished his cry and was on his feet. There was more discussion amongst the three boys that I didn't hear, but judging from the body language, I'm guessing it was either about the fall or about how to best navigate the short, sand-dusted slope. Then, the two boys who had come to their friend's aid, ascended via the easy way. The boy who had fallen, however, tacked the concrete slope. His boot slipped a bit, but this time he made it without injury. He then ran back down and tried it again, then again, four times in all before he moved on.

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Rebellion

My wife and I have had four dogs over the course of our three decades together. Whenever I have made the mistake of pulling on any of their leashes, they pull in the opposite direction every time. Believe me, left to their own devices, they always want to go where ever I go. I know this because when there is no leash involved they follow right on my heels, hot breath on the backs of my legs, tripping me up when I turn around unexpectedly, but if they sense I'm compelling them, their instinctive response is to rebel.

I've found this to be true in humans as well. No one likes to be told what to do, even when we know it's for our own good, even when it's something we want to do. Imagine being commanded, "Eat your dessert!" I might still eat that dessert, but there will be a moment of reluctance, of rebellion, even if it's chocolate ice cream. And I know if I do, it's not going to taste as good after being bossed into it. And depending on who says it and how they say it, there's about an equal chance I won't eat that damn ice cream at all.

Rebellion is built into us, and ultimately it is an adaptive trait. We all pull back against the leash because we are designed to act according to the pull of our own instincts and the tug of our own knowledge. Of course, we've all found ourselves in circumstances when we've decided that we must stuff our rebellious urges, but we always grow to despise those dictatorial bosses or teachers. If we do well it's usually "in spite" of them. And, of course, we wriggle out of those particular leashes as soon as we possibly can.

Parents know the truth about rebellion all too well. We set limits and rules and our children always test them. Even the most patient and progressive among us know, from the inside, that teeth grinding spiral of commands and refusals, until we finally resort to either physical force or the heavy hand of punishment. It leaves everyone feeling angry, resentful, and abused. And if we're not careful, if we're not conscious parents, these smaller spirals become part of a larger whirlpool of ever escalating rule breaking and punishments because every pull on the leash, every punishment, leads to a pull in the opposite direction.

Some of us have decided that this rebellion is a bad thing, at least when it's directed at us, and it must be quashed at all costs. We're the parents after all. We will not have our authority challenged. If that's your approach, your future will likely be either one of temporary, savorless victories followed by frustration, or a regime that involves punishments of increasingly extreme severity. Every study ever done on the subject of punishment (both parental and societal) winds up concluding that punishments only work under two circumstances:

1. when the punisher is present; or
2. when the punishment is debilitating (e.g., so disproportionately severe that one will never again risk it.)

Most of us are unwilling or unable to play the role of ever-present punisher. And I hope that none of us are the type to inflict debilitating punishments on our child.

The alternative is to accept rebellion as a demonstration that our child is healthy and normal, that it is not a sign that she is on her way to a life of crime and ruin, but rather evidence that she thinks for herself, trusts her own instincts, and will not be pushed around. When we accept this, we see that our job is to guide rather than command our children, to help them come to the understanding that behavior has its own rewards and consequences. I've written before about "natural consequences" and they apply here.

A parent taking away a boy's dessert because he hits his sister isn't the natural consequence of hitting. The consequence is that his sister is hurt and the evidence of that is the crying. That's where our attention ought to be. "You've hurt your sister," keeps the focus on the boy's behavior, allowing everyone to explore the consequence and potential remedies. "No dessert for you," turns the boy's attention on the "unfairness" of the parent who is pulling on that damn leash.

Rebelliousness is not a synonym for "anti-social" or "uncivil," it's merely a reaction to the leash. We all want to do the right thing and none of us wants to be told what to do.

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"Either We Win Or We Learn"

When I was eight-years-old, my favorite professional football team, the Dallas Cowboys, lost Super Bowl V on a last second field goal by Baltimore Colts kicker Jim O'Brien. It crushed me. I cried, then proceeded to watch virtually no football for the next twenty years. I certainly didn't have a favorite team. Today, I'll follow the local football teams, usually in an after-the-fact way by checking the scores the following day and watching highlights if "my team" wins, but my sport is baseball.

Part of what I like about baseball is that even the worst teams will still win 60 games over the course of a season, while even the best will lose 60. I like how a baseball season is about never getting too high or never getting too low, that it can be a grind, that there is always a game tomorrow, week after week, month after month. I like that the best hitters fail to get a hit 70 percent of the time, that only a relatively tiny number of teams actually make it to the playoffs; I like that there is a lot of losing mixed up in the winning. In a way, I think of being a baseball fan as a continuation of the learning journey I set out upon after that emotional Super Bowl loss, and among those lessons is to not allow myself to become too emotionally involved in the games other people play.

We often think of professional sports as being all about winning and losing, and of course, at bottom it is, but when you listen to the athletes talk, especially when they talk about their successes, you hear them say a lot about their losses. They speak of how their failures motivated them to work harder, to learn more, and to get back up and try again.

As Confucius said, "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." Indeed, the success, the winning, is secondary to our journey of learning. It's been said that winning the Super Bowl is hard, but winning it a second time is almost impossible. I think that's because it's particularly hard to learn anything from success: we learn the most from failure. Too often we forget this in education as well. We talk of failure as a bad thing, when, in fact, it's what we're here to do.

Over the weekend I was listening to the radio as I ran errands and a football coach (I'm sorry, I don't know which one) was being interviewed about his team's chances. His reply was golden, "Either we win or we learn."

The only way to lose is to not get up again.

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Approaching The Future As A Child

When my daughter was little and frightening news of the world got to her, I would try to put things in perspective, "Most people, most of the time are having a fine day." That this has been true throughout all of history, even when great tragedy is unfolding in one part of it (and indeed when is it not?) I have no doubt.

Maybe it's not a great day, although someone is also always having one of those as well, but a fine one, because most things involving humans are like that -- a little high a little low, a little hot a little cold, a little smooth a little rough. Both the optimists and the pessimists are right: it could always get better and it could always get worse. 

I suspect that most of us are pro-optimism, even if we're pessimistic by nature. It's hard not to be when you're working with young children, who themselves are generally having fine days, but by virtue of the metaphor of their youth shines for us like a light into the certainty of a better future. And even if we can't help but regret in advance the equal assurance that they will suffer, it just seems that optimism is the proper stance when it comes to the young so we pull ourselves together and say, "It will heal," "The lights will come back on," "The worst is behind us."

On the long night of the Winter Solstice, I tried this out on the grown-ups, saying things like, "This is as dark as it gets, now we can look forward to more light," or "It all gets better from here!" Most thanked me, accepting my invitation to look forward with hope, but many drew back in mock defensiveness, bubbling back, "I love the dark! I love the long night!" denying my assertion that there could be anything wrong. I understand that they were looking into the dark with the certainty of their optimism, wearing it like a shield against doubt.

Hope and fear are the two sides of this coin and both are legal currency in the marketplace of the future. There are those that claim that we create reality through our attitude, that if we anticipate success we make it more certain, while the same goes for failure. And I expect there is some truth to that, although probably a lot less than the pop philosophies would lead us to believe. In her book Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, inspired by her struggle with breast cancer, Barbara Ehrenreich, calls this faith in the determinism of attitude "the new Calvinism," seeing a world in which we are all ultimately and personally responsible for the evils that befall us, be it cancer or unemployment, casting every set-back as a personal failure, having nothing to do with the pernicious randomness of disease or outgoing tide of economic recession.

Optimism is a magnificent thing. I hardly think I'd want to go on living without it. Living hopefully does not call for optimism of the blind variety, but rather the eyes-wide-open knowledge that this sure as hell can work given what I know to be true about the world and myself. Optimism backed up by thoughtfulness, experience, and confidence is always justified, but when worn merely as a prophylactic against fear, it sets us at the roulette wheel feverishly spinning away, doomed to go bust no matter what our attitude.

Pessimism gets a bad rap and I understand that. Relentlessly pessimistic people are hard to be around unless they're able to temper it with a cynic's humor, and even that wears thin after awhile. But that doesn't mean that the fear at the heart of the pessimist isn't justified. It could always go wrong. The future is full of pitfalls: we count on our wary pessimists to point them out. Whose investment advice would you be more likely to take: the optimist or the pessimist? The pessimist's, of course, after all if he's willing to place a bet on the future, you can be darned sure he's done his homework and is not relying on the vagaries of a "good vibe."

Young children don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism, especially the very young for whom the future really doesn't exist, let alone with enough concreteness to evoke hope or fear. And sure, as they get older they quite reasonably adopt the cloak most appropriate for the occasion; dressing for instance in eager anticipation of the holidays or in fearful anticipation of the doctor's needles. Rational responses both, ones that belie the reality that the presents are rarely as incredible as one hopes nor the pain as bad as one fears: our attitude, be it hope or fear, not altering reality, but rather helping to temper our experience with reality in a way to prevent the highs from being too high and the lows from being too low.

I'm thinking of all this today on the first day of 2016 because as I reflect back on the year now past with all it's ups and downs, I can't help but think of the "curse" that is usually attributed to the ancient Chinese: "May you live in interesting times."

And indeed, I have been cursed; we have been cursed. The brilliance of this curse, of course, is that it can just as easily be a blessing, because really, who would want to live in boring times? And indeed, I have been blessed; we have been blessed.

I'm going to try this year, as a resolution, to approach the future more like a child, setting aside the dogmatism of optimism and pessimism. I will let my feelings flourish, learn what I can from them, then wearing them on my sleeve, I'll seize the day while worrying about tomorrow when it comes.

When I succeed, I will credit those who hugged me when it was dark. When I fail, I will shrug and not heap all the blame on myself, knowing that I have no control over the weather.

There is a companion curse that goes along with the famous one. It's one we habitually evoke for one another this time of year as a blessing, so take it as you will: "May your wishes be granted."

And in the meantime, however, have a fine year.

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