"You May Give Them Your Love But Not Your Thoughts"

On Children

Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,

but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children

as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might

that His arrow may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

so He loves also the bow that is stable.

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The Power To Create Reality

Last week, Tom Drummond, one of my earliest teaching mentors, the man who introduced me to the technology of speaking with children, dropped by the school. He was particularly interested in our green house and our new "farming" program. After about an hour, we parted. As we did, he said, "You're doing great work. I'm glad you're in the world." We were standing on the wooden walkway that overlooks our playground. I said, "Thank you. And I want you to know that none of this would be here without you. Everything here is a result of how you taught me to speak with children."

We tend to think of reality as a set of facts that exist outside of ourselves, things that are true in equal measure for everyone, and in one way it is, but we also create reality for ourselves, day-after-day, by the way we behave, believe, and especially in the way we speak. When we speak informatively with young children, from a place of warmth and connection, striving to avoid commands and minimizing our questions, we create a certain reality not just for those kids, but for ourselves and those around us. When I look at our playground, our green house, our classroom, I see them as visible echoes and amplifications of the technology to which Tom introduced me two decades ago.

After Tom left, I went back to puttering around on the farm, then before leaving went indoors to wash the dirt from under my fingernails. Being a Friday afternoon, the building was empty except for a pair of contractors who we had hired for a project. As I passed by the room in which they were working, one of them called out to me, "Hey, do you work here?"

"I'm the teacher of the preschool."

"Good. You're the guy I need to talk to." As he approached me, I could tell he was agitated. He was moving quickly. I imagine his heart rate was elevated. "Do you know the guy in the dress? The transgender person or whatever?"

All morning long one of our neighborhood's street people, one of Pastor Gay's men, had been hanging around the place, mostly just lounging on the lawn and smoking butts in the designated area. He was wearing a kind of a skirt, more like a small blanket tied around his waist, but I figured that's who the contractor meant. I said, "I think I know who you're talking about."

"Well, he just tried to come in the building and when I told him I couldn't let him in, he threatened me."

"Oh no. Thanks for not letting him in."

"I just wanted to warn you. He seems like he's about to go off."

"Is he still here?

"Yeah, he's just waiting right outside the front door. He says there's supposed to be a meeting here, but I was told not to let anyone in who doesn't have a key."

"Well, there are a lot of 12-step meetings in this building. Maybe he just got the time wrong. Listen, I know him. I should talk to him."

"He seems pretty irrational. We'll come with you."

When I opened the front door, I found at least a dozen people there, all familiar faces, people who regularly attend 12-step meetings at the Fremont Baptist Church in which our school is housed. Amongst them was a very large person in little black dress, fishnet stalkings, and four-inch heels -- one of the regulars.

Someone said, "Oh, thank god you're here. There was no key in the key box and we have our meeting now."

I replied, turning to the contractors in their black t-shirts who were standing over my shoulders protectively, "Oh, I know these people. It's okay if they come in."

Later, after the group had settled in, I stood on the sidewalk with the contractors who still seemed agitated. I said, "You did the right thing not letting them in."

"Yeah, well that big guy in the dress, or woman, or . . . Well they're big and they were mad. I thought I was going to get punched." He went into more details, obviously needing to get his emotions out, to explain himself, maybe to justify his fear. As he did, I was conscious of his struggle with finding the proper pronouns. My daughter Josephine came home from her first year of college with a lot to say about gender and the use of pronouns. She has friends who are on a campaign against the use of "male" words used to refer to mixed-gender groups: like when we say "you guys" or use "he" as a generic pronoun. They have trained themselves to use "they" and "them" as non-gender based terms because, as Josephine points out, gender is fluid. I support this effort to create a new reality through the use of language even as the grammarian in me recoils.

As the contractor, whose name I don't know, began to wind down a bit, he shared that he lived in a suburban community a goodly commute from the Seattle city limits. "When I come into the city, I'm always on my guard, you know? It seems like there's always someone ready for a fight. I've even had to pull a gun on a guy."

This isn't the first time someone has earnestly told me about the gun they "had to pull" on someone, and it has almost always been a white man from the suburbs. "I have to tell you," a real estate agent friend from Kirkland once told me, "Some of the places I go in the city -- I'm sure glad I had my gun." Another friend who lives in Woodenville can't stop talking about the "dangers" of the city on those rare occasions that he is willing to come visit. This is a black leather wearing Harley rider, a man who affects the stance of a tough guy (although he's genuinely very sweet), yet he talks as if there is a hoodlum around every corner. Every time I see him, he advises me to get a gun like the one he sometimes carries because you never know when you might "need it."

I've lived in cities most of my adult life, I love living in cities, the more urban the better, and I have never once been in a situation in which I felt I needed a gun, yet over the years dozens of people, mostly white men from the suburbs, but not always, have spoken about "pulling guns" or otherwise having to violently defend themselves in the city. It's clear to me that the city presents a different reality for them than it does for me, and I can't help but wonder if much of the difference comes from the stories we tell ourselves and others, the language we use, to describe our experiences.

The media seems to get higher ratings from portraying urban dystopias. And researchers tell us that the more television a person watches, the more dangerous they (not "he or she") believes the world to be. If you don't live and work in a city, the words reporters and scriptwriters choose for creating their TV realities, I supposed, start to form an actual reality about cities that is distinct from that experienced by those of us who live here. That language of violence and menace becomes part of how some people think and speak about the city, which, in turn, results in a higher likelihood of perceiving threats, engaging in conflict, and even having to resort to "pulling a gun," a reality that is as alien to me as my reality is to them.

Some time ago, I wrote here about an experiment in some Swedish schools to eliminate the use of gender-specific pronouns. I tended to doubt the concept, even as I was curious to see the results. Now my own daughter has come home with the same ideas. These seemingly small tweaks to how we speak are attempts to create a new reality about gender through the conscious use of language. The goal is for it to become something we just all do without having to think about it: the way most of us don't think about our use of gender-specific pronouns. Every social change that has ever happened in our world has only really come about once we've fully adopted the new language that goes with it.

Today, we hear loud complaints about political correctness. It's hard to find oneself living a different reality than those around you. Perhaps for most of your life it didn't matter because most people shared your reality, but then as more and more of us attempt to speak a new reality into existence, you see your old, comfortable reality changing as well. I know from experience that it at first seems ridiculous, then irritating, then even frightening because this new reality will replace your old one.

Every day, the words we choose to speak create the reality in which we live. If we talk of cities as menacing, then they become so. If we talk of cities as thriving, exciting, uniquely human communities, that is what they become. If we speak the language of gender fluidity, then we create the reality of gender fluidity. If we speak to children as if they are fully formed human beings, then we create a reality in which children are free to live as fully formed human beings.

We build reality word by word. We all have the power to create it. Indeed, the reality in which we live is already a creation of our words. If we want a different reality it may well be as simple and as difficult as consciously speaking it into existence. It might take a very long time, but if we keep doing it, we will one day no longer have to even think about it and we will have created a better world.

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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Pokemon Go

I'm already inclined, on my days off, to head out on long urban hikes or bike rides, and the advent of Pokemon Go is going to make me even more inclined. For those who don't know -- and I didn't know until about 48 hours ago -- this is a game you play via a free app on your smart phone. The idea is to go out into the world and walk around hunting for Pokemon creatures to collect. There's more to it, but for those details I'll direct you to your local Pokemon-besoted child. For my purposes, the intriguing thing was using technology to "find" imaginary things around my neighborhood that are hidden to the naked eye: I even caught one in my own living room. Viewed through your phone's camera it appears as if these animated creatures are existing in the real world. Another Pokemon I caught appeared to be sitting on an unaware stranger's shoulder.

I learned about this game from social media where Woodland Park parents were posting about how much fun their kids were having, many walking for miles in their collector's quest. There were reports of throngs of children racing around our north Seattle neighborhoods collecting Pokemons. If you're going to be playing electronic games, this certainly is the way to go, although it is very easy to get distracted. Already there are stories in the media about Pokemon Go related accidents and apparently some creative criminals are locating out of the way Pokemon hotspots then just waiting for their victims to come onto the scene. I myself almost stepped into the street at one point while attempting to capture a varmint that was being run over by cars.

Still, what a fun addition to a walk! I suspect it's the kind of thing that will wear thin quickly, but I got a kick out of the "PokeStops," places that include snapshots of local landmarks like decorative manhole covers, historic markers, and local businesses, some of which I'd never noticed before. I can imagine it will be fun to play the game in neighborhoods and cities with which I'm less familiar. At one level, the game causes me to focus on things I don't normally notice.

There are problems with the technology, of course, and at one point the servers went down just as I was arriving at Seattle Center, a place I figured would be rich in Pokemons. While waiting for the problem to be fixed, I found myself wandering around just looking at stuff the way I normally do. At the International Fountain where children were playing in the water as the 1812 Overture built to its crescendo, I noticed a clutch of EMTs around a man on the ground. I've seen the guy before, often heavily intoxicated. He appeared to be passed out. The EMTs were trying to talk with him, but he wasn't able to respond. That's when I noticed his face. Someone had drawn all over it with black marker; scribbles, a mustache, words. Of course, he might have done it to himself before blacking out, but more likely it was the work of some cruel pranksters who found him passed out on a bench and took advantage of his unprotected comatose state.

Another problem with the game is that it really eats up your battery, so I found myself turning it off as I hiked between areas I thought would be the most likely to serve up some Pokemons. One of those places I had the game turned off was as I crossed one of the I5 overpasses that connect downtown with Capitol Hill. As I looked over the railing toward the traffic below, I noticed that someone has pitched a tent atop a wall that divides the southbound lanes of the freeway from the Union Street off-ramp, right there in the shadow of the Washington State Convention Center: a hermit's hut on a desolate island amidst the rushing river of cars that flows through our city.

And the game can be glitchy: it kept freezing as I checked out Denny Park, a place notorious for its summer population of men and women (mostly men) who spend their days and nights living on the benches and lawns. At one point I was tracking down a PokeStop, when the map shifted and I lurched along with it, changing directions suddenly. When I did, one of the summer residents shouted at me, "You better turn away, 'cause we're filthy here." I snapped to attention, smiled, and said, "No, I'm playing a game on my phone. I didn't mean to insult you."

"We're filthy here," he replied. "And that ain't no game!" Then he laughed mirthlessly, still glowering, "You better go over there. We're filthy here."

About then my phone vibrated, indicating that there was a Pokemon nearby. I looked at the man who had spoken to me. He was still glaring in my direction so I checked my phone. There was an animated Pokemon there, flapping its wings, right where the real man was standing. On my screen it appeared as if it was in the space that separated us.

It's not just imaginary things that are hidden from the naked eye.

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 Would Be Like Banning Their Freedom To Think"

A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.  ~John Holt

The other night I was explaining what I do to an old friend who had no idea what I do. It boggled her mind. I explained how when children play they are asking and answering their own questions about the world. She asked, almost in disbelief, "But, then what does a teacher do?"

I wanted to reply, "Get out of the way," but in the interest of not sounding flippant I instead answered, "Mostly, we just provide a relatively safe environment in which children can come together to explore their world through their play with the things and people they find there."

"How is that different than what parents do?"

"There shouldn't be a difference, really. In general, adults need to understand that when children play they are, invariably, preparing themselves for their future." I gave her a couple of examples, which she pondered until I pushed one of her buttons when I said, "For instance, almost all little girls at some time or another dress up as princesses. They are playing with the obviously important concept of feminine beauty."

"What do you mean important? Beauty isn't important!"

I pointed out that she, a retired scientific researcher, was wearing flattering clothing, a particular hairstyle, cosmetics, jewelry. "You may not agree with traditional ideas of beauty, but every woman knows that she can't avoid dealing with societal standards of feminine beauty: you might chose to accept it or reject it or redefine it, but clearly it is important in our world. Children know this even if we try to deny it."

"But shouldn't we be teaching them that it's wrong? Isn't it the teacher's job to teach them that being beautiful doesn't matter?"

"I suppose I can offer them my opinion, but if I attempt to assert that notions of feminine beauty aren't important, the kids will know I'm wrong: the evidence is all around us. It's unavoidable. Every time we turn around we see a narrow concept of feminine beauty being celebrated. It's clearly important to our society. And at least part of why all those girls need to play princess is to explore what it means from the inside so that they can make their own decisions as they get older."

She hated that answer. "But it's not important at all. Women shouldn't be judged for their beauty. We need to teach that to little girls."

"I sure hope little girls learn that, but it won't happen because I lecture them. I expect they're most likely to learn it the way you did -- by experiencing it, experimenting with it, thinking about it, then making their own decisions. If I tried to somehow ban princess play, I would have a rebellion on my hands."

"Oh, I wouldn't want you to do that. Playing princess is fun. You can't ban princess play . . . That would be like banning their freedom to think."

And that's how we left the conversation because it was a school night and time for us to go home.

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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Gathering Sun Rays

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." ~Buckminster Fuller

There's a book I read to the children by the author Leo Leonni entitled Frederick. I'm sure many of my preschool teacher colleagues read this to their kids; Leonni is a popular, brilliant author and his paper collage illustrations are charming. In this story, Frederick the mouse avoids physical labor as the other mice prepare for winter, at first evocative of The Little Red Hen. When the others ask him, "reproachfully," why he isn't working, Frederick replies "I gather sun rays for the cold, dark winter days," "I gather colors, for winter is gray," and "I'm gathering words, for the winter days are long and many."

I've long on these pages bemoaned our society's habit of equating education with the acquisition of job skills. Indeed, I don't believe I've ever heard a political leader from any party speak of schools without directly linking them to the fantastical "jobs of tomorrow." The entire corporate eduction "reform" movement with it's emphasis on high stakes testing, standardized curricula, and privatization is largely a plan to finish the job of converting our public schools into institutions of vocational training. Right across the country, arts, music, physical education, social studies, drama, and civics are being dropped from our children's school days, and even such bedrock subjects as science, history, and the rest of the humanities have been minimized in order to make more room for math and literacy, the only things, apparently, that really matter.

What a sad thing that is. When guys like Bill Gates talk about "unleashing powerful market forces" on our schools, I envision them being unleashed upon our children and it strikes me, at best, as a narrowing of life, and at worst a harsh cruelty. Listen, I'm aware that we're all, at some level, economic beings, and that's not a bad thing, but that's certainly not all we are. What about unleashing powerful artistic forces on our schools? Or powerful civic forces? Or powerful physical or scientific or musical or historical or philosophical forces? Those aspects of a well-rounded life are at least as important as the drudgery that most of us ultimately face when compelled to expend the better part of our days, during the better part of our years, bringing home that damned bacon.

We're told that capitalism, and particularly the free market brand we've been experimenting with since 1980, is as good as it gets, warts and all, but talk about one hell of an inefficient system if it requires pretty much all of its able bodied citizens working most of their daylight hours in order to function properly, as if we exist to serve the economy instead of the other way around. Civilization must be about more than earning a greasy buck, but the economists are in charge and they're "reproachful" of the rest of us who understand that if it's going to be worth anything someone must gather sun rays.

I don't want to live in a world in which my existence is justified by how many dollars I can extract from it. What I do with my life is far more vital than that. I am a father, husband, son, brother, and friend. I am a teacher. I am a man of spirit and philosophy. I am an artist. I am a citizen. I am a politician. I am a writer. I am a cyclist. I am a community organizer. I play these and many more roles in the world, each at least as important as the other, and none of them can be measured on a standardized test like reading and ciphering. I think that's what blinders the corporate "reformers": if they can't reduce it to numbers, if they can't hold someone accountable, if it can't be standardized under shrink-wrapped packaging, it doesn't exist. And that describes most of what makes life worth living.

As a teacher I'm always torn between preparing children for the world as it is and the world of my ideals. I generally come down on the side of my ideals because I simply can't bring myself to prepare these young children for a meager make-work future of inspectors inspecting inspectors with their tools designed solely for inspecting. That's not why most of us are here: we're here to sing, to invent, to discover, to explore, and to gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days. That's the true business of people and trying to measure that is like trying to measure the height of love or the circumference of god.

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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It's Working!

We've been trying to grow plants, and food plants in particular, since I started teaching at Woodland Park, but it was watching Jamie Oliver's 2010 TED talk (the video is there if you want to watch) in which he called on educators to take the lead in teaching children about food and nutrition that I began dreaming of a robust year-round gardening program. Not having ever been a gardener myself and with limited space, most of our efforts were of the one-off, everyone-share-a-single-radish variety, although by the time we moved to our current location in Fremont, we did have a small, tidy seasonal garden that doubled as a mud pit during the colder months.

So when our beautiful new green house was completed last June, with it's surrounding dedicated space for growing things, it felt like a dream had been realized. And then it began to dawn on me that I had no idea, really, what to do with it. It more or less sat fallow last summer, then as fall rolled around some of our parent gardeners began to experiment. All I could think of to do with the kids was to plant seeds and water plants so that's what we did, but I didn't feel like I had a handle on how to really step up to Oliver's challenge. As the days began to get longer, the parent-gardeners began to include me in their planning, asking me lots of questions about what and how, which I mostly turned back on them until one day I realized that if this was going to work, I was going to have to become an avid gardener myself.

So I began to spend more and more time out there, both before and after school, getting my hands dirty, experiencing the joy of seeing my little baby plants grow into big plants, blossom, then fruit. Occasionally, I would bring groups of children to the green house, which is separated from the rest of the school and only accessible to the kids as a kind of field trip. I found myself tense as I watched the children, quite by accident, trample my seedlings, drown them, uproot them, and generally love them to death. The budding gardener in me was aghast even as the teacher in me understood that this is how children need to explore things. I found myself doing what I hate to do, which is boss the kids around about the plants. Then one afternoon as I was re-planting a flat of lettuce seeds to make up for the one we'd lost earlier in the day to an eager "micro-green" eater, it hit me that the goal wasn't a gardening program as much as a farming program.

We've long had a small garden in the center of our playground, to which we've added a pair of good-sized planting boxes against the side of the building. For most of the year, very little of interest grows there. Then in the spring, the pea vines, berries and other things blossom, which iss exciting, although no matter how vigilant we adults are, most of the "fruit" is harvested by the children far before it is ripe. I can't tell you how often I've found our entire crop of strawberries clutched in a single busy hand as a bouquet. I don't think we've ever seen a red raspberry. It was clear the children were drawn to the things we were growing, but their need to explore made it almost impossible to actually produce any food. But now, I realized, with a small farm at our disposal, we could actually grow most of the food in more protected place, a sanctuary if you will, then, when it was ready to be harvested, we could transplant it into the playground garden where the kids could eat to their heart's content. And I could relax, knowing that there was more where that came from.

It might not sound like much, but it was an epiphany for me: it was a way to balance the instincts of a teacher with those of a gardener.

Yes, we still have some snap peas growing on the playground, but we have a lot more growing on the farm. There is some lettuce, kale, herbs, pole beans, nasturtiums and other things on the playground, but we have a lot more growing on the farm. We've discovered that we can grow cucumbers in pots, so each day I've been carrying one to the playground for the kids to harvest and share. Same goes for tomatoes. We're also hoping we'll find the same is true for our other nightshades like bell peppers and eggplant. The green house is our farm, with the playground garden serving as our metaphorical green grocer -- except now it's pick-it-yourself.

Right now we have an abundance of lettuce and kale and we need to clear the "shelves" to make room for more. The kids are grazing all day long, but they haven't made much of a dent one mouthful at a time, so yesterday we set up a "salad bar," providing bowls, forks, scissors and knives, along with a little apple juice to serve as dressing. A couple weeks ago I wrote about the popularity of our DIY ice cream social: well the salad bar was every bit as popular. It made my heart sing to watch two, three, four, five, and six-year-olds assembling, then devouring salads of their own creation, boasting about the flavor, sharing with their friends, even making salads for one another.

As Oliver said in the video, "If kids don't know what their food is, they won't eat it." Well these kids know their chives from their parsley, their lettuce from their kale, and their peas from their beans. And this is because they've been living with it, playing with it, and tending to it.

It's working! It's working! I'm giddy! And we're just getting started. My hope is that we can create such a bounty that it will carrying us through the fall and into winter. I'm prepared for a couple dead months, but not yet resigned to it: something will grow in that green house, and when spring rolls around we'll be ready for it. It's working!

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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