Necessary Work

Our old shipping pallets were looking a little shabby. They weren't yet hazardous, but a few of the boards were cracked and I judged that it wouldn't be long before rusty nails would be exposed. A parent had access to some fairly new, solid, clean heat treated pallets and delivered them over the weekend. This meant was time to get rid of the old ones.

They were too bulky to fit into the dumpster, so they would need to be dismantled, a project I had neither the time or inclination to undertake. From my time as the communications manager at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, I learned from the great consultant "Honkin'" Bill Oncken that this is called a "monkey," it was on my back, and the first priority of a good manager is to try to get it off your back by delegating it to someone else. Now you would think, being a cooperative with lots of parent-teachers around the place that my first thought would be to find an adult to do the work, but when it comes to getting necessary projects done around the school I've trained myself to first think, "Can the kids do it?"

I thought, with adult support, that the kids in the 4-5's class might be up to it, so I dragged one of them down to the workbench, got out our box of hammers and got to work. The first thing I realized was that the pallet was in much better shape than I thought and it wasn't going to be easy to pry all those boards apart, but by then there were already a half dozen kids going at it.

A couple of them spent some time figuring out how the thing was put together, realizing that the claw-end of their tools were going to be their best friends, but most of the kids just got busy sort of randomly hammering the wood. I turned my attention to supporting the claw-end workers. There were a few loose spots where we could get under the wood for prying, but mostly we found that the wood was too tightly nailed together. After some effort, I managed to work my tool into a few spots, and with great effort, got something going, which I then turned over to the kids who primarily used their many hands to complete the job.

Right away, we noticed the long, sharp rusty nails that came out with the boards we removed. We decided that we should be careful and that it sure was "lucky" that the little kids weren't around to get hurt on them.

We struggled like this for a time, then in frustration, I decided to try using one hammer to pound the claw-end of a second hammer under a tight joint. It worked, leaving us with a hammer handle lever upon which the kids could now more effectively apply their brute force. By now we were down to a core group of four workers. They all wanted me to hammer their hammers into tight joints and working both independently and together we managed to use this technique to pry off most of the boards on one side, leaving the boards on the other side exposed.

As we worked, the kids, many of whom had started off tentatively and without clear purpose, had now become more assertive and purposeful with their tools, using them in an increasingly meaningful way.

The prying mostly done, we now returned to hammering away at the bottom boards. As each board came off, a kid would carefully walk it away from where we worked, making sure to not hit anyone, keeping a close eye on those exposed, rusty nails, and deposited it in the trash can. Occasionally, a friend would approach the workbench, often with a toy in hand or some other invitation to play, but the workers warned them off, echoing the words I've often used to create a climate of caution and respect around the workbench: "We're working here," "There are hammers and rusty nails here," "No toys at the workbench." To which I added, "If you want to help, there are hammers and eye protection right over there."

Just as the two-year-olds had worked together to do the necessary work of putting chairs around the art table last week, these older kids worked together to do the necessary work of dismantling the old pallet. This is what it means to be part of a community, voluntarily pitching in, working hard, thinking about the little kids and the hazards, discussing, debating, struggling, and figuring things out. This is how we make a community our community.

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!

-->

Trying To Make Water Flow Uphill

A drinking glass holds water, but only if you hold it the right way. Tip it too much one way or another and you lose control of it as it spills onto the floor. A bucket also holds water in much the same way, but if I take it by the handle and swing it with enough velocity, the centrifugal force created will hold the water in place. I know that a sponge can hold water too, at least until I squeeze it. Same goes for paper towels. If I put water in a bottle and screw the lid on tightly I can make the water swirl and wave without losing a drop. I can direct the flow of water, at least for a time, by building channels and understanding that it moves according to gravity. I don't even try any more to make it flow up hill. I can't hold water in my hand for long unless I freeze it, and even then it eventually leaks through my fingers. I can turn it into steam with heat and use its energy to drive machinery. I can add salt to it so that things float more buoyantly on its surface.

Every adult human knows these things about controlling water. It's the stuff of universal knowledge. Water behaves the same everywhere, throughout history, without variance. We can make reliable predictions about water, including that water will always ultimately defy our efforts to control it, leaking out, evaporating, or changing course as it follows the much larger arc of mother nature's purposes. But as far as human time is concerned, we can "own" water and make it do our bidding.

From the wider perspective, of course, it's water that controls us. We've evolved as animals, at least in part, according to its demands. It does this by being utterly unchangeable; a condition of life that we must accept. Water has nothing more to learn. Water has always existed in its final, perfected state.

We living beings, however, have always been and always will be in progress, our perfected state anticipated by religion perhaps, but it always takes death to achieve it. Philosophers and poets often compare this progressive feature of humanity to the flow of a river, and while that metaphor may reveal important things about ourselves, we are really nothing at all like water. For one thing we're nearly impossible to predict and control. That's because it's in our nature to learn, and to do that we must play, a process that is defined in part by its unpredictability.

Scientific American discusses the phenomenon of how, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, preschools are increasingly trying to control children's learning through more lectures, flash cards, and tests, teaching them tricks to impress their parents, and putting these same children at much higher risk for long-term mental health problems:

Perhaps most disturbing is the potential for the early exposure to academics to physiologically damage developing brains. Although the brain continues to change throughout life in response to learning, young children undergo a number of sensitive periods critical to healthy development; learning to speak a language and responding to social cues are two such domains. Appropriate experiences can hone neural pathways that will help the child during life; by the same token, stressful experiences can change the brain's architecture to make children significantly more susceptible to problems later in life, including depression, anxiety disorders -- even cardiovascular disease and diabetes . . . asking children to handle material that their brain is not yet equipped for can cause frustration. Perceiving a lack of control is a major trigger of toxic stress, which can damage the hippocampus, a brain area crucial to learning and memory.

Despite this, preschools are increasingly ditching their play-based curriculums in favor of this kind of toxic direct instruction.

"Scientists are baffled," says Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. "The more serious science we do, the more it comes out that very young children are not designed to do focused, goal-directed behavior . . . but are to a phenomenal degree very sophisticated about learning from the things and the people around them."

I'm not particularly baffled. The more I read about these corporate education "reform" efforts, the more I come to understand that this is about inexperienced people and their craving for control. Lurking in there is the crazy idea that if we treat education like a predicable, mechanistic system of some sort, we'll be able to manufacture brilliant little minds, all filled up with the names of the countries in Asia or the various species of whales. That if we just put them in the right containers, direct them into the proper channels, or boil them at just the right temperature, we'll have a generation of little knowledge machines ready to set loose on the world. In this vision, teachers need only be technicians, or perhaps mere factory workers, trained to adjust the dials and read the gauges.

This, of course, is like trying to make water flow uphill, with the added sickening bonus that you risk damaging their brains. I think it's because these otherwise intelligent people have so little experience with the process of education that they don't understand the basic principles of how young children actually learn. They don't have the experience to know that the method and the order in which children learn things, the process of learning, is far more important than any trivia you try to cram into their heads. They are trying to push this water up hill because they've not played with it enough to understand that it's simply not in water's nature to flow up hill. In this way, they are showing themselves to be very poorly educated, at least on the topic of education.

It's as if these people are working from the perfected template of a theoretical child, one that they can predict and control the way they might water, a concept they've developed after spending a few hours observing children through one-way glass. Classroom teachers, those of us who have spent years and decades immersed in children's learning, know that they come to us ready to learn everything they need to know, in fact learning it already, usually in spite of us. Experienced teachers know that they spend most of their days racing to just keep up with their charge's natural inclinations and curiosities that carry them in directions often entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable. Much of what I do after making sure they don't kill themselves or one another is to get out of the way. That's much of what teaching is.

The puzzles in the accompanying photos always been moderately popular with our 4-5 year olds. I'd had them out earlier in the year and they kids had been frustrated with them, many being reduced to tears, despite the fact the the official label on the box said they were for "3 and up." Many of the kids had needed a lot of adult coaching to get through them, which is a sure sign that they're not ready for them. I predicted, however, that while many of them still aren't natural puzzlers, enough of them had advanced enough in their puzzling skills by now that at least if help was needed they could help one another. And sure enough, that's how it went. Instead of struggling with the puzzles one-on-one, the children, with no adult instruction, paired up to coach one another.

So there you have it, education "reformers," free of charge, a genuine predictable outcome that took me ten years to finally learn to anticipate. It didn't teach them anything about the nations of Asia or the species of whales in the ocean, but the children did spend a lot of time talking, sharing space, strategizing, taking turns, and generally "just playing," learning from the things and people around them as they are "designed" to do. 

These results are valid until the next time we get out these puzzles with an entirely different set of children, who may or may not take it where this group did. And guess what? No risk of brain damage.

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!

-->

Making It Their School

On the first day of school, our 2-year-olds have no idea what to expect. Sure, some of them have met me, some have visited the school, but none of them have ever been part of a full morning at Woodland Park, which is why many of them are nervous even with their parent attending school with them as parents do in a cooperative. Most kids won't be comfortable at school until they've internalized the schedule. Indeed, the curriculum for our first several weeks is essentially learning about the routines and procedures that underpin our days together.

As many of you know, I use a drum to signal transitions. Last week, I used it to signal "clean up time." Being the first day of class, it was a signal for the parents to start packing things away, to clean paint brushes, to drain the water from the sensory table, although as time goes on I know the children will start hearing it as a signal for themselves. Of course, many of the kids participated anyway, imitating the adults as they put blocks on the shelves, collected small items into storage bins, and put play dough into plastic bags, but most milled about knowing that something was happening, but not exactly what. 

Our large easels needed to be moved so I made a show of it, "I need strong muscles to help me move these easels!" A couple of kids joined me as we slid the first one across the floor. Four children helped me move the second one. Now it was time to move the big green-topped table into its place. When the easels are part of the classroom set-up, I stash the art table on its side against the radiator. A half dozen kids joined me in wrangling the big table, still on its side, to its spot where the easels previously resided.

As we pulled the table I named my helpers, one at a time, saying things like, "This is our school and we're taking care of it together."

When we got the table into place, I said, "Okay, now we need to push the green side," and as they pushed I gently lowered the table onto it's legs, my team now up to a half dozen kids.

I finished by saying, "Now we need some chairs around the table," then turned my attentions to other matters.

Several minutes later, the blocks put away, I turned to survey the room to make sure we were ready to head outside, when I spotted our art table. The kids had not put some chairs around it, they had put all the chairs around it. On the first day of school these 2-year-olds had continued working on the project on their own, making it their own, with no guidance or prompting from the adults, working until it was done to their satisfaction.

They had already made this their school and were already taking care of it together.

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!

-->

So Quit Trying

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.  ~James Baldwin

I don't claim to be a parenting expert.  I'm just a guy who has spent a lot of time playing with children, from that I've learned a little bit, and because of this blog people write me for my take on things. If there is any one thing that people write me more than anything else, it's something along the lines of, "I've tried everything and nothing works." I'm talking about universal parenting aggravations like getting kids to eat their vegetables, take a nap, or participate in household chores. And these are important things. Not only do we want our children to be healthy, rested, and responsible today, but these behaviors represent the values of good health and responsibility that, if we can only "instill" them, we know will serve our children throughout their lives.

While I try to be more sympathetic than this with individual readers because I know they wouldn't write to some guy on the internet wearing a red cape unless they were truly at the end of their rope, my answer to their dilemma is really quite simple: Quit trying.

You can serve children healthy food, but you can't make them eat. So quit trying.

You can put children into their bed, but you can't make them sleep. So quit trying.

And you can't make them clean up their room without the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment. 

So, I suppose I could reply to these parents that they haven't, in fact, tried "everything," because obviously you could always come up with a carrot that is sweet enough or a stick that is painful enough that you can get a child to do what you want them to do, but I would never suggest that anyone consciously step onto the vicious cycle of reward and punishment. Rewards and punishments may appear to work in the moment -- the promise of ice cream may well motivate a child to eat a few peas; the threat of having toys taken away may well motivate a child to tidy up -- but human nature dictates that, being unnatural consequences, the value of the rewards and the severity of the punishments must be regularly increased or they lose their effectiveness. Not only that, but the lessons taught in the long run, to be motivated by the approval or disapproval of others, are certainly not what we wish for our children. Values must come from within; they are not imposed from without: that's called obedience an unsavory and even dangerous trait.

Whatever we publicly proclaim, our actual values (as opposed to the values to which we aspire) are always, always, always most accurately and honestly revealed by our behaviors. When we eat junk food, we demonstrate that we value convenience or flavor over eating healthily. When we don't get enough sleep, we demonstrate that we value our jobs or our hobbies or our TV programs more than rest. When we let our homes become cluttered and dirty, we demonstrate that we value something else over a well-ordered household.

No, the better course, I've found, when it comes to teaching values is to simply give up trying to make another person do something that you want them to do. If you value healthy food, then eat it. If you value being well rested, then sleep. If you value a tidy bedroom, then keep yours tidy. And ultimately, with time, sometimes lots of time, it will be your role-modeling of these behaviors that your child will come to imitate, not on your schedule, but one of his own, which is all we can expect of our fellow humans.

You cannot instill values in other people, you can only role model them. And while I've avoided mentioning them in this post, no matter what your priest, rabbi, pastor, imam, or guru says, this goes for moral values as well.

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!

-->

First Steps On A Journey To Becoming Us

This is our first week of school. 

We made some significant changes around the place over the summer. Our growing kindergarten program needed more space and the only thing that made sense was to move them into the classroom that we've been using as our primary storage room for the past six years. 

Having sufficient storage space is important to me. In an ideal world, I would have at least as much as I do classroom space, but frankly, since we run our program largely on donations, junk and garbage there is really no amount that would be sufficient. That said, we've gone from having just barely enough storage to having not quite enough and over the summer a lot of work went into shoehorning it all into the various cupboards, closets, rooms, and sheds that are now serving the purpose.

Over the first couple months of summer break, I taught some of our summer program sessions which meant only being there 3-4 mornings a week, running our version of a summer camp for a rotating group of kids. This was followed by five weeks of presenting professional development talks and workshops in Australia, before returning for one more summer session followed by a journey from despair to elation as we somehow figured out how to make our storage situation work.

I remember what the first day of kindergarten felt like, a unique mixture of anxiousness and excitement. The children I teach are experiencing that this week, as are, I'm sure, their parents. 

Most years, I feel that way too, but this year the most pronounced emotions for me have been ones of relief, of ease, of relaxation, and honestly, of pure joy. 

After the summer, I find myself embracing this return to normal. I didn't even realize how much I missed it. There are similarities between our summer program and the regular school year, but this is the real deal. 

We will be coming together again and again, the same people, day after day, week after week, month after month. We will be getting to know one another through our play and our projects, through our triumphs and our conflicts, through our belly laughs and our bloody owies. We will be creating the story of all of us living together. 

We are coming together to create something that has never existed before: our community of children and their families. That's why we do this. That's why Woodland Park exists. It's not about a single day or a week, but about the commitment we've made to be together every day, to working things out, to struggling and thriving. In some sense, summer is about every man for himself, while the school year is about everyone being in it together. We're always stronger that way.

We're painting and building and puzzling and digging and exploring this week, the first week of school. And we'll do it next week and the next: first steps on a journey to becoming us. 

In other words, normal preschool stuff. I'm sure happy to be back.

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!

-->

Institutionalized Child Abuse

Last year at this time Seattle's Public School teachers were on strike. They had a list of demands, most of which were ultimately met, including the requirement that all elementary school children receive a minimum of 30 minutes a day on the playground. As pathetic as that victory might sound to those of us who live and work in the world of play-based education, some schools were limiting their charges to 15 minutes of recess over a school day. This is not an uncommon phenomenon in America and indeed many other parts of the world.

As heartlessly cruel as this sounds, it's the result of administrators and teachers who have bought into the entirely unsupported myth that more "instruction time" will result in "better results," and that every moment of free play, especially outdoors, is a waste of time. Meanwhile, 17 million children worldwide have been prescribed addictive stimulants (like Ritalin), antidepressants and other mind-altering drugs for "educational" and behavioral problems, over half of them in the US. Already one in ten American students are on these drugs and the fastest growing segment are children five and under.

And now this from the UK: 

Tests to assess . . . children's physical development at the start of the first school year found that almost a third to be "of concern" for lack of motor skills and reflexes. Almost 90 per cent of children demonstrated some degree of movement difficulty for their age . . . The tests suggest up to 30 per cent of children are starting school with symptoms typically associated with dyslexia, dyspraxia, and ADHD -- conditions which can be improved with correct levels of physical activity, experts say.

What's to blame? Lack of physical play is a big part of it, but there's more. According researcher Dr. Rebecca Duncombe:

"Young children have access to iPads and are much more likely to be sat in car seats or chairs . . . But the problem can also be attributed to competitive parenting -- parents who want they children to walk as soon as possible risk letting them miss out on key mobility developments which help a child to find their strength and balance."

And why do we have competitive parenting: because our schools, indeed our entire educational environment, is built around the idea of competition; around the cruel caution that "You don't want your child to fall behind." Bill Gates has succeeded in "unleashing powerful market forces" on our children and this is the result. Because we have to get them ready for the "competitive job market of tomorrow," we've herded them indoors, where they spend their days locked in being force-fed "knowledge" like it's some sort of factory farm. It's so bad that we have to drug them. It's so bad that  90 percent of our four-year-olds aren't even getting the opportunity to learn how to move their bodies properly. The only other human institutions of which I'm aware that regularly drug and confine people are prisons and mental wards.

Instead of understanding the truth about young children -- that they need to move their bodies, a lot, and preferably outdoors -- we have created a very, very narrow range of "normal" into which we are forcing our children. This is outrageous. It's malpractice. And it's on all of us for letting it happen.

I usually try to end these posts on a positive or hopeful note, but the best I can do right now is to say that at least Seattle's Public School kids are getting their 30 minutes outdoors this year . . . Unless, of course, they are being punished, because taking away recess is one of the more common "consequences" for children who can't sit still and focus. And if they fail too often, we drug them.

Parents: the more time your child spends outdoors, playing, the smarter she will be. Create it at home and demand if from our schools. Teachers: the more time your students spend outdoors, playing, the smarter they will be. Create it at school and demand more of it from your administrators. This is the science. This is what we know about children. What's happening now is nothing short of institutionalized child abuse and we're all a part of permitting it to happen.

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!

-->