Saying Nothing

It happened in a flash. He wanted to dump the bowl of "jewels" (florist marbles) that he had collected into the mud. She wanted them to remain clean. He dump the jewels. There were loud voices and when I looked from across the sand pit I saw her push his face, then storm off.

Both children were upset. The boy's mother was nearby and after checking to make sure he wasn't hurt, engaged him in a discussion, so I followed the girl whose body was tense with rage. She marched this way and that for a moment, jaws locked in anger. As I approached, she turned her back on me, so I stopped in my tracks.

What was I going to say to her? Maybe I was going to remind her of the rules we had all agreed to some weeks ago, specifically mentioning the one that goes, "No pushing." I might have been preparing to say something like, "When you pushed his face, you hurt him." She walked slowly away from me, her shoulders hunched forward. When she got to a corner formed by a railing and a random cart that has found its way onto our playground, she knelt on her knees, nose in the corner.

I looked back at the boy who was now chatting easily with his mom as he bent down to the mud handling the jewels he had dumped there.

I didn't say anything to the girl because, frankly, there was nothing to say. Or rather, anything I said would be redundant at best. There was no question that she was already feeling remorse, regretting her action, mulling it over in the quiet of the corner she had found for herself. I stepped away and left her to her conscience. After a couple minutes, she moved herself into a more distant corner, although this time she faced outward, her face a study of sorrow, staring into the ground.

Again, I began contemplating words I might say to her. Maybe I could comment on her emotional state. Or perhaps there was something I could say to help her understand the cause and effect of the affair. But again I realized that anything I said just then would be a mere distraction from the important work she was doing, sitting alone, calming down, and painfully reflecting.

Moments later the boy approached her, hand outstretched. In it was a jewel. He offered it to her saying, "I cleaned this one for you."

She took the jewel and held it in the palm of her hand. The boy shifted from foot to foot as if waiting for her to say something. When she didn't, I softly said, "That was a kind thing to do." He went away then, back to his play. The girl watched him go then looked back at the jewel in her hand, contemplating it for a moment before clutching in her fist. She stayed that way, thinking and feeling, until she was ready to return to her own play. It's from these moments that we become wiser, gentler people.

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"May I Play With You?"

During this first month of the school year, J has more or less been playing alone, milling around the edges, watching. His mother has told me that he yearns to be included in the larger games, that he talks about it at home, but that he's either waited in vain to be invited or has been rebuffed when he's asked the other children, "May I play with you?"

It's not an untypical scenario. My own daughter experienced some of this when she was four and five. I would try to coach her, telling her that most preschoolers automatically say "No" when they are already engaged and someone interrupts to asks if they can play. I suggested she would have more success if she were to instead start by asking, "What are you doing?" or simply stating, "I'm going to play with you," or inviting, "Let's play on the swings," or best of all, just join the game without any introduction at all, dropping to her knees and getting busy alongside the other children. But despite my best efforts she would insist on doing it her way, continuing to ask "May I play with you?" and suffering those heartbreaks in return.

J's mother has been coaching him along the same lines with similar results. He's not been miserable at school, finding solo activities or grown-ups with whom to interact, but he's also been immune to our adult ideas on how he could more effectively enter into play. I've noticed he was particularly focused on a group of kids playing superheroes: The Hulk, Spiderman, and Batman, along with made-up up caped crusaders with names like Violet, Falcon, and Frogman.

On Monday, he was still hanging back. On Tuesday, however, he arrived in full-on Thor regalia, complete with helmet and Mjolnir, the thunder hammer. From the moment he walked through the gate he was surrounded by the other superheroes, questioned, enthused over, included. His mother told me that it was his own idea.

Yesterday, he came as Wolverine and was not only again included, but several times took on the leadership roll of boldly calling for the superhero team to assemble in this or that place on the playground: "All superheroes to the hideout! All superheroes to the hideout!" And the superheroes responded.

Every human has vast experience with how it feels to be rejected. Studies I've seen indicate that even the most "popular" children are told "No" some 30 percent of the time. And it's not something that goes away as we get older, even if perhaps we've learned to be more philosophical about it.

J made his study, he performed his experiments, he evaluated the results, and through his own process, in his own time, found his way from the edge into the center. But as we know, the center always shifts and sooner or later he'll find himself on the outside again, we all will, but now he knows, though experience, that he can always find his way back in. 

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Emergence

One of the most useful classes I took in college, in a vocational sense, was a class called Advertising Agencies, taught by a professor who had just left his job at a big Madison Avenue shop. We spent most of our time learning how to "sell" our ideas to our superiors and clients, the basis of which was the written proposal. It was a real eye-opener for me, a kid who fancied himself a creative writer, suddenly challenged to more or less forget what I knew about grammar, crafting sentences, and creating narrative structure, and to instead pack as much information as I possibly could into bullet points and fragments, starting with a conclusion then backfilling with the strategies and tactics that would be the stepping stones to success.

When I landed my first job, it was this skill, this ability to create concise, yet detailed, logical, step-by-step plans, that got me the most kudos and brought me to the attention of those higher up the pyramid. In fact, I made one of them literally cry with joy in a meeting based on having pulled together a vital proposal on a deadline that the rest of the team thought we certainly must miss. It got me invited to a lot of meetings I wouldn't have otherwise been senior enough to attend because my bosses wanted me there the shape the discussion into a blueprint for next steps. I loved it: it was the perfect marriage of left-brain and right-brain. By the time I left that job I was pretty much writing every plan and proposal that came out of our office. 

It took me a couple years, however, to figure out that no matter how brilliant my words on paper, no matter how precisely I laid out the timeline and benchmarks, nothing ever went according to plan. I would sometimes, part way into a project, pull our plan out of the filing cabinet and marvel at how "off the tracks" we were. Seriously. This doesn't mean we weren't successful, because we were most of the time, but as great as my written plans were to get everyone going, once the "sale" was made, once people got involved, we might as well have tossed it all out the window. Sometimes even the actual objective would change in the process of real people doing real work.

This is a quote from the book A Simpler Way, by authors Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers.

Emergence is so common to our experience that it's a wonder we don't recognize it, that we still believe we must plan everything into existence. How much of any human endeavor comes to fruition from precise plans unfolding step by step, just as their designers describe? If we look at any successful human activity, we see that what led to success was the newly discovered capacity of people. They came together and invented new ways of doing something. They explored new realms of ingenuity. They made it happen by responding in the moment and by changing as they went along.

I've come a long way since those days as a little junior executive, taking such pride in his plans and such frustration in their destiny as file drawer fodder. When I first started teaching, I put a lot of effort into planning out our school days, but I'd already moved past expecting that those plans would be of any use other than to ease my anxiety.

Our plans, blueprints, and diagrams have made it difficult to see this wonderful creative capacity growing around us all the time. We fear surprise and retreat to caution. We would rather know what's in store than be caught off guard by new possibilities . . . What are we guarding against? Is newness so fearsome?

What I was attempting to guard against back then was failure, of everything running off the rails, but now? After over a decade of playing with children, I've learned that it is exactly that "surprise" that let's me know we've been successful. It's not the plan I've put together, whether on paper or in my head, but rather the "new possibilities" that emerge from us that makes it all worthwhile.

Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the experience vulnerable, unprotected by the illusory cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don't know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage with others for the experiment. We are willing to commit to a system whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion . . . Every act of organizing is an act of faith. We hope for things unseen which are true.

Once our plans have given us a sense of purpose and direction, a filing cabinet is exactly where they belong. Because once we've engaged with others for the experiment no one can predict where our creativity will take us.

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Nesting

Many years ago, a girl named Luna introduced me to a type of play of which I was formerly unaware. Almost every day, she and two or three friends would collect big piles of things -- plastic food, stuffed animals, and other indoor loose parts -- then spend most of their time, it seemed, just sitting on their pile. Usually, they chose the area under our loft and most often they simply called it their home, although sometimes it was a castle or a fort.

To my thinking as a fairly new teacher, it wasn't a particularly "productive" type of play. It was sedentary, isolating, and messy. It was perhaps the messiness that bugged me the most because the girls -- and it was mostly girls -- would not leave their nest of stuff until it was time to tidy up. Then they would make themselves scarce, leaving the rest of us with a huge sorting project. I never said or did anything to scuttle their game, even as I often wished it away.

Indeed, even after Luna moved on to kindergarten, this type of play continued. It seemed that there was always at least one four-year-old with this instinct. Sometimes I would join the kids in their nesting play, finding a spot amongst their maddening clutter, trying to better understand what was going on. I never lasted long, however, because we mostly just sat on our stuff, minutely arranged our stuff, quibbled over our stuff, and conspired to get more stuff. In other words, I found it rather dull even if the children were fully engaged.

That's okay, of course, I don't need to understand everything the children do, so I simply parked it in my brain as "nesting play" and left it there.

When we moved to our current location some six years ago, the nesting play didn't move with us. Although the physical layout of the classroom, including the loft and other furniture, remained virtually the same, the children simply stopped doing it. Sure, there were still times when kids would make big piles of random materials, but it never took on the day-after-day regularity that it had in previous eras. And honestly, I've not really thought about it since: good riddance and all that, I suppose.

The reason I'm reminded of Luna and her nesting game this morning is that after a long hiatus it appears to be back. Pretty much since the beginning of the school year, a small group of four-year-old boys has been nesting in the top of our loft, emptying boxes and bags and shelves of stuff into piles, then essentially sitting on it, calling it their home or their hideout, sometimes keeping others out, but mostly arranging, quibbling and conspiring.

I'm a different teacher today than I was back then. I no longer judge any type of play as being superior or more productive, even if I still detect an itch of irritation over it. I've learned that when children are free to pursue their own interests in their own time, they are invariably preparing for what they perceive to be in their future. When they wear costume gowns and play princess, they are, in part at least, working on societal notions of gender and beauty; when they play hero games they are exploring concepts of masculinity, threat and protection; when they build or create or explore or experiment they are seeking to understand the social, physical and scientific ideas that underpin our world. That is the reason play exists as an instinct: it is how our urge to understand naturally expresses itself. It is through our play that we ask and answer their own questions about the world.

Of course, I can never really know what motivates another human, but in thinking about this nesting play, I can't help but make connections to how too many of us live, sitting in our homes, collecting and curating our stuff, arranging, quibbling, and conspiring to get more. I'm not saying that any individual family is more stuff oriented than another, but rather that the idea, like the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, are a part of our world and each of us, including our children, must come to terms with it. The children, it seems, are seeking to understand this obviously important connection we have with our piles of stuff. Some will grow up to accept it, others will reject it, and most will carve out some sort of middle ground.

In the meantime, the children are nesting in their pile of what we adults see as worthless stuff, asking and answering their own questions, while at the same time holding up a mirror in which we see our own reflection.

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When They Blow Our Minds

As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has -- or ever will have -- something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.  ~Mister Rogers

Every parent knows her child is a genius. It's in the nature of our progeny to blow our minds, to put us in touch with the irrepressible miraculousness of life. And these parents are not delusional: their children are, in fact, geniuses. As a teacher of young children, I can honestly say that I've never met one who is not.

Of course, I'm not talking about "genius" only in the narrow Einstein sense, although that's included in the definition, but rather in the broader idea that each one of them -- indeed, each one of us -- has something that that sets us apart and above. Some parents can't help boasting, while others remain quietly humble, but each of them arrives in my life knowing and loving the genius of their own child, and that's exactly how it should be.

One of the things I love most about being a teacher in a cooperative school where the parents work in the classroom alongside me as assistant teachers is that while they all come into the classroom fully aware of their own child's genius, as time goes on, as they get to know the other children as individual humans, as collaborators in the community we are building together, they come to also recognize the genius in each of these other children as well. Almost every day, an adult will say to me, the light of epiphany in her eyes, "Guess what Sally just did?" or "Did you hear what Johnny said?" 

As I get older, I find myself increasingly convinced that we are here for only one purpose, and that is to look for the genius in the other people and then, even more importantly, to let them know not only that we see it, but that it blows our minds.

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The Intimacy Of Doing

I usually bag my own groceries at the supermarket.  I like to make efficiency games of routine activities and bagging groceries is a classic example. As I line up my purchases on the conveyor band, I start with the things I want at the bottom of the bag and end with the eggs and bread. Not only that but I make sure the bar codes are visible so that even the cashier becomes a part of my efficiency game. This isn’t something I’ve ever talked about; I just do it for fun.

Several years back, one of the cashiers at my regular store caught onto my game and played with me. She was the fastest cashier in the store. I queued up in her line even if it was the longest. We hardly spoke beyond the standard check out line Q & A. I knew her name was Joan because she wore a nametag. I’m a smiler, she was not. I’m a chatter, she was not. But on the issue of check-out line efficiency, we seemed to share a brain.

At one level it was a race and we both knew it. To keep it fair, she always waited, unsmiling, adjusting her wrist braces (yes, she took her job seriously), until the prior customer cleared the counter. But the moment I stepped into that spot, it was on. Since the heaviest items tend to be easily scanned things in jars, cans and bottles, the opening of the game was a flurry of hands, where I struggled to keep up, but as she got to the “hard” produce, like melons, root vegetables, and apples, she was forced to slow down slightly to weigh and type in codes. That gave me just the opportunity I needed to swipe my debit card and begin punching buttons. When it was a multi-bag shopping trip, she gained on me during the change-overs, but I knew the “soft” produce, like bananas, peaches, and grapes would give me the breathing room to catch up.

Sometimes my game with Joan was perfection: we finished simultaneously. One time, I couldn’t help myself, breaking our unofficial protocol to speak, “What a team!”

She answered, “That was fun.” And as we looked into one another’s faces I saw the corner of her mouth twitch, which I take as her version of a smile.

I once got into a similar unspoken flow with a man named Dave, who I had just met the day before. We were unloading logs from a pick up truck and tossing them into the cellar of a cabin via the old coal shoot. Dave and I positioned ourselves on either side of the tailgate, taking turns flinging our logs as deeply into the dark hole as we could. We started off joking around, but before long we were in a rapid-fire rhythm, boom-boom-boom-boom, punctuated by grunts and sweat. I entirely lost myself in our game. My whole world for those 20 minutes was firing logs as accurately as I could, while making sure to stay in time with Dave, or we would have otherwise been flinging logs into the backs of one another’s heads. We didn’t speak about the game, but we took up the same positions with each subsequent pick-up load, and found that same cooperative rhythm.

When we were done for the day, Dave said to me, “That was intense.”

And I echoed Joan’s line, “That was fun.”

These are the moments I feel most alive; these times when I find myself wholly attuned to another person, and they’re wholly attuned to me. There’s an intimacy in those moments that can never be achieved through words. I’ve often found those moments playing on team sports, dancing, doing physical labor, making love, and occasionally while creating communal art. It’s the intimacy of doing.

I teach at a cooperative preschool because of those moments. There is a beautiful, nearly wordless rhythm that emerges among the children and adults on our good days. The work of running our classroom flows like a dance or a song. It happens when we can all manage for a few hours to set aside our stresses and concerns, get down on our knees, and pour everything we are into the children. We don't always get there, but when we do, even if only for a few minutes, it's everything.

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A Wall And A Tower

The two of them, a boy and a girl, built a wall. They had the entire checker board rug to themselves, they had all the baby wipe box blocks to themselves, and they decided together to build a wall to, in their words, "keep the others out."

The goal was to build it so high that "no one could get over" and for quite some time no one even tried. They used all the blocks and had all that space.

A classmate finally came to examine the wall.

"It's a wall to keep people out," they said, "You can step over it and come in." When that first friend accidentally kicked part of the wall down in the process, they decided they needed a door.

More friends joined them, using the door in the wall built to keep the others out. Soon there were a half dozen of them inside the wall. Someone said, "This is our new play area."

There were no other toys in the walled play area and the blocks were all incorporated into the wall. All they had was one another, the checker board rug and that wall that was not really keeping anyone out.

They decided to make it a place for dancing. I put on some West African marimba music. They danced within the wall in their own spaces and in their own styles.

One boy found a box full of small, plastic rainbow people and brought it inside the wall. He began arranging them along the top of the wall saying, "These people are our audience." Some of the kids helped him arrange the rainbow audience while the others danced.

As is usually the case with four and five year olds, it isn't enough to play together without also touching one another. The dancers danced together until it evolved into a kind of pig pile under which one of them was trapped. She didn't cry, but they saw pain in her face and decided to play more gently.

Amazingly, after a good 45 minutes, the wall with it's precariously balanced rainbow audience was still standing. By now there was at least a dozen kids inside the wall that had been built to keep the others out, the wall in which they had built a door, a wall inside which they had danced and grappled and empathized and compromised.

Then, as is every wall's destiny, they kicked it over with such an eruptive suddenness that it alarmed us all. I had walked away just prior to that moment and returned, worried that they would somehow need big, responsible, adult me in the aftermath of that wall coming down, but I saw only smiles on beet red faces as they made rubble of that wall that could no longer even pretend to keep anyone out.

Moments later a cry went up, "Let's build a tower!" And together they did.

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Working Together

Within the context of our school, a place where we come to make mistakes, where right and wrong are only adjudged according to the agreements we've made with one another, puzzles have always fascinated me. You see, there really is only one way to work a puzzle: you either have all the pieces and they are all in their proper places or not. If the puzzle is a "just right" sort of puzzle then it requires a lot of concentration, a lot of trial and error, to finally noodle it out. For some of us, that's both the pain and joy of puzzles.

They become particularly challenging when we break out our giant floor puzzles, the ones that invite others to work them with us. And since ours is a robust, full classroom, you're often not even guaranteed an undisturbed space in which to do all that concentrating. Because of that these puzzles become as much an exercise in cooperation as they are a constructive process.

Most children have better things to do than work the puzzles, but there is always a handful for whom they form the focal point of their morning. It's fascinating to witness the strategies they develop for getting their puzzles done. One year a girl named Sasha took charge, sitting in a position of oversight, then instructed her friends, piece-by-piece. On Monday, these three-year-olds, after rejecting the adult ideas of "starting with the edge pieces," began assembling individual sections of the construction site puzzle, then, in an epiphany-like fashion, connected their disparate parts until they had formed it into a whole thing.

They worked hard concentrating and cooperating, finally finishing their puzzle, jumping to their feet, cheering, then proudly showing off to any adults who happened to be near, "Look what we did!" 

But, inevitably, all puzzles must be dismantled. For some, that's a joy equal to the accomplishment of completion, but for others it's harder to let go. It began with the completion of the construction site puzzle:

"Let's break it!"

"Yeah!"

"No!"

Usually, the enthusiastic damage is done before the objection is even voiced, but this time everyone froze and looked at their friend who was not yet ready to see all that hard work in pieces. It had been primarily a crew of four who had done the assembling: three were poised to return it to the box. They looked up at their friend who wore an expression on the edge of tears. There was a long moment of silence before one of them said, "Let's leave it!"

"Yeah!"

They then turned their attentions to the dinosaur puzzle that another group had left partially assembled. As they worked, the construction site puzzle was in constant jeopardy with children stepping on it, accidentally kicking it and whatnot. At some point, inspired to support the children in their wonderful agreement to not break it, I said, "Hey, when you step on the puzzle you're breaking it. You guys didn't want to break it."

They abandoned the dinosaur puzzle for a moment, reconvening around the one they had previously completed. They stood with their toes as close to the puzzle as possible without actually standing on it. Then one of them went into a deep crouch and leapt across the puzzle, landing on the other side, leaving the puzzle untouched. He turned around and did it again. Then again.

After a few more jumps, one puzzle-working friend joined him, then another. Soon these children who had cooperated to assemble the puzzle and who had cooperated in not breaking it up were now cooperating in leaping over it, sharing space, taking turns, still not breaking the puzzle because one boy, a boy who had by now moved on to other things, had not been ready. 

As a couple kids continued to jump over the construction site puzzle two others returned to the dinosaur puzzle, finishing it. Then, without even speaking about breaking it up, they began to jump over that puzzle as well.

There may only be one right way to assemble a puzzle, but there are as many ways to work together as there are humans on the planet.

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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