Building Your Own Backyard Playground

Awhile back, a reader left a comment on the Facebook page asking, "If I have $200 to make my backyard look a little more like your school, what should I get?"

First off, $200 is a pretty good budget for a project like that, mainly because most of the coolest stuff we have in our outdoor classroom we acquired at little or no cost. 

So here are some suggestions:

Sand or at least someplace for digging. Backyard sandboxes are great, but they're often really too small and too shallow for growing kids. When our community has created playgrounds, we always talk about "full body" sand pits. Sand, while not terribly expensive (around here we get about 60 lbs. for $3), could eat up that whole budget, however, but setting aside a digging area involving just regular dirt is an acceptable alternative.

And, of course, you'll need shovels, pails, and other tools. We use cheap plastic ones. We've tried metal, but galvanized steel buckets are heavier when full and tend to get bent out of shape quite easily in our rough and tumble environment. We do own some metal shovels, rakes, and hoes, but they aren't for day-to-day use even though they would probably make the work go easier. The reason is that our shovels are as often used as "weapons" as for digging, and while they both hurt, getting accidentally brained by a plastic shovel is generally preferred over being brained by a metal one.

Our two-level sandpit wouldn't be itself without a cast iron water pump. You can get a new one for under $50. Our's is mounted on a board that rests atop an inexpensive 30-gallon plastic tub that serves as our cistern. We drilled holes in the lid for the uptake pipe and for a hose to refill it when it's empty.

A natural extension of the pump, of course, are lengths of guttering. Ours are cut into 6-foot sections although we have a couple 10-footers stashed away for special uses. If you spend more than $200 on a pump set up, you've spent too much.

Using the gutters as loose parts is much preferred over a permanent installation. Not only does that allow kids to change the direction and flow of water as their needs demand, but we can use the gutters for other purposes, like down at the art station where we employ them in painting on adding machine tape with balls, mini-pumpkins, and/or toy cars and trucks.

Much of the stuff that makes our space "look" the way it does are things on which you really shouldn't have to spend anything. You can usually pick up logs and tree rounds, for instance, from a neighbor who has recently removed a tree or done some major pruning. Tree services will often give you some if they know its for kids.

Our two boats have both been donations. You just have to get the word out and wait.

It's important to remember, I think, that nothing lasts forever. It's good for kids to spend time playing on, with, and around things that are in various stages of deterioration. So when we got our new metal boat, we simply left the old, rotting, wooden one in place, where it is slowly "sinking" into the sand.

And speaking of loose parts, you shouldn't have to spend a penny on those.

Most of the toys, broken things, cartons, containers, boxes, and whatnot that we're ready to toss out, spend at least a little time in the outdoor classroom before reaching their final resting place in the dumpster.

"Loose parts" is just another name for junk.

Counted among our favorite loose parts are those larger bits that can be hoisted about by teams of kids.

Planks are incredibly versatile.

Ours range in length from 4-8 feet. These have all been donated by families and others looking to make space in their garages.

It's best if you can get new wood without a lot of knots in it: kids really like to experiment with the springy nature of the planks. Some of these have lasted us 3+ years being outdoors year round.

Shipping pallets are a great addition to planks. Ours were all acquired for free. We used to just grab them from the side of the road, but since learning that there can be some chemical and biological hazards associated with pallets, we've started making sure to only use those that are stamped with "HT," which stands for "heat treated." You don't want the chemically treated pallets around kids. We also avoid pallets that have been used to transport food products.

Old car tires are also staples around our place.

And we have a couple of galvanized steel garbage cans. They not only make great, loud, "thunder drums" and hidey-holes, but we often commander them as impromptu table tops.

Other free and inexpensive things we like to have around include brooms . . .

. . . ropes . . .

. . . pulleys . . .

. . . chains . . .

. . . roles of plastic fencing . . .

. . . pvc pipe . . .

. . . old bicycle inner tubes (in this case, we used them to make a sort of catapult) . . .

. . . pipe insulation . . .

. . . cardboard boxes . . .

. . . hoops . . .

. . . stick ponies . . .

. . . chalk . . .

. . . and lots of stuff to just bang on.

As far as more permanent things, I think it's nice to have some sort of playhouse. Again, ours was a donation from a family whose kids had outgrown it, although one of our grandfathers is building us a new one as we speak. A playhouse can be as simple as a cardboard box, however.

It's also nice to have some sturdy tables and chairs. We've purchased ours and they were quite a bit outside the $200 price range, but that's because we're a preschool with over 65 kids playing out there every day. Cheaper stuff, and even cast-off items with the legs cut down will work for backyard purposes. You can often find workable stuff at Goodwill.

And our space simply would not be what it is without a garden. Ours is just a collection of raised beds, but you don't even need that. 

Pots, soil and few seeds will suffice.

We've also re-puposed an old sensory table as a compost/worm bin. 

None of these things are expensive and that's how a child's play space should be. If there is any great truth about an outdoor classroom it's that it should be continually evolving and adapting, a hodge podge of old and new and everything in between. I am not exaggerating when I say that we acquired everything discussed in these photos for not a lot more than $200, other than the furniture and the sand, although there are work-arounds for both of those. If you're just outfitting a backyard, you can probably do it all for less.

That said, it's a backyard, which implies neighbors. As educational as these kinds of spaces are for children, these wonderlands of loose parts, dirt, rocks and compost, these bastions of junkyard chic, they are often perceived as eyesores by the uninitiated. Before going too far, you might want to save up to build a fence.

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"Sea World" Research

Most of the research supporting the teaching of "academics" in preschool can be compared to a marine biologist who goes to Sea World to study orca whales. Yes, you might figure out how to get them to jump through a higher, smaller hoop, but it doesn't tell you anything meaningful about orca whales. This is a metaphor Carol Black first used, but it's so apt I've adopted it as my own.

On the heels of yet more evidence that the Common Core federal public school curriculum is failing to prepare kids for the mercenary objectives of college and career, and as a follow-up to my post from last week, Five-Year-Olds "Falling Behind, I wanted to share with you what appears to be a perfect example of research that studies how children learn in captivity rather than in their natural habitat, then purports to draw legitimate conclusions from it.

In fairness, I've not read the full study because I didn't want to pay for it, but I reckon that this article entitled Preschool Academic Skills Improve Only When Instruction is Good to Excellent from the website of the purveyors of this particular piece of caged-rat research hits what the researchers consider the high points.

"Preschoolers in center-based care showed larger gains in reading and language when their teachers spent more time supporting their learning -- but only if the quality of instruction was in the moderate to high range."

"Children showed larger gains in academic skills when they attended more than on year of Head Start, had fewer absences, and spent more time in reading and math instruction."

"The lowest quality programs are going to have to change a lot in order for us to likely see the kind of improvement in language and academic skills that provide the foundation for succeeding in school . . . Children in our study showed the largest gains when teachers interacted with children frequently in engaging activities that were designed to teach those language and academic skills deliberately."

"Having a sensitive caregiver is really important for young children -- but it probably isn't sufficient alone for promoting academic skills. There has to be content and an intentional approach to instruction."

The jailers' cruelty embedded in these quotes has me shaking with rage. These are 2-5 year olds they are talking about. Every professional preschool teachers knows that children this age should be spending their days playing under the supervision of sensitive adults rather than being subjected to "more time in reading and math instruction," then being tested by "moderate to high" quality task masters. University of Cambridge researchers recently completed an exhaustive survey of all the research available on how young children learn -- not how they best learn in the captivity of schools, mind you, but how young children learn when allowed to lead their own education:

Studies have compared groups of children in New Zealand who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7. Their results show that the early introduction of formal learning (e.g., "academics") approaches to literacy does not improve children's reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later.

That's right, high pressure academic instruction of the sort advocated for in this "Sea World study," especially when it comes to literacy, tends to cause children to not only dislike reading, but to become poorer readers overall.

Anthropological studies of children's play in extant hunter-gatherer societies (e.g., child's more natural habitat) . . . have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups. It enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers . . . Neuroscintific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions.

Indeed, playing princess, climbing trees, building with blocks, and socializing with peers are superior to the sort of direct instruction required to get orcas to jump through those damned hoops:

. . . (S)tudies have also consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional approaches to learning in children. Presence play supports children's early development of symbolic representational skills, including of literacy, more powerfully than direct instruction. Physical, constructional and social play supports children in developing their skills of intellectual and emotional "self-regulation," skills which have been shown to be crucial in early learning and development. Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.

And that is the greatest danger of this sort of Sea World research: it will be used to argue for subjecting our children to the cruelty of even more desk time, more direct instruction, more testing, and less play, than they already have. If you came to me to suggest that you were planning to subject young children to extra stress, the increased possibility of mental health problems, and lower academic achievement, I would call you abusive. This sort of Sea World research does exactly that.

Within education research, a number of longitudinal studies have demonstrated superior academic, motivational, and well-being outcomes for children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes . . . an extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education (is) of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households.

Often, the proponents of academic preschools, will argue that we need to do it to help the disadvantaged "catch up," but the facts betray them. What they are arguing for, in reality, is making the lives of the orcas at Sea World even more miserable than they already are. All children have a right to their childhood: not only will they learn better, but they will be happier and that is a much higher goal that college or career, especially for preschoolers.

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Germinating The Seeds Of "We"

We've just completed the first week of our summer program. It's a fairly laid-back, multi-age, half-day, outdoor affair, attended mostly by families who are currently enrolled during the regular school year or who are alumni, although some of our sessions include a large number of newcomers as well. And even though it's a "summer camp," we still operate as a cooperative, which means I still get a healthy contingent of parent-teachers with whom to work. 

Superficially, what we do isn't so much different than what we do throughout our school year -- play -- but I've found that the nature of two-week sessions involving an ever-changing cast of children fundamentally changes my role. Or rather, it means that I'm pretty much always in "first weeks of school" mode. Even kids who have been coming to Woodland Park for years take awhile to warm up. Some of the kids already know one another, some of the parents do, but this is definitely not the same community that the children left only a week ago. There are older and younger kids, familiar faces perhaps, but not necessarily friends. We never go indoors except for the bathrooms and sinks. The schedule is different.

Adult organized games like "What Time is it Mr. Fox?" and "Red Light, Green Light" are rare occurrences during the regular school year, but I find them a useful tool for bringing a group of children together as they begin to feel things out.

Parents often remark on being surprised that their child who has been coming to our school for years is suddenly clingy, but I'm not. Yes, the "stuff" (sand pit, water pump, workbench, garden, swings, etc.) is the same, and the teacher is the same, but the different people make it a different place.

I've always had a teaching style that in many ways reflects my more youthful experiences as a baseball coach. I find myself often more focused on "the team" than the individuals, which is, I think, somewhat anathema to the focus of most of our schools, which tends to be mostly on individual accomplishment (test scores, grades, etc.). For me, we as a collective, as a unit, as a team, as a community is always at the forefront of what I do, even during the regular school year, but especially during these summer sessions. Of course, I have the luxury to do this because of our cooperative model, with plenty of adults around to support the children with their individual needs and challenges, which leaves me to put more of my energies into community-building.

During the first couple days this week, most of the kids, even the seasoned vets, were doing a lot of milling around, playing alone or in pairs, and the play I observed was mostly superficial, with a tendency to bounce from one thing to the next without getting to much depth and with little connection with one another. Whenever I sat down, be it in the sandpit boat, on the swings, or just in a pile of wood chips, kids gathered around me. I didn't call them, but they came anyway, looking I guess for an anchor or a touchstone or something, so I told stories, sang songs, or made art, leaving spaces for them to join in, to interrupt, to make suggestions. I think of it as a way to start our conversation, the one that would, given enough time and space, grow into what we call "our community." 

On Monday and Tuesday, despite the arguably more exciting lures of our playground, there were times when a dozen kids or more would choose to join these impromptu circles. My goal then is to gradually let the children take it over, usually by growing increasingly quiet, then by inching my body away to another spot. The larger group typically disperses, but there are always a few kids who stay behind to keep the game, whatever it is, going.

We've been coming together since Monday, but it wasn't until yesterday, Thursday, that we finally had a day that felt like Woodland Park. Sure there are still some kids figuring out how they fit in, but there were larger teams of them playing together, digging trenches in which to flow water, inventing "let's pretend" games, and making plans together for the coming minutes, hours, and days. By the end of next week, we'll have the beginnings of a real community, one that doesn't really need me, but then they will scatter to the wind and we will restart the process of germinating the seeds of we once again.

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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Our Urban Farm

We've now been living with a green house for about a year. The goal was to provide the opportunity for the children of Woodland Park to develop stronger connections with the food they eat and their natural world through a robust urban gardening program.

As with all new things, we struggled in the beginning, but now we're hitting our stride, even as we still have a long way to go.

When a family enrolls in a cooperative school, the parents commit themselves to working one day a week with me as an assistant teacher, but each family is also responsible for performing one of the many "jobs" that go into making a school function. What is making our gardening program function so far is that we have committed three parents to the job of "gardener." Over the years, we've made efforts to grow a garden at our school, with some successes, but mostly failures, mainly because we've not, as a community, maintained the patient year-round consistency required to really grow food productively.

Our process has been less one of planning and more one of group experimentation. As things stand right now, we have our "grazing gardens" on the playground. These are the beds we've filled largely with lettuces, kale, snap peas, nasturtiums, herbs, and a few berries. The idea is that this is where the children can freely engage with the garden, watering to their hearts' content, digging around in the worm bin, and sampling the produce. This tends to result in muddy beds and lots of barren stalks and vines because the kids devour pretty much anything out there. We've had a garden on the playground long enough to know that this is how it happens. For instance, we've had blueberries and raspberries growing out there for the past few years and we have never, never seen a ripe berry: they all get picked too early, tasted, and rejected.

The first red tomato we've ever produced!

Until the advent of the green house, we were forever struggling with the balance between allowing the children to love their garden to death and allowing the garden to actually grow. I think this is the spring in which we're turning that corner.

The green house and it's surrounding garden sits on the opposite side of the building from the playground. It is a place where we only take smaller groups of children, those who have chosen to "work in the green house," which usually means planting seeds, watering, and studying the less ravaged plants we have growing out there. The rest of the time, we're using the area as a kind of farm, in which we are growing new food plants to replace the old ones the children have devoured. For instance, there are several flats of lettuces, kale, and spinach growing in anticipation of the day when they will get moved to the grazing garden. We have a crop of snap peas thriving over there and each morning I harvest all the ripe ones to augment the few teeny, tiny ones we find and pick in the grazing garden. We also have raspberries and blue berries over there for the same reason.

We've located our nightshade plants (tomatoes and bell peppers) on the greenhouse side because the leaves aren't compatible with a grazing garden and honestly, we don't want those plants to suffer the same fate as the berries. As it is, my estimate is that we lose one green tomato for every one two or three year old who visits the green house. The same goes for vine plants like squash and cucumbers, those slow-growing plants with the big blossoms that are irresistible "picking flowers," which of course means we never get to see the fruit when they grow in the grazing garden.

The goal right now as summer is upon us is to create such a bounty that it carries us through the fall, always trying to find a balance between growing food and enthusiastic children, which is an uneasy one at best. Still, it seems to me that the main thing is to just grow an abundance of food knowing that a certain percentage of it will be sacrificed to play. Indeed, I've been telling people that I've come to realize that we don't have a gardening program at all, but rather an urban farming program, the sort of thing that I can't imagine doing without the commitment of our parent community.

And one day, we hope, we will be producing so much food that we will be taking our excess to local food banks to feed our wider 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!

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The Cure For Modern Life

Our school is housed in lower level of the Fremont Baptist Church, a place that also opens its doors to several 12-step groups, one of which meets early in the morning as I'm getting ready for school. I try to honor the "anonymous" part of AA and keep to myself, but I've become friendly with a few of the guys over the years and have taken part in many conversations about addiction.

The 12-step model is based upon the idea that alcohol and drugs (and gambling and sex and other things) are addictive and that any one of us could become an addict were we to systematically abuse them. We treat it like an incurable but controllable chronic disease and the kind of talk therapy offered by groups like AA is generally considered central to subduing addictive behavior. That is the prevailing societal idea, although I'm aware there are some who still consider addiction to be a weakness of character.

A couple months ago, I read a fascinating article by Bruce K. Alexander, psychologist and professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Much of our current thinking on addiction stemmed from rat studies in which rats were put in cages with the opportunity to inject themselves with various narcotic substances and in every case, every rat chose to do so, usually at an increasing rate until they died of their drug use. I've read of other experimental models in which these caged rats were given a choice between water bottles and water bottles laced with cocaine with similar results. And it was from these types of experiments that we came to the conclusion that some things are just inherently addictive and we are best advised to stay away from them.

As a young researcher, Alexander had taken part in some of these studies, but was dissatisfied with the experimental model. I mean, come on, rats in the wild are intelligent, social, active creatures. It only makes sense that if they are confined in a small cage with nothing to do but take drugs that's what they'll do. He and his colleagues decided to perform their own version of the experiment, but instead of isolating rats in solitary cages, they would build what they came to call "Rat Park," a place with plenty of space, things with which to play, plenty of tasty food, and, of course, other rats, including potential sexual partners. It was, in a word, a kind of rat paradise, and unsurprisingly, even when "addictive" drugs were available, the rats did not become addicted. Sure, they would sometimes imbibe, but most often in a way that we would probably identify and "recreational," and there was nothing like the universal addiction that had resulted from the earlier studies.

Alexander went on to find ways to study humans, mostly by digging into the historical records surrounding people who had had their traditional cultures destroyed such as Native Americans, but his tentative conclusion is that addiction has less to do with the drugs or the humans themselves, and more to do with the cages, real or metaphorical, in which we find ourselves.

When I talk to addicted people, whether they are addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, Internet use, sex, or anything else, I encounter human beings who really do not have a viable social or cultural life. They use their addictions as a way of coping with the dislocation: as an escape, a pain killer, or a kind of substitute for a full life. More and more psychologists and psychiatrists are reporting similar observations. Maybe our fragmented, mobile, every-changing modern society has produced social and cultural isolation in very large numbers of people, even though their cages are invisible!

Alexander points out that even in societies in which drugs and alcohol are not available, people who had been separated from their culture still exhibited many of the characteristic behaviors of mass addiction:

(P)eople stopped doing productive work and taking care of their families . . . idling away their time. Criminality and child neglect became problems, where they had not been before.

I've been living with this metaphor for awhile now and the more I think about it the more sense it makes to me. The mission of our little play-based cooperative school is to be a community in which we are raising our children together, a place with a thriving social and cultural life, a kind of "Rat Park" for children if you will, a place where we can play together. More than ever, I'm convinced that this is the way we should be doing it: that free play within the context of community is the cure for the plagues of modern life.

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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Five-Year-Olds "Falling Behind"

What would you think if you saw a mother hovering over her two month old infant drilling her on vowel sounds? Or how about a father coaching his five month old on the finer points to walking? I expect you would think they were at best wasting their time: two month olds can't talk and five month olds can't walk, let alone be taught. Talking and walking are things children just learn. Now imagine that when these babies failed to acquire these capabilities that are clearly beyond their developmental grasp, these parents began to fret that their child was "falling behind." You would think they were crazy. If a doctor told these parents their child was "falling behind" we would think he was either incompetent or cruel.

Sadly, there are actually people out there doing things like this. I've written before about hucksters who assert that babies can be taught to read and there are devices on the market that purport to help babies learn to walk. The good news is that while there are some naive parents who fall for such gimmickry in the misguided attempt to somehow one-up nature's long, successful history of "teaching" talking and walking according to well-established developmental timelines, most of us know better than to worry about these things that virtually every child stressless-ly learns without any special interventions.

My own daughter spoke her first word at 3 months old, consistently saying "Papa" when I played and cared for her: she was putting together full sentences before 6 months. This same "advanced" child didn't crawl until her first birthday and wasn't walking until close to 20 months, a full lifetime "behind" some of her peers. Today, as you might expect, she talks and walks like the rest of the teenagers: if she was ever behind she caught up, and if she was ever ahead, the others caught up with her.

This unsavory practice of taking advantage of new parent insecurities in the name of profit is one that deserves to be called out wherever it rears its nasty head, and it's borderline criminal when they play the "falling behind" card, which is why I'm writing today.

I've had the opportunity these past few years to travel around the world to talk to teachers and parents. Every place I go I find myself discussing this bizarre notion of "school readiness." Often translated in the US as "kindergarten readiness," it is essentially code for reading. It seems that the powers that be in our respective nations have decided to sell parents on the snake oil that if your child isn't starting to read by five-years-old she is "falling behind." They are doing this despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done on the subject recommends that formal literacy education (if we ever even need it) not begin until a child is seven or eight years old. They are telling parents and teachers that children are "falling behind" despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done finds that there are no long term advantages to being an early reader, just as there are no long term advantages to being early talkers or walkers. In fact, many studies have found that when formal literacy instruction begins too early, like at 5, children grow up to be less motivated readers and less capable of comprehending what they've read. That's right, if anything, this "school readiness" fear-mongering may well turn out to be outright malpractice.

But the worst thing, the unforgivable thing, is the cruelty of the assertion that five-year-olds are "falling behind." It's one thing when commercial interests attempt to move their crappy merchandise by playing on fears, but when schools are doing it, when teachers are doing it, that's unconscionable. Listen, I'm a staunch supporter of my fellow teachers here on these pages, but I am calling my colleagues out on this one. Teachers should know better than to help these guys sell this stuff: it's bad for kids, it's bad for families, and it's bad for society. We are the professionals. Teachers need to put our collective foot down, point to the research, rely on our own experience, and if we can't refuse to subject young children to developmentally inappropriate, potentially harmful "readiness" garbage for fear of losing our jobs, the least we can do is refuse to take part in the crass abusiveness of "falling behind." If we can't do that maybe we don't deserve to call ourselves professionals.

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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Language Creates Reality

I took a course in rhetoric in college. It was one of the most useful classes I ever took. Essentially we studied the art of persuading or motivating others. One of the messages I took away from the class was the professor's assertion that "language creates reality."

In the context of this particular class, of course, he meant that a deft use of specific words could literally shape one's audience's world, which is what lies at the heart of the art of rhetoric. And then he went on to prove it to us by one day successfully making the argument that altruistic acts are really acts of base selfishness, then the next persuading us that those very same acts were evidence of the existence of God.

I've carried that phrase "language creates reality" with me for most of my adult life and have come to understand that it didn't just apply to those I was attempting to motivate, but also to myself. We all carry a running narrative or dialog within ourselves. We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that this conversation we're having with ourselves is a reaction to our reality -- that lousy drivers, those rotten kids, or our doting husbands -- and it can be, but more often than not the script we're running in our heads is actually creating that reality for better or worse.

I found a great deal of support for this notion in the work of the great early psychologist and philosopher William James who said, "It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome," and "belief creates the actual fact." It was James who first suggested that one of the best ways to create a better reality was to simply stand up straight, put one's shoulders back, breath easy and walk tall.

This is deeper than simply having an optimistic or pessimistic attitude, but that, in part, lies at the heart of it.

Today, scientists have proven the actual physical truth of my professor's rhetorical assertion. Dr. Andrew Newborn, a neuroscientist and Mark Robert Waldman, a communications expert, in their book Words Can Change Your Brain, write: 

(A) single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.

In other words, the words we use both when speaking aloud or in our heads literally change our brains:

Angry words send alarm messages through the brain, and they partially shut down the logic-and-reasoning centers located in the frontal lobes.

This certainly explains much of our nation's political disfunction. So much of our political discourse is of the day-to-day, outrage-to-outrage variety, which is why so much of it makes no sense at all.

But on the other hand . . .

By holding a positive and optimistic (word) in your mind, you stimulate frontal lobe activity. This area includes specific language centers that connect directly to the motor cortex responsible for moving you into action. And as our research has shown, the longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain . . . Functions in the parietal lobe start to change, which changes your perception of yourself and the people you interact with. A positive view of yourself will bias you toward seeing the good in others, whereas the negative self-image will incline you toward suspicion and doubt. Over time the structure of your thalamus will also change in response to your conscious words, thoughts, and feelings, and we believe that the thalamic changes affect the way in which you perceive reality.

In other words, practice thinking and saying good words about yourself and the world will become a better place. 

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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Everything I Need To Say

On Wednesday I wrote a post entitled The Inherent Risk of Risky Play. A reader who I very much respect took issue with my use of the word "risky," suggesting that we instead refer to this sort of play as "challenging."

When we label children's challenging activities "risky play," we are colluding with fearful parents and risk-averse authorities and the industries that prey on them, like lawyers and insurers.

Honestly, the entire time I was writing that post, I was musing on my use of the words "risk" and "risky." I have my own issues with the word and have myself suggested that a more accurate way to describe it would be "safety play," because after all, a big part of what the children are doing through the process is learning how to keep themselves safe by developing the habits of risk assessment while simultaneously developing the physical skills that will keep them safe not just today, but throughout their lives.

I also contemplated making the post a bigger one, by riffing on the idea that, as this reader put it, "Life is risky. Walking down the street is risky." I even considered whether or not to include non-physical risky behavior like performing in front of an audience or telling someone "I love you" for the first time. For many, the emotional pain suffered from the risk of shame or rejection is far worse than any bloody owie. Indeed, I've seen surveys of American adults in which public speaking is a greater fear than death.

I did consider including the reader's point that the real "villains" in the contemporary propensity for bubble wrapping our kids are those "fearful parents" and "risk-averse authorities and industries that prey on them," most notably the lawyers and and insurers.

Ultimately, however, I decided to stick with the word "risky" because I choose to keep the post as concise as possible and it is a word that communicates exactly the sort of play I was trying to describe. I had faith that most readers would largely share my understanding of both the denotative and connotative definitions of the word. For most of us, most of the time, the word "risky" suggests physically challenging oneself with heights, speed, rough and tumble games, potentially dangerous elements (like sticks, water or fire), potentially dangerous tools (like knives, hammers or power drills), and "disappearing" or getting lost.

Speaking as a writer, were I to have used the term "safety play," I would have lost the benefits of the communicative efficiency offered by the alternative and it would have required several paragraphs to first "define" the term before using it. The same goes for the word "challenging," which incidentally is exactly the word the corporate education reformers are using to describe their high stakes standardized tests, their standardized curricula, and even the rote-based homework that children hate so much. "Challenging" is a good word, it's a legitimate replacement, but it does not communicate as clearly or fully, I think, as does "risky."

Speaking as a teacher at a school set up to support risky play, I worry that an attempt to "cotton wool" this sort of play with softer-sounding words will mean that some of the parents who choose to enroll in our school will not fully understand what I'm talking about and will opt to join us without their eyes being fully wide open to the real potential for injury. I don't want them to ever forget that aspect of risky play: the risk. I tell them that they should expect their child to come home with blood stains. This is vital to running a school like ours, a cooperative in which we rely on parents to also serve alongside me as teachers. I need them to be capable of wearing their fearfulness on their shoulders, allowing it to be present, not ignoring it, even as they go about the business of supervising with minimal interference.

Risk is a real part of risky play, even if our worst fears are rarely realized. There is no margin in ignoring or obfuscating that with alternative words which leave us open to being accused of "not warning me" of the inherent dangers, or worse, forgetting about them. I find myself comparing it to the way I fail to see the advantage in using alternatives like "hands-on learning" or "experiential learning" as stand-ins for the word "play." I'm glad that the word "risky" invokes the reality of the potential for injury, but at the same time, like the word "play," it evokes the thrill and joy that drives us to engage in it in the first place. The alternatives simply can't offer that. Speaking only for myself, I'll take "play" over "learning" any day, just as I'll choose "risky" over "challenging" in a heartbeat. One sounds fun, the other sounds hard. In the world in which I live and work, at least, the word "risk" has both a light and dark side, which has the virtue of being the truth about this sort of play.

On Wednesday evening, during the orientation meeting for our summer program, during a discussion about risky play, a veteran parent spoke up, "One of the things I've learned from being a part of this school is that I can't let my fear drive me to make kids stop taking risks. If I'm really concerned, instead of making a kid stop, I might just say, "What you're doing worries me," or "That doesn't look stable" or "That's a long way to fall." I'm not telling the kids what to do, but it does at least make them stop for a second to consider whether or not they agree with me. Sometimes they do, and they fix what worried me, but most of the time they just say "I'm okay," so I move a little closer just in case."

Of course, I share the concerns of the reader. I have no interest in colluding with the fear mongers, but I guess, for now, I've come down on the side of owning the word "risky," because it says everything I need it to say.

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"Philanthropists Shouldn't Be Setting America's Public School Agenda"

Wow. I'm surprised the editorial board of a major American mainstream media outlet has published this. LA Times editorial headline:

Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn't be setting America's public school agenda

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been foisting its special brand of venture philanthropy on American school children for nearly two decades now. Leveraging the Microsoft founder's reputation as all-around smart guy and sprinkling a few million here and there funded by the world's largest private bank account, they have pushed our public school system to the edge of crisis. In his dreams of "unleashing powerful market forces" on our nation's children, the world's wealthiest man, almost single-handedly, has succeeded in making public education a toxic environment where competition has replaced collaboration, veteran teachers are leaving the profession droves, parents are opting out, rote standardization rules the day, and high stakes testing dominates the curriculum.

The Gates Foundation's first significant foray into education reform, in 1999, revolved around Bill Gates' conviction that the big problem with high schools was their size. Students would be better off in smaller schools of no more than 500, he believed. The foundation funded the creation of smaller schools, until its own study found that the size of the school didn't make much difference in student performance. When the foundation moved on, school districts were left with costlier-to-run small schools.

This was followed up by their Machiavellian plans for improving teaching by modeling the profession after the dog-eat-dog environment that demoralizes employees at Microsoft and other technology companies, pitting state-against-state, district-against-district, school-against-school, and teacher-against-teacher in an arbitrarily refereed cage match with money being dangled as carrots and unemployment lines being wielded as sticks.

The program, evaluation system and all, was dumped.

But not before thousands of experienced teachers moved on to greener pastures. Not once did they consider that children are not widgets to be manufactured and that teachers are not generally a population that is motivated by greed. Of course, had they taken the time to actually collaborate with professional educators before turning our children into guinea pigs, these guys might have been in a position to anticipate the flaws in their plans. Now they are well into the disaster of forcing the Common Core federal public school curriculum onto our schools, a plan that was likewise developed with minimal input from actual teachers, and absolutely none from early childhood educators. Only now, it seems, have these ivory tower dilettantes come to recognize that maybe, just maybe, teachers have something important to say.

Writes Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellman:

We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators -- particularly teachers -- but also parents and communities, so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

Note that she's not saying they ought to have consulted us with an idea toward creating an actual, positive change in our schools (and with the billions they've already dropped on this, a real transformation could be taking place). No she is only saying that she wishes they had engaged us with a better sales pitch from the start. This admission highlights what has become evident: these corporate "reformers" view teachers and parents as sweet, well-meaning little puddin' heads who have been just waiting for Superman to save us, but even this weak tea confession is a noteworthy walk-back from one of the true super-villains of education. Desmond-Hellman even writes "the Gates Foundation doesn't have all the answers."

As the editorial writer responded: "It was a remarkable admission for a foundation that had often acted as though it did have all the answers."

I don't reckon this is a sign that Bill Gates and his minions have had a change of heart because the evidence is that they are now doubling-down on Common Core and it's soul-sucking regime of high stakes standardized testing, but that's exactly what this editorial is calling on them to do:

Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn't be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation's public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.

I have long said that there is a productive role that could be played by philanthropists like Gates, but it first requires that they drop their "shock doctrine" methods and begin by educating themselves about how children learn and how teachers teach. Until they get past the hubristic idea that we just need to run schools like a business, however, and let the professionals take the lead, they will continue to do far more harm than good. The LA Times seems to still hold onto the hope that they can change their ways, but at this point I don't trust them any more than I trust Microsoft's marginal software.

No, I expect, in their own brick wall-like ignorance, they will continue to view those of us who are pushing back as selfish, entitled puddin' heads who are simply too dense to grasp the wonders that they bring to us. And they seem prepared to use their deep pockets to keep pushing, which is why we must keep pushing back. Meanwhile, it's encouraging to see that even the LA Times has seen through them. 

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The Inherent Risk Of Risky Play

For the record, I don't want children to get hurt on my watch either physically or emotionally. That said, if children don't get physically or emotionally hurt on my watch then I'm doing my job poorly. It's the Catch-22 of working with young children in any capacity, but especially in a school with a play-base curriculum; we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Last week a four-year-old boy managed to fall into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo, resulting in a 17-year-old silverback gorilla being shot to death in the name of protecting the life of the boy. The parents have been vilified in the media, both traditional and social, for not better supervising their child. The zoo has been likewise lambasted for not better securing the enclosure, but mostly for resorting to  killing the gorilla rather than than opting for non-lethal means. 

I'm sad for the gorilla, the parents, and their son, and have for the past few days been thinking thoughts along the lines of "there but for the grace of God go I." I mean, we are a school that strives to provide opportunities for what is usually dubbed "risky play," and on any given day a child on my watch could get hurt, very hurt, even fatally, and were that to happen (knock on wood) I have no doubt that I would be vilified and lambasted. I have no doubt that there are posts on this blog that would be cited as evidence of my negligence. 

In this case, thankfully, the boy, while certainly frightened and probably suffering minor injuries, has emerged relatively unscathed, even while the gorilla (who some say appeared to be attempting to protect the boy) did not. And while we don't have gorillas around the place, we have had an alligator visit us as well as a boa constrictor, both of which touched and were touched by the children. We also have regular opportunities for kids to explore heights, speed, dangerous tools, dangerous elements, as well as rough and tumble play, five of the six general categories of essential risky play. The only one we don't provide is the opportunity for children to "'disappear' or get lost": we try to be relatively non-intrusive, but as a cooperative the children in our care are always being supervised by at least two adults. 

As a teacher, I count on that supervision. It's our special safety precaution, if you will, and it allows us to perhaps more fully explore the other aspects of risky play because, 1) the kids are well-supervised, and 2) over time, the children's parents who are doing the supervising become increasingly comfortable with risky play, because they are taking part in it. Indeed, some parents come into our school already fired up about risky play, while others are admittedly uptight. Last week, I watched a mom confidently managing 4 glue guns at the workbench when two years ago she confessed to me that the whole idea terrified her. I'm quite proud of that. Whole families learn at our school.

But the point is, we are minding the kids, believe me, but because it's inherently risky play, they will still sometimes get hurt, even badly. We've not had any broken bones, but we've twice sent kids to their doctor's offices for stitches and another handful to the ER as a precaution after bumped heads. All of those children, including those going home with everyday bumps, abrasions, and bruises, were well-supervised.

I don't know anything about the couple in Cincinnati. Maybe they were negligent. Or maybe their child was just engaging in one of the essential types of risky play (disappearing/getting lost) in a presumedly safe place (I know I've always treated the zoo as a safe place) and, by definition, this is a rare extreme manifestation of the risk inherent in that kind of play. It could happen to the most responsible parents on earth: you turn your back for a minute to laugh at a joke or something and that kid chooses that moment.

The risk inherent in risky play is the price we pay for the developmental, learning, mental health, and physical health benefits that come from engaging in it, a notion that is supported by an exhaustive review of the research into the connection between risky play and overall health published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Their conclusion:

The evidence from our systematic review indicates that the overall positive health effects of increased risky outdoor play provide greater benefit than the health effects associated with avoiding outdoor risky play.

I understand how any or all of the six types of risky play might terrify a parent. I can do the catastrophic thinking too, but the odds are actually very much in your child's favor, and the confidence, resourcefulness, and safety learning that takes place through risky play can't be replicated elsewhere. And the health and psychological, not to mention philosophical, consequences of playing it too safe can be debilitating.

A few weeks ago, as our 4-5's class paddled our umiaq out into Lake Union, my brain couldn't help but race over the risk involved as we played with a dangerous element. But then, as we drifted for a moment, looking back toward the South Lake Union skyline, it was fully replaced by a feeling of exhilaration: here we were, a dozen kids and a handful of adults, all of us engaged in risky play together. And let me tell you, that moment alone proved to me that the risk was worth it.

Please don't be too hard on that poor boy's parents in Cincinnati, and the zoo did what they felt they had to do and may well have saved the boy's life. I'm grateful that the boy escaped with only a few cuts and bruises. I'm sad that a silverback gorilla was killed through no fault of his own. There is always this side to risky play.

I don't want children to be hurt on my watch, but they do, often as a direct result of the opportunities we offer for risky play. I just pray that I'm not the one you're reading about next week. I might have to move to Bimini. I guess that's part of the inherent risk in being a preschool teacher.

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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