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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A Well-Meant Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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A Children's Party

On my flight back from the "Digging Deeper" Play Symposium in Ithaca, NY last night, I read a depressing article about the state of Detroit's public schools in Harper's magazine written by Alexandria Neason entitled "Held Back." in which the schools have continued to crumble, close, and fail children. State government has wrested control of the school district from the community (which had previously, in its own way, been failing the children), funding continues to be woefully inadequate, facilities are falling apart, unions have been busted, and charters are largely unregulated. Parents, teachers, and students are understandably frustrated and angry, even to the point of rebellion. It was not a happy read, made even more so by my own gnawing fear that Detroit's case may be a glimpse of things to come.

At the symposium and at a meeting of the North American Adventure Play Association on Saturday evening to which I was invited by artist, designer, and author Rusty Keeler, there was a lot of talk about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which was originally adopted by the the General Assembly back in 1989 and has been signed by every member nation of the UN except the United States. We committed ourselves to pressuring the Senate to finally ratify it, but it's beyond infuriating that after more than two decades, the fundamental rights of children are still not formally acknowledged her in our nation.

I've had the opportunity to travel a lot over the past several years, meeting progressive, play-based early childhood educators and advocates from across the globe. Everyone sees the problems. Still, except in certain pockets, children have less time for play; school's are ignoring the research and instead increasingly becoming the sort of test score coal mines envisioned by the corporate "reformers" here in America; children and the things that are important to them are either political footballs that adults toss about like hot potatoes, or completely ignored as secondary issues. This is not because there aren't enough smart, energetic people working on these problems: teachers, play workers, parents, and even kids are aware that things are going in the wrong directions, but even our success (and we have had successes) seems to be of the one-step-forward-two-steps-back variety.

As I read the Harper's article, I began to feel the all too common frustration about the fact that those with deep pockets are simply better at gaming the system than we are. They know how to play the game of politics, they have access to those with their hands on the levers of power, and they, like the doomsday machines they are, are relentless in their pursuit of their aims, which are largely economic. I fear that until we get better at influencing policy, any success we have will be temporary and limited.

Some time ago, while reading an article about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who survived being shot by the Taliban for the "crime" of going to school as a girl, and who has since become perhaps the world's most effective advocate for children, I learned that she had been a part of a kind of children's shadow government in Pakistan. I don't know the details, but the idea as I understood it was that children campaign for and are elected to offices similar to those in the actual adult parliament. The body has no actual power, but serves rather as a body that can at least advise the actual government. How effective it is, I don't know, but the basic idea has stuck with me.

Maybe it's time to give children a stronger voice in governing our country. Maybe it's time for the formation of a Children's Political Party, one completely separate from the existing parties. The idea is still doughy, but I can imagine the formation of a party that elects delegates just as the Democrats and Republicans do today, the difference being that they all must be under 18. These delegates then come together at a national convention to develop a platform and run adult candidates to run for actual political office with the mandate to push for matters of importance to children. Meanwhile, the Children's Party would set up its own shadow government, with a legislative body made up of children to develop model legislation base upon the ideas and concerns of children. If nothing else, it would be an incredible education in how American democracy works.

That's as far as I've gotten, but I think there is promise in this idea. How about you? I'd love to hear your thoughts about how something like this might work.

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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