"Real" School

I attended a play-based kindergarten. It wasn't called a play-based kindergarten. It was just called kindergarten and what children did in kindergarten was play with blocks, paint on easels, and run around on the playground. Most kids didn't even attend kindergarten, it wasn't considered a proper year of schooling.

The following year, first grade, was the first year of "real" school. Most of us were approaching seven years old. We were not expected to know the alphabet, although I did, even as I was still unclear about the lower case letters, and we certainly weren't expected to have a tool belt full of "sight words" at our disposal. In fact, other than my own name, I'm pretty sure I didn't have any. Sitting at desks was a totally new concept and when we took our seats on that first day, we found small construction paper teddy bears, one for each of us, upon which Miss McCutcheon had written the word "Ted." I went home that day to tell mom that I'd learned to read. We were later to be divided into reading groups where we worked together to make out the text in our Dick and Jane books. We were all more or less starting from scratch.

When we received our report cards, I received straight A's, which made me proud, but what confused me was the second set of grades that came under the heading "personal skills" (or something like that), scored with numbers instead of letters. There were four of them. I don't recall the other three, but one of those skills upon which we were being evaluated was "self control." Self control? I remember thinking, how could anyone not get a high mark in that? And indeed, as I compared my grades with my classmates as one does, every kid in my social circle had managed one of the two highest marks.

In today's artificially rigorous schools, children who are still struggling with the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten are considered "behind." In fact, most are expecting the kids to already be working on sight words. Miss McCutcheon's "Ted" activity is the kind of thing teachers are now doing in preschool! At the same time we've accelerated our academic expectations for young children we have seen more and more of them struggle with "self-control" (e.g., struggling to self-regulate attention and hyperactivity). 

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research:

We found that delaying kindergarten for one year reduced inattention and hyperactivity by 73 percent for an average child at age 11 and it virtually eliminated the probability that an average child at that age would have an 'abnormal,' or higher-than-normal rating for the inattentive-hyperactive behavior measure.

In other words, if today's kids had the sort of introduction to school that we had back in the 1960's they too would be scoring high marks in self-control. Instead, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, the prescription of psychostimulant medication to children, drugs like Ritalin, has boomed in recent decades. In some parts of the country as many as one in ten school-aged kids are on some sort of medication to help with self-control. Many of these kids then go on to a lifetime of mood altering medication. It's a nightmare as parents, teachers, and doctors are doping young children to make them "school ready" when simply giving the kids an additional year of the sort of unstructured play would do essentially the same thing, you know, without the drugs.

And this doesn't even factor in the majority of kids who are perhaps able to sit still, but continue to struggle with curriculum expectations that are beyond their developmental abilities, leading them to either conclude they aren't smart, to hate school, or both. 

It's around this time of year that parents tend to ask me whether or not their child is ready for kindergarten, especially those with kids whose birthdays fall right on the cusp. I always advise them to give their kid another year at our play-based school or one like it. Indeed, I would advise that for all children whatever their birthday, because the research is quite clear: children are best served by the sort of play-based education I received in kindergarten, even if we didn't call it that, until at least seven-years-old. 

It turns out that playing with blocks, painting on easels, and running around on the playground is "real" school after all.

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Listening And Understanding

Every parent has had an experience like this. Our daughter wasn't even two. We were in the car, headed to meet grandma and grandpa at a Seattle University basketball game. Traffic was horrible and I became particularly incensed at one driver in particular. I rarely swear so I'm confident that what I said aloud was "clean," but I nevertheless let him have it. There was a moment of silence, then from the backseat, I heard my little angel say, "Get out of the way driver! Go over there and drive in the trees!"

One of the most common complaints about children is that "they don't listen," but they are always listening (they just don't always obey, which is a healthy thing). Humans are designed for language and from the moment they are born, indeed, even before they are born, they are listening. They may simply begin with tone and timbre, but they very rapidly move on deciphering not just the words we use, but their meaning, often comprehending long before they are ready to use the words themselves.

One of the most remarkable experiences of my teaching life came a couple years ago when I was visiting my friend John's Dorothy Snot preschool in Athens, Greece. One of his teachers asked me to tell a story to a group of 4-5 year olds in English, none of whom spoke the language. I chose to tell George Shannon's Lizard's Song, one that I often tell to the kids at Woodland Park. At the end of the story, the kids wanted to hear it again, so I retold it. Then the teacher interviewed them. As a collective, they had missed some of the details, but they had more or less understood not only the plot, but many of the nuances, as well as the moral of the story.

I'm sure that I "sold" some of the story through my facial expressions and hand gestures and I'm certain that they knew more English than they let on given that it is sort of the unofficial second language of the country, but their ability to tease out meaning from my foreign language floored me. There is no way I could have done that had the tables been turned.

They are always listening and they understand far more than we credit them with.

Lately, I've been trying out the expression "tough luck" with the kids. Not in a mean or dismissive way, but more as a statement of philosophy.

"I pinched my finger!"

"Whoa, that's some tough luck."

Yesterday, I was sitting around the play dough table with a couple of kids and one of them told a story of woe. I replied, "That's some tough luck."

She replied, "What does that mean?"

And before I could answer, a newly-minted four-year-old replied, "It's like saying 'Bummer, dude!'"

They are always listening and they understand far more than we credit them with.

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"Sweetie"

They are best friends, two girls who seem to love little more than being together. Younger sisters of older brothers, carpool companions, they share their fondness for certain stereotypical "girl" things, like princesses and ponies. Lately, they have been spending their mornings huddled together under the loft, just the two of them, in their gowns, playing with stuffed animals or our collection of My Pretty Ponies.

Sometimes other three and four-year-olds seek to join them in their games, squeezing into the area. The girls are accommodating, even making room for them, but the presence of a third wheel tends to break the intimacy of their face-to-face play as they turn shoulder-to-shoulder to engage the newcomer, usually just listening to what they came to say, perhaps sharing a toy or two, but otherwise politely tolerating their presence until they move along. They make no effort to exclude others, but their love for one another creates a kind of bubble that the rest of us can rarely enter when they are inside.

From a teacher's perspective, they are quiet, sweet, and undemanding, mostly taking care of their own business. They have their conflicts both between themselves and with others, but these are rare. It would be easy to just leave them alone, which is mostly what I do, perhaps checking in with them now and again, but otherwise directing my attention toward the squeaky wheels which is, for better or worse, what most teachers spend their days doing. Lately, however, I've become curious about what exactly they're doing under there in their fancy dress. 

I've taken my moments to position myself near them with the intent of eavesdropping, but they speak so softly, so closely, that it's impossible in our active classroom. So for the last couple weeks, I've been taking the role of third wheel, dropping to my knees and sneezing in with them, which is a technique I feel better about because there's nothing secretive about what I'm doing, like with the eavesdropping. Of course, they are then fully aware of my presence, which means their inside-the-bubble game stops as they turn to deal with me the way they deal with their interloping peers, shoulder-to-shoulder. In physics they call it the "observer effect," whereby the act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed.

Of course, I should just leave them alone, I suppose, which is what I mostly do, but my curiosity and my understanding of my role as teacher to include being a researcher, compelled me again yesterday to attempt it once again. This time they greeted me by introducing themselves, in character, "I'm Moana and she's Anna."

"No, I'm not Anna, I'm Elsa."

"Oh, that's right Sweetie, you're Elsa."

And in that give-and-take, they fell into their bubble as if I wasn't there, or more accurately, as if I had fallen in with them.

"Yes, Sweetie, I'm Elsa," then holding her pony the way one does when using a handheld avatar, she said, using a higher pitched voice, "Mommy Sweetie, when will I grow up?"

And her best friend held up her own pony to reply, "You're already growing up, Sweetie. You're a big girl now."

"But I'm just a teenager, Sweetie."

"Yes Sweetie, but some day you'll be a grown-up like me."

Not wanting to disturb anything I slowly rolled back onto a pillow to listen. Their conversation was gentle, each of them making room for the other. When one of them said, "I want to be the mommy now," her friend replied, "Okay, Sweetie," and they easily reversed roles.

After a few minutes, they looped me into their play, proving that they had not forgotten me, but rather included me, "Teacher Tom, you can be the baby now." They handed me a small pony. Their ponies had wings, whereas the one they handed me had lost it's wings, leaving only a plastic nub on its back. They continued to talk with one another, even as I sat with them holding my wingless, baby pony. Their ponies were planning a picnic, one that would involve flying. I thought they had forgotten the baby, but on cue they turned their ponies to the one I held. "It's time to go now, Sweetie . . . Oh, but look, the baby hasn't grown its wings yet!"

"Oh dear, Sweetie, how is it going to fly to the picnic?"

"We'll have to carry it, Sweetie."

"Yes Sweetie, we can carry it on our backs," and with that they took the baby from me as all three ponies rose into the air. "Don't be afraid, Sweetie, we won't let you fall," their love story ascending into the more rarefied air.

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In The Cracks And Crevices

People tell me that the new federal education secretary is awful. I reckon she is, I mean, she is clearly determined to destroy public education, although I want to follow that reckoning up with the caveat that the previous one was awful too and he, in his way, was equally determined to do so, him with charter schools and the Common Core federal curriculum and her with charter schools and vouchers. Indeed, I sometimes think that the only reason we still have public education in our country is because our nation's founders had the wisdom to leave education to the states and so the Secretary of Education really has little power beyond the bully pulpit and, to a certain extent, the pocketbook.

This isn't to say that our states are significantly better, but at least the politicians that need to be persuaded are far more accessible to real human beings with stories to tell, and that includes both parents and teachers. We at least have a chance with them. We have little chance on the federal level because, ultimately, it's the corporations who have their ear and they are the ones behind the federal curriculum, vouchers, and charters, as Diane Ravitch (who worked in the education departments under both Republican and Democratic presidents) fully details in her book Reign of Error.

Let (your scholar) know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learned it for himself.  Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason, he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything for other people's thoughts. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Ultimately, what corporations seek from education is different that what I seek. They are looking for employees who diligently do their work, comply, and toe the company line. Oh sure, they claim they are after critical thinkers and leaders and whatnot, but that's just window dressing. If that was what they really wanted they would stand opposed to education in which authority is substituted for reason, which has long been one of the defining characteristics of American schooling. But they don't. Instead, they favor a system in which adults make all the decisions about what, how, and when children will learn because ultimately they seek easily managed employees. They sell their educational "ideas" to our elected leaders and the farther away they are from we the people, the more easily they are persuaded to endorse schools that support corporate rather than democratic principles.

You see, corporations are dictatorships that have set up shop in the heart of our democracy. What they need are compliant workers who do as they're told and don't question too deeply. By keeping our nation focused on education as vocational training, preparing children for those "jobs of tomorrow," and making parents anxious about their kids' economic future, they seek to guarantee a steady stream of playthings for their thoughts. This is why they continuously bend the ears of our elected representatives for things like artificially rigorous top-down curricula, ever more de-humanizing quality control measures (high stakes testing), and the guarantee that some pre-determined percentage of our children will land in the reject pile like defective merchandise. I mean that's how they do it in large corporations and they have been amazingly successful given that I've yet to come across a politicians who hasn't bought into their ideas, be they Republican, Democrat, Socialist or Libertarian: they all view our schools, essentially, as factories that produce workers.

The flaw in their system is that there are still a lot of teachers who refuse to toe that line, who come to work each day committed to doing what's best for their students rather than the economy. I can't tell you how many of the teachers I know who hold their noses as they do what they must to avoid being fired, while seeking every opportunity to find cracks and crevices within the system in which children can learn things for themselves rather than always being told what to know. I am not one of those teachers because I have been lucky enough to find a place that embraces the broader, democratic idea of education, but I can't tell you how grateful I am for my public school colleagues who go into their classrooms each day as if into battle, subversively fighting on behalf of their charges' right to something more than mere job training.

This is why the corporate model ultimately favors wresting the control of public schools away from we the people, preferring a full-on privatization of schools by way of charters and vouchers which will slowly drain funding and middle-class students away from traditional schools, weakening them until they finally crumble from neglect. The plan is that these privately run schools, then, without citizen oversight and unionized teachers, will have fewer cracks and crevices in which real teaching can take place.

If this all sounds gloomy, I suppose it is, but I'm not without hope.

One of the corporatists leading the charge against public schools has been Bill Gates via the Gates Foundation. They have literally spent billions developing and promoting the Common Core, high stakes standardized testing regimes, and other education initiatives. Indeed, the Gates Foundation spends more money on education than anything else, yet in their most recent annual newsletter in which they usually boast of their successes, there is not a single mention of education. That tells me that despite it all, our resistance is working: all those teachers, parents, and students are successfully pushing back. I doubt the Gates Foundation has given up, but they have certainly gone silent.

And this is why I'm not in despair over the new secretary. When teachers, parents, and students are united, there is no force in all of society that can defeat us -- not even the wealthiest man in the world. I dream of someday creating the sorts of schools Rousseau envisioned back in the 16th century, but until then, we will defend our children's right to a childhood on the picket lines, at the ballot box, in the streets, and, mostly, in the cracks and crevices where they are finally allowed to "learn it for himself."

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STEM Education

My wife is the CEO of a software company. Earlier in her career she was an automotive executive and has held senior positions in several technology-based businesses. She is, as she realized to her delight not long ago, one of those much sought for rarities: a woman with a successful STEM career. That said, she studied languages at university. That's right, languages, not science, technology, engineering or math, yet here she is today running a technology company.

One-to-one correspondence. 

Science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM as they are collectively called in the contemporary lexicon, has become an emphasis for our schools both public and private. The idea is that those legendary "jobs of tomorrow" will require STEM skills and so we are feverishly "educating" our children to be prepared for their future roles in the economy. Setting aside the hubris embodied in the assumption that anyone can predict what jobs our preschoolers will grow up to hold, science, technology, engineering and math are important aspects of what it means to be human and fully worthy of exploration whether or not one is going to one day require specific employment skills.

These boys are swinging while simultaneously trying to avoid being hit by the swinging tire, a game that involves science, technology, engineering, and math, among other things.

Science, after all, is the grown-up word for play. As N.V. Scarfe wrote while discussing Einstein, "The highest form of research is essentially play." I know a number of scientists and whenever they are discussing their work, they describe it as play: "I was playing with the data and guess what I discovered," or, "I played with the variables and you won't believe what I found." Conversely, the highest form of play is essentially science as children ask and answer their own questions with both rigor and joy without the soul-sucking artifice of rote.

Working on math skills at the art easel.

Technology, which is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, is how children typically extend their play, building upon their discoveries to further explore their world.

Engineering is the process by which children create their technologies, be they dams intended to hold back flowing water or springboards designed for jumping into it.

Exploring a circle

And math is something humans have to be taught to hate because, after all, it is the process of learning increasingly complex and wonderful ways to do things that give us great pleasure as human animals: patterning, classifying, and sorting. When we boil it down, that's the entirety of math, which is ultimately the foundation of analytical thinking.

Constructive play forms the foundation of engineering knowledge. In this case, she is also exploring set theory, including the  horses in one set while relegating the other types of animals to another.

The tragedy of STEM education in the early years, however, is that too many practitioners have concluded that we must engage in extraordinary measures to teach it, that without lectures, worksheets, and drill-and-kill testing it simply won't happen, which is, in the lexicon of a generation long before mine, pure hogwash.

This two-year-old is exploring the technology of a lever or a balance scale, striving to find a balance point.

STEM education is not a complicated thing, children are already doing it when we leave them alone to pursue their own interests in a lovely, varied, and stimulating environment. We can, however, destroy their love of science, technology, engineering and math by turning it into the sort of rote learning that involves authoritarian adults dictating what, how, and by when particular knowledge is to be acquired or skills learned. A good STEM education is a play-based one; one that takes advantage of a child's natural curiosity; that gives free rein to their boundless capacity for inventiveness; and that understands that vocational training is but a small part of what an education should be about.

These hydraulic engineers spend their days working together to manage the flow of water.

When we step back and really observe children in their "natural habitat," which is while playing, we can see the STEM learning, although it takes some practice because it's intertwined with the other important things they're working on like social-emotional skills, literacy, and the capacity for working with others, which is, at bottom, the most important "job" skill of all. Indeed, while we are only guessing at what STEM skills our preschoolers are going to need in the future, we do know that getting along with our fellow humans is the real secret to future employment, not to mention happiness.

What happens when I stick this in there?

When my wife was a preschooler, no one envisioned computers on every desktop, let alone on every laptop. The internet hadn't even made an appearance in science fiction novels. And we all carried dimes in our pockets just in case we needed to make a call on a public phone. Today she is the CEO of a software company by way of the automotive industry by way of the jobs that her study of languages made available to her when she stepped into the workforce. The problem with predicting what specific "job" skills our children will need in the future is that we can only guess, because it's not us, but the children themselves who will invent those jobs, just as my wife has invented her own STEM career.

That said, when we allow children to explore their world through play, we see that they are already scientists, technologist, engineers, and mathematicians. We don't create them, but rather allow the time and space in which those natural drives can flourish, and that's how we ultimately insure that our children not only have the narrow skills that may or may not be necessary for those jobs of tomorrow, but also for the broader  purpose of living a good life.

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Public Dreams

When our daughter was in high school she spent a semester rehearsing and three nights performing Mary Zimmerman's retelling of Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses.

We toss about the word myth as a synonym for false. Sometimes we say "myth" when we mean "lie." It's a word quite often used dismissively, as in, "Ah, that's just a myth." But these are all abuses of the word. Myths are in fact true; maybe not literally, but they are always unflinchingly honest in the same way that our dreams are always honest.

It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly. ~Mary Zimmerman

I wonder if it's true that we give scant attention to our mythic side these days.

Some say that Hollywood is our modern myth-maker and it's certainly true that American film has given us a large collection of shared stories, archetypes, symbols, and even gods, but for the most part it's failed as myth-maker in one significant sense: there's nearly always a happy ending. As Zimmerman's Greek gods say, "Almost none of these stories have entirely happy endings."

I suppose you could say that our cultural obsession with celebrity is holding the place of mythology, these glittering gods we read about in supermarket tabloids. They certainly provide both tragedy and comedy at least in equal measure, and their endings are often far from happy, sometimes even providing object  "lessons" in the style of myth. That said, I have a hard time finding anything important or salutary in these stories. It's more like rubbernecking at the scene of a proverbial car crash, and I'm not talking about Phaeton setting the Earth ablaze by driving his father Apollo's sun chariot too close to the ground.

After the closing performance I complimented the director, and we started talking about the play. I told him, honestly, that I'd been teary several times, a phenomenon that had intensified with each successive performance. He said he'd had a similar experience, saying, "I think we forget that myths are more than just stories that end with a moral like, and that's why trees have bark."

Is Zimmerman right? Do we have anything in modern life that compels us to expend more than scant attention to our mythic side, our public dreams?

I'm tempted to suggest that our mythic life today resides in our politics. For one thing, we have the entire pantheon of gods from Obama and Trump to Clinton and Sanders, complete with lesser deities, and demigods, while other nations, just as in the times of the ancients, have their own political Zeuses and Aphrodites. These political gods, while on the one hand supremely powerful, also have the same flaws, failings, jealousies, and lusts that drive the plots of mere humans and gods alike. While their names may change over time, their stories really do not as we've more or less been having the same debates and have been courting the same disasters since the founding of our nation. Where the metaphor falls apart for me is that most of what I see in politics is effect rather than cause, and if there is anything myths do it is to attempt to explain our world.

As Zimmerman's narrator says, "Myths are the earliest forms of science." Maybe this is why we give scant attention to our mythic side these days, why we dismiss our dreams, both public and private as false. We live in an age in which science has answered, truly answered, so many of the questions raised by myths, at least those of the 'why trees have bark' variety, but as I've come to realize, these are only superficialities. Myths are about the enigmatic, the irrational, the ambiguous. The only answer science has for these things is to say, "I don't know," a true, but unsatisfying answer, even if appended with the hopefulness of "yet."

Myth, like science, attempts to bridge the maw of not knowing, but takes it one step farther by not waiting for the hard proof of evidence that may never come.

There is wonderful comedy in Metamorphoses, but also great, unspeakable tragedy. My own daughter played a character so anguished that she literally dissolved into tears, being laid down by Aphrodite into the pool of water that forms the stage of Zimmerman's play, a scene that leaves the audience with the same kind of impotent despair that we feel after real life horrors such as what happened in Newtown or on 9/11. Science will never satisfactorily answer our hopeless "Why?" That is a place only for myth.

At whom do we rail and plead in our anguish if not at the gods? To whom do we sacrifice? Without the gods, we're left with only ourselves or each other, a game of blame that takes us no where but into loathing. I know there are some who will suggest that I'm neglecting our more contemporary monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, and the grace they offer through forgiveness and mercy, and those are powerful salve. But even so we're still left with the white hot unbearableness of human failing, those of others, and even worse, ourselves, when we all know in our hearts that sometimes it's "the gods" who are behind it and there is neither forgiveness nor mercy. Then we are left to rail and curse, something monotheistic gods do not tolerate, while the more ancient polytheistic gods seem to take it in stride, often agreeing that they or their colleagues have mucked things up.

I find myself drawn to the idea, one that I believe is original to the mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell, that myth is a public dream and that our dreams are private myths. When Zimmerman writes that we give scant attention to our mythic side these days, maybe what she means is that we simply won't or can't look into the abyss that so often only reveals itself to us in our dreams; that we tend to ignore it and deny it while waking. I don't know if we have public dreams any more, but I do know we have public nightmares. I can think of no better way to speak of the enigmatic, irrational, and ambiguous than through myth.

I can't tell you how happy I am that my child has spent several months thinking about these things as well, but more than thinking about them, living them, dreaming them. It was one of the hardest things in my life to sit there night after night and watch her dissolve into tears, knowing that my baby has been looking into that abyss day after day and was then able to show it to the rest of us, giving us a tour of this public dream. Do not ever let anyone tell you that drama and the rest of the arts are somehow less important than the pedestrian pursuits of math and literacy. It's a tragic thing to hear people say, "It's just drama." It's just a myth. It is a true failing of our educational system that every child is not acting in great plays every day.

Maybe art is where mythology is hiding today, and as we cut it from our schools, we are cutting out the heart of education, because, after all, what is education if not to examine the enigmas, irrationalities, and ambiguities. Mythology, I've come to see, is the only tool we have for doing so.

As I sat through these powerful, ancient stories, made so new and fresh by both Zimmerman and the young actors, I cried. I cried for how nothing has changed, at how we still walk in the world of Midas and Erysichton, Aphrodite and Hermes, Hunger and Sleep. I cried for these child-actors who understand as much as any adult, perhaps more. I cried for the enigmas, irrationalities and ambiguities, the anguish and dark comedy. I cried for the unflinching honesty.

If this all sounds too dark, I suppose it is, even while it's also true. But like Pandora's box, there at the bottom is Hope. In the penultimate scene of Metamorphoses, the questioner asks: "So it has a happy ending?"

The answerer replies, "It has a very happy ending."

Q: "Almost none of these stories have entirely happy endings."

A: "This is different."

Q: "Why is that?"

A: "It's just inevitable. The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul."

Q: "It always happens?"

A: "If we're lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind."

Q: "Instead of watching out?"

A: "Instead of always watching out."

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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Making Order From Chaos

Several weeks ago, we were playing with our Mah Jong tiles. We don't play the actual game because I don't think any of us know how, but I trot them out every now and then because they come in a nice little case and the smooth, heavy game pieces are a pleasure to handle. There are always a few kids who take an interest in them, often building small table top structures, but they are even more often left alone for long stretches of our days together. At one point I passed the unoccupied table where I'd put them to start the day to find that one of the kids had arranged them purposefully. I hadn't seen who had done it, but they had apparently been studying the markings and had played a quiet matching game. 

I love these sorts of discoveries, evidence of a child's brain at work. I find several each day, but the story they tell is not always this clear so I took a few photos. Later, at the end of the day, I found that someone had put them all into their carrying case, failing to arrange them with the care it takes to make them fit properly. The lid was nevertheless snapped shut. I have no way of knowing if this was the work of the same child or not, but whoever it was had struggled to get that lid to close as evidenced by the way it bulged over the improperly stacked tiles.

Not long thereafter we were celebrating Valentine's Day. I've already told you the story of the man who brought the children candy in some festive metal cans. Pastor Gay had distributed the contents to children who didn't have as much as we do, but had returned the empty cans to us to use as playthings. I had positioned several Valentines Day themed items on our red table -- love rats, love ducks, some felt heart puzzles, and a so on -- and thought the cans were suitably festive enough to include there as well. I had a vague idea the kids would enjoy putting things into those cans and they did, stuffing them full, dumping them out, carrying them by their handles. 

At the end of the day, I found that the cans had been returned to the table, but the rest of the materials were missing. I hunted in the most likely places, but no luck. I even went down the hall to check the kids' cubbies thinking that perhaps someone had attempted to take the prized items home. It happens. Finally, feeling a bit frustrated, I opened the cans and, sure enough, that's where the materials had been stashed. I should have known, but as I opened each can, removing the contents in preparation for the following day, I realized that this stuff had not been tucked away randomly: there was one can for the rats, one for the ducks, one for the puzzles and so on. I was immediately reminded of my mysterious Mah Jong arranger.

Earlier this week, I'd put our four "Barrel of Monkeys" sets on that same red table. At the end of the day, I found that someone had taken the time to sort the red ones into the red barrel, the green into the green barrel and the blue ones into the two blue barrels. This was starting to become a mystery I needed to solve.

Yesterday, I illustrated a post with photos of buttons and muffin tins. Honestly, I'd snapped the pictures for no other reason than I thought they would make colorful illustrations for the blog, but when I later looked at them, I saw that someone had meticulously sorted those buttons by color. So the following day, I planted myself at the button table, determined to figure out who it was. I sat there a long time, but finally, as I was about to give up my vigil, my mystery organizer revealed himself by quietly recreating those photos I'd taken the day before.

I watched him go about his business, admiring his concentration, and experiencing his satisfaction of making order from chaos by proxy. Mystery solved.

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School Is Boring

I once asked our daughter Josephine about a mediocre grade in a high school class. She didn't like the grade either, but said she found the subject boring. I accepted that answer. She hadn't chosen to take this math class; it was required to graduate. She excelled in courses that had to do with art, literature, drama, music, science, and the contemporary world, those that she had either chosen or in which she was learning things she could directly apply to her life. I don't blame her that she found math boring. I don't blame her teachers. And I certainly don't blame mathematics. I blame her boredom on the requirement.

I started getting bored by math around the same age. Like she did, I continued to manage decent grades, but it was a struggle to summon up the energy to care, even as I plodded through math classes until my junior year in college. I was pretty good at memorizing formulas and deriving correct answers, but that's all it was, rote memorization because it wasn't important to me. Most of it, especially once we got into abstract math, wasn't even going to be useful in my day-to-day life and I didn't find it inherently "beautiful," so naturally I found it boring.

When humans are required to do something that they find mind numbing, it's quite normal to produce mediocre, even atrocious, results. It's only when we find something intellectually and emotionally stimulating that we excel. That's the way it works straight though life.

I teach in a preschool in which I can honestly say, over my 15 years here, there has never been a bored student. And that's because we don't have requirements. The kids are here to learn about living in a community by freely playing together: it's impossible for most kids to not be motivated by that. They might feel a wide range of emotions as they pursue their own education, but they are never bored. Of course, you say, high schoolers are different than preschoolers? That's right, they're older. Whatever our age, humans, at best, endure tedium, but that's hardly a future for which we should be preparing children.

It's not just fine to be bored with compulsory schooling, but unavoidable: it's how we deal with that boredom that matters. Producing mediocrity is one way. Sulky boredom is among the most benign responses. It could just as easily be full on rebellion, which is in fact how preschoolers often respond to being forced to do things they find boring, dashing away, shouting in quiet places, refusing to sit as the plane is taking off. Older students tune out or even drop out, opting to accept the "consequences" over the boredom. Some are coached into adopting an attitude of bright-sided optimism, ginning up motivation by refusing to acknowledge the boredom, sprinkling their pep talks with things like "only boring people get bored." Maybe it works for some people, but for most, the dictates of artificial motivation tend to evolve into a modern brand of Calvinism, in which you have no one to blame but yourself, suck it up, be thankful for what the grindstone is doing to your nose, and if you're bored it's your own fault. Many of these folks wind up burnt out by the time they graduate.

Children at Woodland Park do not have to play these sorts of mind games, they do not check out, and that's because their "schooling" is based upon them asking and answering their own questions about the world through their play. When we are free to choose what, how, and when we will learn, boredom, when it comes, and it always comes, is short-lived, because we are free to move on to something else, something that does motivate us. Boredom is a signal that learning is not happening: it's nature's way of telling us to move on, but traditional schools ignore this warning, leaving generations of children feeling that learning is boring, that school is not for them, or that they must go to extraordinary measures to keep their spirits up.

When student's lead their own learning, they are always motivated learners; when authorities lead, learning becomes much harder. That's not just me spouting off: it's what the research shows. Traditional schools, with their top-down model of feeding instruction to children on a schedule is the result of mere habit, not evidence. It's a miracle that any of them thrive and rather heartless to blame them when they don't. The proper way to deal with boredom "in the wild" is to find something else to do, but our schools rarely account for that.

Of course, there are some kids who are bored with it all. Those are the kids who should set of alarm bells because, in all likelihood, they are suffering from something much deeper than mere boredom. But for most kids, boredom is the natural response to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

From author Ken Robinson:

"When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don't know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn't really care."

This more or less sums up my attitude about Josephine's school years. She is now at university where, for the record, she is earning the best grades of her life, not because she came to enjoy putting her nose to the grindstone, but because, as she once said to me, "I either love everything I'm learning or I understand why I have to learn it." That's the way school should be. We can do it in preschool and apparently we can do it in universities, so why not in between?

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Where It All Begins

Completed in 1985, the Columbia Center stands as the tallest building in the Seattle. When people think of our city's skyline, the Space Needle typically leaps to mind, but this building dwarfs it. Indeed, at 76 floors it has more stories than any other building west of the Mississippi River. It was completed shortly after I first moved to Seattle and it's sheer size contributed to the passage of what was called the "Citizens Alternative Plan" in 1989, placing a cap on building heights, one that can only be over-ridden by including public accommodations, artwork, childcare, and other amenities, which is part of the reason why the tower has not been surpassed in the intervening two decades.

The reason I'm telling you about this is that last week our 4-5's class caught the bus downtown to take in the views from the public viewing level on the 74th floor. The last time I was up there was 1985 when the Columbia Center was twice as tall as anything else, and while the rest of the city has grown up around it, the view from the top of the black tower (which often reminds me of the sort of place a terrestrial Darth Vader might reside) is unimpeded in all directions.

As we approached the building, we craned our necks to take it in, enthusing over the adventure ahead. We were met in the lobby by the father of one of our classmates who works in the building and escorted up a pair of escalators before breaking up into two groups for elevator rides halfway up the building. We then transferred to a second set of elevators that took us the rest of the way to the top. Our ears popped as we moved into the atmosphere, a feeling that some of the kids recalled from their experience with air travel. 

If you look carefully, you might be able to make out the Space Needle in the distance.

Most of the kids pressed themselves against the windows. It was fun to stand with them as they slowly began to recognize familiar sights from this height.

"I see the ferry boat!"

"There's the Space Needle! It's so small!"

"Is that really the ferris wheel?"

"The cars look like toys!"

I stood with a pair of kids looking down on the Duwamish Waterway where we saw the giant Port of Seattle cranes lifting containers from the vessels and stacking them on the docks. Behind the stacks we spied a queue of trucks awaiting their loads. We found Lake Union and the bridges that are near our school. The observation deck provided a fascinating view of many construction sites, including several buildings that are just being topped-off.

Several of the kids, as they tired of the view, turned to the maps, models and other displays that decorate what is essentially a functional space. Maps and models can sometimes confuse young children, but here, in context, they seemed to make sense as kids traced the roads with their fingers and drew connections between the real world they saw from nearly 1000 feet in the air and the abstractions humans have developed to make sense of them.

There was a time when the Smith Tower (lower left corner of this photo) was the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

As spectacular and interesting as that view was, however, it could only hold our interest for so long because there was something far more spectacular and interesting commanding our attention. By the end of our hour there, few of the children were standing before the windows. Instead, they had turned their attentions back toward one another, using sentences that began with the creative invitation of "Let's . . ."

"Let's play super heroes!"

"Let's pretend this sofa is our house."

"Let's play hide-and-seek."

It was time for us to go.

I'm prone to feeling inspired by feats of engineering like the Columbia Center. Humans are amazing. We are capable of so much and yet, when it comes right down to it, there is nothing more spectacular than what the children were doing: turning toward one another in inspiration and saying, "Let's . . ." That's where it all begins.

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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