How Much Happier We Would Be!

One of the great lies told to us by our society is that acquiring more stuff, or the right stuff, or any stuff for that matter, will make us happy. None of us "believe" it, yet most of us live our lives in ways that disprove our disbelief. Every one of the great religions warns us of the danger or ultimate worthlessness of material stuff, as do the great philosophers and artists, yet most of us have collected and continue to collect stuff like it's going out of style . . . And it is going out of style: that's one of the many ways we convince ourselves that we need just this one more thing to be happy.

I recently wrote about children who experiment with hoarding things in the classroom, kids who collect piles of things, then guard them protectively. They have all the stuff, yet their faces always look miserable, and it's because they are miserable: the natural state of a hoarder is misery. I'm not claiming intimacy with any of them, but I've spent enough time in my life in the proximity four different billionaires, all of whom have come off as surly, suspicious, and tight-fisted, wary of all who approach them, proving to me that the hoarding of money is no different than the hoarding of anything else.

Our classroom hoarder stood out for me because most of the children I teach haven't yet unlearned the great wisdom that stuff can't make you happy. And the younger they are, they closer they are to this wisdom. Anyone who spends time with young children knows this is true, and many of us envy it, yet we nevertheless systematically go about teaching them our society's myths about stuff, indeed we can't help ourselves, and by the time they're ready to head off to elementary school most are already firmly in the mainstream of thinking that just this one more thing will make me happy.

I'm not writing this by way of boasting that I am somehow above it because I'm not. I still have clothing in my drawers that I'll never wear again, yet continue to buy more. I still have a television set in the back of a closet, although I haven't plugged it in for close to a decade. I still have crap in a storage locker that I visit, maybe, once a year. And even as I can see that the weight of those things makes me less happy, I continue to hoard them because I worry, I guess, that someday I might need them and then I'll sure be sorry, accepting real, current unhappiness over a purely theoretical happiness that my stuff might bring me at some point in the unknowable future.

I recently shared one of my favorite jokes here: "The difference between my phobias and yours is that mine make sense." The same could be said of stuff, although at least phobias are something I know I ought to be working to get rid of, whereas it seems I'm far more attached to my stuff than my fears because I tend to find it less easy to let go of the later than the former.

The subtitle for this blog is "Teaching and learning from preschoolers" and this is one of those areas in which our youngest citizens have everything to teach us and nothing to learn except misery. Young children use things until they're done with them, then let them go, usually simply dropping them to the ground and walking away. Most of the time as adults we find it frustrating because they are making a mess, but seriously, this should be inspiring stuff. What if we could do that with our stuff? How much happier we would be!

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The Future Belongs To The Curious And Creative

Tom Drummond, retired instructor at North Seattle College and one of my most important mentors, once showed our class a video of himself interacting with preschoolers by putting a can of house paint on the center of a table and saying something like, "I have this."

One of the children identifies it as paint.

Tom answers that it looks like a can to him. We then watch the kids guide Tom until he uses a screw driver to pry the can open where, sure enough, they find not just paint, but the color and type they predicted. Throughout this, Tom more or less plays dumb (or maybe he's playing innocent), sticking to simple, informative statements, and I'll never forget how right near the end of the video, at just the perfect moment, he introduced the word "pry" into the conversation, which really expedited things.

Viewing this had a big impact on me as a cooperative parent-teacher and continues to influence me to this day. It gave me an opening into a new understanding of what it meant to be a teacher, having up to then essentially understood the profession as one in which the teacher conveys knowledge to children by telling or showing them things and then expecting them to remember it. Here I saw a teacher guiding a group of children toward understanding, using language to prompt exploration and conversation, letting them construct meaning and purpose from their own experiences, collaborating with their peers, arriving at the point where a traditional teacher would have started, prying the can open.

I find myself taking this approach daily in the classroom, be it putting on bandages, building with blocks, or making art; playing innocent, not taking the role of authority or the possessor of superior knowledge. When the Easter Bunny comes up, for instance, my response is to simply wonder if that's their pet bunny and we're off. It's fascinating to facilitate a discussion like that, as they share what they "know," adding new parts to the story, deciding if EB is a boy or girl, debating if he's big or regular sized, wondering amongst themselves if she lays eggs or just brings them, and speculating on how he gets into their houses. I've found that as long as the adults refrain from attaching a right or wrong label to their responses, the discussions might get heated, but at the end of the day, everyone gets to go home with their own story intact, but enriched with new things to think about.

There is a debate raging in the US right now about how teachers ought to teach, with one side, the one at the podium right now, insisting upon a "direct instruction" approach, one in which the teacher shows or tells students the answers, while the other side, the one generally advocated on these pages, favoring an exploratory approach in which the teacher encourages students to discover the answers on their own.

Teaching is a notoriously hard thing to measure, of course, because so many things play into it both inside and outside the classroom. Direct teaching may well be a superior approach if the goal is simply to teach specific facts or skills, the kinds of things that can be measured on standardized tests, but doesn't really do much for curiosity and creativity, attributes far more important to becoming lifelong learners.

In an article on Slate by developmental scientist Alison Gopnick, she discusses the findings of two studies:

. . . (w)hile learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes the less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution."

(The studies) provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific . . . But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

I urge you to click over there and read about how the studies were conducted. I don't think anyone who has spent any amount of time in a preschool classroom will find the results surprising.

The thing that struck me the most, however, was that in both studies, the researcher playing the role of teacher in the exploratory approach essentially played "dumb," much in the way Tom did in his video, and the way many of us naturally do in the classroom.

Also fascinating is where Gopnick takes us at the end of her article, looking at scientists who work on designing "computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do." Which, as it turns out, was the real motivation for engaging in these studies in the first place.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative . . . (T)he learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Of course it's true that an authoritative adult can narrow the world for young minds, but it had never occurred to me that the very definition of "teacher" comes into play in how children learn. The kids who come to Woodland Park arrive as 2-year-olds and as such, for most of them, I am the only teacher they've ever known. And for many of them, three years later as they head off to kindergarden, the "playing innocent" approach forms the basis of their understanding of what a teacher does.

Nearly all of them will spend the next dozen years in a world of schools in which teachers are mandated to teach them a certain core curriculum of specific, standardized knowledge and skills organized grade-by-grade, year-by-year, much of which is conveyed by direct instruction. I assume this changes the kid's definition of "teacher." I know that most teachers in the early elementary years strive to create a balance between direct instruction and exploratory learning, so I hope this new experience simply adds to the definition the children already have, making teaching a bigger idea. But I also worry that this new definition comes to completely overshadow the old one by the time they've made their way through high school, where the amount and specificity of knowledge they are mandated to learned leaves little room for exploration.

Personally, I'd like to see more of a focus on exploratory learning in our schools, especially in our upper grades, even if that's difficult to measure, because curiosity and creativity are the only traits we know our children will need as they come of age in our rapidly changing world. This is a position I've largely come to through experience and intuition, one I'm always pleased to see repeatedly supported by scientists through well constructed experiments. While the education debate rages, it's interesting to note that no one -- from parents and teachers to politicians and business people -- disagrees that the future belongs to the curious and creative.

I have this. I don't know what to do.

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A Place Not Of Teaching

I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're especially clever, trick someone into learning something, but the idea that one person can "teach" something to another is perhaps, except under narrow circumstances, one of the great educational myths.

There is a quote that is most often attributed to the Buddha, but is more likely of Theosophical origins, that goes: "When the student is ready the master will appear." I like these kinds of quotes that persist because they are true even when they can't be traced back to the utterances of Buddha, Socrates, or Einstein. This one is even so true that there is a corollary: "When the master is ready the student will appear."

Some days I accidentally "teach" something to a kid. For instance, I once improperly used the term "centrifugal force" (when I actually should have use "centripetal force") while a child was experimenting with a hamster wheel and the kid, months later, was still misusing my term while performing his experiments, even as I repeatedly tried to correct him. But most days I teach nothing at all except, perhaps, what I convey to my students by role modeling. I've tried, believe me, to convey specific information to kids, like when I tell them that dirt is primarily made from volcanos, dead stuff, and worm poop, but most of the time the only things that stick are the things about which the kids are already asking questions.

And still, despite my utter lack of "teaching," the kids who come to our school are learning. How do I know? I watch them. I listen to them. I remember when they didn't know and then I hear them saying and see them doing things that demonstrate that now they do. And even though I'm not teaching them, they mostly learn exactly what I want them to know.

What do I want them to know?

The joy of playing with other people.

The frustration and redemption of failure.

Emotions come and go and they are important.

I'm the boss of me and you're the boss of you.

Our agreements are sacred.

It's not only important to love, but also to say it.

It's not my job to "teach" these things. It is my job to do what I can to create an environment (e.g., work with our "third teacher" in the parlance of the Reggio Emilia model of early childhood education) that is stimulating, beautiful, and safe enough: a place where children can ask and answer their own questions about the world and the people they find there. A place not of teaching, but of discovery. We call it play. It's really as simple as that.

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Way Ahead Of The Rest Of Us

On Friday, a girl arrived at school to announce that she has a new baby at her house. This wasn't the first time she had announced it, but you know, big news deserves multiple announcements.

I replied, "That's so exciting. Have you taught your baby to walk yet?"

"Yes I have!"

I was not expecting that answer.

"Wow, what a terrific big sister! Have you taught your baby to talk yet?"

"I have!"

Typically, the kids inform me that the baby cannot walk, nor talk, nor eat food. In fact, the only things babies can do is drink mommy milk, cry, and fill diapers, which leads to a conversation about how they, as a big kid, can walk, talk, eat, jump, run, sing, dance, put on their own coats, and so forth. For some newly-minted older siblings, the advent of a baby is unsettling, especially as everyone is fawning over it, so I do what I can during those first few days to make sure that at least some part of the spotlight continues to shine on them and their "big kid" accomplishments.

In other words, I know some kids really appreciate the chance to talk about something other than baby, but this wasn't the case on Friday. She was just answering "yes" by way of brushing off my questions in order to get to her own agenda. She was with her father. "My baby is a baby boy so he has a penis. Daddy has a penis too, right daddy?" When he confirmed her assertion, she added, "And I'm a girl so I have a vulva."

I said, "That's right, boys have penises and girls have vulvas . . . " That's when it hit me that we are probably going to have to start working on a new way to talk about gender now that we're coming to understand, as a society, that it's not necessarily an either-or thing. I said, more to myself than anything else, "Of course, I know a boy who was born with a vulva and he's now a grown man with a penis."

It went over her head, but it started a conversation amongst the adults in the room. We agreed that we're going to have to develop new ways to talk about gender, even if none of us are yet sure how that will look.

Later in the day, our new big sister was attempting to dress one of our classroom baby dolls, half of which have penises and and half of which have vulvas. A friend objected, "You can't put a dress on your doll, silly. It has a penis." She turned the doll upside down for a better view, pausing to study it. "She does have a penis." She then proceeded to pull the dress over the doll's head anyway. Maybe preschoolers are already way ahead of the rest of us.

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Octograbbers

They have been playing together all year long. They initially called themselves "Diggers" because they were the ones digging in the sand, manning the cast iron pump, exploring together how gravity works. Anyone who picked up a shovel was "in," excluding has never been a part of their games, but there have been 4-5 at the core of the group all year long. Today, they refer to themselves as "Octograbbers," by way of "Crabbies," referring to the fact that their game has evolved into running around with a shovel in each hand, manipulating the world as a club of Edward Shovelhands.

I've known most of these kids for years now and have seen each of them struggle with friendships or tantrums or hitting or whatever, but now these Octograbbers are daily creating a beautiful world in which they seek agreement rather than conflict. Each have their own quirky passions -- construction, sharks, robots, organizing -- but their shared passion for this friendship is what drives them to easily adopt one another's passions by turns, sharing even that. There have been occasional conflicts, of course, but for the most part, and especially now during this Octograbber era, I feel little need to check in with them, because they seem to have this getting along with one another figured out.

Many adults still don't have it figured out.

Long ago, I watched the television series Six Feet Under, which is where I picked up the line: "Together we're a genius," and let me tell you, these kids are that, the highest form of collective genius.

Earlier this week I wrote about an outdoor dance party on our new stage. Well, we've continued it all week and the "gravity" of the whole playground has suddenly shifted toward this simple platform and a little recorded music, so much so that it has even drawn the Octograbbers down from their usual habitat up by the pump. They've not joined the others on the stage, but they have been a part of the larger music/dance/performing game by addressing the pile of soil that was left behind after we leveled a spot for the stage. As the other kids performed, backed by numbers from Disney movies, Broadway shows, and television theme songs, the Octograbbers used their duel shovels to dig a hole atop the pile of dirt. As the other kids danced and emoted, the Octograbbers filled their hole with water from a nearby puddle, using their shovels the carry the water. As the other kids made song requests, the Octograbbers used their shovels to cause their newly created volcano to erupt in a mudslide, discovering their own Octograbber way to enjoy the music and our new stage.

Of course, this is the sort of thing the Octograbbers do all day long, cooperating, collaborating, agreeing, and engaging in their own scientific and social experiments. I'm not always right there with them because, like I said, they don't on most days really need me. But I was standing amongst them as their volcano erupted. They let out a collective guffaw, one that I hear daily from across our playground and which in that moment I recognized as their version of "Eureka!" Together they're indeed a genius.

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Church Pants

"We'll eat you up we love you so." ~Maurice Sendak

A couple days ago I spotted flesh through a tiny thread-bare spot in the knee of my jeans. I tend to think of these as my "new" jeans, but in reality they've been my go-to classroom pants for a while now. The consumer in me feels that a good pair of jeans should last more than two years, but the truth is that I've been hard on them, what with the constant kneeling and crawling required by the job.

I know that I shouldn't let a tiny hole stop me from wearing them. After all, I virtually invented the tattered jeans look. During my early years as a teacher, in fact, there were kids who referred to their own hole-y jeans as their "Teacher Tom pants," but in recent years I've become more proactive in replacing them the moment I begin to see that the end is neigh.

For most folks, this tiny hole would be of little concern. For them it would grow bigger and bigger over time, slowly, predictably, over the course of a year or more, but I know from experience that this tiny hole in my pants will grow to be a big hole within weeks -- a month at the most. This is because the children will innocently, but systematically and inevitably, tear it wide open.

And sure enough, yesterday, while I was sitting on my stool reading to the children, only hours removed from having discovered the spot myself, I felt a finger on my skin. A boy who had been leaning against my leg had absent-mindedly worked the thread-bare spot to a finger-sized hole through which he was caressing my kneecap. Later in the day as I sat cross-legged amidst a pile of stuffed animals another child found the hole, this time making it big enough for two of her fingers. Later, as the hole grows, whole hands will find their way in there.

The consumer in me would like to keep wearing these jeans awhile longer, but I don't scold the kids because what they are doing is not destructive, but rather a genuine act of love. I often joke that my torn jeans are my "church pants" because they are so "hole-y," and indeed it's no joke, they really are.

"The only way to get there's on your knees." ~Leonard Cohen

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Let's Dance!

My first year teaching, I had the idea of suggesting to our five-year-olds that they, collectively, come up with something "big" they could do "for the whole school." That year, the kids decided they wanted to build a volcano, but the following year our oldest kids wanted to perform a play, making such an impression that it has since become an annual tradition.

The kids start by writing a script, a process that takes several weeks, followed by dozens of rehearsals which are really opportunities to re-write, edit, and play around on the stage. They make their own sets, props, and costumes. All told, it's a process that takes months and results is a wonderful, child-led mess of a show.

Most years, the kids include at least one dance number: this year we have three. Yesterday, we democratically chose the songs to which we were going to perform, and, for the ninth time in the past ten years, among the songs selected, unanimously, was Kool & the Gang's Jungle Boogie. (For the curious, we also chose Sly & the Family Stone's Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) and the Ramones' Too Tough to Die.) The children at Woodland Park, apparently, love them some Jungle Boogie. The selection of songs, as always, was limited by the music I personally own and I recognize that I'm dating myself.

Our process was one of me playing various songs and the children voting with their bodies by dancing or not dancing. We took a field trip to the Pacific Northwest Ballet on Monday where we learned about dancing "energies" like "smooth," "sharp," "swinging," and "shaking," all of which were evident in the kid's dance moves. We had so much fun that we took the music outside with us where some of us continued dancing on our new playground stage, a project that a group of parents undertook last Saturday.

We do quite a bit of singing and dancing around Woodland Park, but recorded music is relatively rare, a fact that probably has more to do with me than it should, but there you have it. When I first started teaching I thought it would be nice to have a little background music every now and then, but found that it tended to just simply ramp up the overall volume level in our already noisy room as the kids vied to shout over the music. But more significant is the fact that background music tends to drive me a little bit crazy: I love to listen to music, but I simply can't do so while occupied with anything that requires talking or listening to other people, a big part of the job. And while, yes, the school is the children's space, it is also my workplace and so recorded music is rather rare, a fact that I found myself regretting yesterday as the children danced.

When I first suggested our new stage, my idea was that it would be a place for the children to present impromptu acting performances, but yesterday's outdoor dance party was one of those "Well duh!" epiphanies for me. While the "noise" might be unbearable for me indoors, outdoors is a different story. I'm now in the market for an outdoor sound system capable of standing up to northwest weather that the kids can use themselves.

Let's dance!

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Why We're Here

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. ~Kurt Vonnegut

Circle time was a perfect example of its type. We spent a good 10 minutes making up painful, icky, cold, and silly things to sit on, including a discussion of what exactly constitutes potty talk, we sang a song, then we gave each other compliments (which was mostly saying "I love you"), finishing by counting all of the links in our compliment chain aloud (371, give or take). And then we were done. You know, we just farted around.

The hamster wheel doesn't come apart on it's own. Someone has to work on taking it apart, removing the wheel from its stand.

I'd been wondering why someone would be doing it every day. I now know who's been doing it.

And I also know why: he's just been farting around.

Kids have been asking why we have this giant pencil. I tell them it's for drawing and writing.

They've figured out, however, that it's just for farting around.

Sometimes we fart around by putting cowboys in Wyoming and grandpas in Ohio and Winnie the Pooh in Georgia . . .

. . . or by lining up the "big boys" . . .

. . . or combing the ponies' manes.

We fart around with our whole bodies . . .

. . . inside and out . . .

. . . or up in the trees.

It's why we're here on Earth, man. The people who try to make it about anything else are wrong.

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