Talking, Laughing, And Making Up Stories

Over the weekend we had one of our thrice yearly, all-hands-on-deck, Saturday workdays. I can count on some 20 able-bodied folks to show up at each of them because participation is a requirement of enrollment, but also, honestly, I believe that most of our families would show up even if it wasn't.

One of the things we did was pull all the furniture away from the walls and sweep up all the debris that has collected there. While doing this, one parent came across our box of plastic sea creatures and mentioned that her daughter "V," a shark fan, would be thrilled if we could play with them, especially the sharks. So I've had the sharks in the sensory table this week.

We have several model sharks, but the "center piece" of our collection are four Great Whites, larger than the others in scale, with wide open, tooth-lined mouths behind which are their deep, hollow bodies. They are the reason I often segregate the sharks from the rest of our marine animal collection: they tend to invite a kind of play that involves aggressively jabbing the damn things in other people's faces, which not everyone likes. So, on Monday I put them in the sensory table and prepared myself to coach the kids through their episodes of jabbing.

Our 3's class more or less ignored them, but the 4-5's class, in which our resident shark admirer is enrolled, mobbed the table. I'd provided more than just the sharks, including dozens of smaller fish, octopi, lobster, artificial seaweed, and our collection of polished petrified wood, recently given to us by Pastor Gay's husband Leonard, an accomplished rock hound. There was no jabbing. Instead, V and her friends stuffed those hollow sharks full of whatever they could shove down their throats, while talking and laughing and making up stories.

I am always struck by this type of play: children using surrogates like these sharks to interact with one another. In most cases, each child at the table selected one of the sea creatures to be "me."

"I'm your baby!"

"I'm going to eat you!"

"I can fly!"

"Let's pretend we're friends . . ."

No one teaches children to wield these kinds of hand-held avatars. It comes naturally, perhaps not to all kids, but a lot of them. Of course, the classic of these surrogates are dolls, but we've all seen children do it with cars or rocks or flowers or just about anything one can hold in one's hand. It's something fundamental to learning to play with other people, a way to experiment with roles, environments, and situations; to try out, for instance, what it would be like to live in water with no arms and legs, but rather a powerful tail, rows of sharp teeth, and an insatiable appetite. And through that alien avatar play, they deepen their understanding of working and living together.

By the end of Monday, the group around the sensory table was essentially down to V and a couple of her oldest friends. They spent a good 20 minutes using the hollow sharks to scoop the water from one side of the sensory table to the other, eventually leaving one side dry, all the while talking and laughing and making up stories.

They played sharks on Tuesday and yesterday as well: being "me" the shark, emptying one side of the sensory table, "making an ocean" on the other. And all the time they've been talking, weaving their story together, one that has continued in installments for three days. And at no point did our sharks feel compelled to jab themselves into the human faces of their friends, leaving us adults with nothing to do but watch.

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Failures, Mistakes, And Poor Judgement

In our cooperative school, there are days, like one right after the holiday break when a bunch of kids were still out sick or traveling, when there are as many adults in the room as kids. Even on regular days our classes have adult ratios of anywhere from 1:2 to 1:5, depending on the ages of the kids. When folks who are unfamiliar with our model hear this, they typically ask some version of, "Don't the parents get in the way?" 

My standard reply is that they don't get in the way any more than the children do. Now, if the question is, "Do our parent-teachers always do everything the way I want them too?" then the answer is, of course not. Nor do the kids. Nor does anyone for that matter. But just as so much of children's learning comes through what are commonly called "failures," "mistakes," or "poor judgement," the same is true for adult learning.

We are not here to just to educate young children, but rather entire families, which is one of the great strengths of the cooperative model. We call them parent-teachers, but in reality, they are students right alongside their kids, learning through the experience of living with the other people. And I would assert that a family that develops the habit of learning together is one that will be better prepared for the social, intellectual and emotional roller coaster ahead.  

My mother once said about being a parent, "You want them to be independent, but then you're terrified when they are." It's a piece of wisdom I reflect on daily as I watch parents struggle with their end of "letting go," of learning to trust their children. It's hard to watch any child struggle through their necessary failures, mistakes and poor judgement, and especially when it's your own "baby." It's heartbreaking when their hearts are broken and mortifying when they break someone else's heart. It's terrifying when they try to climb higher or run faster or step up in front of an audience of peers to perform. 

Most of our families are with us for three years and what they mostly learn during their time with us is to step back, to loiter with intent, and when and when not to step in. But we also learn how to play with our children, how to join them where they are, how to serve not as a leader but a follower of our own children, a role that teaches us perhaps the most of all. But mostly what we learn is that our children have to experience the consequences of their failures, mistakes and poor judgement, just as we did and continue to do.

So no, all those adults don't get in the way. Indeed, they are, as much as the kids, the reason we are here.

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"Hey, It's Not A Race"

"We must prepare our children for the jobs of tomorrow."

"The Chinese are beating us!"

"We need to out-educate the rest of the world."

These are the kinds of statements we most frequently hear from our elected representatives when they talk about education, framing their comments always in the context of economic competition. Competition is at the heart of the corporate education reform idea, the one adopted by both Republican and Democratic administrations: pitting student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, district against district, state against state.

I've written before about one of the reasons I believe that corporate-types and other power freaks are so gung-ho on turning our schools into education factories. It's not because they have any actual data or research to support their plans (that is all on the side of those of us who advocate for progressive education reform) but rather because the factory is simply a model they understand from their day jobs of producing widgets, most of them having never spent a day in a classroom since they themselves were students. Another bedrock of this businessman's ideology is this notion of competition: a faith that competition always leads to the best and the cheapest, and the more unbridled the competition, the better. This is also not supported by anything that has ever happened in the real world, but rather by theories that live beautifully on the pages of text books, but that when implemented in the real world always lead to the inevitable result of the rich getting richer and the ranks of the "lazy" poor expanding.

No, perhaps competition would be the best way to organize education if the goal was purely to prepare children to take their place in the economy, if we accept the idea that we are here to serve the economy rather than the other way around. But I even doubt that. The most successful companies rely at least as much on teamwork and collaboration to succeed as they do competition. At most, competition is a part of the puzzle of business success.

But that's all almost beside the point. The purpose of public education is so much broader than preparing the workers of tomorrow. That's certainly not what I ever want for my child's education. I wanted her, first and foremost, to acquire the skills of good citizenship. Good citizens, the kind with the critical thinking and interpersonal skills required to truly assume the rights and responsibilities of self-governance, must be prepared to contribute to society in ways far beyond the mere economic. We must be able to count on our fellow citizens to contribute socially, artistically, politically, culturally, spiritually, and in all the other ways that make life worth living. A well-rounded citizen is more than just a worker: our schools exist to prepare the well-rounded citizens required for democracy to flourish, people capable of doing more than just hold a job.

Education simply doesn't work as a competition. At it's best, education it's a collaborative process with students and teachers and administrators and schools and districts and states working together, sharing, building upon the work and ideas of one another. This is how democracy is supposed to work as well: not as some competition between polarized political ideologies, but rather as the self-governed standing on the shoulders of one-another to build a better, more fair, more responsive, more beautiful, more enlightened, and yes, even a more prosperous society. Competition is all about "me." Democracy is about "we."

And likewise, education is about "we." Or as my friend Jaan, then a 4-year-old, said as his classmates were pushing and shoving to get through a narrow doorway, "Hey, it's not a race. The playground's only good when we're all out there."

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For Which We Are Designed

Last week, a parent arrived at school with a stack of V-shaped plastic signs marked with numbers, the kind that pizza parlors give you to put on your table so they know where to bring your order. She found them while cleaning out the garage amidst her husband's childhood keepsakes. Apparently, as a middle schooler, he and his buddies had thought it an hilarious joke to steal them, one by one, from a local restaurant. Having been an adolescent boy, I can imagine how funny it was. The signs then retired to a box where they've been for a couple decades.

She asked, "Can you use these?"

I replied, "Let's see," and left them out for the kids, who, sure enough, could use them.

I thumb through those fancy school supply catalogs like everyone else, often envying some of the materials, but we rarely purchase them, opting instead to take one last crack at junk like these table top numbers, giving it one last life before sending to the landfill. In fact, these numbers, already garbage, will likely become a regular part of our rotation of indoor materials for a time. We will find more and better things to do with them. Then, as they begin to break and become otherwise less "pretty," some will become incorporated into art or science projects, while others will find their way outdoors where we'll play with them until they're simply "gone" (e.g., buried in the sand, broken into tiny bits, lost under the shed). A few of them, years from now, might even wind up in the dumpster, but not until they are completely used up.

One of our guiding principles at Woodland Park is that educating young children need not be expensive. We count on parents and other members of our community periodically purging their attics, garages, and basements. That's where we get most of our best stuff. Indeed, I would assert that, generally speaking, the quality of an early years education is inversely related to how much is spent on "stuff": the more expensive the curriculum and curriculum supplies, the worse it gets.

Look at what's happening in our public schools, for example, where we spend billions every year on poorly constructed, high stakes standardized tests that measure nothing meaningful about our children, teachers, or schools, but are rather there to guarantee that most kids fail, which can only be "remedied" by purchasing curricula, text books, computer programs, and worksheets produced by the very same companies that create those crappy tests. What a magnificent scam they have going: get paid to create a problem, then get paid to "solve" it. These tests, the expensive out-of-the-box curricula, and the attendant "stuff" they sell to schools are simply the company store shovels and pickaxes with which we equip our kids for their days laboring in these test score coal mines, turning a profit for giant "education" corporations like  Pearson Education, who then turn out even more crappy tests in a vicious cycle that may look like school, but without, you know, the actual education.

Our goal at Woodland Park is children who love to learn because they are asking and answering their own questions through their play. We can do that because there are no stockholders involved demanding a profit, but rather parents who want their children to have an actual childhood.

As I watched the kids play with the pizza parlor numbers, attempting, for instance, to build with them, I thought of all those off-the-shelf building sets that click together perfectly, where this part fits that part just so. Usually, there are instructions in the box that show kids what they can build. In fact, many building sets can only be used to build the thing that's pictured on the outside of the box. As these pizza number constructions toppled and fell, the children started again and again, saying to one another, "Look what I did," with each temporary success. With no picture on the box to follow, with no building "system" to obey, with no end-product in mind, there were also no failures, but rather only experiments that made the children laugh and scream and want to try it again.

This is the childhood learning for which we are designed.

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Beyond Smashing

Seattle's marine climate typically keeps us damp and just above freezing for most of the winter, but a couple times every year, the skies clear, removing insulation, which allows temperatures to fall, and if it comes right after a good rain, all the collected water hardens into ice. This is an exciting thing for the kids, who then tend to go into a sort of ice smashing frenzy.

This is what happened on Wednesday this week. The kids made short work of the ice, dropping it, kicking it, throwing it, and hitting it with sticks, leaving the playground looking like the scene of an auto accident with "broken glass" scattered from top to bottom. I have nothing against smashing ice, we even got out our rubber mallets to support the process, but as a teacher this instinct to joyfully destroy it all it left me feeling like we had missed an opportunity to really explore the stuff.

So what's a good teacher to do? Well, I don't know about good teachers, but this one spent an hour after school replenishing every concavity on the playground with water, from buckets and wagon beds, to sauce pan lids and the insides of car tires. Not only that, but I filled a dozen other containers that I put atop the storage shed, set aside for purposes other than smashing.

My main idea was to offer the chunks of ice alongside regular tempera paint. I figured that would give more meditative kids a chance to play with the fundamental properties of ice beyond its brittleness -- hardness, melting, slipperiness, cold. And as some kids ran wildly about smashing what they could find "in the wild," others were intrigued by the notion of painting the stuff and did, curving their bodies over their work, commenting amongst themselves about the hardness, melting, slipperiness, the cold, and joking that this was art they didn't get to take home.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, when I noted one of the three-year-olds carrying a chunk of ice to the workbench where we were building with glue guns. We had earlier discovered that it takes quite a bit longer for the tools to heat up in freezing temperatures and that, once fully heated, we had to work faster than normal because the hot glue cooled more rapidly than normal. Now we were going to see what would happen if we shot hot glue onto ice.

The first thing we learned was that if the tip of the glue gun actually touched the ice, the tool wouldn't function. The second thing we learned was that the hot glue didn't melt the ice as we had predicted, but instead the ice cooled the glue instantly causing it to slide right off. So that's what we spent the rest of our time doing, emptying glue guns onto the ice, often painted ice, creating great tangled hot glue sculptures that we began to call "snow flakes."

The rain is supposed to return next week, so it's back to what we know: cold, but not freezing, and damp. Few humans on earth know more about those conditions than the kids I teach, but, for a couple days our natural habitat gave us something else to learn about and as children always do when given the opportunity to explore, we jumped in with both feet.

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Transitions

Most kids I've known, most days, are eager to come to school, but some kids drag their feet every day and all of them have mornings when they would rather not. I get it and I don't take it personally. After all, I love my job, but I'm not always a happy camper about getting dressed and getting out the door either.

It's typically not about school, but rather about the transition. We've all known kids who struggle with transitions and it isn't really something we necessarily outgrow. I mean, that's what Monday mornings are all about, right? Or returning from vacations. On the final night of this most recent winter holiday break, I found myself wishing for just one more day and I have the best job in the world.

Children have their adults to push back against and they do. They don't want to transition from the playground to go back home, they don't want to leave home to go to school, and nearly every day I hear kids whining at their parents that they don't want to leave school, even as their mother's are telling them that their next stop is the playground. As adults, there is typically no one but ourselves to push back against, so we play games like hitting the snooze alarm, but ultimately it's our sense of responsibility rather than another person's scolding that gets us out of bed.

We all want our kids to be the sort who jump out of bed, dress themselves, make short work of breakfast and are waiting at the door in plenty of time, but it's not in human nature to be eager to stop having fun in order to have fun. Indeed, one could argue that a strong resistance to transitions is part and parcel with feeling contented with how things are right now, which is a state of enlightenment. For instance, I love when I tell the kids that I'm thinking of banging the drum (our signal for clean up time) and they call out for "five more minutes!" It means they are fully engaged. By the same token, I often feel like a bit of a failure when a kid prompts me, "Can you bang the drum now?"

Life is a series of transitions. Rarely are we in a position to let it just flow from one thing to the next, so all of us, whatever our natural temperament regarding transitions, learns our own way to handle them. And young children, more often than not, start by targeting the obvious "villain," which is the adult who is telling her she must move on, which then turns into a power struggle that leaves no one feeling happy. If our goal is to give our kids the opportunity to develop their own sense of responsibility about life's necessary transitions, then it's important that we work to take the focus away from "mean mommy" and onto the schedule itself.

Many parents find it useful to, in non-transitional moments, talk to their children in advance about the transitions they can expect in the coming hours, days or even weeks, depending on their age, and then regularly remind them of the full schedule, including the unscheduled parts, throughout the day. All of us tend to do better when we know what to expect because it gives us the opportunity to prepare ourselves and develop our own philosophical approach to moving on from one thing to the next. Perhaps most importantly it allows children to begin to see that it's not mommy or daddy, but rather the schedule that makes the transition necessary.

And until we have the revolution, that's the way it's going to be. In the meantime, we learn our schedules, acknowledge our emotions, and hit the snooze alarm until our sense of responsibility gets us out of bed.

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Letting The "Teachable Moment" Pass

"Don't worry Leon, you can always make some more blood."

I heard Luke say it in passing, consoling his friend, as I was on my way to somewhere else. Not having heard what came before or after, it struck me as both hilarious and intriguing. I couldn't help but try to bring it up again. When next Luke and I met on the playground, I said, "You can always make some more blood."

"It's true, Teacher Tom! Your heart pumps and makes more blood. That's why you don't run out when you bleed." Luke knows a little something about bleeding. "And you know what else? Blood is really blue."

I was sitting on the ground with Audrey and a couple of other kids. Audrey interrupted, "No, blood is red."

"No, really," Luke said, turning to her persuasively, "It's blue inside, but when it comes out it looks red."

"Luke, it's red. I've seen it."

"No really, it's true, it's blue."

I thought I could clarify. "I think what Luke is saying is that blood looks blue when it's inside our body. See my vein?" I showed her my inner wrist. "Doesn't it look blue? Veins are how blood flows in our bodies."

Luke supported me, "That's right, Teacher Tom. That's what I'm saying."

But Audrey had other information. "No, that means the blood is flowing to your heart, and it's red when it flows away from your heart. That's the way blood flows: around and around." She drew a circle in the air with her finger.

Some of the other kids were fascinated with studying the visible veins in their wrists and I was distracted into that conversation, but the science debate continued between our two experts. By the time I re-focused on them Luke was saying, "I guess we're both right."

And Audrey replied, "Yeah, we're both right."

Friendship won out over being right, but not over science. Luke was, of course, correct in his assertion that blood inside the body -- as seen through the skin which reflects blue, but absorbs colors of other wavelengths -- appears blue to the human eye. And, of course, that is the nature of color: we only see what is reflected. It's why everything appears to be the same color, black, in the pitch dark. Audrey was correct in her assertion that blood flowing away from the heart tends to be a brighter red because it is highly oxygenated, while on it's return trip it tends to be a sort of purplish-red because it is oxygen-depleted. 

It's tempting, as an adult with a little more information, to step in and correct the flaws in their arguments, to give them the correct, or more correct, or more complete answer. This is the sort of conversation that we so often jump on as a "teachable moment," but I chose to let them conclude like this. Science is built on inquiry and collegial debate, just like this one. (The angry debate is for politicians and theologians who are too often more invested in winning arguments than understanding)

Luke and Audrey came to the table with essentially true, but incomplete information, which is how we all go through life every day. They each walked away with a little more truth, but their knowledge, like that of all scientists, remains incomplete. That is what drives the scientist, not the knowledge, but the incompleteness, the wanting to know. Science is about discovery and when we leap in with all our grown-up "knowledge" we too often rob children of what makes science, or anything for that matter, worth pursuing.

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Poor Suckers

When our daughter Josephine was born, we lived in an apartment on 1st Avenue above Seattle's Pike Place Market. This was back in the mid-90's, before downtown had become a popular place to live. We had just returned from four years in Germany, however, and the area was the part of the city that reminded us every day that we were back home, so we wanted to be there, at least for awhile. As Josephine grew and became more mobile, we began to feel that we wanted her to have a little more space and a yard of her own, so we bought a house in the Seward Park neighborhood in the southend, a 17 minute drive away.

Josephine and I would spend a lot of time together downtown, especially after Jennifer went back to work, even though we no longer lived there. Several major new developments had opened during the late 80's just before we had moved away so Josephine and I spent a lot of mornings checking them out, or going to the Seattle Art Museum, or hanging out in the market, then we would have lunch together. And for us that meant a proper sit down lunch.

I know now that we were lucky to have a daughter constitutionally capable of enjoying a restaurant meal and she did, very much. Even as an 18-month old we would discuss the pros and cons of various establishments, reading menus in the window, remembering past meals, considering views and service, before finally settling on one.

Among our favorite spots was a corporate-style place located on the top floor of the mall portion of the City Centre building on 6th Avenue called Palomino, which is still there. It catered to a business crowd at lunch and having only a few years earlier "escaped" the suit-and-tie lifestyle, it delighted me to be there as a daddy with his little girl. One day as we talked about our fellow diners, I said, "I feel sorry for these guys because they don't get to have lunch with their children."

She was struck by that and fell silent for a moment watching them knife and fork their way through their working lunches, before saying, "Where are their children?"

"At home, I guess, or in school."

"I'm sorry for them," she agreed.

I nodded, "Poor suckers." She found the expression funny and so it turned into our nickname for Palamino from that moment forward: The Poor Suckers Restaurant.

We were mini-celebrities at Palamino for a time. The waitstaff was mostly young women who were charmed by Josephine in her floral print dresses. Her favorite dish was a squash soup with a pad of butter melting on top. By the time she was two she had figured out how restaurants work. If the table needed more bread, for instance, she would look pointedly at a waiter and raise her finger in the air the way she had seen me do it. In the beginning, I would have to mirror her gesture over her head to actually get service, but after a few weeks as regulars, she didn't need even that support. Someone had said to me that women tend to pick husbands who are like their own fathers, so I decided to be the best date she would ever have, focusing my full attentions on her, asking her for her thoughts and opinions, and generally behaving in the ways I wanted her future boyfriends to behave.

Before having a child, there were many promises Jennifer and I made ourselves about the kinds of parents we would be. We were late starters as parents among our friends, so had, as non-parents, seen how "badly behaved" they were, how "spoiled," and how they seemed to "ruin" our good times by demanding all the attention. When the realities of parenting hit, however, we quickly recognized how unintentionally mean-spirited we had been as we eventually broke every single one of those promises we had made in our ignorance, with one exception: our kid would know how to behave in a restaurant.

Today Josephine is definitely a city girl, like her parents, having chosen to attend NYU in the heart of Manhattan and we still like to go to restaurants together where I ask her about herself and take a moment to feel sorry for all the poor suckers.

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Note: Over the holiday break I started a new blogging project called Stories from 6th Avenue. Essentially, it's a place to publish my non-education related writing. It's been a long time coming so I'm excited to get it off the ground. It's still under construction and I don't expect it will have general appeal to Teacher Tom readers unless you have a particular interest in my thoughts and memories about downtown Seattle. I will likely be cross-posting a version of this piece over there in the next few days. Just wanted you to know.

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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It Pays To Be Gentle

I know a lot of young adults who are earnestly exploring our traditional ideas of gender, making the case that it's not an either-or thing, but rather something that exists on a continuum. When meeting someone new, for instance, they ask about one another's preferred pronouns: he, she, they or something else entirely. I cringed at first, had an urge to mock, and even felt a flash of anger.

I continue to allow myself to be educated by these young people, but I find myself frequently thinking back to that initial reaction. Why the urge to mock and the feeling of anger? At bottom, I suppose it's because these young people were teaching me something that I figured was a settled matter: there are boys and girls, men and women, he's and she's, and now they're telling me that not only is everything I know wrong, but that if I am going to absorb this new knowledge, I'm going to have to make a conscious effort to change myself.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think they'll hate you. ~Don Marquis

I recall feeling similarly the first time I was in the company of two men kissing one another. I was a guest in their home, I was eating their food, I knew they were gay, but in the moment their lips touched, something that in those days never happened on the street or on television, I experienced an urge to mock and a flash of anger. Up to that moment, my thoughts on the subject had been easy superficialities, but with that kiss I was made to really think, and while I'm not going to say I felt hate, some of the emotions it evoked are part and parcel with hate. Deep down I recognized that this new knowledge to which they had exposed me through their kiss meant that I would have to change.

And change is frightening: that's why so many of us fight it, at least at first. As individuals who value knowledge, it's incumbent upon us to find ways to overcome "hatred" in our quest for truth. As a man who's lived for more than half a century, I've gone through this process hundreds if not thousands of times, and more often than not I come out on the other side prone to evangelizing, and few things match the zealousness of the newly converted. I see it in many of those young people who are working to redefine gender, even as they are being mocked quite roundly in the media and elsewhere.

The student becomes the teacher and good teachers, ones who really make other people think, invite mockery and anger, even hatred, but that's no reason to stop teaching. It should, however, cause us to take a moment to understand that when we are speaking our "new" truths, no matter how beautiful we find them, what we are teaching is frightening, so if we really want others to think, it pays to be gentle.

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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