We Don't Understand

For me, the most challenging part of being a parent of a young child was when her friendships aren't going the way she wanted them to go. Especially heartbreaking were those teary car rides home from school when someone had rebuffed, insulted, or otherwise treated my baby badly. I suspect every parent knows the anguish of helpless pity and impotent rage; that objectless casting about for someone to blame or punish or at least be the deserving recipient of the whipsaw of karma, all of it made worse by the knowledge that no one deserves any of that; that these are just children with parents just like you who are trying to figure it out as well.

We all have a vast pool of experience when it comes to being rejected. Researchers have found that even the most popular kids in elementary school are rejected 30 percent of the time when they seek to enter into play with others. Knowing this, of course, does nothing to reduce the sting, and in particular the special pain we suffer when it is experienced by proxy as it is when it's our own child.

I still have these feelings as the parent of a young adult, but they're now tempered by a couple decades of what I'll call wisdom; the experience of having my child repeatedly come through on the other side where there really is friendship. We still, quite regularly, remind ourselves of the great genius of her classmate Katrina who I once overheard successfully comforting my then six-year-old by saying, "She's mean to me too. When she's nice to me, I play with her. When she's mean, I don't play with her."

As a teacher in a cooperative, I am right there with parents as they see their child struggling with friendships, being rejected, but also, perhaps even more painful, rejecting others. I know how it's often impossible to not drop to your knees and plead with your child to behave or feel differently, to accept, if only just this once, your advice and counsel. Or to tell them they must apologize or make amends or buck up or take it philosophically. I'm there as all of these efforts fail because we, as parents, really are helpless and impotent when we try to do anything other than hold them, and listen to them, and feel with them.

Learning about friendship, learning about how we make friends, is, in fact, a lonely road. Learning to populate that road with fellow travelers is something we have to do for ourselves, through the experience that comes from trial and error. "You just don't understand!" is a great truth our children shout at us when we try to do more than just let them finish their cry. We don't understand, even while we have a vast experience.

Friendship is a joy found quite often through pain, sometimes great pain. That's probably part of why it feels so good when we get there.

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"They Ruined It"

When our daughter Josephine was three, the cooperative preschool we attended was temporarily housed in a pubic school building in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, which was just across the street from the Wallingford Playfield, which in turn made it one of our go-to stops after school.

One corner was dedicated to a wading pool (empty for most of the year), some swings as I recall, and a massive, asphalt covered mound upon which the Parks & Rec Department had erected a one-of-a-kind construction featuring walkways, stairs, and a pair of massive tunnel slides. This play area was ringed with trees and shrubberies which is where Josephine typically played with her friends after a few minutes of going up and down the slides.

Those yellow dots are the kids playing in the landscaping rather than on the "proper" playground.

At one point the playground was closed for several months as the play-area was being rebuilt. The goal was a safer (e.g., less asphalt) and more aesthetically pleasing place. In the meantime, the school found it's permanent location north of Wallingford, so it wasn't part of our regular circuit any longer, but we eagerly awaited the re-grand opening nevertheless, having circled the big day on our calendar.

I'll never forget how my now four-year-old Josephine stopped at the fence for a moment in stunned silence before remarking, "They ruined it." At the time I disagreed, but I now know exactly what she meant. They had replaced this quirky, one-of-a-kind place with flashy out-of-the-box equipment, including a "climber" that filled the same footprint as the asphalt mound, but without the height, impressive slides, or perception of risk. The nail that stuck up had been hammered down.

As you can see, the climber, to the right in this photo, has been abandoned.

Josephine and her friends nevertheless tried it out for a few minutes before retreating into the trees and shrubberies which they had thankfully left, albeit now at the top of a tidy rockery. As I stood with some other parents on the sidelines we realized that all the kids were playing on the rocks and in the trees, while the only ones on the slides and swings were the adults who had brought the kids. This pattern held true for our next few visits as well and that playground eventually fell off of our rotation.

Last year, a parent, on her own dime, installed a type of climber on our school playground, a structure of pipes create by a parkour trainer. It was a big hit for a few months as the kids tested themselves on it, but then that corner of the space fell fallow. When we started this new school year, the structure again received attention for a couple months, but has since become a relative dead zone. That's the problem with these sorts of things: yes, children are attracted to them at first, but they usually only enjoy them until they've mastered them, until they've played the risk out of them, then they're done. This is why I have no problem with them being installed on "destination" playgrounds because most children are only there occasionally, and then for only an hour or so, but I'm not a fan of them on schoolyards. Our community has agreed with me. Next week we are are removing our parkour climber and replacing it with something else that I expect will be used every day because it will be more open ended.

A couple weeks ago, our 4-5's class took a trip into Chinatown to visit the Wing Luke museum, then popped over to a nearby pocket playground. There was a cool dragon sculpture on which the kids could clamber, a small sand box, and a standard issue climber. The kids swarmed the equipment for the first few minutes, but before long, they were all climbing the rockery and playing in the landscaping. Climbers come and go, but the newness never wears off terrain featuring rocks, sticks and plants.

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Playishness

I receive a fair number of newly published early childhood/teaching books, often unsolicited, with the idea that I'll write a review or otherwise promote it on the blog. I don't read them all -- indeed, I only tend to read those that come from authors who I know or who previously contacted me. I'm sure most are fantastic books, but I only have so much time, and even if I do read the book, there is no guarantee that I'll hype it here.

These guys have invented a game they call "bumper swings." They get the tire swing in the middle going side-to-side, then strive to avoid getting hit.

I hope that each one of these books finds it's audience, even if I'm not included in it, but there is one type of education book that really, really gets under my skin. Last week, I receive one such book. I don't want to embarrass anyone, so I won't share the title with you, but it's ostensibly a book about children acquiring STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) learning through play. They quote Mister Rogers:

"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood."

Nice. They go on to talk about how children learn best through play, how they tend to be holistic learners, and generally promote the idea of play-based learning. Then they make this ludicrous assertion: "The idea of integrating science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) into learning centers is relatively new." If they mean, relatively new in terms of the history of the universe, then okay, but animals have been learning science, technology, engineering, and math through play since there have been animals. In fact, almost everything any human has ever learned has come through play.

It's a game that involves science, technology, engineering, and math, among other things .

Once one gets past the opening pages, the book disappointingly goes on to instruct adults on how to set up activities that contain elements of play or that seem playful, but that require the adult is to continually "tell" or "explain" things to children, or to "have" them do this or that, and to generally boss the kids around, essentially turning what could be meaningful, child-directed opportunities to learn and explore into formulaic, adult-directed marches through material. The comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness" to describe those things that sound true, but really aren't: I'm going to claim the term "playishness" to describe those things that might seem like play, but are really just exercises in direct instruction using toys and art supplies instead of lectures and text books. Often you will find these sorts of things under the heading, "play with a purpose," a sure indication that what you're going to read about is not play at all.

I have no idea what they are learning from their game, but I do know they are learning because they find it engaging enough to choose to play it again-and-again. When they choose to stop playing this game, that will tell me they have learned what they wanted to learn from it.

First and foremost, play is a self-selected activity. The moment you have an adult "telling" you things or "explaining" things or "having" you do things, it is no longer play; it's direct instruction, a type of teaching that this book's authors argue against even as every page is about how to get children to learn what the adult thinks they ought to know rather than, as happens in a true play-based curriculum, leaving the children free to both ask and answer their own questions.

This is what learning through play actually looks like.

The research is quite clear, as the authors point out, that play is how children learn most naturally, including the so-called STEM skills. The book even has the word "play" in the title, but it's all just playishness used to disguise the same old top-down, adult-driven, tick-box style of learning that already makes school a place where so many children lose their love of learning. Play is about freedom to pursue one's own learning and the more free we are, especially from adults always telling us what to do, the more we love to learn. 

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"I Brought Candy For The Kids!"

Our playground is built on a long slope along the side of the Fremont Baptist Church from whom we lease our space. The church offices are located above the playground, accessible via a boardwalk walkway, so we have a view of everyone who is coming and going. We see church staff and congregants, but most of the traffic on any given day is comprised of "Pastor Gay's men," our neighborhood population of people (not all men, but mostly men) living rough, stopping in to ask her for prayers, money, advice, and other sorts of help. They made us nervous when we first took up residence, and sometimes they still do, but for the most part, we've come to view them as fellow members of our community and take pride in the small part we play in the vital service of Christian love that Pastor Gay provides.

The children largely ignore them as they pass by overhead, but last week, one fellow arrived carrying five large, festively festooned cans in addition to his regular rucksack. Boy, we noticed that!

"I think that guy has candy!"

"That's a lot of candy!"

"Maybe he's bringing it to us!"

"Yeah!"

The cans were indeed decorated as if they contained sweets of some kind, but I figured the man was just using them to carry some of his belongings or something. I joined the kids in their game, enthusing about this magical man with buckets of candy. It crossed my mind to trot out the stranger danger warning from my own childhood -- "Don't take candy from strangers" -- but bit my tongue, especially since he was ignoring us. If he heard the kids' remarking on his haul, he didn't let on, passing into Pastor Gay's office and, in turn, out of our imaginations.

Shortly thereafter, the man emerged from the offices no longer carrying his cans, which rendered him once more invisible to the kids. I was standing near the walkway. As he passed, he leaned over the railing, spread his arms, and said, "I brought candy for the kids!" I answered, "Really? Thank you." Then he said it again, "I brought candy for the kids!" There was joy in his expression.

Later, when I spoke with Pastor Gay, I learned that they were, in fact, unopened supplies of caramel popcorn and maple candies, and that the man had claimed them at a food bank, thought of us, and dropped them by. The pastor and I agreed that there were more deserving places for these treats to go, but I asked her for the cans when they were empty.

As I've reflected on this, I'm reminded of an incident from a couple years ago, when a rough-looking guy who I'm now pretty sure was the same man as the one last week, approached me as I watched the kids from outside the playground fence, "Do you want some more toy trucks?" I replied, "Sure, we can always use more toy trucks," a response I meant as breezy, friendly conversation, not expecting anything to come of it. After all, how could this guy, a man living on the streets, come up with toy trucks?

The following morning there were a half dozen metal, gently-use construction vehicles on the playground. Of course, I worried they had been stolen from a neighbor's garage. Later that day the man showed up again. I said, "Are those new trucks from you?" He proudly said they were. I tried to not sound accusatory when I asked, "Where did you get them?" He answered, "Up the street," then I think he realized what I was asking. "I didn't steal them or nothin'. There was a sign that said "free."

I thanked him, then he asked, "Can I watch them play a bit? I'll stay right here." I stood with him as we watched the kids enthusiastically embrace their exciting new toys. He watched and nodded. If he wasn't the same man as the one last week, the joy in his expression was. Then he said, "I guess I'll be on my way." 

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She Had Them Rolling In The Aisles

Give them what they want. ~Winston Churchill

Not long ago, I shared a quite literate story by a four-year-old author. He's written several things since, but after sharing that last one in front of the whole group he has subsequently declined, usually saying, "It's not finished yet." This is, of course, a valid choice for any writer. He loves the creative process, one where he sits in one-to-one intimacy with the adult taking dictation; the public performance isn't his thing right now. Maybe some day he'll be finished, but maybe not.

We have other authors in our class, however, who are very much interested in having their stories presented in front of the entire group. And then there are some who are mastering the art of writing for their audience, giving them what they want.

The following story is really a creative collaboration between a daughter and her mother, both of whom were aware from the beginning that this story was always going to be destined to be read aloud to room full of four and five year olds:

"Once upon a time there was a

big monster who pooped

everywhere. And he was

called POOP MONSTER!

But he just kept on

pooping. Poop, poop, poop

Poop, poop, poop, poop

Poop, poop, poop, poop.

Poop.

Poop.

Poop.

"This is a big, big poop from that

blue monster! And then it just kept on pooping!

Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop . . .

"This is a really big, big buh-buh big poop!"

I had the honor of reading this masterpiece of its kind to the class. She had them rolling in the aisles, every last one of them.

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Take A Walk

I live on a street that is lined with mature chestnut trees. The leaves are off the branches right now, but when spring arrives our piece of the concrete jungle becomes a lush, green promenade. Someone, decades ago, had the foresight to plant those trees from the downtown core all the way to South Lake Union and those of us who live and work here today are reaping the health benefits, both psychological and physical.

Only one in 10 American teenagers spends any significant time at all outdoors on any given day, but that's twice as long as the typical American adult. Even younger children, those who supposedly need to "burn off excess energy," hardly spend any time at all outdoors with only around 30 percent of them doing it daily. These are sad facts, even tragic.

From a recent National Geographic article entitled "This is Your Brain on Nature":

In 2009 a team of Dutch researchers found a lower incidence of 15 diseases -- including depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and migraines -- in people who lived within about a half mile of green space.

Going outside is not just about simply "burning off excess energy," it is about being healthier, happier human beings. For instance, researchers have found that urbanites who simply live on blocks with more trees show "a boost in heart and metabolic health equivalent to what one would experience from a $20,000 gain in income." It's not about weekend camping trips (although those are great), it's not about exercise (although that's important), and it doesn't have to be anything more "natural" than your local city park. Even hospital patients with views of trees out their windows tend to heal faster than those who don't. The benefits come simply from spending time near green spaces.

"People underestimate the happiness effect" of being outdoors, says (psychology professor Lisa) Nisbet. "We don't think of it as a way to increase happiness. We think other things will, like shopping or TV. We evolved in nature. It's strange we'd be so disconnected."

Strange indeed. I urge you to read the article for yourself. I'm particularly fascinated by what's going on in South Korea, a citizenry known for work stresses, digital addiction, and intense academic pressures. They are taking the research on being outdoors so seriously that they have developed three "healing forests," staffed with "health rangers," with another 34 forests on the way by the end of this year. 

Chungbuk University offers a "forest healing" degree program, and job prospects for graduates are good; the Korea Forest Service expects to appoint 500 health rangers in the next couple years . . . Programs include everything from prenatal forest meditation to woodcrafts for cancer patients to forest burials. A government-run "happy train" takes kids who've been bullied into the woods for two days of camping. A hundred-million-dollar healing complex is under construction next to Sobaeksan National Park.

Hopefully, this sort of insight is just down the road for us in America, but in the meantime, we can enjoy the benefits today and it really is as simple as going outside:

It may also make us nicer to ourselves. Stanford researcher Greg Bratman . . . scanned the brains of 38 volunteers before and after they walked for 90 minutes, either in a large park or on a busy street . . . The nature walkers, but not the city walkers showed decreased activity in the subgenus prefrontal cortex -- a part of the brain tied to depressive rumination -- and from their own reports, the nature walkers beat themselves up less. Batman believes that being outside in a pleasant environment . . . takes us outside of ourselves in a good way.

And it doesn't even take 90 minutes: even a 15 minute walk results in measurable changes in our physiology. It's not hard, it's not just for your kids, and it will make you happier. It might even save your life.

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The Enemy Of Learning

I went to kindergarten back in the 1960's. We played outdoors, built with blocks, pretended, and made some art. I don't think there was any particular curriculum or ideology behind the program offered by Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Ruiz. We mostly played, much like the kids do at Woodland Park, although I remember one classroom project in which we sat around tables, each responsible for coloring in a part of a train -- box cars, coal cars, passenger cars. I got the engine. Mrs. Jennings gave very specific instructions about how to color our pictures. We were to strive to color side-to-side, using only horizontal motions, and to stay within the lines.

It was the kind of project I always enjoyed. To this day I love the challenge of creating artwork that requires fine motor deftness and precision. I chose to make my engine mostly red and was quite impressed with how wonderful the finished product looked. I'd already learned to take aesthetic pleasure in staying within the lines, but the whole horizontal coloring concept was an epiphany to me, a concept I employed in coloring projects throughout the rest of my youth.

The following day we arrived at school to find that Mrs. Jennings had taped our individual pictures to the wall to create a train, my red engine at the front. I was proud of that engine, but man was I appalled at my classmates' work. Most of them had failed to stay within the lines, and from what I could tell only I had adhered to the horizontal coloring method. Yet there was Mrs. Jennings, not scolding anyone, not correcting anyone, not making anyone do it over, but rather enthusing about the beautiful train we had made together.

Of course, today I can see that the problem was not with the other kids, but rather with my own expectations. You see, I was apparently a coloring within the lines prodigy, much in the way some four-year-olds prodigiously teach themselves to read in preschool, while most of their classmates are still years away from being developmentally ready for it. Mrs. Jennings instructions had hit the five-year-old me right where I lived, while it went over the heads of most of my classmates: she knew this, which is why she didn't scold or correct. It's why she saw beauty.

The development of human beings, especially in the early years, is notoriously spiky. My own daughter began to speak at three months, but didn't crawl until her first birthday, and wasn't walking until she was closer to two. Some kids are capable of reading at an early age, some are genius climbers, others have advanced social or artistic or musical skills. Every parent knows their own child is a genius: every preschool teacher knows that every child is a genius. And we all know that every child is also "behind" in some areas. This is all normal.

Indeed, the range of "normal" is enormous. This is one of the most powerful aspects of a cooperative preschool. As parents work with me in the classroom as my assistant teachers, they come to appreciate this, and even, as Mrs. Jennings did, find it beautiful. And this is why a play-based curriculum is ideal for young children, it allows each child to focus like a laser her own personalized educational objectives in a way that meshes perfectly with her developmental stage.

Sadly, kindergarten, at least the public school variety, no longer accommodates this wide range of "normal." Over the past decade or so, kindergarten has transformed dramatically, and not for the better:

A . . . University of Virginia study found that kindergarten changed in disturbing ways . . . There was a marked decline in exposure to social studies, science, music, art and physical education and an increased emphasis on reading instruction. Teachers reported spending as much time on reading as all other subjects combined . . . The time spent in child-selected activity dropped by more than one-third. Direct instruction and testing increased. Moreover, more teachers reported holding all children to the same standard.

The whole idea of standardization runs counter to what we know about how young children learn and develop, yet that has been the focus of the corporate education "reform" movement, which spawned the most recent era of the federally mandated Common Core State Standards and high stakes standardized testing. The cabal that created this pedagogically indefensible mess, lead by Bill Gates through his foundation, have ignored what professionals know about how children actually learn:

To make matters worse, the drafters of the Common Core ignored the research on child development. In 2010, 500 child development experts warned the drafters that the standards called for exactly the kind of damaging practices that inhibit learning: direct instruction, inappropriate content and testing . . . These warnings went unheeded . . . Consequently, the Common Core exacerbates the developmentally inappropriate practices on the rise since NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

No, the goal of these "reformers" was never to meet the children where they were developmentally, nor to shape a curriculum around the way children learn, but rather, as Bill Gates famously said in an interview with the Washington Post: "(T)o unleash powerful market forces on education." You see, standardization makes it easier for businesspeople to develop products to sell to schools. The dehumanizing metaphor Gates used was to compare it to standardizing electrical outlets. Perhaps things will change under a new administration, but I'm not holding my breath. I've never heard a politician of any political stripe who understood how education could and should work.

But Mrs. Jennings understood, as all professional early childhood educators do, that children cannot be standardized like computers or washing machines or electrical outlets. Some of us can stay within the lines, but most of us can't, and that's what makes us beautiful.

Standardization is always the enemy of learning.

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Putting Off That Transition

When I climbed into bed last night, it was raining like it had been all day, but I awoke to find it had turned to snow and it's still coming down. As a city of hills, bridges, infrequent snow, and therefore, inexperienced snow drivers, it doesn't take a lot by comparison to other places to close our schools.

There are few things better than a Monday morning snow day. I love my job as I hope these pages attest, but there always comes a point on Sunday when I find myself wishing for "just one more day." It's a manifestation not of my desire to laze around the apartment in my bathrobe (although I'll do that), but rather a manifestation of my knee-jerk reluctance over transitions, which is why I'm so sympathetic to children when they don't want to move on from one thing to the next -- from home to school, from playing to clean up, from outdoors to indoors. Even if what comes next is every bit as good as what comes before, many of us, throughout our lives, have to learn to psyche ourselves into it.

There's a boy in our 2's class who screams and yells and fights his mother all the way to school, but the moment he crosses the threshold he's nothing but smiles and deep, focused play until it's time to pack it all away. Then he pouts and refuses until we start singing songs when he transforms into Johnny-on-the-spot, beaming like it's his birthday.

I'm confident that few of our parents will have trouble with their children this morning, because snow in Seattle is rare enough that it contains magic. Earlier this winter, we received a light dusting over night and Facebook was littered with photos of Woodland Park children out playing in it at the crack of dawn -- no fights about waking up, getting dressed, and getting out the door. I know that some families will have to scramble to figure out child care, but most will spend their morning outside in the snow, teaching a curriculum of snowballs, snowmen, snow angels, and hot chocolate. That is one of my great regrets as a teacher: we're so quick to close the schools that I've never played in the snow with the kids, although I did with my own daughter when she was school-aged. It's a privilege reserved only for parents around here, I guess.

My wife, like the rest of the work-a-day world is still planning to make it into her office, albeit a bit later than normal, and even now I can hear cars passing in the street below. But me, I'm taking advantage of one of the non-monetary perks of the profession: drinking a second cup of coffee while watching the snow and putting off that transition for another day.

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"No Super Hero Play"

There are always kids in our 4-5's class who spend their days together playing "super heroes." They might call it something different (good guys, bad guys, Star Wars, Ninjas, Minecraft), but it's essentially the same game: they form a team, negotiate their roles, discuss in detail just how powerful they are, then race about talking tough, making fierce faces, and striking assertive poses.

And just as predictably, there are some children who come to fear the super heroes. It's not something the kids usually talk to me about, but rather their parents, who then attempt to coach their kids through it with varying degrees of success. A couple weeks ago, an adult brought up the topic during a parent meeting, and we discovered that there were a handful of children feeling uncomfortable at school because of the super hero play.

The following day, when the children assembled for circle time, I knew I wanted to steer the conversation that way. We started off talking about our classroom rules, the agreements the children have made with one another. It's a long, comprehensive list by this point the the school year, but that doesn't mean we don't keep adding to it. Children began taking turns suggesting new rules, which we accepted or rejected. I was prepared to broach the subject of super heroes myself, but was hoping that it would emerge from the kids. I knew that one girl, H, via her mother, had been attempting to summon up the courage to suggest an outright ban on their play, and this was the day.

I said, "H has something to say," and she replied, "No super hero play."

There was a moment of dead silence as her words sank in. Then the super heroes, their expressions full of shock and outrage, raised a chorus of, "Nooooo," which was followed by a more scattered chorus of, "Yesssss." It was obvious that we were not going to reach consensus on this rule, but that wasn't the point: the point was to have the discussion. Once we'd settled down we took turns making our cases. We started with those who were feeling afraid. Several classmates joined H. As they spoke up I watched the superheroes who were listening the way one does when the topic is of utmost importance. As they listened to their classmates, their expressions turned from outrage to what I can only describe as stunned.

When it was the superheroes' turn to talk, one of them said, emotion rising in his throat, "But we're good guys." Another said, "We protect people." They were simply astonished that they had been so misunderstood. They definitely did not want anyone to be afraid of them.

The discussion that followed was long and rambling, and atypically, I worked to steer things back to the topic of the day. We knew we couldn't agree to H's suggested rule, but we talked about things we could do like being more aware of one another's feelings, being more direct with one another about how we were feeling, and figuring out better ways to share the space and resources. As we discussed, we learned that most of the children were neutral about the super heroes, sometimes joining them, but not every day. They had concrete suggestions, but perhaps their most important contribution was to let their friends know that they weren't afraid, which I think helped some of the more fearful children see that there was an alternative to either-or. I didn't check the clock, but it was a long, productive discussion in which the kids learned something about one another.

This won't be the last time we will need to talk about this, but it was a good starting point and the parents of the anti-super heroes have reported that their children came away feeling much better, empowered even. As for the super heroes they have been quite sincere in their desire to not frighten their classmates going forward, even if they sometimes forget as they immerse themselves in their dramatic play. And we adults now have a convenient reference point for supporting the children as they work this through.

On Wednesday, one of super heroes was running full speed near the swings. A boy standing nearby flinched as he passed, which caught our caped crusader's eye. He slowed briefly and said, "I'm sorry I scared you," and his friend replied, "That's okay. I was only scared for a second." Like I said, we're going to be working on this for the rest of the school year, but man that was awesome.

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"A Little Bit Of Mommy"

At the beginning of the school year she wasn't happy about mommy leaving her at school. Since we're a cooperative, it was a natural thing for mom to accommodate that concern by simply staying with her. But ultimately mommy couldn't stay all day every day, so most of the school year has been a slow-motion process of letting go.

At first she dealt with her mother's departure by crying, choosing a spot in the hallway where she could have relative quiet and privacy. When I checked in with her, which I did frequently, she would pause long enough to tell me she would rather that I return to the classroom, but also to request that I pass on the message that she didn't want any of the other kids or adults to hang out with her either.

I did my best, but the other children had a hard time staying away: their innate compassion drew them to her. I would gently chase them off when I spotted them, but one day a girl got through my protective wall with a stuffed penguin that she offered as an idea for pacifying her friend. From that day onward, as she set herself up in her crying spot, I would ask if she wanted me to get the penguin for her, and she did, telling me each time that she "had one just like it at home."

After a few days, she let me know that it was okay for kids to come into her crying area, but that she wanted the adults, including me, to stay away. So there was a phase during which a friend would sit with her in the hallway, often bringing a plaything or two.

Then one day she arrived to announce that she had decided she wasn't going to cry about mommy today, although she would still miss her. And indeed she knew herself: it was a great day, where she spent most of her time playing with the play dough. These days she is quite comfortable in class, moving from station to station, activity to activity, putting the third teacher through her paces.

These days, the only vestige of her concern is that mommy tends to stick around for a few extra minutes each morning before they kiss bye-bye. Yesterday, as they parted ways, I noticed lipstick marks on the girl's cheek. I joked, "I didn't know you were old enough to wear lipstick," assuming that I would now need to retrieve a mirror to show her what I was talking about." But I was wrong. She was fully aware of that lipstick on her cheek. She smiled and said, presenting her cheek to me proudly, "I like to have a little bit of mommy stay with me at school." 

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What A Teacher Ought To Be Doing

"Teacher Tom, I need a box."

"What kind of box?"

"This is my firing pad and I need a base for my firing pad." We had been dismantling machines all week, then repurposing the parts for our own creations using glue guns. His "firing pad" employed the shell of a DVD player upon which he'd mounted bits from a vacuum cleaner along with a couple wine corks he had found on the ground.

I thought I might have a box that would work for his purposes in the storage room and hustled inside for it.

When I returned, before I'd even handed over the box, I was waylaid by a group of girls who needed duct tape.

"What do you need duct tape for?"

There was a crack in the side of a plastic bucket they were using. When I offered help them find a bucket that wasn't cracked, they insisted that it had to be this one because it "matched." They all wanted to be using the same red buckets. After delivering the box to the workbench, I went back inside for duct tape.

Upon my return, another boy asked me for another box to use as a base for his firing pad. "But a smaller one."

This is how my day had gone, frankly. It seemed as if I'd been sent into that damned store room dozens of times already, fetching everything from fabric and string to drinking straws and "sparkle sparkles," all at the behest of kids. I was feeling a bit irritated, not at the children, of course, and not really even at myself, but rather at my "third teacher," and her inability to make all those supplies more readily accessible. I love her, but she's far from perfect.

Our supply of cardboard boxes was at an ebb, so this mission required some rummaging around. As I searched, I ground my teeth at the fact that this was what I was doing with my day rather than, you know, actually teaching. In my internal grumbling, I asked myself why the kids couldn't just stick with using the huge supply of materials I'd already provided and that's when it hit me: I was, in fact, doing exactly what a teacher ought to be doing in a truly child-lead environment. They were out there, fully engaged in their self-directed projects, and when they came across an idea or obstacle I'd not anticipated (and in all honesty, most are of that variety), they were using their knowledge of the storage room supplies to ask me, the teacher, the one with the keys, the one tall enough to reach the top shelves, to help them.

After retrieving an acceptable box, one I'd made available by moving its contents to a different container, I heard a couple kids chanting, "We need more water, we need more water, we need more water," the way they do when the cistern over which our cast iron pump sits is dry. An adult needs to go outside the playground gate to turn on the hose that refills it, so I headed that way, not plodding as much as I sometimes do, understanding in this moment that this is what I get paid to do at our play-based school: supporting the kids as they pursue their self-directed projects.

A group of children had earlier gone around to the greenhouse to plant a few seeds in hope of some early crops. A clutch of them were standing at the gate, wanting to come back in. "We need watering cans!"

"Okay," I said as I let them in, "but first I have to refill the cistern."

"Don't worry, Teacher Tom, we'll get them ourselves. We know where they are," and off they race, down the hill, fully engaged in their project, and all they had needed me for this time was opening the gate.

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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