That's How To Share

If there's one aspect of our outdoor classroom that consistently provokes conflict, it would be our swing set. With only two regular seats and 20 or so kids, there's almost always someone waiting for a turn, or, more precisely, someone who is upset with how long the current swinger is taking to get finished.

Generally speaking, our policy about sharing is that we inform the person currently using an object, "When you're finished, I want a turn," (although more often than not it's expressed as, "I'm next!") then let the person with possession decide for her or himself when it's time to give way, which always happens sooner or later, if only because they can't resist the "pressure" of a friend just standing there waiting for them. It's not a perfect system, prone to abuse, but I think it's better than the alternative which is for an adult to arbitrarily decide when it's time to give it up, robbing children of an opportunity to practice working things out for themselves.

When I paused to listen in to these two girls, I heard one of them counting while the other took a turn.

And while the swing set is where much of our turn-taking and sharing practice takes place, they are skills easily transferable to other endeavors. For instance, we once had our old Fisher Price "record player" out, a wind-up device with 5 tough plastic records. A group of us were in the other room, leaving the field clear for Finn, who loved figuring things out, to master the thing. When we returned, there were suddenly a half dozen kids in his space, demanding a turn. Finn let out a howl as the other kids turned to the adults, loudly, saying things like, "He won't give us a turn!" and "He's taking too long!" Emotions were high.

I said, stating the facts as I understood them, "Finn, your friends want a turn when you're finished."

He answered, "I have to play these records first." Everyone backed off a pace. Finn then methodically selected a record, placed it on the turn table, wound it up and turned it on. With the first few notes of Camptown Races, children began to call out, "Now it's my turn!"

When she'd counted to 20, they traded places, and the count to 20 began again.

"No," said Finn firmly, "I have to play all the records." That's when it dawned on me that his plan was to not only play each of the 5 records, but to play each of them until they'd exhausted the wind-up. This was going to be a 15 minute proposition. I asked, "So you're going to play all of those records?"

"Yes."

A couple kids shouted, "That's not fair!"

I said, "It's his turn. When he's done someone else gets a turn."

As the records played, the number of children waiting dwindled, but not by much: four of them remained crowded around. With London Bridges in the air, they began to sort themselves out. Rex was standing directly behind Finn, using that to support his claim that he was next. Charlotte objected at first, but after a couple rounds, relented, stating, "Then I'm after you." She then pointed across the table at Cooper, "And you're after me," to which he agreed, although that left Ben "last," which didn't seem at all fair to him.

This was a system they worked out on their own: no obedience necessary, just agreement among peers. I said nothing, no "Atta girls" necessary, because the reward, as it always is when we are left to work things out for ourselves, is built into the solution.

As Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star played, Rex took a crack at things, pointing as he spoke, "I'm first, she's second, he's third, and you're fourth." This use of ordinals was stroke of genius on Rex's part, leaving Ben feeling much better about being fourth rather than "last." 

By now Finn had played 3 of his 5 records. With the turn-taking sorted out, everyone's attentions now returned to him. There were a couple grumbles of, "He's taking a long time," and "When is it going to be our turn?"

As he placed Clair de Lune on the turntable, he said, "This is the last one I'm going to play. I don't like that other one." Playing 4 records instead of 5 was his concession to the group. He then declared himself "finished" a couple notes in, vacating his chair for Rex.

Rex, Charlotte, Cooper, and Ben, their sharing plan already agreed upon, then rotated through in a matter of minutes without a hitch. That's how to share.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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The Things We Did Together

I've been married for 30 years . . . All to the same woman. (Rim shot! Thank you very much. I'll be here all week. Tell your friends!)

We were in our 20's when we started dating. One of our late night hang outs was a place called The Dog House. It was on the fringe of downtown, located in a sort of no-man's land that didn't really have a name. Open 24 hours, it was a dive-y piano bar by night and a dive-y breakfast anytime place by day. It had been in that location since the 1950's, although The Dog House itself pre-dated that in a slightly different location since the 1930's.

It closed it's doors in 1994 with a sing-a-long, followed by the bartender apparently announcing, "It's time folks. Get the f*** out of my bar. I wanna go home; they quit paying me." We were sad to see it go and I remember people moaning that it was yet another piece of evidence that the Seattle we all knew and loved was gone forever. Shortly after they took down their iconic "All Roads Lead to The Dog House" bar-backing mural, a new place opened in the location called The Hurricane. It was a also a 24-hour bar/greasy spoon, but for almost two decades it was dead to us. That is, until our daughter and her friends adopted it as one of their after-hours haunts and although my wife and I had by now aged out of the all-nighter phase, it became our family's go-to weekend breakfast spot, where we would often dine alongside still-drunk patrons and after-hours prostitutes who were grabbing a bite after a hard night's work.

A couple years ago, The Hurricane announced that the building had been purchased by Amazon, which was going to tear it down to build more offices. We joined the crowd of distraught old-time Seattleites bemoaning its demise. When we shared our sadness with our waiter, who had been serving us for at least a decade, he shrugged, saying, "He's not saying it to the newspapers, but the owner is thrilled. He got a great lease buy-out and he's moving to San Diego." That made us feel a little better, at least it wasn't a small business person be forced out, but it did little to satisfy those of us being left behind. The crappy old building has now been torn down and construction is about to begin on a brand, spanking new office tower.

I've considered this city my home since I moved here in 1984, right out of college. The demise of The Dog House, then The Hurricane, isn't the first thing I've seen make way for something new. Indeed, when I walk around downtown, it seems that most of what was once here has been replaced. In fact, I can remember when many of the "beloved" places being torn down today, like The Hurricane, were themselves soul-less Johnny-come-latelys.

That's what cities do, of course, the old is forever making way for the new. Only when our beloved Hurricane closed did I learn that our beloved Dog House had been pre-dated by another 24-hour place in that same location called The Bohemian Continental that had operated during the 1920's. I expect people mourned that as well. If it's in the nature of cities to forever re-make themselves, it's human nature to regret the losses, even if it was really just a string of seedy bars. It's tempting to, as William F. Buckley wrote, "stand athwart history yelling "Stop," and that's what most of us do, at least once in awhile, especially as we get older.

People sometimes refer to it as progress, but that implies moving forward toward something better and I'm not sure if that's accurate. Most change is simply different, not better or worse, but rather a reflection of the times, of our collective and contemporary needs and desires. It's a perspective I've learned from working with young children, who are today just starting to create the memories that will cause them to mourn the loss of their own icons. When our school moved from our location on Phinney Ridge down into Fremont, an objectively better location for us, we strived to make the classroom feel as much like the old one as possible, right down to painting the walls the same color, but I'll never forget our four and five year olds crossing the threshold for the first time. Many were appalled, a few even cried. They remembered The Dog House and this was The Hurricane.

But they got over it quickly, most never mentioning it again. As they launched into their play during those first days, weeks and months, they were beginning the work of making this new place as special as the old because what was important about our old place, of course, was not the four walls and a ceiling, but rather the things we did there together. By the same token, each time I sit down with my wife and daughter over an omelette, hash browns, and a side of pre-buttered toast which we then spread with the jam from those little packets, we return to The Hurricane, not the building, but the actual place, the one that lives within us as a warm memory of doing things with people we care about.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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That Has To Be Enough

I don't make lesson plans, at least not in the traditional sense. I've certainly reflected upon what the kids were doing and talking about yesterday, then made my best guess about where they might want to take it today. Based on these reflections, I might make sure certain materials are available, but even after all these years I still get it wrong more often than not and spend much of my day running back and forth to the storage closet, which is my real lesson planning. That's because there is no way to predict play.

Play makes its own "plan," one that emerges as motivated learners come together to create, invent, and explore. In fact, it's that unpredictability, at least in part, that makes a play-based curriculum such a powerful and motivating way for children to learn. Predictability is one of the the hallmarks of rote and no one is motivated by that. No one is motivated by being told what to learn and by when, which are the hallmarks of a typical lesson plan. No, humans are at their intellectual best when they have the time and space to both individually and collectively pursue their own interests within the context of a community, and it's impossible to know beforehand what discoveries they will make, no matter how much planning the adults have done.

Indeed, even after the fact, even as I take a moment at the end of the day to ponder what we have done together, I've come to recognize that I still have no idea what the kids have learned on any given day. I can tell you what I thought they might learn going in, I can describe their behavior and make a record of their words, I can speculate about what they might now know or not know, I can even directly ask them, "What did you learn?" but at the end of the day, the only ones who can ever know what they have learned are the kids themselves, and more often than not it's so fresh and exciting and still "in process" that they simply aren't capable of put it into words in a way that we can understand.

This is why, in the same way I don't see value in making a lesson plan, I also don't see the point of tests: they don't reveal what a child has learned, but rather what they are able to regurgitate in the form demanded by that particular test. And besides, most of what is learned from any given experience is extracurricular and falls beyond the scope of any test.

Sadly, lesson plans and tests form the backbone of what most teachers do. They are expected to make their plans, complete with learning "goals." They then execute their plan, which may or may not engage the children. If children begin to pursue their own interests, to follow their own light, they must be coaxed or scolded or otherwise guided back to the plan because later, as everyone knows, the children will be tested on a narrow, narrow range of trivia, rather than on the big picture of what they are actually learning. What incredible hubris to think that lesson plans or tests or complicated "frameworks" can allow us to know the unknowable.

The truth is that no one can ever know what another person has learned and no amount of planning or testing or evaluating will change that. In fact, most of us don't even know what we've really learned until much, much later in life, when we look back, perhaps from our therapist's sofa, and realize, "A-ha!"

No, I don't pretend to know what the children I teach are learning on any given day, nor is it any of my business. That I know the children are learning is enough for me, and I know they're learning because they are playing as members of a community where we strive to provide time and space enough for them to ask and answer their own questions. We don't need lesson plans or tests because the children I teach cross our doorstep each morning with their own personally meaningful plans and they engage the world by conducting their own personally meaningful tests. I will never know what they are learning, but I can see them striving, persevering, and experimenting; I can see them figuring out the other people and working with them toward common goals; I can see they are motivated every day because there is nothing rote or compulsory about it. That has to be enough for all of us.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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"School Readiness" Fear-Mongering

Yesterday, my friend Denita Dinger from Play Counts! shared a post from a year ago on Facebook entitled Five-Year-Olds "Falling Behind." I agree with her that it's a message that bears repeating, so I thought I would re-publish it here this morning. Thanks Denita!

*****

What would you think if you saw a mother hovering over her two month old infant drilling her on vowel sounds? Or how about a father coaching his five month old on the finer points to walking? I expect you would think they were at best wasting their time: two month olds can't talk and five month olds can't walk, let alone be taught. Talking and walking are things children just learn. Now imagine that when these babies failed to acquire these capabilities that are clearly beyond their developmental grasp, these parents began to fret that their child was "falling behind." You would think they were crazy. If a doctor told these parents their child was "falling behind" we would think he was either incompetent or cruel.

Sadly, there are actually people out there doing things like this. I've written before about hucksters who assert that babies can be taught to read and there are devices on the market that purport to help babies learn to walk. The good news is that while there are some naive parents who fall for such gimmickry in the misguided attempt to somehow one-up nature's long, successful history of "teaching" talking and walking according to well-established developmental timelines, most of us know better than to worry about these things that virtually every child stressless-ly learns without any special interventions.

My own daughter spoke her first word at 3 months old, consistently saying "Papa" when I played and cared for her: she was putting together full sentences before 6 months. This same "advanced" child didn't crawl until her first birthday and wasn't walking until close to 20 months, a full lifetime "behind" some of her peers. Today, as you might expect, she talks and walks like the rest of the teenagers: if she was ever behind she caught up, and if she was ever ahead, the others caught up with her.

This unsavory practice of taking advantage of new parent insecurities in the name of profit is one that deserves to be called out wherever it rears its nasty head, and it's borderline criminal when they play the "falling behind" card, which is why I'm writing today.

I've had the opportunity these past few years to travel around the world to talk to teachers and parents. Every place I go I find myself discussing this bizarre notion of "school readiness." Often translated in the US as "kindergarten readiness," it is essentially code for reading. It seems that the powers that be in our respective nations have decided to sell parents on the snake oil that if your child isn't starting to read by five-years-old she is "falling behind." They are doing this despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done on the subject recommends that formal literacy education (if we ever even need it) not begin until a child is seven or eight years old. They are telling parents and teachers that children are "falling behind" despite the fact that every single legitimate study ever done finds that there are no long term advantages to being an early reader, just as there are no long term advantages to being early talkers or walkers. In fact, many studies have found that when formal literacy instruction begins too early, like at 5, children grow up to be less motivated readers and less capable of comprehending what they've read. That's right, if anything, this "school readiness" fear-mongering may well turn out to be outright malpractice.

But the worst thing, the unforgivable thing, is the cruelty of the assertion that five-year-olds are "falling behind." It's one thing when commercial interests attempt to move their crappy merchandise by playing on fears, but when schools are doing it, when teachers are doing it, that's unconscionable. Listen, I'm a staunch supporter of my fellow teachers here on these pages, but I am calling my colleagues out on this one. Teachers should know better than to help these guys sell this stuff: it's bad for kids, it's bad for families, and it's bad for society. We are the professionals. Teachers need to put our collective foot down, point to the research, rely on our own experience, and if we can't refuse to subject young children to developmentally inappropriate, potentially harmful "readiness" garbage for fear of losing our jobs, the least we can do is refuse to take part in the crass abusiveness of "falling behind." If we can't do that maybe we don't deserve to call ourselves professionals.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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Every Day In The Sandpit

It was the sort of conflict that comes up almost every day in the sand pit. As one child operated the cast iron water pump, a group of kids were working downhill in an effort to manage the flow of water.

I was sitting nearby watching the play. The kids had dug a hole into which the water flowed and were from there directing it onto either side of our sand pit row boat.

"We need it open so that the water can go in all directions."

"Well, we're trying to stop it in this direction."

"But we need it open so it can go all ways."

"No, we're not doing that. We're stopping it here with a dam."

Up to this point, all was calm, a group of engineers discussing their project, but as the debate continued, with each side essentially asserting their own unchangeable vision for their collective work, voices began to rise.

"Yes we are!"

"We are not!"

One girl said, ineffectually, "Stop fighting!" but judging from the other voices chiming in, it was clear that the majority favored the dam, a fact that neither of the original debaters could notice because they were too busy advocating for their own points of view. Although I was right there, at their level, no one appealed to me and why would they? They were doing what adults do all the time, engaging in debate over matters of importance. 

One could, as the girl did, call it arguing, and indeed it was arguing, but even when that makes some of us uncomfortable it is a part of life: good people argue, sometimes emotionally. But as I listened I didn't hear any of the name-calling or other kinds of ad hominem attacks one so often finds in adult discourse. No one was calling anyone "stupid" or even "bad." No one was behaving violently or otherwise attempting to impose his will on the other. They were simply restating their assertions about what "we" want, albeit with ever increasing volume and intensity.

I've been involved in these sorts of debates among adults: people who are working together, like the parent community that owns and operates our cooperative school. Setting internet political debate aside, I reckon we grown-ups usually do a better job of varying our arguments, adding rationale, nuance, and background by way of being more persuasive, rather than simply restating our views louder and louder as was so far happening in this case. But we have decades more experience with this sort of thing. We've learned, for instance, that it will typically come down to the rest of the group. It will come down to them to either choose sides or suggest a compromise, so we strive to make the best case we can. We know as well that in most debates among adults of good will, the one who loses her composure or who makes it ugly tends to wind up with the short end of the stick.

Up to this point, I didn't figure there was anything for me to do. I could see the tempers were rising, but that in and of itself doesn't mean they needed me. I was, of course, ready to leap in should violence seem imminent or the words turn ugly, but I was curious about where it would go and so remained on the sidelines. 

Then, in a flash, the dam was destroyed with a shovel, "We need the water to go through here!"

This was my moment to step in. I would have said something like, "You can disagree, but you can't destroy another person's things," or something like that. I would have then put myself between them and repeated, calmly and clearly, where I thought matters stood between the primary opponents: "You want a dam and you do not. There is only one stream of water. What can we do?" I would not have expected the more emotional kids to have made cogent suggestions (although I've been pleasantly surprised in the past by some children's ability to think clearly through their tears) but rather relied on the views of the other children involved, the engineers who had been working on the project as well, but who had not yet had their voices heard.

The group would have come to some sort of compromise, I'm sure. Perhaps not the one that we adults would have proposed, but one of their own devising, made perfect by their agreement. Unfortunately, the shovel-wielding boy's mother was on the scene and she stepped in and scooped him up before I could do anything, removing him from the scene. I can hardly blame her, of course. She could see as well as I could that he had been the one to "cross the line," and I'm sure she was either feeling embarrassed or frustrated or perhaps worried that things would just continue to ramp up and was simply, from her perspective, saving us all the headache.

And it might well have been a headache. I've taken part in debates like this that go on and on and on, both on the playground and in the adult meeting room, so her actions might have saved us from that, but at the same time we lost an opportunity to really hear everyone, to authentically engage in a process that lead to true community agreement.

As the kids went happily back to work, their conflict abruptly ended, I sat there feeling the loss, wondering what might have been, but I bucked myself up with the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before we would get another chance. Such is the nature of humans living together: it's the sort of conflict that comes up almost every day in the sand pit.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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"Me" Into "We"

Yesterday was the first day of our summer program. I'm teaching the afternoon session this go around which means, because of typical napping schedules (or at least the napping schedules to which parents tend to aspire) there aren't many two or three-year-olds enrolled, so I have a collection of primarily four, five, and six-year-olds with me for the next couple weeks. Most of them are kids I know, either from the regular school year or from previous summers, and a few know one another.

One thing I always forget during the intervening months, and then remember as the kids assemble on the first day, is how much of what I do with children, both consciously and unconsciously, is geared toward creating a "team." Or in non-baseball coach parlance: building a community, because that is the soil from which progressive, play-based education grows. Of course, it starts with each unique, individual child, but over time, as we come together day-after-day, what we are ultimately doing is turning from a collection of "me" to an inclusive "we."

Over the long-haul of a school year, we can take our time evolving, going through stages and phases, working through our emotions, figuring out who these other people are and how we fit among them. But we don't have a long-haul during the summer: we will only convene as a community for six two-and-a-half-hour sessions before heading off into the rest of our individual summers. Some will attend other sessions, of course, but despite knowing me, knowing our playground, and even knowing something of our overarching culture (or "third teacher" in the metaphor used in the Reggio Emilia approach) each time will be like starting all over because the most important part of what we do at the Woodland Park Cooperative School is this process of becoming a community.

I know from experience that we'll make headway each day, discovering a little more about who we are together, and what we learn will, in turn, shape the following day until, by a week from Thursday, we will have become something bigger and better than when we first convened. I don't know what that is going to be, but I do know that it will come through our conflicts and big emotions; through working together, making agreements, and discovering new things about ourselves; and through the ritual practice of coming together again and again. There will be some who are outraged when they figure out next week that it's already over and others who are even this morning telling their parent that they would really rather not return today because the work is hard.

This isn't to say that what the kids experience and learn over the next couple weeks isn't important because any time we are working on "we," be it as part of a community built for a day or a lifetime, we are doing the work we are here to do. Step-over-step we'll become who we are together. We'll do it for six afternoons and at the end of the final one we will have made something new under the sun, something uniquely our own. We will have turned "me" into "we."

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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Exploring Limits

During my first year teaching preschool, I was appalled at the amount of glue kids were squirting from our little Nancy bottles. It just seemed so wasteful. Committed to not bossing kids around, I tried using informative statements like, "That's a lot of glue," "It only takes a dot of glue to hold a googly eye," and even the usually more powerful, "I think that's too much," but to no avail. I attempted role modeling and narrating my own "proper" glue usage with similar results. I even purchased new bottles, snipping the tips to create extra tiny holes in the hopes of limiting the flow. The kids just handed the bottles back to me saying it was "too hard," causing me to make the holes a little larger and little larger until the good white stuff was flowing freely again.

It was only after many months that I finally gave up my obsession with waste, introduced the glue table, and started just buying gallons of the least expensive glue I could find. I no longer think of glue as an adhesive, but rather as a stand-alone art medium.

This was the beginning of my journey into the deep philosophy that "waste" is in the eye of the beholder. It's not just glue. All kids some of the time, and some kids all of the time, will use the materials at hand to what adults perceive as excess, sometimes with spectacular results (bubble printing is a classic example), but more often with spectacular messes, both of which are valid results of a trial-and-error scientific process.

One of my favorite lines from all of literature is this one from Goethe:

In limitations he first shows himself the master.

More often than not, we interpret this to mean the limitations imposed from above or without, forgetting that most of our limitations in life are of the self-imposed variety. Playing with extremes is how we learn about self-limitation, which is at the heart of self-regulation or self-control. When we're not permitted the opportunity to explore limits, it means we are under the control of others, leaving us with two choices: rebellion (the natural human response to external control) or obedience (the unnatural one), neither of which tend to contribute much positive to our self-identity or our ability to think for ourselves.

I've often boasted that our school runs upon garbage, using for one last time those things heading off to the landfills and recycling centers, not using stuff as much as finishing using stuff. The fact that this is good for the environment is truly an unintended consequence: it really came about because we value managing our budget and value exploring the extremes. You just can't waste stuff that is already waste. Garbage and cheap materials are one of the ways we accommodate these seemingly opposing values.

This is why when a child dumps an entire bowl of googly eyes into a lake of glue then empties a shaker of glitter onto it, I no longer see waste. In fact, I know she is using just the right amount.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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Learning Nothing And Everything

As a child we spent our summers outdoors, mostly, with few plans. Or rather, that was the plan: going outside. From there, we followed our instincts. When I got older, there was baseball, but Little League didn't start until we were eight, so instead we just played outside.

This was a cul-de-sac street in a suburb of Columbia, South Carolina, so we were outside in the summer without shoes. The boys usually went without shirts as well, looking, we thought, like Tarzan. I remember all the names of the kids who lived on Wembley Street: Pheobe and John Azar, Johnny and Chuckie Beale, Lisa, Stevie and Angie Weibel, John Sain, Tom, Ruby, and Jeff Broome, Thomas Ballentine, Ralph Cozart. There were big kids as well, Ralph had a couple older brothers and there were a few teenagers, but they were, for our purposes, just smaller adults.

There were no fences between the yards and we roamed freely, walking in the grass because the pavement was too hot. Early in the summer, before our sole callouses formed, we would have to be wary of the "stickers," wild blackberry plants that would grow out of even the nicest lawns, but once we had toughened up the bottoms of our feet, even sharp gravel was tolerable.

One time we got into mom's sewing box and created what we called a "booby trap" at the bottom of our tree house ladder. We planted needles points up in the dust with the stated purpose of stopping bad guys who tried to climb up. Not once, not twice, but thrice, I forgot about the trap and pierced my own heel. My callouses were so thick that there was no pain and the needles slipped right out, something that impresses me to this day.

Sometimes we would play games with the hot pavement. Walking at a regular speed was impossible, but if you ran, it was tolerable. Wembley Street was particularly hot because the city had recently dug it up to install a new storm sewer, then repaved it with a strip of smooth, black, black asphalt. They had left strips of the old pavement along either side of the street and those remained noticeably cooler. When it rained, it usually poured, often with thunder and lightening. Typically, we would run into the nearest house or garage to wait it out, then reconvene outdoors on the steaming pavement, taking joy in the fact that now, until evaporation had completed its task, we could stand barefoot in the street without dancing.

The rain water would collect in the roadside gutters. Walking barefoot in those impromptu streams was how we commuted until they dried up, splashing and kicking the water the way kids always do, following it to the storm drain in front of the Weibel's house where it filled the newly installed pipes. We would float leaves and swings in the gutters, watching them until they fell into the abyss, Pooh Sticks that didn't survive to emerge on the other side.

One day, Jeff Broome, who was older than the rest of us and often used bad words, taught us a game that he called "Mumbley-Peg." In his version, two of us would stand facing one another with our legs apart, then we would throw a pocket knife (everyone had a pocket knife) to stick in the ground as close as possible to the other person's bare foot. In the actual game of Mumbley-Peg, you stick the knife into the ground near your own foot, which makes a lot more sense. I suppose we were lucky that none of us were impaled, but we played the game, cautiously, until Jeff left us to do big kid stuff, then we never played the game again. Although the experience did prompt us to wonder if it was possible to develop callouses on the tops of our feet for protection against knives, just in case this was a game we would be expected to play when we got older.

I knew everyone's parents, of course, but I don't recall them very clearly. They called us inside for lunches of sandwiches and potato chips, and then later we would be called in for dinner with the whole family sitting together over meat, bread, and two veggies. We were allowed to dine shoeless during the summer, but not during the rest of the year. Sometimes we had to go somewhere, like shoe shopping, but most of the time when mom had errands to run, she would just let us know she was leaving and to talk to Mrs. Beale if we needed anything.

We never needed anything, of course, because adults, like shoes, were not part of our summers. I have memories of kindergarten and first grade, of course, but none are as clear as those barefoot summers, when we were learning nothing and everything just by making a plan to go outside.

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"They Will Learn By No Other"

I reckon it would be best if we didn't put so much energy into worrying about our children's futures. It would be best for both us and our kids if we could more often just be here in the present with them, wondering at who they are right now, appreciating the unique human they already are, helping and loving them right now. That would be best, but human parents have never been very good at it. Sometimes we dream big dreams for them, imagining our child, their best qualities flourishing, as a masterful something or other, admired, inspired, passionate, and supremely comfortable in their own skin. But there are times when we fear their worst qualities and fret that they will grow to be spoiled, disrespectful, and lazy, prone to messy bedrooms, selfishness, depression or worse.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn by no other. ~Edmund Burke

These thoughts enter our heads because we are the adults, cursed with the disease of thinking we have any control over the future. Maybe, we think, if we just lecture our children enough, take them to church often enough, give them enough chores to do, and reward and punish them appropriately we can somehow stave off the bad future and encourage the good. But that isn't the way it works.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. ~James Baldwin

Most of what children learn about being a human being in this world, they learn from the people they most love, but not because they have been drilled, scolded, or otherwise indoctrinated, but rather because they follow their example. If we want children to be kind, we must be kind. If we want them to be tidy, we must be tidy. If we want them to be respectful, then we must be respectful, especially toward them. Indeed, the more we focus on ourselves, on being the person we want ourselves to be, the better we "teach" the most important life lessons. Our children will not learn to pursue their passions, unless the loving adults in their lives set that example for them. They will not learn to be unselfish if their loving adults live with a tight fist. They will not learn to manage their emotions, if their role models haven't figured it out for themselves.

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau

That's asking a lot of adults, I know, but if we are going to ask it of our children, we must also ask it of ourselves. And we must also know that we will fail in our role modeling and fail often, but in that too we are role models. Children do not expect their parents to be perfect, but they are always making a careful study of what we do when we make mistakes. Do we give up? Do we blame others? Do we rant and rave? Do we cry and mope? Or are we able to apologize, forgive ourselves, and get back up to try again? The approach we take is very likely the approach our children will, in turn, grow to embrace as their own.

Teaching is painful, continual, and difficult work to be done by kindness, by watching, and by praise, but above all by example. ~John Ruskin

Of course, we all know examples of children, perhaps even ourselves, who have overcome poor role modeling. Perhaps we eat more healthily than our own parents, or make more time for our own kids, or avoid committing felonies. But even then, we can see that is was the examples set, more than the lessons "taught" that informed the future.

No one can predict the future and only fools take their attempts to do so seriously. When we are hopeful about the future we are, as my wife and I like to say, just "spending Yugoslavian dollars." When we worry we are, at best, wasting valuable emotional bandwidth that would be better applied to right now. The only thing over which we know with any certainty is the next 10 minutes and, I've found, it's generally not too hard to be the best me, the person I most want to be, for the next 10 minutes. When we can do that, 10 minutes at a time, we are being the teacher, the parent, our child most needs. And it is from those 10 minute building blocks that the future emerges.

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations. ~Patricia Neal

It's not our job to "teach" our children anything, but rather to love them and to strive to live according to our own expectations, not in the past or future, but right now. The future, as it always does, will take care of itself.


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Fighting

Most of the time, superhero play, when you really study it, is negotiating ("Are you a good guy or a bad guy?" "I'm on your team," "This is our hideout!") followed by bluster ("We will defeat you!" "I can block your punch with my force field," "You can't catch me, I'm too fast!") accompanied by powerful poses and a bit of running. It's the sort of dramatic play I remember from my own boyhood, in many cases right down to the same superheroes and villains.

The one thing I don't see so much of, even as it tends to dominate the comic book pages and movie screens, are fisticuffs. Most of the fighting is done remotely, via "blasts" or "webs" or guns of various sorts. There are a lot of evasive actions like turning invisible, activating force fields, flying, turning into flame, or otherwise evading the attacks of one's foes, but very rarely do I see the kids I teach standing toe-to-toe throwing fantasy haymakers.

Of course, I understand it because that's the way we played fighting when I was a kid. I mean, getting "hit" by someone's blast carries no real risk, whereas even a pretend punch will hurt if it accidentally makes contact. Everyone knows that, either via experience, observation, or mental experiment. It's the reason that one class a couple years back decided to ban "swinging weapons" (swords, whips, etc.) while retaining their right to bear "shooting weapons." And whenever someone does pretend to fight with his fists, it often leads to real conflict because there is a fine, previously unknowable line between a pretend punch and a real one. A pretend punch may be an exciting part of the game, but a "real" one, as interpreted by the party on the receiving end, one that makes someone cry or angry, threatens to destroy the entire game. Either the hurt kid quits playing or the strong emotions attract the attention of adults who invariably breaks things up. Children know this even if they can't usually articulate it.

As Peter Gray points out in his book Free to Learn, the power to quit is one of the most important and overlooked aspects of cooperative play. That freedom to just walk away if it's no longer fun is a powerful regulator because the drive to keep playing is so strong that children will do whatever they can to avoid having their good time come to an end. And contrary to appearances, these sorts of combative games, which are central to the play of all mammals, are highly cooperative endeavors. When you really listen and watch children play these games, rather than just paying attention when someone is crying or angry, one finds the children engaged in a rich, intense, complex social activity one in which agreement, or at least the quest for agreement, stands at the center.

During our final week of school, I was watching a group of guys negotiate their way through a kind of impromptu fist fight choreography. I was drawn to it because, like I said, it is unusual to see on our playground, but mostly, speaking honestly, because I'm one of those adults and I guess I figured I should stay close because I expected they would need me to scuttle things when they got out of hand. As it turned out, they didn't need me at all.

There was one bad guy against three good guys. That's where they started. The good guys, rather than ganging up on their single opponent, were taking turns, throwing semi-slow motion punches, which our villain defended himself against with his own pulled counter punches. They were making actual contact with one another, and not lightly either, but mostly on the arms and hands. In fact, they were all very careful about avoiding contact with faces and body-contact was limited to an occasional kick to the shin or slap on the back. Soon the play took on a sort of rhythm with flurries of action followed by pauses during which they spoke about what had just happened and what was going to happen next.
 
Naturally, I thought of puppies wrestling with their litter mates, playing at the skills, developing the instincts, and building the muscles that their evolutionary program tells them they will need as they grow older. And while I hope that actual fighting isn't a big part of these kids' futures, there is no doubt that their play fighting is a proper preparation a future among the other human beings, where negotiation, cooperation, and agreement are the real secrets to success.

(I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!)

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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