Novelty Is The Beginning Of How We Are Meant To Learn

Kleo

I often watch the Great British Bake Off, a competition show that good-naturedly pits amateur bakers against one another. I don't bake myself, but I find the show relaxing. After 13 seasons, there are no surprises, the jokes are predictably corny, and the contestants, hosts, and judges seem like kind, bland, well-intended people. Each episode runs about an hour. It's been years since I've made to the end of one before dozing off. In other words, it's a program I choose to watch when the goal is an early night.

Last night, however, I chose to watch a German revenge thriller called Kleo. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is complex and strange. I was so eager to know what was going to happen next that I was up half the night.

In other words, the first show tends to turn my brain off, while the second definitely turns my brain on. In the most basic vernacular, I would say that I've grown bored with the baking show, while the thriller offers me something new. There was a time when I found GBBO more stimulating, when I might watch several episodes back-to-back, but the novelty has worn off.

I'm currently reading Christine Caldwell's book Bodyfulness. She writes:

"Researchers have found that the learning process begins when the nervous system, which monitors our inner and outer environment largely below our awareness, senses a contrast . . . This novelty wakes up certain parts of the brain, which then focus attention on the new stimuli and gather sensory data about that new thing . . . if it creates a contrast with what we are used to, then our conscious brain lights up and we start focusing our senses toward that new experience. We consciously take in the new experiential data, and if we feel sufficiently drawn to it or emotionally invested in it, we will commit this new experience to memory, which is another way of saying that we have just learned something. This also explains why we have difficulty learning things that we don't care about."

Novelty is an under appreciated aspect of how humans are designed to learn. I often think about how I learned to drive a car. As a 16-year-old, I really cared about learning to drive. The first time I got behind the wheel of our family car, however, I nearly drove into a ditch. In the beginning, the novelty (or contrast with what I was used to) was rather extreme. I had to concentrate on everything -- which pedal to press, operating the turn indicator, my speed and direction. But as I committed these new experiences to memory, as I learned to drive, I found that I needed to commit less and less conscious attention to the routine tasks to the point that I could carry on conversations, fret about homework deadlines, or anticipate the weekends. Some people have become so "bored" with the process that they text message or watch videos while driving. It's such a problem, in fact, that we spend millions a year on public service campaigns designed to remind people to pay attention as they drive.

We are constantly surveying our environments in search of novelty. Our first filter is whether or not the new thing poses a danger. After that, however, our next filter is whether or not this new thing is in some way relevant to us. Is it interesting? Confusing? Exciting? Useful? Is this new thing or stimuli or experience or person something I want to understand or learn more about? If so, then learning is a natural self-motivated process. 

If our brains determine it is not relevant, however, which is the case with a large percentage of the crap we're taught in school, then learning becomes a heavy lift for both teachers and children. Since we've decided that the hierarchy gets to decide what the children must learn, and by when, we drain the process of the natural motivation triggered by novelty and relevancy. We then have to refill it with a system of rewards and punishments. We scold teachers to to make otherwise boring stuff  "relevant," pitting them against Mother Nature. And worst of all, when a child can't learn what we want them to learn, we set them to tasks of mind numbing repetition and rote memorization.

School is not typically set up around the concept of novelty. On the contrary, our idea of school tends to be one of predictability and uniformity. Even our curricula tend to be based on the idea of slowly building learning one step at a time, meaning that we rarely create the contrasts that our brains are designed to seek out as opportunities to learn. This is probably why children seem most "alive" (often interpreted as misbehavior) when the tedium is interrupted by field trips, substitute teachers, or broken water mains. It also probably explains why recess is many children's favorite part of the day: this is the one part of their day where they are free to pursue novelty, not as a break from learning, but as the essence of what it means to learn.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

"Do Unto Others . . ."

During my first year as a teacher, I had a student, a two-year-old, who loved her hugs. She would hug me hello in the morning. She would hug her mother and father goodbye. She would hug total strangers if given the chance. It was a charming instinct, one for which she had grown accustomed to receiving praise. "She is such a loving girl!" "Oh, how sweet!" However, her hugging did not always go over particularly well with her peers. Indeed, more often than not, her unsolicited hugs, which were generally quite enthusiastic, bordering on tackling, would frighten other children, often causing tears.

The Golden Rule, most commonly cited as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is one of the underpinning principles of many of the world's major religions and cultures. As a moral guide, it relies on individuals to look inside themselves, to perform the mental experiment of putting themselves into the shoes of others, and to act accordingly. The problem, of course, is that the way I want to be treated isn't necessarily a good guide to how others want to be treated. This little girl enjoyed a good hug, but doing unto others was, in this case, obviously the wrong thing to do.

Over the next couple of years, with the support of the adults in her life, she learned to become more gentle and discerning with her hugs. One might say that she had learned to be more compassionate, thinking not about what she would or would not have done and projecting it onto others, but rather taking it beyond the Golden Rule and actually considering the needs, preferences, and desires of others, then choosing to act accordingly. Projection is the opposite of empathy, and compassion, which is feeling for others rather than with them, is what stands beyond empathy.

One of the most important public discussions we have been having in recent decades is the one about consent. Most often, it is applied to sexual relations, but it goes beyond that and the ongoing, often contentious, debate has highlighted the fact that we, as a society, are not particularly good at compassion, too often confusing it with projection or even empathy. Perhaps our biggest challenge as human beings is that our brains have evolved to believe themselves. Our prejudices and opinions feel like facts. We might be born empathetic, but compassion is something that must be learned and it can only be learned through the process of listening. 

As we helped that two-year-old learn to express her affection in appropriate ways, we did so by redirecting her focus from her own feelings to those of others. "He's crying because your hug frightened him." "She said 'stop it' because you were hurting her." It wasn't an easy leap for her, this learning how to "listen," to objectively evaluate the behavior of these other humans who perceive the world through different eyes and interpret it with different brains. We offered her alternative ways to show her affection. "You can use gentle hands." "Maybe he doesn't want to be touched, but you can smile at him or wave to him." As she got older and more verbal, we included the idea of asking, "May I hug you?" and then encouraging her to listen to the response.

This is not an easy thing we are doing, teaching ourselves to be compassionate. Projection is so much easier. Empathy comes much more naturally. "It's for your own good." "Don't be so sensitive." "We've dropped bombs on your fellow citizens so that you can be free, like us!" The Golden Rule can only take us so far.

A few years back, a group of Woodland Park preschoolers, while struggling with this exact thing, made a rule for themselves, Don't do anything to anybody before you ask them. It meant that we were all committing ourselves to listening -- a lot. It was an amazing challenge they set for themselves, one we could all stand to embrace.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

There Is Nothing Cute About It

Over the past decade or so, I’ve listened to a lot of early childhood experts. More often than not, I find myself nodding along. They say things I think are true about children. Or rather, they say things I want to be true about children. I hear that children are honest, open, and loving. That’s what I want to hear, for sure. They tell me about children who are curious, eager to learn, daring within reason, and who delight in getting messy. These children are instinctively thoughtful, caring, unspoiled, and above all cute. I often catch myself speaking of children in this way as well.

But the truth is that children aren’t like this at all. Or rather, they aren’t always this way any more than adults are. They lie, deceive and hate. They can be self-absorbed contrarians, fearful, manipulative, and persnickety. It’s a mistake to confuse their inexperience with innocence, and they often don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. In other words, children, like all the rest of us humans, are a mixed bag, prone to the same flaws and weaknesses, even as we tend to place them on a pedestal.

Of course, every parent knows this, even if we’re not always willing to admit that our child is not the ideal child as described by experts. Sometimes, no matter how much we strive to be the perfectly calm, connected adult, our kids will behave like utter jerks. Still, we tend to persist in the myth of childhood as a kind of paradise and children as charmingly flawed little angels. 

Perhaps it’s because when we compare our “adult” world with theirs, their troubles seem so mundane, silly, even. Crying over the wrong kind of cracker just seems so cute. Being afraid of pine cones (which was an actual phobia of a two-year-old I once taught) makes us chuckle. As a boy, I spent a good year afraid that a green monster I’d seen on an episode of Get Smart was going to climb through my window and into my top bunk as I slept, a fear that kept me awake night after night. I mean, we adults have real problems: mortgages, expanding waistlines, and marriages that aren’t as fulfilling as we’d like. Of course, any thoughtful adult knows that our children’s problems, emotions, and phobias are every bit as real and important as ours, yet even the best of us find ourselves sometimes minimizing them into cute stories we tell our friends or record in baby books.

When we idealize childhood, when we persist in the cult of cute, we minimize their experience or elevate them onto pedestals. We objectify them in a way that serves our needs at their expense. It's an insult to their full humanity. They are not better or worse than us: they are us. 

What is true is that young children are less likely be have become embittered or disillusioned by their experiences. They don’t tend to carry their grudges as long as we do or waste as much of their precious emotional energy on worrying about the future or regretting the past. They don’t save their energy out of a concern for being tired later. And they are much quicker to forgive us when we fail than are we with one another.

Childhood isn’t a special time in life. It is life, and everything children need we all need: compassion, forgiveness, and space to be fully human. There is nothing cute about it.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

Joy Is The Emotion Of Growth

We never had a teeter totter (i.e., seesaw) on our playground, but the children were always making their own, usually by pivoting a plank of wood over a log. Sometimes they would put the plank of wood over one of our swings and call it a "teeter swing." The contraptions could also easily evolve into a "catapult" (by placing objects on one end, then jumping onto the other to launch it into the air) or a "diving board" (by having an adult stand on one end while the kids inched out to the other end to bounce off). 

As has happened with other classic playground equipment like swings, metal slides, and merry-go-rounds,  manufactured teeter totters have more or less disappeared due to fear of litigation. Some will say it's due to injuries, but they simply won't be able to provide any reliable data showing that children's playground injury rates are any higher when teeter totters are present. Indeed, there is very little actual data at all about playground injuries, and what I have seen tends to place the risk of injury about equal to a child playing indoors at home.

I've never noticed the teeter totter to be a particularly dangerous plaything, if played with as intended. After all, the script is an oscillation of up-and-down, up-and-down, up-and-down, a fine metaphor that can be applied to the ebbs and flows of life, but I never found it particularly exciting unless, of course, you went off its one-dimensional script.

For me, the most fun one could have on a teeter totter was at the extremes: the bump as you hit the ground, then the bump as you reached the top. From this, my playmates and I would typically make it into a game of extremes rather than balance. We would send one another into hysterics by trying with all our might to launch one another into the air by allowing our end to crash to the ground with as much force as possible. You held on tight at the top because if the person on the other side was a "big kid" it could feel like you were about to flip into the air. It was probably this sort of play that caused adults with catastrophic imaginations to ban teeter totters, although as wild as our play got, I don't recall anyone ever getting hurt.

A second way we added spice to our teeter totter play was to walk or run across the plank. We would start on the end that was resting on the ground, then balance up the ramp until we got to the pivot point. Stepping across that point caused the raised end to descend to the ground so that you could complete your crossing. Again, in the spirit of challenging ourselves on this otherwise tedious playground contraption, we would increase our speed until we were essentially doing it pell mell.

A third off-script game was to try to balance in the center. It was fun for about 30 seconds, easily mastered. Every now and then we would count to see who could balance the longest, but we quickly realized that we could maintain the position indefinitely, but doing so was the most dull thing of all: standing in one place while micro-flexing your leg and torso muscles in order to stay in place.

Truth be told, teeter totters on the playgrounds of my youth were widely left alone. There was already enough tedium in school and if the teachers were going to scold us for attempting to add a bit of challenge and risk to our play then we would just do something else.

Many of us have become familiar with the concept of neuroplasticity over the past couple decades. Even as recently as twenty years ago, experts were telling us that humans didn't grow any new brain cells after about the age of 25, and that most of the cells we were ever going to have were grown during the first few years of life. We now know that this isn't true. What led scientists to suspect that we didn't continue to produce new neurons were studies done on apes in cages: when they began to look at apes who had been freed from their cages, they discovered that neuroplasticity was a lifelong phenomenon. 

And as psychotherapist and author Christine Caldwell writes in her book Bodyfulness, "While the definition of this term (neuroplasticity) restricts itself to nerve cells (neurons), the principle of plastic change likely occurs throughout the body as well. Change and even growth occur constantly and normally throughout our lives."

This lifetime of growth, however, is not a given. When we find ourselves in metaphorical cages, like those apes did, cellular growth slows down or stops. That's because our brains and our bodies need self-selected challenges and self-identified novelty in order to grow new cells. As Caldwell puts it, "While we operate within genetic limitations, we are less limited than we previously thought. To a certain extent we can directly influence how many new cells we produce. We now know that we can learn new things during our entire life spans and retain capacities longer, even into our advanced years. Our daily experiences determine how fully we can operate within these expanded genetic limits. How can we influence our capacity to continue to change and grow? The key word here is challenge. In order to change something, we must challenge the status quo."

This is knowledge that children tend to have that we, as adults in our society, tend to unlearn as we age. When a child goes off-script with a toy, when a child adds challenge or risk to an otherwise dull or previously mastered activity, when a child spins in a swing or goes up the slide or uses the teeter totter in "unauthorized" ways, they are doing exactly what they need to do to stimulate cell growth in both the brain and the body. They are challenging the status quo.

Of course, the children are not thinking about neuroscience, but rather following their education instinct, which is to seek out novelty and challenge.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I'm now a man in his 60's and more and more of the people in my life are retiring or thinking about retiring. They generally talk of a life of low stress, contentment, even happiness. But when I try to put myself in their shoes, I wonder about the lessons I've learned from young children. As essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in her new book Owell's Roses, the state we call "(h)appiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord." It sounds a bit like the nowhere game of balancing on the middle of the teeter totter. She distinguishes it from joy which "can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly. In their book Joyful Militancy Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery draw the distinction thus: 'Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection (i.e., subjugation). Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart. Whereas happiness is used as a numbing anesthetic that induces dependence, joy is the growth of people's capacity to do and feel new things in ways that can break this dependence.'"

In other words, joy is the emotion of growth and it comes from "combat" or challenging ourselves in new ways. As children play, especially as they concentrate on the challenges they are engaging, it would be impossible to describe them as happy. Indeed, happiness, especially as defined above, is not the natural state of the playground, but regular burst of joy are indeed a big part of it.

I worry that as adults too many of us seek that dull state of "balance" and avoid the bumps at the bottom and top. We so often attempt to sacrifice joy for the sake of happiness and growth for the sake of the status quo. Even worse, I fear that we sometimes try to impose this on the children as well.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

"I'm Thinking It Might Be Clean Up Time"

As clean up time approached, I began to survey the two-year-olds, "I'm thinking that it might be clean-up time." Some agreed while others informed me that they wanted to wait "Three minutes" or "Five minutes." They all knew by now that after we tidy up we go outside. I've never instructed the children to participate in cleaning up, but I have instructed the parent-teachers in this cooperative class to practice stepping back, to leave space for the children who choose to participate to do so in a meaningful way.

After three or five minutes, I retrieved the hand drum we use as a transition signal. Children were engaged in their play all around the room, although a couple of them stopped what they were doing to notice me. I said, "I'm getting the clean-up time banjo," and proceeded to "play" it like a banjo.

A few more kids noticed me. "It's not a banjo," I said, "It's a flute," and I played the drumstick like a flute.

"It's not a flute, it's a trumpet," and I played the stick like a trumpet. Now several more children were watching me. One of them laughed, saying, "It's a drum!"

"It's not a trumpet," I continued, "It's a trombone," and I pantomimed playing the stick as a trombone.

"It's not a trombone, Teacher Tom! It's a drum!" By now about half the kids had dropped what they were doing to watch me.

"It's not a trombone, it's a tuba." I used the drumstick for the mouthpiece and held the drum over my head to represent the large, flared tuba bell.

By now, most of the kids were paying attention, and most of them had come over to where I stood on our checker board rug to stand amidst the Duplos that were scattered there. Several of them shouted at me, "It's a drum!" and "It's not a tuba!"

I said, "It's not a tuba, it's a harp."

"It's not a harp!" they shouted. "It's a drum!" Some were so full of anticipation that they demanded, "Bang it!"

"It's not a harp, it's a piano."

"It's a drum!" "Bang it!"

"It's not a piano, it's a drum and I'm going to bang it so loud that your brains are going to shoot out of your ears and splat on the wall."

By now everyone was focused on my silly little show and they were demanding that I bang the drum. They were demanding the transition. It's not the first time I've done this, indeed, it's part of my regular teacher repertoire. After a couple of goofs where I pretended to miss the drum, I finally made contact, playing it gently with three soft beats because they were all so focused with anticipation that that was all I needed.

As I said, I've never suggested that these two-year-olds participate in clean-up, although they had by now been coming to class for months and most had been pitching in of their own accord. On this day, the sound of Duplos being dropped into boxes was almost deafening, as they all, as one, leapt to the task. There were a couple visitors in the room at the time, mothers touring the school with an eye toward enrolling for next year. The response was so dramatic, so instantaneous, so opposite of the stereotype we have of young children, that I couldn't help making eye-contact with one of the prospective parents boastfully, as if to non-verbally say, Surely, you want your kid to be a part of this!

I then continued to make informational statements like, "That box needs to go over here," and "Phillip is putting away lots of blocks," and "We need help at the red table," until everything was packed away. None of them complained. None of them hid. None of them sought to avoid the "work." They simply did what we were doing until it was done, then we put on our coats and went outside.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

The Essential Art Of "Short-Arming"

The boys were playing together as they often do, running, debating, forming and re-forming "teams," which was the trend of the moment. Being the day before a holiday, about half the kids were not at school, off on their travels or entertaining out of town guests. It was nearing the end of the day and the adults were mostly chatting among themselves, already shifting into long weekend mode, a great time to be a kid.

I watched one of the guys scoop up water in the blade of his shovel, then toss it toward a friend. I say toward rather than at because although it may have looked as if he was attempting to douse his buddy, I could tell that he "short-armed" the effort, causing the spray of water to land on the ground near the feet of his ostensible target, who replied with a good natured, "Hey!"

Periodically, what looked like sword fighting erupted, everyone swinging their shovels and stick ponies and broom handles at one another in ways that typically cause adults to step in with cautions, if not outright commands to "Stop!" Sure, it would have hurt had someone been hit, but the reality was that those sticks were rarely coming within a foot of making actual contact with a person. And if you really studied what the kids were doing, you would find that they were again short-arming their efforts, not swinging full force, targeting one another's sticks, rather than their bodies. Accidents could happen, of course, that's part of the thrill of the game, but they were all striving to make sure they didn't happen in what was a complex ballet of battle.

Occasionally, one of the girls would get involved with the game, seeming to enjoy themselves until someone took it one step too far and "captured" them, which meant wrapping them up in a bear hug. Then they would yell, "Stop!" and "I don't like that!" The boys rarely released them on the first voiced objection, usually not responding until the third "Stop!" or "I don't like that!" The rule of thumb for adults is that one needs to wait a minimum of 12 to 15 seconds for young children to respond to a question: I reckon the same goes for commands. And indeed, although it may have seemed at first glance that the boys were refusing to acknowledge the girls right away, as I counted I found they all released their hold in under 6 seconds. This tells me they were so finely tuned into their playmates' feelings that they were able to cut their typical response time in half. Again, a sort of short-arming.

That's what this kind of play is all about. It's why it's best when adults don't jump in so often and so promptly, at least when we're talking about four and five year olds. When children are younger, say two, they aren't ready yet, from a developmental and experiential perspective, to short-arm, which is why they sometimes wail on their classmates, physically and emotionally, often without any apparent provocation. They aren't trying to hurt their friends, but rather are experimenting with the limitations of friendship itself, figuring out how far one can go: only with this information can you begin to calculate how to short-arm for yourself. This is when adults most effectively intervene, protecting children, while offering informative statements like, "When you hit people it hurts them," and "When I knock over someone's building, I help them build it again." We say these things not because we necessarily expect these very young children to spontaneously apologize (although they often do, in their own way) or to drop to their knees and help re-create whatever tower has been demolished (although they often do, in their own way), but rather to plant seeds that will, if consistently and lovingly tended, result in the kind of self-control that leads to short-arming.

At one point, a boy with a smile on his face shoved his friend to the ground. It was a hard shove, too hard, not at all short-armed, and it happened right in front of a group of adults. Had this happened when I was the only adult present, I'd have likely stood back for a moment to see how things played out, but in this case I knew that if I didn't make an effort to respond, someone else would, so I stepped toward the boys. As I did, I could see a face of anguish, we all could. Before I could take two steps, however, the boy who had done the pushing, dropped to his knees beside his friend saying, "Are you okay?"

Through his tears, "No."

"I'm sorry." When he received no response other than more tears, he again said, "I'm sorry." When he still received no response he asked, "What can I do to make it better?" These were not my words coming out of him, but I've heard his mother suggest them many times.

This time he received a response, "I want you to apologize."

Without hesitation, he said, "I'm sorry . . . I've said it three times!"

The boys lay there together on the ground for a couple minutes, then the drive to play again took the upper hand. Learning to play with the other people is the work of a lifetime. Next time, or the time after that, or the time after that, he'll short-arm that shove and a good natured, "Hey!" will be all that remains of the tears.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

I Have No Idea What Those Kindergarten Teachers Are Up To

When I have something to think about, I take a long walk. There is something about walking that tends to free our minds to think more clearly. This is because our minds and our bodies are not separate things.

As professor and author bell hooks writes, "(M)any of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only our mind is present, and not the body." This is both a new idea and an old one. The growing consensus among neuroscientists is that consciousness emerges from the metabolic and sensory processes of our bodies. Ancient Greeks thinkers such as Lucretius proposed more or less the same thing. 

Doctors, taking a page from the first physician Hippocrates, have started prescribing walks to their patients due to the unquestioned physical, intellectual, psychological, and even spiritual benefits of walking, although I imagine that physical activity of any sort would do much the same thing. And it's more than building muscles or cardiovascular capacity, although I assume that's a piece of it. Our minds simply don't exist without our bodies. One might even say that our capacity to think is a bodily function like respiration or digestion. In other words, if there is a hierarchy, and it's not clear that there is, the body must precede the mind.

Whatever the case, we know that without movement, the rest of it breaks down.

I blame the French philosopher Descartes, who contributed so much to modern thought, especially about the scientific method, but whose "mechanistic" conception of the world led him, and many of the thinkers since him, to believe in the idea of the universe, including humans, as a kind of clockwork that could be understood by breaking it down into its component parts. Indeed, he was apparently so impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens that he developed a hydraulic theory for the action of the brain. It's from this sort of reductive "scientific" thinking that we began to believe that the brain alone is responsible for creating our minds. This has lead to the sorts of classrooms Bell Hooks writes about, and that are still all too common: places full of chairs with bottoms firmly in them under the misguided notion that if we keep the bodies still we can force the brain to learn more efficiently.

Descartes was wrong. There is no good evidence that the brain alone can carry out the work the mind does.

Clear thinking requires movement. It requires walking and pacing and jumping up and down. It requires climbing and skipping and rolling about on the floor and all the other things that adults tend to label as distractions. We think with our hands. We think with our bellies, feet, and torsos. Conscious thought does not come from our brains alone, but rather from a conversation between our whole bodies and the outside world, an interaction that involves our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual responses to the sensory input we receive through all parts of our bodies. And it is from this full body conversation that our brains ultimately construct stories that make some sort of sense.

We see this imperative to move in order to think most clearly in very young children who tend to defy every effort to keep them still. Tragically, kindergartens are increasingly expecting preschools to prepare three, four, and five year olds for "desk time." It's a cruelty entirely unsupported by any of the science from the last several hundred years.

My job as an early childhood educator who follows the evidence is to create an environment in which children can think and that means a place where movement is not just allowed, but encouraged. I have no idea what those kindergarten teachers are up to, but it's quite clear that it has nothing to do with thinking.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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Setting Our Collective Intelligence Free

Some time ago, I wrote about a new (to me) metaphor to explain an alternative theory of addiction. In a nutshell, the predominate addiction theory is based upon experiments in which rats in cages were given the option between, for instance, plain water or water laced with narcotics. The rats drank the narcotic water until they died prematurely, leading to the conclusion that narcotics themselves are addictive. One scientist, however, began to wonder about the design of the experiments. Instead of putting his experimental rats in traditional cages, he designed a kind of rat paradise with a lot of varied space, play-things, good food, play-mates, and sex partners, along with the narcotic option. In this experiment, none of the rats showed addictive behavior (although most of them occasionally used the drug recreationally) leading the scientist to conclude that addiction has more to do with the cage in which we live than the mind-altering substances themselves.

Since learning about this research I've spent a lot of time thinking about "cages," both mine and other people's, and how our "misbehaviors" are almost always the direct result of those cages.

It's hard, for instance, not to reflect on the cage that is school for many kids. In the play-based model we employ at Woodland Park, our goal was always to create a kind of "kid paradise," full of a lot of varied space, with play-things, play-mates, and the freedom to explore the physical, social, and emotional world as they see fit. Traditional schools, however, are more like the cage in the addiction experiments: freedom is restricted and their days are strictly controlled; children are expected to learn certain things at a certain time according to a predetermined schedule, and if they don't, or if they rebel in any way, they are labeled, condemned, punished, and often even drugged. This does not happen in play-based schools. This does not happen in democratic free schools. This tells me that school children's "disruptive" or "uncooperative" behavior has little to do with them and everything to do with the cage in which they find themselves.

Peter Gray, researcher and author of Free to Learn, a man who wrote, "children hate school because they love freedom," posted at Psychology Today about a study in which researchers found that the "inclusion of a person with ADHD greatly improved the problem-solving ability of groups, even though it led to more off-task behavior." Now to be clear, ADHD is generally considered by traditional schools to be a disruptive condition, one that often requires medication, yet this experiment in which groups of middle school students were tasked with solving problems found:

The groups including an ADHD student were far more likely to solve the problems than were the control groups! In fact, 14 of the 16 groups (88%) containing an ADHD student solved both problems, and none (0%) of the 6 control groups did. This result was significant . . . meaning that there is less than one chance in 10,000 that such a large difference, with this many groups, would occur by chance.

In other words, in a problem-solving setting, kids with ADHD make the group more capable, yet they show up as a "problem" within the cage of traditional schools. Gray then, as he does, dug more deeply into the ADHD research:

Taking all of the research together, the studies indicate that ADHD symptoms correspond with improved performance on tasks that involve divergent, or "out-of-the-box" thinking, but interfere with tasks that involve convergent, or "in-the-box" thinking. ADHD students generally perform poorly in school, because school involves almost entirely in-the-box thinking. In fact, thinking out of the box can get you in trouble in school.

We live in a world in which schools have arbitrarily decide that they are in the business of educating individuals in their unnatural cages, rather than humans in their natural habitat which is, after all, playing in community with one another. We have spent trillions in both treasure and hours attempting to educate individuals when history shows that problems are rarely solved by the lone wolf, no matter how much of a brainiac she is. No, problem solving, going back to the darkest reaches of our hunter-gatherer ancestry has always been, as my wife often calls it, a "group grope," each of us bringing our unique cognitive capacity to the effort.

(H)istorically, intelligence was the product of a network of minds working together, sometimes at odds with one another. And, in many if not most cases outside of school, that is still true today.

Traditional schools are indeed an anomaly historically and in the contemporary world, most similar institutionally to actual prisons: cages in which we shove all the kids, commanding them to keep their eyes on their own papers, to stay indoors, to shut up and listen, to be still in their chairs. In fact, in many regards, convicts have more freedom than our school children. This is the kind of cage I'm talking about. I paint the picture here in extremes, of course, many kids plow through just fine, some even excel, but far too many don't, and they react to their cage in completely predictable ways, what we usually call misbehavior. And all too often we blame the kids when they react to their cage with distraction, anger, rowdiness, shyness, and other strong emotions, not to mention manifestations of what we call "special needs," a population for which traditional schools simply are not a good fit, even as I acknowledge the dedicated work their teachers are doing. Just as rats -- intelligent, social animals -- can be expected to react self-destructively when confined to a cage with only food and cocaine, we can also expect intelligent, social children to react to their deprivations.

We call them disruptive or unfocused or misbehaving. We call it ADHD or diagnose the behaviors as some other syndrome or disorder. Of course, I understand that these diagnosis help people, and the conventional treatments, including drugs, can help children and their families live better lives. I get that. It's true. But please consider that these conditions would not be the problem they are if the children were spending their days outside the cage of traditional schooling. Indeed, that cage is often the primary reason that many "challenging behaviors" show up as problems.

No, outside that cage the behaviors show up as nothing more or less than a vital part of our collective intellect, and if we are going to solve our problems, we're going to need all of us.

******

 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!

What Would Happen If We All Spent More Time Watching The Sky?

This morning, as I sat outdoors drinking coffee, a gaggle of Canada geese flew overhead, flapping hard, heading east, honking. Several minutes later they returned, silently, gliding, having circled back. As they drifted down to the place from where they had begun, I wondered why.

If you know why Canada geese might do this, don't tell me. I don't need an answer. I just need the wonder.

There was a jet up there a few moments later, to the north, very high, not coming in for landing. It was heading westward where there is nothing for thousands of miles except ocean. Where was it going? Who was on it? How many of them were white-knuckling it? How many were asleep, dreaming of destinations either ahead of them or behind?

To the south, between the saddleback of mountain peaks there were a few grey clouds. They were moving slowly in the direction the geese had originally set out, but strangely, one small cloud seemed to remain in place, changing shape, elongating, but also not moving from its spot in the sky. I wonder if this wasn't the single cloud it appeared to be, but rather the source of all the clouds, the place where they were forming before heading off toward the rising sun. Or perhaps they were there to camouflage the flying saucer containing aliens who were sent to observe us, afraid to be seen lest they blow our minds.

We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, "What's the story on that?" and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now. ~Tom Waits

I've lately had the opportunity to just sit in the darkness watching the stars, night after night as they move across the sky; pondering the distances, wondering where they've been and where they are going. I've lately had the opportunity to sit, riding the earth backwards, the sun rising behind me as it lights up the mountain peaks from top to bottom, awakening the world, birdsong first.

In a world of answers, it's still the questions that I find the most appealing. 

The answers that we call up on our smartphones might settle a disagreement, but where is the satisfaction in that beyond simply boasting, "See? I was right."? Our answers today are so synthesized through algorithms, so condensed by our ever-shortening attention spans, and so reduced into black and white by the modern myth of certainty, that they are ultimately dissatisfying both to our intellects and our souls.

Our schools are set up around the idea of correct answers. We judge our children based on how closely they mimic the pre-formed answers, especially in the early years where we tell ourselves that they must form a solid foundation made up of correct answers. What a pity. What if we understood that any foundation worth its mortar must be constructed of wonder? A child who has not been permitted to wonder, which is to say, to play, will struggle to learn to think for themself. To wonder means to consider all the possible answers we can imagine, even if they've not been officially sanctioned as "correct." This is what it means to think. And when we set ourselves up as the authorities on right and wrong we rob children of their most sacred freedom, which is the freedom to think.

Our schools are set up around the idea that we are to mold children, to guide them, to lead them toward correct answers, but that, from where I sit, is properly the domain of curiosity, not authority figures. We are there, of course, to keep them safe and to answer the questions they ask us as honestly as we can, even, especially, when our answers are "I don't know." Not knowing, thinking, playing, and experimenting is the essence of all deep learning. Proper answers, ones derived from wonder, don't close the door to inquiry as our smartphone answers too often do, but rather open new vistas about which to wonder, letting us see the infinite vastness of what we do not know and what we will never know.

I worry that we are forgetting how to wonder in this world full of quick answers. Increasingly I'm coming to see this lack of curiosity not just as the greatest crisis in education, but as the greatest crisis in democracy; the greatest crisis of humankind.

I wonder what would happen if we all spent more time watching the sky. I don't know, but it's worth a try.

******

 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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!