Consciously Constructing Memories to Be Empowering Rather Than Traumatizing

Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous -- sunny, warm, with a gusty breeze. My wife Jennifer and I had just voted our ballots so I decided to cycle to city hall where they have a ballot drop box in the lobby. 

On my way home, I took a familiar route, riding a well-paved bike track that runs between a public golf course on one side and a large, well-used city park on the other. I was the only cyclist along this segment. I was accelerating. I was taking in the scenery, breathing deeply, letting my mind wander a bit. I thought I heard someone say, "Watch out!" I turned my eyes toward the voice and saw a man wearing a yellow shirt and sun hat standing some distance off in the sports field to my left. Visions of a soccer ball, or perhaps golf ball, flashed briefly through my head. But seeing nothing to warrant alarm, I refocused forward just in time to see a thin string across my path at handle bar level.

The next thing I knew that thin string was cutting into my forearms and biceps. 

The next few seconds passed like minutes. In that condensed moment, I recognized that a kite had come to earth, its string caught in the top of the fence on one side, while the wind filled the downed kite making the line taut right across my path. I watched the string dig into my skin. I knew I needed to stop, but with my arms pinned by the string I struggled to get my hands to my brake levers. Meanwhile, the pain of this extreme rope burn was cutting right through any endorphins I might have been producing. I imagined I saw friction smoke coming from my wounds. I wondered if it would cut to the bone. I contemplated throwing myself off onto the pavement. I considered what I would do if the string somehow slid up my arms to my neck.

From the perspective of someone watching, this all probably happened within three or four seconds, but this morning I'm recalling it as something that happened in an immeasurable space of time. I fought through the string to get to my brakes, let my bike fall to the ground, and pulled the string out of the gashes on both arms. 

In the meantime, I'd figured out that that the man in yellow was the kite flyer. There was a fence and a good 100 feet separating us. I yelled at him. This was his fault. I was in pain and I wanted him to know he was to blame. I wanted him to pay for it. I'm pretty sure I didn't swear, but I might have. He said he was sorry. It bothered me that he remained where he was, though in hindsight I realize that he was winding up his string as fast as he could. What else could he do?

He offered to call an ambulance. He offered to call the police so I could file a report. My wounds were deep, narrow gashes in my skin. The one on my right forearm was bleeding slightly. They looked ghastly, they hurt like the dickens, but for all that had happened they appeared, thankfully, superficial. By now, my yelling had lost its energy. I said that it seemed like an overreaction to call 911, plus I didn't want to spend the rest of my day talking to authorities. But what if it was worse than it appeared? He gave me his name (Tony) and phone number. He could have been lying, but I didn't think so. He seemed genuinely upset. Indeed, at one point he pulled his sunglasses from his eyes and said, "I want you to see my eyes so you know I'm sincere. I deeply apologize." I regret that I didn't immediately accept his apology.

I few minutes into all this, a young man showed up in a golf cart. I think he might have been an employee of the golf course. He said he'd seen it happen, that my wounds looked terrible, and that I should file a police report. After he drove away, I returned to Tony to say that maybe I would file a police report. Tony agreed and even offered to call. But when I considered what I was going to say to the officer, I waved him off.

I mean, what would I say? Here was a guy flying a kite in a field. It had fallen to the ground in just a manner and at just a time that it coincided with me, another guy engaged in an innocent hobby. What else could he have done? What else could I have done? This was an accident in the purest sense of the word.

I rode the rest of the way home, washed the wounds, and slathered them in Neosporin. I told Jennifer the story. We went around a couple of times about calling my doctor or going to urgent care, but the pain had receded, and I had other things to do. I noticed one of my neighbors outside tossing a tennis ball for her dog. I know her to be both compassionate and wise, so I went out to tell my story to her. She imagined that I might be feeling traumatized and offered to fetch me some big bandages. We wondered together about calling the police, but what was there to report? As we spoke a couple of other neighbors came by. I again told my story and we stood around joking about the stories I might fabricate about the scars I was sure to have.

I went back inside and texted Tony. I wrote:

Hey Tony. This is Tom, the cyclist who got caught in your kite string. I've washed up and applied Neosporin. I'm sorry I yelled at you. I think it's going to be okay, but I'll let you know first it's anything more than superficial. Flying kites is probably the most wholesome hobby anyone can have. Don't let this stop you!

Within seconds my phone rang. It was Tony. By now a couple hours had passed. He told that he was sick to his stomach, that he had been running over and over in his head what he could have done differently. He thought that maybe he should have shouted, "Stop!" instead of just "Watch out!" He told me he was going to buy a pocket knife so that he could just cut the string if something like that ever happened again. He apologized once more and this time I accepted it.

I'm writing about this here for a couple reasons. The first is that I'm currently reading a book called Why We Remember by memory researcher Charan Ranganath, in which he explains what we know about how memories are constructed. Things like this can be stored as trauma, but it's not necessary. I am consciously attempting to process this experience as life-affirming and humanity-affirming. Yes, I was hurt, but I'm emerging stronger, and I will have scars to prove it. When we suffer things like this, our minds tend to flash back on specific moments. In this case, I keep seeing the string burning into my skin. Each time I see it in my mind's eye, I turn my actual eyes to the long, thin scabs that are forming on my arms, then think about the unique story I will have to tell each time someone asks about my scars. This is also the story I'm telling myself, consciously constructing the memory in a way that will be empowering rather than traumatizing: a story about "survival" (in the broadest sense of the word), but also compassion and forgiveness. I mean, in the long run, poor Tony is the one who is likely to be the most traumatized. I meant it when I said I wanted him to keep flying his kite.

The second reason I'm writing about this is here is to point out that as important adults in the lives of young children, we can play a significant role in how they construct and store the memories they are making every day. When we support them in telling their own stories about their challenging experiences, we are giving them the opportunity to create memories that tell an autobiography of resilience and survival. People are always saying stupid things like "There are no accidents," but they're flat out wrong. There are accidents. The emergent now is always an accident. Bad things happen in our lives no matter how wholesomely we live them. At the end of the day, it's the stories we construct about them that determine how they ultimately impact our lives.

Meanwhile, I've awoken the find that my wounds are slightly better this morning, itchy and sore, but well on their way to being part of the legend of me. Later today, I'll reach out to Tony to let him know how I'm doing.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

"We Need Help!"

I help children when they need my help, but most of the time when they ask, it isn't my help they need, but rather help in general, help that could be just as easily provided by other children.

When a kid asks me, for instance, to push them on the swing, I call out, factually, "Audrey wants someone to push her on the swing!" and wait. Sometimes I have to announce it a second time, but invariably, before I've said it a third time, someone has come to the conclusion that they will be the ones to help Audrey.

If a child asks me to, say, lift a heavy car tire on top of a tree stump, I might respond, again factually, "There are a lot of strong kids around who could probably help you." And on most days it only takes one or two requests to find someone willing and able to help.

Asking for help is a vital life skill. When my wife was starting out in business she often worried that asking for help would cause her male co-workers to think her incompetent, so she would try to do everything on her own. One day, however, in a pinch, she broke down and asked her boss for help. It was an epiphany. Not only did he lean in, providing the help she needed, but as she later said, "He thought I was brilliant because I'd asked him for help." To this day, one of her mantras is, "Most people want to help you, but you have to ask them."

She's right. I've had to train myself to not instantly come to the aid of a child who asks because my natural inclination is to just leap to it. But I've come to see that too often what that means is that I wind up doing it for the children when one of the main goals of any education is for children to learn to do things for themselves. And that includes asking peers, rather than adults, for help. Again, I have to use my judgement, sometimes they need adult help, but most of the time, the kids can do it for themselves, including helping one another.

A couple of girls wanted to stack our large wooden boxes to create "bunk beds." They're heavy things, awkward for small bodies to hoist. Most children need help to lift them. They managed stacking the first box on their own, but then realized that was their limit without help. I was sitting right there, but being children experienced in how our school works, they began calling out, "We need help! Everybody, we need help!"

And sure enough help arrived to assist them in wrangling a third box on top. 

When they began working on a fourth box, however, I expected they would turn to me. Honestly, I was nervous about the idea of stacking them four high. I knew that their plan was to climb to the top to "sleep" and an unsecured tower like that could easily fall with children clambering all over it. I was prepared to issue my adult cautions, but they took on the challenge of a fourth box without even turning toward me. I stepped a little closer to be prepared for a rescue if necessary. It wasn't easy to get that fourth box up there. Indeed, thought it impossible, but four of them working together did it. (I then unobtrusively nudged the boxes into alignment to satisfy my concerns about stability as they curled their bodies into those empty bunks.)

"Look what we did, Teacher Tom! We made bunk beds!"

I answered, "You asked for help and your friends helped you."

She replied, "They did." Then she corrected herself, "We did!"

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

All Work and No Play

I spent an evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's short form for "What to you do for work?" Boiled down, it's the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say being unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in most cases it's illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over the course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do with my life today? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

******

I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 16 years. I've recently gone back through the nearly 5000 blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Self-Directed Learners Live in a State of Alert Awareness

Psychologist and author of the book Changing Our Minds, Naomi Fisher, once told me that her three-year-old son took an early interest in numbers. One day as they walked together through their neighborhood, he noticed the house addresses. "Did you know," he asked his mother, "that there are lonely numbers and friendly numbers?" He had, she said, "discovered odd and even numbers."

I doubt there is an educator on earth who would "teach" this mathematical concept in these terms. Indeed, most school curricula don't introduce the idea until first or second grade when children are twice Naomi's son's age, and even then it's typically done using the dry convention of numerals and ciphering, rather than the rich, relevant metaphor of lonely and friendly numbers on a street of houses.

As a preschool teacher, I've known hundreds of children who discover mathematical, scientific, literacy and other concepts well before they're "supposed" to. Parents have been taught by our educational system to treat this as a matter for pride in their obvious genius, to jump on it, to get them enrolled in advanced enrichment programs. The truth, however, is that sometimes their youthful proclivities foretell an abiding passion, as was the case with Dr. Fisher's son, but generally their epiphanies are indicators of nothing more than a typically curious child taking note of their world.

As a teacher in a cooperative school, my entire classroom career has been spent in the company of both children and their parents, and often even grandparents. I recall having a conversation with one of these grandparents who was visiting for a week. She wanted me to know that her grandson's obvious brilliance was the product of his mother's genes, who had, she assured me, been a genius child. She also let me know that she loved her daughter, but was disappointed that she had "wasted" her genius on such commonalities as stay-at-home motherhood. If she had anything to do with it, she was not going to allow the same thing happen to her grandson Max, which is why she was saving up to pay for expensive private schools. She also let me know, kindly but firmly, that she disapproved of our play-based curriculum. Perhaps it was good enough for the rest of these more common kids, but her grandson, she assured me with a wry nod, needed something more.

It was both sad and touching, mainly because I knew the mother (her daughter) and she was fully onboard with her son spending his childhood at play. In fact, she was considering avoiding school altogether, opting instead for a self-directed version of homeschooling called unschooling. "Max has already taught himself to read," she shrugged. "He's shown me that he's his own best teacher." 

Not every child is a literacy or mathematics prodigy, of course, but they all, if allowed to be their own teachers, are driven to discovery. I've rarely met a parent who was not, rightly, blown away by their preschooler's capacity to learn in this way. "Children who don't go to school," explains Dr. Fisher, "live in a state of alert awareness because they're not expecting to be told what to do and not expecting to be evaluated." It frees them up, she says, to look for patterns and make connections. A child who has not yet been taught the dubious lesson that they need adult instruction and approval for their learning instead comes to rely upon their own curiosity, which is what play-based, or self-directed, learning is all about.

In his book The Search After Truth, rationalist philosopher Nicholas Malebranche writes, "The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that are present to it but do not affect it." This is the idea behind not just self-directed learning, but learning in general up until the relatively recent advent of what we today call school. "Schools are the new bit," says Dr. Fisher. "Sadly, society thinks that self-directed learning has to end at seven."

Yes, Max had taught himself to read, but his driving interest during his grandmother's time with us was working with his buddies to construct devious traps. They would spend their days snickering and scheming, using scrapes of wood, fabric, old mesh produce bags, and whatever came to hand to create contraptions that they were certain would ensnare a classmate or two. His grandmother was appalled, whisper-begging me to guide them into more useful endeavors. Then one day, a trap made of rope was sprung on his grandmother, who found her ankles tied together as she tried to traverse the playground. As the boys cackled, I helped extricate his grandmother who was laughing along with them. I couldn't help remarking, "Pretty genius, huh?" 

It wasn't likely that Max would grow up to be a professional trap maker, but that's beside the point. He is, however, currently pursuing a theater degree with the same joyful passion with which he explored traps. The beauty of play-based learning is that it is always relevant to the learner and that is what's important if are goal is live a life of alert awareness.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

When I've Earned the Respect of a Child

There are a lot of adults who believe that the problem with today's youth is that they lack respect. It's a complaint about youth that can likewise be found in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian texts.

I want to be respected, not just by the children in my care, but by their parents, and by pretty much everyone else in the world. If I'm respected, it means that I'm behaving in ways others find worthy of respect. It means that I'm admired or esteemed for my abilities or qualities. It means that I make a valued contribution to the lives of others.

I don't expect to be respected by virtue of any arbitrary status that may be attached to me. My age alone is no reason to respect me. Staying alive for a certain number of years may be noteworthy, but that doesn't mean I deserve a level of respect beyond that which all humans deserve. There are those that insist on respect for "the office," meaning that an individual must be shown respect simply because they are the President or the parent or the teacher. But if their contribution isn't valued, if they don't behave in ways that causes us to admire or esteem them, then they are not owed respect. We owe them courtesy, of course. Everyone deserves courtesy.

Many mistake fear for respect. I've heard people say they "respected" their parent because when they behaved badly they got spanked. That's not respect, that's fear. Fear is an entirely different thing. Cowering is not respect. It's not respect if it is demanded or commanded or compelled. That's force; the threat of pain or punishment. That's simply an exercise in power. "Respect" earned through fear has no value to anyone.

Indeed respect is wholly inaccessible through fear. When we fear someone, we do what they say to avoid pain. Fear compels, but respect is earned. Respect is the result of behaving in ways that cause others to admire and esteem us. The respect of others tells us that we are valued. As an early childhood educator, I don't have an inherent right to respect. Indeed, one of the things that I enjoy most about working with young children is that they are simply too honest to feign respect. You know when you've earned the respect of a toddler. You know it when they come to you with their questions, joys, hurts, and epiphanies. 

There is nothing more affirming than when I've earned the respect of a child.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Taking Delight in the Experience of Exploring a Mystery

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. ~Joseph Wood Krutch

The daughter of a friend, a girl with whom I used to roll down grassy hills, is in graduate school, putting the finishing touches on her studies in earth systems science (ESS). She spends much of her time in nature doing research. She does not spend her days fussing over atoms or genes. She refers to computational models, but doesn't see them as anything other than starting points or perhaps maps that may indicate reality, but are not reality. As she once told me, nature is far too complex to be "captured" by math.

ESS is a new kind of science, one that takes a huge step back from the Western tradition of attempting to understand reality by disassembling it. It's not an offshoot of physics, biology, chemistry, or social science, but rather a coming together of all of them. Instead of reducing everything to their component parts, the science of complex systems embraces complexity as its highest principle. In many ways it is a return to the science of indigenous peoples from around the world who start with the interconnectedness of life.

A few days ago, I wrote a post in which I stated that "research rarely persuades anyone of anything." I pointed out that in the world of early years research, the evidence overwhelmingly favors play-based preschools and keeping our youngest citizens away from handheld screen-based devices, yet our system continues to push academics into our preschools and parents keep handing their babies iPhones. This is science denialism.

The term "science denialism" is tossed around a great deal these days. It's used on both sides of the political divide to paint their opponents as cult-like and irrational. We accuse one another of cherry-picking data to suit our pre-conceived narratives about the world. And we're not wrong: that's exactly what most of us do. Humans have not evolved to seek accuracy or truth, but rather survival, and one of the strategies our species uses is to tell stories, both to ourselves and one another, that enhance our chances. 

That tree we see, if we believe reductionist science, is a product of photons that reflect off a collection of atoms and our minds put it together to tell a story that allows us to avoid harming ourselves by hitting our head on its branches. Or a story that allows us to identify whether or not we can count on it for sustenance, shade, or refuge. Indeed, as cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues in his book The Case Against Reality, what we see is almost certainly not what is actually there. As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."

Yet still, I see a tree, which is a complex system that connects the soil to the sky. I breathe the oxygen it produces. It breathes the carbon dioxide that I produce. This means that I am part of the system that is this tree and it is included in the system that is this human. Interconnectedness is what our lived experience tells us about the world. It's what formed the basis of most indigenous science prior to being colonized by Western science. There is no doubt that the science of reductionism has created powerful "tools" for us to understand nature, but often at the expense of lived experience. 

We are not separate from "nature," we are in the midst of it. Western science depends on objectivity, but there is no objective place from which to consider reality. All data sets include the biases of the observers' perspective. When we break it all down into atoms and waves and formula derived in computer models or laboratory settings, we ultimately render it meaningless and functionless. And math? Well, as Nancy Cartwright puts it in her book How the Laws of Physics Lie, "(M)athematical physical laws don't describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models."

No wonder science denialism is on the rise. It's a form of sales resistance. We've been sold "science" -- Western science -- as a collection of "facts," that only the ignorant would dispute. Yet our lived experience disputes it every second of every day. Reductionist science tells us that time is not part of reality, but tell that to the man who's just missed his train. It tells us that colors are products of our minds, not reality, but tell that to the woman who mistakes a tiger for a zebra. It tells us that hot and cold are psychological phenomena, but tell that to the person who is shivering.

In their book The Blind Spot, a physicist and a pair of philosophers (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson), warn about how science is "sold" to society:

It may take the form of science documentaries telling people they are nothing more than their so-called genetic programming (genes aren’t programs, and they require the existence of whole organisms embedded in their ecosystems to be expressed). It may be breathless science news articles that claim future generations will upload themselves into computers (your selfhood or personhood isn’t a computational data structure). It may be public lectures or op-eds that claim physics has now answered the question of why there is something rather than nothing (this is not the kind of question science can answer) . . . When Blind Spot ideas are presented to the public as facts that only the naive and uneducated would dispute, it is likely to exacerbate opposition to science in public policy debates.

As early childhood educators we are currently being "sold" the lie that "earlier is better." Policymakers and parents, wielding "data" collected by pseudo-scientific testing, are trying to get us to buy into the mathematics-driven story of bottoms-in-seats, drill-and-kill direct instruction. They sell it with fear-mongering and snake oil about poor children "falling behind." Meanwhile, our lived experience of this approach is the reality of miserable, anxious children whose development is stunted because they never learn to play. They are taught that learning is hard and they are incompetent; that their curiosity is a distraction, that their bodies must remain still, and their voices silent. When we object, they accuse us of being naive and uneducated, of standing in the way of "progress." They show us their metaphorical maps and try to convince us that it is the real terrain, even as we live, every day, in the actual world and witness with our own eyes the harm they are inflicting on children.

A while back I wrote about meeting a man who believes the earth is flat. The conversation reminded me of the aggravating round-and-round debates I have with those who are convinced that children need worksheets and homework. As frustrating as science denialism is, however, I find myself wondering if its rise isn't simply as aspect of the system trying to correct.

The Blind Spot authors write:

(B)est practices in the domain of science and society include becoming aware of how the story of science is told to the public. Without doubt that story is about the profound capacity of the human imagination and our ability to prevail over ignorance and bias. But if the story is told as one of transcending the human, then it becomes an essentially religious narrative about the search for perfect knowledge beyond our finitude. Instead of saying that science is a means for rising above the great, strange mystery of being human in the vast wide world, a better story is that science takes us deeper into that mystery, revealing new ways to experience it, delight in it, and, most of all, value it.

Taking delight in the experience of exploring a mystery. This is what makes humans come alive. This is what a proper education is all about.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Hulk

"I'm The Hulk!" 

His parents hadn't taken their three-year-old to see the movie, but the marketing had nevertheless penetrated into his awareness, capturing his imagination, which clearly interpreted The Hulk as an image of power worthy of emulation. Or rather, in this boy's case, embodiment.

"I'm The Hulk!" he would declare as he swaggered through the classroom door each morning, flexing, his legs spread wide, taking up as much room as his tiny body could fill. He insisted on being called, "The Hulk," not Hulk, not The Incredible Hulk or the Green Goliath, and definitely not the name his parents had given him. Most of the time, The Hulk did the same kinds of things the other kids were doing, albeit punctuated by bodybuilder stances and the regular declaration, "I'm The Hulk!"

This was very early in my teaching career and this boy happened to be the brother of my own daughter's best friend, so I knew this boy quite well, having spent countless hours at his house, dining with him, vacationing with him, and even trick-or-treating with him. Interestingly, he hadn't dressed as The Hulk for Halloween. Similarly, he didn't insist on being called The Hulk in any circumstance other than while at school. His bedroom was full of green merchandise, including a giant pillow fist that made the sound of breaking glass when you punched something with it, but pretending to be The Hulk was apparently reserved for school.

It's estimated that the average adult spends almost half of their waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future, with the rest, presumedly, dedicated to the present. I'm unaware of any such estimates regarding three-year-olds, but from what I've observed, and based on the simple fact that they have fewer memories to reflect upon, and less experience upon which to base their anticipation for tomorrow, much more of their conscious thinking time would, by the process of elimination, have to be spent on the present. And for a child like this one, a large chunk of his time in the present, especially in school, was spent pretending. 

As researchers and professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkley, Alison Gopnik writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, "By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what's going on in other people's minds. Theory of mind, as it's called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people. It's quite possibly the most important kind of learning people ever do . . . (T)he period from eighteen moths to five years is the great watershed for developing theory of mind . . . Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people."

I often think of this boy who embodied The Hulk. Certainly, he was exploring how it might feel to be a large, physically powerful entity, something that he objectively was not. Sometimes the other children would be frightened of The Hulk, cowering or even crying. When that happened he usually dropped the act for a time, seemingly confused, often insisting softly, "I'm not really The Hulk." Sometimes he would say the tagline, "Hulk smash!" but he was rarely actually violent. Indeed, when the other children would wrestle, he'd stand nearby, flexing, but would decline to actually engage. He loved few things more, however, than another child who would go face-to-face with him, being, counter-factually fierce and powerful and strong. 

"Thinking counterfactually in this way is a tremendously useful skill for adult human beings," writes Gopnik. "It's what we mean when we talk about the power of imagination and creativity. Counterfactual thinking is crucial for learning about the world. In order to learn we need to believe that what we think now could be wrong, and to imagine how the world might be different . . . In order to change the world, we need to imagine that the world could be different, and then actually set about making it that way. In fact, just about everything in the room I'm sitting in -- the woven fabrics, the carpentered chairs, not to mention the electric lights and computers -- is wildly fictional from the perspective of a Pleistocene forager. Our world started out as a counterfactual imaginary vision in an ancestor's mind. One way of thinking about pretend play is that it gives children a safe space to practice higher-order mental skills, just as rough-and-tumble gives baby rats a safe space to practice fighting and hunting, and exploratory play gives baby crows a safe space to practice using sticks."

The Hulk is a young man now. Despite his experience pretending to be The Hulk, he didn't grow into a large, green, be-muscled adult. I know that he tried out football in high school, but found it too much for him. He does, however, write and perform music, fierce powerful music that gets people up on their feet. The kind of music one might imagine The Hulk would make.

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