Pride of Authorship

The other day, I Googled something and the top result was an AI summary, part of which read a lot like something I wrote several years ago. To the AI's credit, there were several source links provided, and I'm sure that whatever it "borrowed" came from one of those pieces. I didn't bother to check. Maybe I was quoted within someone else's work, maybe someone just happened to phrase an idea in a way very similar to the way I phrased it (it happens), but those were my thoughts expressed in my words.

I've been publishing on the internet for 17 years. I've come across my own words quoted in all kinds of places, usually with a proper credit. I quote people, with proper credit, all the time on this blog. And it's not just writers. On Tuesday, I used a photo of Auguste Rodin's statue "The Thinker" to illustrate my post . . . with proper credit.

Ever since the so-called British Statute of Anne became law in 1710, the first copyright law, we've legally recognized an author's right of ownership to their own work. Other works of creative output have been added to copyright law over the decades, right up to this day as new creative forms emerge.

My point is that for most of human history, when we created something we didn't expect that the product of our intellectual-creative work belonged to us. History's most celebrated artists and thinkers -- Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Plato -- didn't own the exclusive rights of anything they produced. Once it was out there, it belonged to everyone, a gift to the world.

In his book Devine Fury: The History of Genius, historian Darrin McMahon writes, "The medieval dictum that God alone can create . . . resonated in the minds of theorists and practitioners alike, who regarded all art and thought as in large measure an act of recovery and imitation, a re-creation of what God in his perfection had already conceived." In other words, we didn't give human beings credit for the thinking and creating. It was all the work of the Devine and we were the tools used to bring it into the world. To assert ownership would be to blaspheme. 

Up until the emergence of the idea of copyright there was little or no pride in authorship. Indeed, many of our earliest books were handwritten copies of copies of copies. Once you owned your own copy, you could then earn your keep by dictating it to others so that they could "write" their own copy to dictate to others and so on, a practice largely carried on by literate monks. The original author's names are unknown because they were irrelevant. Art, in all its forms, wasn't so much about originality as it was creating imitations of what came before. I'm no art expert, but when I spend time with ancient indigenous art from any culture, I'm struck by the idea that what I'm looking at are endless variations on the same themes, as if the goal was not something new, but something more perfect. And since perfection is the exclusive realm of the gods, it would have been gross hubris to sign any finished work.

The printing press, followed by copyright laws, changed all that. Now "(w)riters and artists strove to define unique personalities and styles in order to highlight claims to the ownership of their creations. Originality and copyright developed in tandem, and the new creator of "genius" dramatized the emergence of the modern artist and self."

I imagine that this is one of the key, unintended changes that the advent of AI will ultimately bring with it, a return to a time where there is less pride in authorship. We will still have "celebrity" creators, of course, people like Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Plato who knew how to self-promote, but we're already seeing most creative output being lumped together under the label "content." Screenwriters, actors, and other Hollywood creatives are currently in a fight for their creative lives as their work, and even their voices and likenesses, are on the verge of being sucked into this cloud of content that are owned by corporations. Works of "art" are already being created by machines, cobbled together by the new, and far less perfect, "god" of AI. The fight in favor of copyright may be a long one, but if I were a gambling man, my money is on AI.

As a person who has always admired the unique creative genius in others, those artists and thinkers who produce works that are unlike anything I've ever before experienced, and who hopes, in his small way to contribute something new to the world, I don't like it at all. At the same time, if I try to imagine a world in which we've all set aside our possessiveness about our own creations, I can also see a kind of beauty in it.

Every day, in preschool classrooms around the world, children are making art, then handing it to someone, saying, "This is for you." I could hardly have saved all of these gifts of creative expression that I received over my decades in the classroom, although I do have a file folder where I keep a few special ones. I remember those artists, but they long ago forgot about the art, probably within minutes of handing it to me.

Copyright is a legal concept, not a natural one. If we adults weren't there urging them to sign their artwork, or signing it on their behalf, most young children, most of the time, wouldn't care what happened to their creative genius once they released it into the world. Of course, parents teach them that their work has a certain kind of value when we stick it on the door of the fridge, but that's different than ownership, it's evidence that the creative gifts we've given to loved ones are appreciated.

I have no illusions about the wider world, but I like knowing that preschool is a place where creativity, even genius, is not commodified, but rather sent out in the world as a gift.

******

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!

In Praise of Distraction

I took a book outside, setting up in a shaded chaise lounger with a cup of coffee. The sun was out. It was going to get hot, but would be pleasant for a couple hours yet, especially with the gentle breeze. The mocking birds were talking, creatively mixing their trills and titters. My wife would be with her girlfriend for the next few hours and no other person was in sight. It was, in short, a perfect set up for a morning with a novel. And this was one I was particularly eager to read, the fifth book in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence pentalogy.

As I settled in, before I could even open the book, a dragon fly buzzed me. It hovered before my eyes, its teal and pearly flanks iridescent, set off by veins of pure black, veins that became thin and intricate as they continued into otherwise transparent wings. I noticed that out over the lawn there were dozens more of the species patrolling the area. My insect friend had not come alone. The typical dragon fly only lives for a couple weeks, a bit to trivia I'd kept stored away for just this moment. Later I would look it up, to be certain. (As it turns out the life of an individual dragon fly can range from one to eight weeks.) Such a short life, yet long enough to be born, to feast, to procreate, and to die. 

With a start, I realized that my book was on my lap, unopened. Okay, now for reading. I was a couple paragraphs in, when a squabble erupted in the tree overhead. The mocking birds' song was now a kind of shriek, an alarm, as a pair of them shot from the branches to intercept a crow that was flying past, an innocent passerby mistaken for a nest raider. The crow, much bigger than its attackers, nevertheless took evasive action, diving, circling, flipping onto its back to show sharp talons, while the smaller birds drove it onward and away, chasing it to anywhere but this place. It was a kind of epic battle, fought out against the background of the local mountain, now orange and purple in the rising sun.

The mountains here are protectors. At least that's how they struck me as my attention shifted to their flanks. I was reminded of an idiom I learned from the writer Rebecca Solnit, "(T)he mountain is beautiful in the distance, but steep when you're on it." I was reminded of the idea that if a mountain peak represents human goals, the slopes represent life itself. The life-and-death dance of the birds had, in the meantime ended, as I refocused on the pages of my book, 600 to go, a steep climb before I reached the peak, which would be the end of a reading experience of several months. I flipped to the end of the book to see that my goal was page 612. And then I'd be no where.

Okay, now I read, I told myself, but not before taking a sip of coffee. As I did, a rough gray-brown rabbit emerged from a hedge across the way, followed by a baby, then another. I let the coffee, which was no longer quite hot enough, rest on my tongue, robust, nutty, bitter, before swallowing. The baby bunnies made me scan the sky for birds of prey. Only a few days ago, I'd seen a hawk carry off a ground squirrel. There are so many rabbits around here, of course, almost too many. Bobcats, coyotes, and owls have all been seen hunting in the area, doing what comes naturally to them, while incidentally preventing the rabbit population from overwhelming us. Although it's impossible to not feel sympathy for individual bunnies, like the ones who live in the hedge across the way, it's likewise impossible to not find a kind of peace, which is to say acceptance, in the way nature tends toward balance.

My book rested heavily on my lap. I took it in two hands and began to read, telling myself that now I would concentrate, focus, put my nose to the grindstone. Martha, the protagonist, was making a study of an ancient hunk of wood that had been fished from the muck at the bottom of the Thames River in London, probably a vestige of some long lost ship, that had for a time been part of a stairway prior to the second World War, but was now, more stone than wood, being used as a gate post for protective fencing bearing skull-and-crossbones signs, encircling a bombed out building. Meanwhile she was thinking about the places she needed to be, the things she needed to do, the people with whom she needed to consult. I continued reading the words, but my mind was busy considering a teak sculpture that I once saw daily, and that I thought was stone for the longest time. I caught myself reading without comprehension, backtracked, and re-read. There are curricula that purport to teach children how to read like this, without requiring comprehension, but rather drilling kids on phonics, on sounding out random words as they stand alone; they read sections of books, but not the whole thing; I once heard about a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird, but not all the way to the end. To do it this way is to strip writing of meaning, which is to strip it of interest, as if the mountain peak can exist without its flanks, making reading into a rote task and no one likes rote tasks. What a cold, harsh lesson about reading.

It would be a miracle if any child, taught to read this way, would choose, on a sunny morning to carry a book outside . . . But I'd not read more than a couple pages. 

A "V" of Canada geese flew overhead, squawking. The smell of a neighbor's bacon and egg breakfast curled under my nose. Some doves had joined the mocking birds in song. Yellow butterflies had supplanted the dragon flies over the lawn. And the mountain, beautiful and steep, was now bright in the full sun. The book felt good in my hands, solid, the words on the page taking me from this century back into the last one, into the mind of a young woman from South Africa, a post-war woman on the streets of London being distracted by a hunk of old wood that appeared like even older stone.

In the previous book in the series, Lessing wrote, "The big city's not been with us long enough to be important, we are already beyond it. Because now we think: that star over there, that star's got a different time scale from us. We are born under that star and make love under it and put our children to sleep under it and are buried under it. The elm tree is out of date, it's had its day. Now we try all the time, day and night to understand: that star has a different time scale, we are like midges compared to the star."

Far overhead, a jet was painting a trail of frozen water vapor in the brilliant blue sky from west to east, carrying passengers back because east is the direction of back in this country, just as west is out, south is down, and north is up, points on the map and in the story we tell of how the world goes together.

I'd not given up on reading, but the distractions of the morning were doing their jobs. We say that we live in the age of distraction, but we have always lived in an age of distraction. Seneca the Younger, the ancient Roman philosopher complained, "A multitude of books distracts the mind." Descarte, Mark Twain, John Locke, Tesla, all of them complained of distractions. The challenge of self-important educators throughout history has been how to compel the attention of their students. These teachers are forever trying to force children to focus, to concentrate, which is to say, block out the here and now in order to one day be able to do or know or believe . . . something. They take away their smartphones, they hush the room, they close the doors, they make rules about when the children may eat or urinate or sing or ruminate on the connections between themselves and the world around them. Sometimes this is even enforced with shame and punishment. 

Yet, the children, in being distracted, are only doing what nature has designed them to do. This is how the human brain has evolved: for a world of distraction. That distraction is a bane, is a product of the myth of the mountain peak, the fairy tale of goals and destinations. Reality tells us over and over again to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, to pause on the steep slopes, to experience what is real and who we are in that reality. It's not an accident that what neuroscientists call our "window of consciousness" can only remain open, on average, for about seven seconds. We are not evolved to think in straight lines, and we are especially not evolved for spending our youth attending to the trivia that bossy adults set before us as summits we must attain lest we be labeled failures.

By the time the day grew too hot to continue sitting outside I had managed to read most of a chapter. That was enough. There is no hurry to finish a book, any book, especially when there was so much else to feed the mind, heart, and soul. The only insects out now where pesky flies. The birds had fallen silent. The rabbits were hidden in the shade. My coffee was the temperature of the air. And the mountain still embraced all of us, beautiful and steep. And far above everything was that star, invisible now behind the brightness of the star we call our own, somewhere along its dragonfly journey of birth, feast, procreation, and death: beautiful, steep, present, not a distraction at all, but rather the only thing there is, life itself.

******

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 Universal Language

The universal language is movement. It is the one language that all living things share. To move is an essential aspect of our definition of what it means to be alive.

Verbal language helps us communicate about our thinking, talking about the past and future, and dealing with abstractions, the things that have to do with our conscious minds. But for the rest of it -- emotions, intentions, social status, sexuality, gender, communal affiliations, power preferences -- information mostly about our subconscious minds, it's our bodies that communicate most clearly. Human facial expressions are particularly communicative. Even small movements of the eyes, mouth, or nose can convey deep emotion, subterfuge, or intent beyond any words we may say or even consciously know.

As a species we've evolved to "read" the body language of others. We don't necessarily realize we're doing it, but we learn a lot from the angle of someone's eyebrow or shuffle of their feet. We read their facial ticks, their eye movement, and the way they run their fingers through their hair. We are aware when the body language doesn't match their words. Obviously, some of us are better at this than others, and the ability to understand body language can be improved with conscious practice, but it's something that even very young children can do, because, after all, it's our native tongue, the language we share with all living things. Indeed, the vast majority of living things on this planet, including plants, thrive perfectly well without verbal language at all.

As preschool educators, whether we know it or not, we are forever studying the body language of the children in our care. We all know the "potty dance." We recognize when they are "hangry." We learn to tell when this or that child is on the edge of being overwhelmed, if they're frightened, if they're tired. If we take our responsibilities seriously, we get quite good at reading the nuances, because we all know that when it comes to young children verbal language (e.g., "Why did you do that?" "Are you sleepy?") often doesn't get us anywhere.

The other interesting thing about body language is that it's much more difficult for us to lie. Our various ticks, our blushes, our unconscious hand gestures, our posture . . . Only the most practiced and conscious of confabulators -- like a professional con artist or politician or actor -- can "lie" convincingly with their bodies. Young children may lie with their words, a necessary developmental practice, as they explore "theory of mind" through "counterfactual" communication, but never with their bodies.

It's important to remember that we too communicate with our bodies. Children understand a clenched jaw, even if the words we speak are honey sweet. They hear the disconnect and, as it does with all of us, find the contradiction confusing. I've found that when I want to know how I'm really feeling, it's necessary to check in with what my own body is doing. Am I holding tension in my legs, back, or shoulders? Am I chewing my nails? Messing with my hair? Scratching imaginary itches? Unable to stand still? Where are my eyes looking? Why is my jaw clenched? Which way are my feet turned? All of these aspects of my body language are communicating to those who around me, but they can also be a form of self-talk, something that often is at odds with what's going on in my head. 

It's a form of self-care to take time each day to listen carefully to our own body language with as much clarity and purpose as we do the children in our care. Not only does it help us understand what we are unconsciously communicating to the children, but also what our subconscious is trying to tell us about ourselves.

******

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!

Socializing and Playing are Central to Thinking

"The Thinker," Auguste Rodin

We've all experienced the phenomenon of genius in the stairwell, that flash of brilliance that comes to us when it's a little too late. It's that moment when we realize what we should have said in the job interview. It's when the perfect zinger comes to us after we've already hung up the phone. It's that flash of genius that we experience when we're no longer focused on the matter at hand. 

One of the odd things about thinking is that very often the worst way to come up with a solution is to focus on the problem. It's why it's sometimes best to just go for a walk or take a shower. It's why we need to clear our minds or take a break. We tend to think of thinking as something we do consciously, in the spirit and posture of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker that I've used to illustrate this post. But in reality, most thinking, or rather deep thinking, doesn't usually work that way. We tend not to be at our best when we're furrowing our brows over things, but rather when our minds are in a relaxed or distracted state. Indeed, like with genius in the stairwell, our best ideas are often, when we tell ourselves the truth, the product of our unconscious minds.

When presented with a problem or challenge that our conscious mind cannot easily solve, we have two choices. 

The first is to invite other people to discuss it with us. Neuroscientists tell us that the "window of consciousness," that time during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. The exception is when we are in dialog. In dialog we can sometimes keep the window open for hours on end.

Our second option when dealing with a problem or challenge is to do something else, anything else, just so long as it has nothing to do with the task at hand. Another way to say that is to go play: do anything that relaxes and distracts the mind in order to free our unconscious mind to do the work of genius in the stairwell.

Again, the most worst way to solve a problem or address a challenge is to sit down and break our brains over it. The best way to solve a problem or address a challenge is to talk and play with others.

The problem is that normal schools expect children to spend large chunks of their days in silent, solitary pondering in the misguided and unsupported belief that this is how thinking happens. Indeed, the behaviors that are most likely to get young children in trouble with their teachers are socializing and goofing around, which are, contrary to our school-ish myths, natural manifestations of thinking. And thinking, I hope, is our goal.

Children are born knowing how to learn. That's why, when left to their own devices, they talk and play.

******

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!

"Whoever Uses Machines Does Their Work Like a Machine"

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool has a workbench on the playground. This is the place where "real" tools are used, which is to say hammers, saws, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, glue guns, sanders, and other classic hand tools. 

The rest of the playground is a loose parts paradise in which the children are free to manipulate, transport, combine, and dismantle whatever they find, according to their curiosity, with the caveat that an adult will step in if that threatens to harm themselves or someone else. (Our landlord also expects us to be protective of the building.) But the workbench is something else. If you step into the workbench area, the adult will often expect you to wear protective eyewear. You can use the tools to make whatever you want, often involving objects you find on the wider playground, but you are expected to use the tools for their intended purpose.

Hammers are for driving and prying out nails . . . If you want to smash something, you use a mallet.

Screwdrivers are for tightening and turning screws . . . If you want to stab something, you use a knife or a pick or an awl.

Saws are for cutting wood . . . If you want to have a sword fight, you'll have to find some sticks.

Tools are not uniquely human, but our capacity for creating and using tools is unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. Indeed, nearly everything we do in our lives involves using a tool. We drink coffee from a tool called a mug. We take notes with a tool called a pencil. We cook dinner with tools called pots and pans. Our world is full of machines, fancier tools, from automobiles to televisions to computers, all of which are designed for a purpose or purposes. We create tools to extend ourselves into the world in increasingly powerful ways. From the earliest cutting and grinding tools of our most ancient ancestors to the machine intelligences and screen-based technologies that we carry in our pockets, the story of tools is the story of humankind.

One of the stories we tell ourselves about our tools and machines is that they represent progress. We say that we're grateful that we don't have to, say, carry our laundry down to the river the way they did in the olden days. We don't think we'd like to live without running water and HVAC systems and coffee makers. We could do it, of course, but why?

Then we wonder why we're soft in the middle, why we're anxious, and why, with all this progress, we still have to find ways to motivate ourselves to get out of bed in the morning. We join a gym because we don't get enough exercise out of our natural lives. We waste chunks of our lives seeking for something like human connection as we doom scroll or binge watch. The machines and tools are supposed to free us up for more important things . . . But we struggle to figure out what's more important.

There is an ancient Chinese Taoist parable about an old gardener who is painstakingly watering his fields by hand. A passerby suggests using a simple mechanical device called a levered well sweep that would make the work go faster and easier.

"Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all their work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things (machines); I am ashamed to use them." (From The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan)

Tools and machines may increase our efficiency, but they also, inevitably, reshape the human spirit, turning life into a kind of mechanical routine, which, I assert, is part of the reason so many of us find ourselves vaguely, or even pointedly, dissatisfied in the modern world.

I am not anti-technology any more than I am anti-hammer, but every tool changes us for better or worse, and it's therefore important to use our tools consciously: to use them for the proper purpose. Most of the time, our new tools are about making tasks faster or easier, but efficiency cannot always be our North Star. Education, in particular, is not improved through efficiency. That is a matter for commerce and manufacturing. But learning is about thinking and our current computer/screen based technologies tend to thwart actual thinking by robbing us of wonder. When I hear ed-tech evangelists touting their latest "innovation," I'm reminded of Abraham Maslow's famous quote, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."

I like keeping an eye on the birds that hang out near my home. Several years ago, I noticed that the local ravens habitually fly in a flock (an unkindness to use the so-called proper term) westward about 15 minutes before sunrise. At first I thought that maybe a local business, like a bakery, tossed it's day-old food into an open dumpster every morning, but had to dismiss the theory when daylight savings time rolled around that the ravens continued their behavior. If humans were involved it would be according to clock time rather than orbital time. Every morning as the ravens passed by, I wondered about them. They didn't seem to have any particular urgency about their mini-migration. It didn't include all the ravens, because I spied others hanging out in trees. There weren't ravens flying in from every direction as if they were descending on a specific destination. It was just a general westward movement by a subset of ravens. Why were there sometimes more and fewer in the flock? Why was it connected to sunrise? Every day, I looked for clues, hints, and ideas, spending a few minutes each morning wondering about it. It was a purely intellectual activity.

I finally began to settle on an explanation that delighted me. I imagined a local ur raven from centuries ago that developed an irrational fear of the sun as it rose over the horizon in the east. Too bright! Too hot! What the hell is that thing? So it would, each morning, attempt to run away to the west. Before long, other ravens joined it, not out of fear, but because this one raven, maybe in other contexts a respected leader, seemed to "know" something. Now, centuries later, they are still doing it as a kind of cultural tradition.

This is something I've been contemplating almost every morning for several years. I recently, however, made the mistake of asking an AI about it. I still see those ravens most mornings, but their behavior no longer fills me with curiosity and wonder because I have "the answer." Like that ancient gardener, I'm ashamed that I used a machine. Now when I see that flock overhead, I'm struck by a sense of loss.

Our phones, tablets, and computers are great tools for efficiently determining the right answers (or at least the general consensus answers: I still prefer my own theory about the ravens). They are tools for testing. But they are emphatically not tools for thinking, which requires curiosity and wonder, which is to say not knowing. The main contribution these tools make to early learning is to help adults get through their top-down curricula more efficiently, but if thinking is our goal, they are emphatically the wrong tools, like using sandpaper to hammer a nail.

Perhaps worse, these correct answer providing machines create the illusion of ultimate answers. They cause us to stop wondering. When we use these wrong tools for the wrong reasons we, in the words of physicist Carlo Rovelli, risk losing "the scientific spirit of distrust in whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth." Doubt, distrust, and not knowing are essential for thinking to take place.

Someday, these young children will grow into adults who need those correct answers and they'll turn to the proper tool. Someday, they'll need efficiency. But right now in these early years, the tools they need are ones that open vistas, that create space for curiosity and wonder, that help them think like a human, not a machine. And that tool isn't a tool at all: it's life itself.

******

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!

It's Respect that Matters

As a new parent, I was convinced that our daughter would grow up to be a sports playing, hammer wielding tomboy. After all, I was playing the role of stay-at-home-parent in our family, and I just assumed that my male influence would make it so. We didn't exactly try to raise her in a non-gender specific way, but her mom was the one heading off to the office, while her dad handled childcare, cooking, and cleaning. Not only that, but we both preferred her in short hair and overalls, and for the first couple years of her life, whenever she was out with me, everyone just assumed she was a little boy, a mistake I didn't always correct. If anyone was raising a child outside the cultural expectations for little girls, it was us.

When she was around two-years-old she came across a bejeweled crown in a toy store, put in on her head, looked me in the eye and said, "You don't know what girls do." She then proceeded to wear a crown, princess dresses, tutus, and sparkles every day for the next three years.

I wasn't disappointed, but I was surprised. After all, the mainstream debates over gender back then tended to be of the nature v. nurture variety and I was convinced that our nurturing would, of course, result in a girl who was not so, well, girly. I began to wonder if maybe nature had, indeed, won out. It was around this time that the two-year-old daughter of one of our friends began to dress herself in her brother's "boy clothes" and insist that the rest of us call her Joe. It wasn't a "phase" and today, nearly 30 years later, we all know him as a young man. Was this even more evidence for nature? Or was it nurture?

Who cares? I mean, I'm sure there are scientists out there trying to figure it all out, and I'm convinced that they will continue to find that it's some combination of both, but as a parent or educator in the real world, my responsibility is to stay out of it. If the child says they're a girl, they're a girl, even if it's only for a day or a week, and even if they aren't choosing frilly dresses. If they say they're a boy, they're a boy, even it it's only for a day or a week and even if they aren't choosing overalls. And if they don't want to be forced to pick a gender, it's not my job to push them one way or another. 

I know that for many, our attempts to raise children in a gender neutral way seems like a radical concept, simultaneously dangerous and silly. "Dangerous" because they fear our nurturing will result in forcing something on their children and "silly" because they expect that in-born gender wiring will win out. But "gender-neutral" only means that we seek to be neutral, which is to say we strive to take their word for it.

We do it because we respect children and there is nothing dangerous or silly about that.

In an interview with Australian early childhood expert Maggie Dent that I conducted for a few years back, she told me that she continues to have to "heal the wounds" she suffers due to gender expectations and stereotypes. Even though her gender identity matches her biology, she was, as she tells it, a loud, physical "tomboy" who was forever being told to quiet down, know her place, not get to big for her boots, and, above all, to be compliant, because girls are expected to be "people pleasers." She tells of an old family photo in which she is wearing an expression of "rage and disgust" over being forced to wear a fancy dress.

She's not the only woman to object to being shoved into the "woman box" even as she identifies as a woman. I can tell you that as a man, I resent being shoved into the "man box." We are all more and bigger than the stereotypes. Maggie talks of Australian fathers who are upset when their boys come home from school wearing nail polish fearing that it will somehow turn them gay or female, which is as silly as thinking that a stay-at-home father will turn daughters into macho men. As for the argument that children will be somehow confused if we don't stick with their "biological" gender, I ask you to consider how confusing it must have been for little Joe who knew, even at a very young age, that he was a boy even as the rest of the world was telling him he was wrong. 

Everything is confusing until it is not. That's what learning is all about. Humans can deal with confusing. It's lack of respect that wounds us.

We are born with the bodies we're born with, but the rest is a social construct enforced by expectations and stereotypes that serve no one but those who would shove others into boxes. I might continue to struggle with things like gender neutral pronouns. I have 64 years of social conditioning to overcome. But I'm working on it, not because it's politically correct, but because I want to show my fellow humans, even if they are young children, the same sort of respect that I want for myself.

******

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!

Children Must Bicker as They Play

One of the things Seattle's teachers won in their 2015 strike was a commitment from the school district that elementary school students would receive a minimum of 30 minutes of recess per day. In fairness, some schools were already providing more than that, but there were several, apparently, that were limiting their youngest students to a meager 15 minutes. It's actually disheartening to this play-based educator to learn that a half hour is considered a victory.

The ostensible reason for such pathetically restricted recess is that longer recesses cut into that all-important "classroom time," but I also heard that some administrators favor limited or non-existant recesses because when children freely play they are more likely to wind up in conflicts.

Let me be the first to say, "Duh."

As a teacher in a school that engages in no direct instruction, but rather bases its curriculum on the evidence of how children learn best, which is through their own self-selected play, I'm here to tell you that conflict stands at the center of how learning happens. Our entire school day is, for all intents and purposes, recess, and yes, much of what the children are doing while playing both indoors and out is bicker.

For adults interested in eliminating bickering, I would say that 15 minutes is about right: it usually takes the children at least that long just to figure out what they're going to do, which, in a robust classroom like ours, with lots of kids with lots of agendas engaging with shared and limited resources, is typically followed by a period of often intense negotiation, which often shows up as conflict.

For instance, a group of four and five-year-olds, mostly boys, found themselves playing together with a collection of cardboard tubes and tennis balls. For the first 15 minutes or so, they engaged like independent agents, each arranging tubes, and collecting balls for their own personal use. That time passed relatively quietly, with each of them exploring and experimenting. 

The next 15 minutes was characterized by physical and emotional chaos, as they began to bump up against limitations of space and resources, but the real impetus for the conflicts were their divergent ideas for how they were going to play. Most of the kids were setting their tubes up at angles down which they were rolling balls, but at least one guy was more interested in using the tubes as a way to practice balance, rolling them the way a lumberjack might. The resulting spills and his lurching body, of course, tended to upend his classmates' carefully constructed efforts and there were a lot of things said about it, like, "Hey! You're knocking over my tube!" which was followed by a round or two of argument, sometimes even accompanied by shoving and other physical attempts to solve their impasse. 

Others began to collect balls, "all the balls," which lead to complaints like, "Hey! You have all the balls!"

Some objected when friends would block up the end of the tube so their balls couldn't pass through, robbing them of the satisfaction of witnessing the end result of their experiment.

By the end of this 15 minutes, there was one boy crying, several flush with frustration, and a couple who found themselves wound up into a slightly hysterical state by the hubbub. This is where I did my work for the day. I stepped in several times to help cool tempers and encourage conversation, which I did by reminding the children of the rules they had made together the previous week, the agreements we had made about how we wanted to treat one another. Among those rules were such classics as "No taking things from other people," "No hitting," "No pushing," and "No knocking down other people's buildings," along with an agreement that if someone tells you to "Stop!" you must stop and listen to what the other person has to say.

Most of the conflicts I let run their course as the kids were talking, sometimes loudly, sometimes heatedly. As long as they were heading toward resolution I stayed on the sidelines, but when things became physical or the emotions turned intense, I dropped to my knees in the midst of it and said things like, "I saw you take that tube from him. We all agreed, 'No taking things from other people,'" and "He's crying because he worked really hard building that and you knocked it down." But mostly what I did was encourage the children to listen to one another by simply saying things like, "I want you to listen to what he has to say."

This is the period of recess play that those administrators want to avoid. I know that many schools consider recess to be a time for the classroom teachers to catch a little break, leaving the school yard in the hands of a few "monitors." One kindergarten teacher told me that they often have 40 or more children per adult on their playground. I know I wouldn't want to face that second 15 minutes without all hands on deck.

So why do we put up with that second 15 minutes? To get to the third 15 minutes and beyond. That's when all that bickering begins to pay off. That's when all the conflict and talking and listening start to bring those ideas and agendas together. 

For the next hour I more or less sat on a bench and watched the children play, together, saying sentences to one another that began with the invitation word, "Let's . . ." 

"Let's connect all the big tubes!"

"Let's put all the balls in this bucket!"

"Let's move it over here!"

There was still a bit of bickering, but it was of the productive variety, with children actually listening to their friends' thoughts and ideas, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly finding ways to incorporate it within their own agenda. This is the gold standard of a play-based curriculum: creative, cooperative play, and sometimes the only way to get there is through that second 15 minutes.

******

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!