Advice for New Parents

Grandma had taken charge of the newborn, while the parents, her own daughter and her husband, swaggered in the sheer audacity of what they had done. They humbled-boasted about their exhaustion, their lives turned upside down, and the love they felt in every waking moment. I'd met them before the birth of their baby and in this second meeting I found them transformed.

Author and Yale University professor of philosophy and cognitive science L.A. Paul proposes a puzzle in which you are to imagine that you are approached at a party by a charismatic stranger with whom you exchange a few minutes of flirty banter. He then says to you, "I'm a vampire and I think you would make a great vampire." He goes on to offer to make you into a vampire, telling you how wonderful it is, how you will be immortal, how you'll have super strength and speed, the ability to fly, and, like him, you'll be irresistibly charming. You have to admit, that all sounds pretty good, but you have some concerns. "What about the blood drinking? I don't like the sound of that. And I don't know if I can live without ever seeing the sun again. Those seem like a pretty big downsides." The vampire nods, "I get it, but let me assure you, once you're a vampire, those things won't matter."

I had shared my own version of this thought experiment with these young parents several months earlier. At the time, they treated it as a joke, but here they were, transformed into people for whom things like dirty diapers, lack of sleep, and a non-existent social life no longer mattered. They were, like all new parents, like all vampires, transformed.

The father remembered my story. "You were so right," he told me. "Nothing is the same and I love it."

I've spent my career around new parents. At any given moment, there were a half dozen or more pregnant women in our preschool community, and another dozen with children under 12 months old.

I told this father what I've told young parents for decades. "Listen to every bit of advice that comes your way, especially from your own parents and your in-laws, but only follow the advice that you feel in your heart. What worked for other parents may or may not work for you. What worked for other children may or may not work for yours. At the end of the day, you are creating a relationship between two people. My only advice is to explore being a parent as if you are the first to discover it . . . because you are."

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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!

Rivalry Games

A five-year-old girl complained that some boys were being "mean" to her and her friend.

I answered, "Oh no, what did you do?"

"I told them to stop it, but they didn't stop."

I looked across the playground at the "mean" boys in question. "It doesn't look like they're being mean right now."

"No, they're not being mean now, but they were."

"And you told them to stop."

"I did."

"And they stopped."

We stood looking at the boys for a moment, then she said, cheering up, "They did." Then the clouds returned, "But they might be mean again."

"They might. Then you'll have to tell them to stop again."

This occurred during one of our summer sessions at Woodland Park, so it was a collection of kids that had just come together for the first time. Some of them know each other from the regular school year, some from previous summers, but others are with us for the first time. I'd known the so-called "mean" boys for the past couple years, neither of whom have a mean bone in their bodies, but I could well imagine that whatever game they were playing might have come into conflict with the game of someone else. I'd just met the girl who had complained as well as her friend, a boy. Despite the tattling, however, it's clear to me that they are both sufficiently practiced in the playground arts. I didn't think they really needed me, but I nevertheless kept an eye on the four of them for the rest of the morning.

There was definitely a "them vs. us" dynamic. The boys were messing with the newcomers in a way that was meant good-naturedly, even if it wasn't being received that way. At one point a toy was mischievously taken, then returned sheepishly when it resulted in an uproar. The newcomers were firm in establishing their rights, even as the others seemed driven to test them. By the end of the day, things were more or less settled with the pairs opting to play distinct and separate games. The good news for me was that after that first exchange none of them sought my intervention. This is what they worked out on their own.

On the following day, we started with a bit more friction, although the negotiations tended to be carried out in more conversational tones rather than the raised voices from the day before. At one point I overheard the girl say, "Okay, if you don't be mean to us, you can come in here, but only for three minutes," a conditional invitation that the boys accepted with glee.

The day after that, one boy from each of the vying parties arrived on the scene earlier than their respective friends. They immediately fell into play with one another, the rivalry of the past two days set aside for the time being and put their heads together like old buddies. 

This was far from the first time I'd encountered "rivalry play." Indeed, it crops up regularly in any group of four and five-year-olds, kids banding together "against" one another, sometimes along gender lines, but usually along some other fracture like "good guys" and "bad guys." Sometimes there are taunts. Thefts are common. And, of course, there is conflict, which I think is often the real driving force behind this kind of play. Many of us adults have learned to be conflict averse, but the kids who involve themselves in these games, and at one time or another most of them do, seem to crave the conflict, almost as if they know they need the practice. I'm there to prevent violence, to coach if necessary, and to step in when the strong are victimizing the weak, but every time I impose my adult-ness onto these games I worry that I'm preventing them from learning what they crave to learn, so my goal is to stay out of it, while loitering with intent.

After a few minutes of playing together, the boys came up to me to announce, "Guess what, Teacher Tom? He told me that they aren't going to be mean any more!"

I said, "Right on!"

The boys stood face to face, holding one another's hands. They began to giggle while jumping up and down. When their friends arrived, they informed them of the agreement they had forged. To an outside observer the games the four played for the rest of the day may have been indistinguishable from the games they had been playing on the previous two. There was still plenty of bickering, badgering, and bossing, but now it was conflict amongst friends and no one was being "mean."

******

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!

Declaring Our Interdependence

We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin

Happy Independence Day! And “happy” is the appropriate greeting for this long weekend. The Declaration of Independence was the first historical instance of the word "happiness" appearing in the founding documents of any nation.

In 1776, 56 men signed their names to this radical document. As a result they were, without trial, proclaimed traitors by the government and sentenced to death. These were middle class people. John Hancock was the wealthiest among them and he was not even a millionaire by today's standards. The wealthy sided with the king. Most of the signers were working people -- farmers and tradesmen primarily. None of them left behind a family fortune, or a foundation, or any other kind of financial memorial of their lives. Our nation is their legacy.

Their average age was 33 (Thomas Jefferson's age at the time). The youngest was only 20-years-old. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin, who was 83.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, all 56 of the signers were forced to flee their homes. Twelve returned to find only rubble.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, 17 of them were wiped out financially by the British government.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, many of them were captured and tortured, or their families were imprisoned, or their children were taken from them. Nine of them died and 4 of them lost their children.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, as I do each July 4, I find myself in awe of their courage. They were all aware of the likely consequences, but they did what they knew must be done. Two centuries later, I still feel the outrage they must have felt as I read through the specific governmental abuses that lead them to that critical moment.

Even more than our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the beginning point for the United States of America. I find it both educational and inspirational to return to the source before heading out for fireworks.

When Franklin was asked what kind of nation they were forming, he answered, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

I worry at times that we won't be able to keep it, that, in fact, we've already lost it. I worry that too many of us have declared our independence not from tyrants, but from one another, not understanding that in creating a constitutional government of, by, and for we the people, we were also declaring our interdependence.

At the signing to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin famously said, "We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately." 

And while we come together this weekend to commemorate our independence from tyranny, this is also a day for embracing our fellow countrymen, for celebrating our interdependence. In that direction lies happiness.

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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!

Turtles All the Way Down

There are versions of the World Turtle story that can be traced to ancient Hindu mythology. The following version, which is most certainly a fabrication, is from J.R. Ross who associates it with the psychologist and philosopher William James. Upon finishing a public lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a "little old lady."

"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.

"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.

"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."

"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,

"It's no use, Mr. James—it's turtles all the way down."

This story has been used to make points about everything from the tension between faith and science, to the futility of argument and persuasion, to the so-called "problem of infinite regress." Lately, I've been thinking about in terms of one of the most current theories about the nature of consciousness. Usually called the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), it posits that everything in the universe, right down to the smallest particle is conscious, even if ever so faintly. The degree of consciousness within a system -- like a human being -- can be measured by how well the system integrates these tiny amounts of consciousness into the singular experience of reality.  

I've read two full books on this theory and still don't fully understand it, and the theorists themselves can't explain how this integration results in conscious experience (it's not called the "hard problem" for nothing), but what it amounts to, it seems to me, is that it's consciousness all the way down.

IIT is likely a passing fad. Theories about consciousness come and go, often inspired by our latest technologies. René Descarte, one of the towering figures in all of science, was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens and developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain. 

Neuroscientist Patrick House writes, "It is often said . . . that theories of how the brain works latch on to whatever complicated technology or idea exists at the time. Hence, we got steam-based theories of the brain in the eighteenth century, loom-based theories in the twentieth, computational theories in the twentieth, computational theories in the twentieth, and quantum-computing-based theories in the twenty-first . . . Considered in the inverse, these criticisms represent a remarkable fact about nature. It implies that no matter how complicated a discovery we make, we find out shortly afterward that nature has already both known and taken advantage of the phenomenon. 

"Long before Newton discovered the laws of gravity, our muscles stretched in calculated attempts to defy it and our eyes tracked objects as arcs in the sky, which accelerated somewhere around ten meters per second squared. Long before we understood Earth’s magnetic field lines, birds and butterflies were using them to migrate, etc . . . One can only imagine what else brains might harness from the universe as future scientific fields that we have not discovered yet."

Of course, our species has had only had about 300,000 years to figure things out. In a universe that's 13.8 billion years old, and still inventing itself, it stands to reason that we are an infinitely long way from comprehending more than a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. It's humbling to consider, especially as an educator of young children who often show themselves to be closer to the core of the matter than all the scientists, theologians, and philosophers combined. It often seems like pure arrogance to think that I have anything truly important to teach these humans. 

What I've learned from the culture of childhood, the one that emerges when they are allowed to step away from our self-important nagging and instruction, is that to engage reality through wonder, awe, and play -- to feel too deeply, to laugh too loudly, and to love too hard -- is the best, and indeed only, possible use for our very short lives. 

Young children, like the ancients, the butterflies, and the little old ladies, already know that it's turtles all the way down. The rest is an endless series of theories and fads with which we play until we either break them or discover a something new. That is education.

******

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!

"I Can Pick Up This Whole School!"

Several of the kids were taking turns boasting about how strong they were.

"I can pick up this whole table!"

"I can pick up this whole school!"

"I can pick up this whole world!"

As their claims escalated ludicrously, some of their classmates called them out.

"No you can't!"

"You can't even pick up a piece of paper!"

"You can't even pick up a piece of toilet paper!"

It was all fun and games, of course, no one was serious. Then one of them said, "I can pick up the whole loft." The loft is a two level piece of furniture that stands in the corner of the room. I recall that when it arrived, decades ago, it came, ready-to-assemble, in cartons weighing a little over 250 pounds. I tossed this information out there, like a loose part, "The loft weighs more than 250 pounds."

The boaster paused, looked astonished, then said, "I guess I can't lift 250 pounds by myself."

A fellow boaster said, "Maybe we can lift it together."

The tone had suddenly changed from one of one-upsmanship to serious consideration of a job at hand. They agreed to try, approaching the loft with their muscles flexed, but they were unable to budge it.

Not stymied, they called out, "Hey guys! We need help!" and "We're going to lift up the whole loft!" As more and more children gathered, I began to get the idea that this might really happen. One or two of them could never manage it, but dozens, working together, likely could. What was the worst thing that could happen? It could topple over and land on the kids. They could succeed in lifting it, then drop in on their toes. I moved closer. As the children assembled, I called a couple of other adults over and we quietly strategized how we could make it safe enough, just in case.

At first, even with nearly twenty children, nothing happened. Their efforts were individual and uncoordinated. But they were still working on it. 

"We have to lift at the same time!" 

"We have to spread out!" 

"We need more people under the low part!" 

"I'll count to three!" "No, I'll count to three!" "Let's all count to three, then lift!" "Okay, guys, ready?"

They indicated their readiness with a sudden silence, then together they chanted, "One! Two! Three! Lift!" And the loft began to rise, all 250 pounds of it, hovering one then two inches off the ground. As agreed, the adults then stepped in and took much of weight as we helped them slowly lower it to the ground, cautioning about toes and fingers.

Sadly, this type of experience is all too rare in American schools, especially the farther one gets from the preschool years. Grades and scores and other assessments are individual things. Indeed, to achieve school-ish success in any way other than on your own is labeled as cheating and punished. Oh sure, there may be one or two tick boxes that rate a child's ability to cooperate with others, but no one takes those seriously. Teachers might assign a group project here and there, but we all know that the "smart" kids resent the "stupid" ones, concerned they will "hold them back" or not do enough of the work, taking relief in knowing that the grading, at least, will be individual. Working together to lift a loft, write a report, or solve a problem might be praised in the abstract, but every school child comes to know that at the end of of the day they will be judged not by what they have accomplished together, but rather by how well they compete against their classmates.

In school, to boast of one's prowess is no joke: it is the point.

People often try to make the argument that school must be this way because life is this way, but is it really? Yes, perhaps we do compete for jobs and promotions. There are some professions, like high-pressure sales jobs, in which employees find themselves pitted against one another, but even professional sports teams, like most employers, value teamwork above individual accomplishment. 

Even if we stipulate that the work-a-day world has certain competitive elements, that hardly comprises most of what makes life worth living. Most of what we do in our homes, communities, churches, and with our friends involves coming together around common problems, opportunities, or projects. Democracy itself, if it is to work, is far more akin to lifting a loft than competing for grades. This is what school, if it is to truly prepare children for life, should be about: people coming together to lift the loft.

One of the great American myths is this idea of a solitary hero who single-handedly saves the day, but it has never happened outside of a Hollywood movie. No doctor saves a life on their own. No engineer builds a bridge without the support of thousands. No community has ever been kept safe except by the actions of the community itself. No one has ever lived a joyful life unless they have spent it accomplishing meaningful things, shoulder-to-shoulder with others. That is what I wish for the children I teach -- a life in community.

The moment the loft's long legs touched the ground, the children cheered. Spontaneously. For themselves. Together they had done something that had at first seemed like an hyperbolic boast. They hugged and jumped up and down, saying things like, "We did it!" These are the best educated people on earth.

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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!

Making Repairs

If I were a toy manufacturer -- or a manufacturer of anything, for that matter -- and I really wanted to know how sturdy my products were, I’d test them in a preschool classroom. I can’t count how often things get broken the first time we play with them. It’s not because the children aren’t careful. They’re mostly under 5-years-old and they’re playing with those toys exactly the way they should be playing with toys, which is to say, like mad scientists, poking, prodding and seeing what else this thing can do.

Things break. It’s in the nature of exploration to test the limits and that sometimes means that things get broken. And when they do, it’s an opportunity to repair them.

Years ago, for instance, one of our bathroom sinks was clogged solid. A child had apparently poured a cup full of hard red wheat berries down the drain. One of our parents said that she would take care of it. The next day she arrived in class with a European brand vacuum cleaner that had a special attachment made for sinks. She’d never had the opportunity to use it at home and wanted to give it a try. She took several children into the bathroom and they blew those wheat berries out of our pipes. The kids came pouring back into the room cheering like they’d won a championship, then escorted their friends back in to demonstrate their handiwork.

One of our most popular playground "activities" was to gather around the workbench as I made repairs to our cast iron water pump.

The day, the plumber installed new toilets was a major event.

Books often need repair. I love that inexpensive printing and binding techniques have made it possible for small, non-profit operations like ours to afford an extensive library, but those 2-staple bindings are not designed to last in a multi-user environment. Fortunately, one of my predecessors had the foresight to purchase a special book-binding stapler, which I use to return loose signatures to their proper place.  

I typically start by holding up the damaged book at circle time saying something like, “Look what happened. These pages came out of the book. Now no one can read it.” I try to infuse it with the kind of serious concern that an unreadable book deserves. The statement never hangs in the air very long before someone pipes up with, “We could try to fix it.” That’s the cue to break out the special stapler, make a show of repairing the book, which is almost always followed by cheering.

We had 3 plastic pizza-wheel type cutters that we used as play dough toys. One of their handles snapped under the pressure of someone who really wanted to make sure he was getting all the way through to the other side. We had a long discussion about how to go about fixing it, settling on tape as the solution. When it broke again after a couple weeks, we opted for tape and glue along with the support of popsicle sticks.

What I noticed about this repaired dough cutter is that in spite of there being two un-repaired wheels available, this one became the cutter of choice. Sometimes they even fought over it, "I want the one we fixed!" "Well, then I'm next!"

Kids often bring books to me and say, “I’m reading the one we fixed,” usually showing me the page we returned to its rightful place, even sometimes pointing out the new staples.

It’s important that the children are learning that broken doesn’t need to mean forever and that sometimes, in fact, the repaired item is more valuable because its been repaired. 

It occurs to me that these are concrete examples of a larger lesson we want our children to learn about damage and loss. We can’t help feeling sad or disappointed – that’s normal – but we needn’t give-in to despair. Repair is often possible. Sometimes our “repairs” return things to a like-new condition, as with our books or a friend to whom we genuinely apologize for an inadvertent hurt. Sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, we can never completely return things to the way they once were, like with our dough-cutter or a betrayal of trust. We can still use that dough-cutter, but we’ll always have a reminder in the form of duct-tape and popsicle sticks that it can be broken, which probably makes us use it a little more cautiously than we once did, but we can use it nevertheless.

Of course, there are some things that can’t be repaired. We’ve taken apart enough old vacuum cleaners, radios, and other machines in class to know that some things are broken for good, but you never know what those things are until you first try to repair them.

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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!

The Present is Our Business

As a cooperative preschool, each family is responsible for sending an adult (usually a parent) to school with their child one day a week to work in the classroom as an assistant teacher under my supervision.

When I began teaching, cell phones were fairly common, but smartphones were still in the future. Even so, we, as a community, identified these devices as a problem for the classroom because they distracted parents from the job at hand, which was to keep the children safe enough and help them when they needed it. Our rule was that if you had to take a call or answer a text message, you were to let the rest of us know so that we could cover for you while you left the room to deal with your emergency. 

As smartphones became ubiquitous, we stuck with this policy, although things became a little more complicated. It's hard to tell a parent not to take pictures of their children doing remarkable or cute stuff. The smartphone made documenting through photos an accessible and valuable tool for educators as well. And sometimes the children had pressing questions that we could answer with our amazing pocket computers. Yes, there is at least as much power in wondering as there is in knowing, but there are also times when only knowing will do, especially in an educational context. 

Talking, texting, and scrolling, however, weren't acceptable "on the children's time."

Our debates over these devices, and screens in general, are all over the place. Are they changing the minds of our children? Of course they are. That's true of every technology, from fire to quantum computers. As Marshal McLuhan pointed out, every new technology (or in his terminology every new "medium") is simply an extension "of some human faculty -- psychic or physical . . . The wheel is an extension of the foot . . . the book is an extension of the eye . . . clothing, an extension of the skin . . . electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system." Our modern devices are definitely changing us because they take certain of our abilities and turn them into superpowers. 

And yes, for every superpower we embrace, we lose whatever it was we relied on before. The composer John Phillip Sousa was concerned that the advent of recorded music would mean that average people would no longer learn to make their own music . . . And he was right. Far fewer of us can play musical instruments or carry a tune than previous generations. "The discovery of the alphabet," worried Socrates, "will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because the will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves . . . You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." . . . And he was right, most of us no longer have memories capable to holding, say, the entirely of Homer, as was common in Ancient Greece.

This is the story of technology. Hopefully, we gain more than we lose as we adopt and adapt, but we'll never really know until we've already become something new. And this will be true of such things as the smartphone as well.

That said, one concerning impact of smartphones is that adults are not talking to babies as much as they did in the pre-smartphone era. A recent study found a significant association between maternal phone use and a reduction the amount of speech infants were exposed to. "Overall, researchers found that phone use was linked to a 16% decrease in maternal speech directed toward the infant. The reduction was more pronounced during short phone use events of 1-2 minutes, with speech dropping by 26% during these periods . . . The findings suggest that even brief interruptions caused by checking a phone can sharply decrease verbal engagement with an infant."

This is concerning because caretaker speech is foundational to language development in young children and is associated with early vocabulary development. Smartphones, in effect, are taking parents away from their children for significant chunks of time even if they are physically present. That said, maybe it's not so concerning because today's mothers are spending almost twice as much time with their children than mothers in the 1960's and fathers are spending nearly 75% more time with them. Childhood independence, time spent engaging the world while off a caretaker's radar is associated with greater creativity, lower levels of anxiety, and enhanced basic skill development . . . So maybe it's not so bad that today's smartphone using parents are hovering a little less.

My point isn't to make a case one way or another, but rather to say that as important adults in the lives of young children, it serves us to remember that much of what people predict for the future, including scientists and technologists, is fear mongering and hyperbole. History and philosophy, I think, are often better guides when it comes to the future than these secular prophets. 

But more importantly, the children in our lives are not their future selves and our world is not the future world. Our children are who they are right now, living in a world as it is, and so are we. What they most need from us is to love them for who they are right now in the world as it is right now. The future isn't our business, even if it can be alternatively frightening and exhilarating to contemplate. The present is our business and when love stands at the center of it, the rest revels itself as little more than noise. When we know this, we can trust ourselves and our children. That is what we all need.

******

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!