What is This System Trying to Do?

When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home. I'd anticipated it. We live within the jurisdiction of a home owners association and periodically, when ant populations begin to surge, they lay down insecticide. Whenever they do this, within 30 minutes, the ants come inside.

Of course, they're escaping the tragedy and my home, being relatively poison free, is a sanctuary. Usually, they just mill around on the floor, but this time, one the scout ants, the ones whose role in ant society is to randomly search for sustenance, discovered the panty, and specifically the dog treats and a package of shelled pistachios that had not been fully resealed. 

I'm not a fan of swarms of ants inside my home, and especially in the pantry. Over my adult life, I've had to deal with ant invasions at least once a year and, to be honest, I've come to relish the challenge. It's always an opportunity to learn something new.

I've tried all kinds of things over the decades, but my current approach is to start with Windex. I emptied the pantry shelves, tossed the fully infested food, then took the rest outdoors where I would later wipe off any remaining ants. I then gave the swam, their trails, and their entry points a good dose of Windex. I wiped the slowed ants up with paper towels. This does a few things: the liquid slows them down, the surfactants in the product interferes with their respiration, and the cleaning product dissolves the all important pheromone trail.

Ants are what biologists call "superorganisms" in that they are both individual animals and parts of a larger organism. The "queen" is comparable to the reproductive organs, the workers function like the body's cells or tissue, and their pheromone communication system operates like a nervous system.

When I awoke yesterday, there were still a few lingering ants, but they seemed to be aimless -- just a few scouts randomly hunting. Often, if I'm diligent for an hour or so, I can finish the project one ant at a time until they've "forgotten" about the inside of my house entirely. But first I fed the dog, who then came over to see what I was doing and coughed up a "little something." I saw it, but I was busy with other things for about 30 minutes. When I returned, the ant swarm had also returned to this meaty mucus on the floor.

What had happened was that one of those scout ants had stumbled upon our dog's wee gift, found it interesting, tasted it, then returned to the rest of the ant-body all the while leaving a pheromone trail by way of remaining connected to this delicious morsel. Back in the colony, it regurgitated its bite so the others could confirm for themselves that, indeed, this just what they needed. Then it was "C'mon everybody!"

I often feel like the preschoolers I work with operate very much like a superorgansim. A child will come across something on the playground, like an ant trail. They'll stop to study it, to wonder about it, to experiment with it. Then they tell someone else about it. Before long you have a swarm of children. I've often referred to the "hive mind" of preschoolers who have been together for a while. 

Some ant species focus on sugars, some on protein/grease, and some on both depending on what the colony needs at the moment. I've often had good luck with maple syrup and borax traps (the workers carry sticky sweet grains of borax -- an ant toxin -- back to the colony), but I knew that wasn't going to do the trick this time, at least not all on its own. I'd already destroyed the pheromone connection to my pantry, but the ants were clearly trapped between the outdoor insecticides and me. And they needed another find a source of protein. I would need to consider other measures.

My approach to ant invasions is to observe, try to understand, then adjust the environment in order to make it possible to live as much as I can in harmony with them. In fact, I usually don't even use borax in my "traps." Often I just put a pool of syrup on a piece of aluminum foil and place it along their trail between the entry point and the food they're after. When the ants are seeking sugar, they very quickly abandon the more distant food for the more readily available syrup. I then, day-by-day, sometimes even hour-by-hour, shift the foil in order to redirect the flow of ants until I get them outdoors. I will then move them away from the house and leave the foil in the middle of the lawn for them to gorge upon. I can then clean up the pheromone trail and that's that.

I gave this new swarm the Windex treatment, but knew that I needed to get them going somewhere else. Among the foodstuffs I'd tossed out was an almost empty box of Milk Bones.  I dug it out of the trash. They were still swarming it, even though I know that these individual ants, despite plenty of food, were destined to die. Ants cannot survive for long without a connection to their colony, any more that a human cell can exist once disconnected from the whole. They can't start new colonies anymore than we can regenerate our arms and legs. They cannot join a different colony because their chemistry identifies them as part of a rival and marks them for death. They may have survived on those Milk Bones and other garbage for while, but left where they were, they were doomed.

I put the box of Milk Bones against a wall outside my home, closest to their main entry point. The ideas was to lure them to a new, perfectly acceptable food source outside my home. I dusted the crevices with a food-grade "soil" comprised of fossilized algae (diatomaceous earth, available at my local Ace Hardware). This isn't a poison, but rather a naturally occurring product that can remove the waxy protective coating on the exoskeletons of ants. It can kill them if it remains on their bodies for a few days, but they are actually amazing at cleaning it off themselves and one another (grooming). The main function of the soil is to make things uncomfortable which discourages all but the most determined scout ants.

This morning, knock on wood, I see no ants indoors. Surprisingly, a check of the outdoor Milk Bones that had once been swarming with ants, was today completely ant free, so much so that I'm going to let the dog decide if they're still edible . . . I think I know the answer to that one! But I don't know the answer to my most pressing question: Where did the ants go?

I mean, they must have found a better/closer food source that does not involve my pantry and avoids the poison.

I regret that my process killed some ants. I am more upset, however, with the HOA and its insecticide program. Ants are not my enemy. They were simply escaping a habitat that was rendered suddenly, and ham-fistedly, inhospitable. That said, I didn't want them in my food or my house. 

This week I've written a couple of posts about earth systems (here and here) and how we're part of those systems. What I see when I slow down and study these ants, is a system, or a part of a system, revealing itself. I tried to approach this "problem" the way I approach my work with young children, which is to say, when things aren't going as expected, it's my opportunity to learn. These ants have given me a live demonstration of emergence, adaptation, and collective intelligence, which is what happens whenever we slow down and consider that we exist as systems within systems. The whole of evolution is systems adapting to one another as part of greater systems.

When we see the world this way, we learn to approach challenges with the question: What is this system trying to do? We can only answer this question through close observation, experiment, and patience. Then once we understand, our interventions can become specific, smaller, more elegant, and usually far more effective than if we, you know, just lay down a bunch of poison.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Is Play the Creative Process of Our Universe?

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle."

I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us that the theory of quantum mechanics, the core theory of modern physics, "does not describe things as they 'are': it describes how things 'occur,' and how they 'interact with each other'." In other words, our entire physical universe is not comprised of things at all, but rather interactions, processes, and systems, which is to say verbs. We don't live in a world of objects, but rather "a world of events."

The language of the Potawatomi people of what is today the Great Lakes region of North America, is a language of verbs. It's estimated that 70 percent of their words are action words. "When bay is a noun," writes Wall-Kimmerer, "it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegadmaa -- to be a bay -- releases the water from bondage and lets it live."

The people who brought English to the Americas didn't just colonize land. The Potawatomi weren't the only Indigenous people whose language and traditions reveal an understanding of the universe that Western science is only now coming around to embracing. Western culture still has a long way to go. Around the world, we find Indigenous cultures understand that humans cannot be separated from the rest of nature, that nothing exists without relationship and connection, that nothing can be thrown away because there is no such place as "away."

Our young children, if we avoid colonizing them with our thing-based way of viewing the world, seek to understand their world through relationships. Most conventional schooling expects children to categorize things like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and facts that can be tested. Play-based learning is much more about verbs than nouns: exploring, negotiating, building, pretending, wondering, arguing, balancing, inventing, and connecting. Learning in this context isn't something they acquire, but rather something they do. 

This is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed lately that many of my former preschool students have chosen educational and career paths that study the earth itself, like environmental science, climate science, Earth systems science, sustainability, and interdisciplinary environmental programs. These are all disciplines that ask about relationships: how to the atmosphere, oceans, soil, plants, animals, microbes, and humans interact? I like to think that their play-based foundation played a part in this. 

Play is how we learn about how the world works, how the different parts, the loose parts, play with one another, and we too are a part of it. 

In her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she writes of a "world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events." 

It strikes me that this would make for a good definition of play.

She points out that Indigenous creation myths tend to be about "trickster creators" who argue and improvise a world that is "never perfect, never finished," and, most telling, "never fell from grace." This is how I view the young children with whom I work, these natural humans, these creators, who evoke the entire universe as they play. 

Maybe what we see is that play is the creative process of our universe. I don't think it's a stretch to at least wonder about it.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

If We Want Children to Think, We Must Let Them Move

As you step onto a preschool playground or a play-based classroom, the first thing visitors are struck by is the never-ending swirl of bodies in motion. Adult visitors to Woodland Park have always stopped at the gate or doorway seemingly afraid to get in the way as children move from one thing to the next, leaping, skipping, swinging, crawling, jumping, jiggling, bending, and reaching. Even when children stop to greet the newcomers, they are in motion: kicking a leg for no apparent reason, clapping their hands, bouncing up and down. Sure, some of the children might remain relatively still for a few minutes at a time, but even the ones curled up with a book are bouncing a foot. Even the ones pretending to be a baby under a blanket are wiggling.

"Sit as little as possible," wrote the influential philosopher and notorious nature trail hiker Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."

A mountain of studies back up Nietzsche's assertion. When we move our bodies our visual sense is sharpened, our ability to concentrate is enhanced, comprehension is boosted, information retention is increased, and self-regulation improves. Cognitive scientist Sain Beilock even asserts that "(m)oving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our heads before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own time." (Italics are mine.) In other words, our bodies can know stuff through movement for which our brains aren't yet ready. And it doesn't necessarily have to be robust movement either: one study found that when people doodle while listening to a lecture they retain nearly 30 percent more of the information. By now, most of us know that our brains alone don't do our thinking, but rather our whole bodies, other people, and even things are involved, not just intellectually, but emotionally as well. 

Another great 20th century philosopher and psychologist, William James once observed that one of the best ways to overcome mild depression or ennui is to stand up straight, pull our shoulders back, hold our head high, and move confidently. More contemporarily, Katherine Isbister, a professor and researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, talks of what she calls embodied self-regulation. "Changing what the body does," she writes, "can change our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. 

One of the foundational myths of schooling is that we must somehow get the kids to stop moving around in order to focus, but the exact opposite is true. Some schools have even gone so far as to cut back on recess in elementary school in favor of more "seat time." The evidence, however, tells us that the more children move, the more clearly they think. This evidence is so clear and so compelling (and by now, so widely known) that the fact that our schools persist in forcing even preschoolers to spend large chunks of their days sitting quietly is outright malpractice.

What visitors see as they stand in the doorway of standard classrooms are humans whose minds are torn between obeying the adults by sitting still and their natural urge to actually think and learn through movement. 

What visitors to a play-based classroom are witnessing are humans in motion, thinking, and learning at full capacity. 

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

We are Systems, Not Categories

I recently learned a new word: holobiont. A holobiant is an animal or plant and all the symbiotic microorganisms living on or inside it, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. I'm one, you're one. 

"We ourselves are not singular," writes Rebecca Solnit in her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, "each of us, but plural, a cooperative community. About half the cells in our body do not have human DNA, and your gut, skin, mouth, and many other parts of you are populated places. These are the strains of bacteria and other microbes crucial to your digestion, immune health, and other functions, and they make you a plural being, a lurching collective of mutual beneficial entities."

In other words, we are no the individual, independent entities our culture tells us we are, but rather a system of cooperation and agreement, that is likewise a part of wider systems. Even our minds, this seemingly central thing that we often identify as our self, is created by this interconnected system of mutual benefit, a cooperative community. It would be more accurate to say, "We're hungry" than "I'm hungry." "We're tired." "We're stressed." "We're happy."

We've been taught by our culture to bifurcate ourselves from the rest of nature, to somehow see ourselves as separate, not just from the rest of nature, but from one another. It's a philosophy in which everything is categorized. "Categories," writes Solnit, "are the antithesis of systems, at least when the categories are deployed in service of an anti systemic worldview and of containment by conceptual and literal boundaries. A system is by definition in motion, connecting and circulating, made up of the flow of interactions and exchanges; it is a process of change."

And change is learning. 

I can't help but see a play-based preschool classroom in this description, the ebb and flow of children moving, connecting, circulating, weaving a web of interactions and exchanges. There are conflicts, of course, but there are also agreements. There are times when the system seems to become chaotic, but also times when it settles into the perfection of a bee hive, a place where we understand the true nature of nature, and that we, not me, is the central, ever evolving, unit of life.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Real Rigor of Play

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane. 

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves. 

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Play is a Perfection That is Not Improved by Gilding

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it."

He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans come into contract. In our efforts to improve upon Mother Nature, Leopold bemoaned our urge to build roads into perfect places in order to make them more accessible; to manage the plants and animals in order to create a more desirable "balance"; to construct facilities to make the experience of wilderness more convenient. We gild natural places with fences and signs and bear-proof trash cans only to find that our love is suffocating. We can't seem to resist the urge, as Shakespeare put it, "(t)o gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the rice, or add another hue unto the rainbow . . ."

Even the lilies we purchase to decorate our homes have been gilded in their way, cultivated to produce over-sized blooms that come in a gaudy rainbow of colors never seen in nature. Not long ago, I found myself among wild growing lilies, pure white with yellow-tipped stamen and instantly felt the difference. These were the flowers that have inspired culture, art, and literature before they were made tawdry in our efforts to one-up Mother Nature.

We've done the same with children's play, which is to say the natural urge to educate ourselves. For some 300,000 years, our species, Homo sapiens, has evolved an extraordinary intelligence through the processes of curiosity-driven exploration, discovery, experiment, cooperation, and invention. Play stands among the perfect things, yet alongside that has emerged this human urge to gild the lily.

We see this gilding in the advent of modern playgrounds and the proliferation of manufactured toys. We see it whenever someone touts an innovation by labelling it "play with a purpose" (which renders it not-play) or by asserting, "They won't even know they are learning" (as if children must be tricked into it). We see it in our classroom management methods which seek to replace the sacred urge to play with rules and curricula that require the application of external motivations like grades, punishments, and rewards.

Play is enough, especially in the early years. Everyone knows that this is when we are at our most capable as learners, when our brains and bodies are as facile as they will ever be. "They are like sponges" we enthuse and we are right, but it only works properly when self-motivation is the engine, which is to say, when we are playing. Play has evolved as a perfect mechanism for learning, yet sadly, too many of us cannot leave it alone: it's a lily we are too ready to gild.

When we build roads into a wilderness, we begin the process of rendering it less wild and therefore less perfect. Our intentions may be good, but a gilded lily will never live up to the ones that grow in natural places. Play is another perfection that is not improved by gilding.

When we resist the urge to gild and instead stand aside as our children play, we see a perfection in our imperfect world, and if we would keep it, we must resist the urge to gild it.

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Starting tomorrow! If you want to learn how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, the this summer camp is the place for you! The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think is a one-week exploration of how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes soon. Click here for more information and to register.

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!

"He Has an Irrational Fear of Pinecones"

Before I'd even met the two-year-old boy, his mother told me, "He has an irrational fear of pinecones."

This was important for me to know because there was a pine tree on the playground. And she knew it. I quickly considered how I should respond if she asked me to remove pinecones from the playground. Thankfully, that's not where she was going. Instead, she said, "I wonder how he's going to react when he notices."

In recent years, we've seen an uptick in mental health diagnoses in young children, especially anxiety disorders. The jury is still out on why this is happening. It may well be that society, the environment in which our children are growing up, is causing it (e.g., early academic pressure, technology, decreasing opportunities for outdoor play, and so on). But it's almost certain that at least some of the increase is simply a statistical phenomenon based on improved diagnostic methods and earlier intervention, rather than an actual increase in anxiety disorders. 

I've known many families who are grateful for their preschooler's anxiety disorder diagnosis. It gives them access to language, services, and interventions that genuinely reduce suffering. This is a good thing. 

In our role as preschool educators, however, we've all worked with parents who mistake normal childhood anxieties for anxiety disorders, or at least the worry about it an awful lot. Most of us aren't qualified to diagnose a disorder, but if we've been at this for any length of time we are experts on normal childhood anxiety.

Helping children through separation anxiety, for instance, is a beginning-of-the-school-year tradition as young people experience their fear of being without mommy, and then learn, through experience, that they can not only handle it, but emerge on the other side feeling more independent and capable. These sorts of normal childhood experiences in resilience, in turn, give them the confidence the next time they are faced with an unknowable and uncertain future. This is an enduring finding in both psychological research and practical down-on-our-knees experience.

Anxiety disorders are one thing and should not be dismissed, but typical emotional development is a process of repeatedly experiencing manageable amounts of fear, frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty -- and there's my point -- while supported by caring adults. We don't leave a child to simply "cry it out." We don't toss them in the water to let them sink or swim. We're there to comfort them and let them know that they're safe, to let them know their fears are valid, but ultimately allow them to discover that they can manage their own fears. 

There is a difference, however, between support and "rescue." When adults see fear as the enemy and all anxiety as a "disorder," they can often rob their children of the necessary opportunities to exercise autonomy, taking risks, solving social problems, and recovering from setbacks. At best, this sort of bulldozer parenting, in which natural opportunities to learn about anxiety are cleared away by well-intended adults, just pushes the learning off into the future. At worst it can lead to an actual disorder, which we all want to avoid.

It took the pinecone averse boy several weeks to peer up into that pine tree and, to his horror, spy those dreaded pinecones. I happened to be watching him as his eyes grew wide and his jaw clenched. He pointed into the tree and said, "Teacher Tom."

His mother had prepared me. I said, "You've noticed the pinecones." I didn't tell him that he had nothing to fear, because quite obviously he felt he did.

He pulled his arms into his chest and moved slowly away. Over the next several days, we talked about those pinecones. He showed me how malevolent they were with his hands. He described their fearsomeness with his words. He imagined that they were a kind of monster that was going to do something scary to him. The future is always uncertain and unknowable and this is what he was dealing with, what we all deal with, as we confront the world beyond the safety of what we already know. Trepidation, fear, and anxiety are all valid responses. It's what we do in spite of those feelings that matters.

By the end of the week, he was still worried, but seemed to forget about the pinecones for longer and longer stretches of time. Every now and then, especially when he was playing under the pine tree, I'd see him cast a wary eye their way, but then go back to his game.

Then one morning, after a wind storm, there were pinecones on the ground. He noticed them as he entered the building. "Teacher Tom," he pointed out the window, "pinecones." We stood looking at them through the window for some time before he got on with his play. When we later went outdoors he mostly ignored them. I even saw him kick one out of his way. 

A few minutes later he was tugging on my shirt tail, "Look!" He was showing me the pinecone he was holding in his hand, his face a portrait in pride.

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The way I spoke with the boy in this post is an example of The Technology of Speaking With Children at work. In summer camp we'll explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. It's not too late to grab your seat around the camp fire. Click here to learn more and register.

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!