Learning is Connected With Living Through Play

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey

People tend to have one of two responses when I tell them I'm a teacher. Either they say something like, "Good for you . . . Such important work," or they roll their eyes and puff out their cheeks in comic mimicry of exhausted frustration and say something along the lines of, "You must be a saint."

Neither of these responses ever strike cords for me. 

I mean, I've certainly been an important adult in the lives of thousands of young children, but it rarely feels like work. Or rather, it's the work everyone must do whenever other humans are involved, the work of being a human being living in the world with others. It's the work of relationships and community. 

That's not work, that's life itself.

What we do with and for young children, I believe, is vitally important, don't get me wrong, the most important thing in the world, but to say that creating relationships and building community is work is to take the misanthropic position that life itself is toil and trouble. 

Of course, I realize that these people who call me a saint are responding to their ideas of teaching, such as the widely held notion that schools are a kind of factory in which learning is manufactured like any other widget. Teaching, in this model, is the equivalent of being a worker along a super long assembly line, mind numbing, repetitive, with incomplete adults gradually taking shape over decades. And when we try to do it that way that's exactly what teaching becomes: hard work for both us and the children. 

When they say, "You must be a saint," they're talking about the other widely held notion that children are fighting against their learning and that it must require divine patience to coax them open enough to shove the learning in.

Sadly, in many of our public schools, that is exactly how it's done. These very people who misunderstand teaching as a manufacturing process, who view children as incomplete humans who fight learning every step of the way, are the policymakers and education dilettantes who are, bizarrely, in charge of deciding what happens in the classroom. Life itself, in this model, is something that begins at 18; everything up to then is preparation.

When we understand our "work" as life itself, all of that goes away. When we view children as fully formed human beings due the dignity and respect due to all human beings, learning becomes one with living. Everyone is still exhausted at the end of the day, but not because we've labored, but rather because we've lived. Labor saps our life, while living, well . . . It's living.

The work of relationship and community is the real work of a play-based educator. We live our days in the flow of life, connecting, listening, and striving with all our being to understand these fully formed humans with whom we find ourselves. And that's what the children are doing as well -- connecting, listening, and striving to understand. When we turn it all into work and preparation, we are paddling against the flow of life, and yes, it becomes toil and drudgery for everyone.

Connecting, listening, and striving to understand: this is what we all do from the moment we are born until the day we die. This is life itself.

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. . . And play is the mechanism through which children connect, listen, and strive to understand. It is our education instinct made manifest. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a 6-week course for early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, and caregivers who believe in the radical idea that children deserve an authentic childhood centered around play and wonder. Registration for the latest cohort will begin in the coming days. Whether you're new to play-based learning or are a seasoned veteran, this is a great way to launch you (and your whole team for that matter) into a new, play-filled school year. Click here to learn more and to get on the waitlist.

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!

Launching into a New, Play-Filled School Year

I started this blog in 2009 simply because I'd written a couple articles for Seattle's Child magazine that I thought were pretty good and felt they deserved a life beyond the recycling bin. That was the entirety of my ambition. This blog would provide an online home for these two articles. Period. They didn't have any readers beyond my friends and family, and that was fine because that's all I expected.

Before long, however, I began adding posts, inspired by the children as they spent their days playing at Woodland Park. It became a place where I told their stories, where I told my stories, and where I told our stories. As the only teacher in this school owned by the parents who enrolled their kids, I began to crave connection with other educators who felt as I did, who were learning from young children as they played. It took some hunting back then, but I finally found a handful other educators scattered around the globe that were, like me, celebrating play-based learning.

The cocktail of being a relatively new teacher, children at play, and these inspiring women, who to this day I think of as sisters, was a heady one. Our little informal collective began to inspire one another. We shared ideas and projects. We challenged one another. We one-upped one another. We had each felt alone in our play-based worlds, but now that we had found one another we began to realize that maybe we weren't crazy after all. In a world in which preschool was becoming increasingly academic and, frankly, hard-hearted, we were creating, in our own ways, and in our own corners of the globe, the opposite.

We were trusting children.

We were following children.

We were embracing this radical idea that, through play, through their self-selected activities, the children in our care were learning to be self-motived, to work well with others, to be critical thinkers, and, most of all, to love learning. 

Slowly at first, then suddenly, we all began to see our audiences grow. There were others like us! I guess I knew that something big was happening in 2013 when I was invited to speak in Athens Greece where a man who I now count as a dear friend, John Yiannoudis, had started his own urban preschool based, he told me, "on your philosophy." 

I have a philosophy?

When I met John face-to-face he confessed, "At first I thought, 'Who is this crazy guy in a red cape doing all these crazy things with kids?' But then I started reading your posts and realized that this is what I wanted for my own daughter."

John had organized an event at which I was the only speaker, scheduled for 6 pm on a Friday night, and the venue he had rented seated 400 people. Talk about crazy! When I saw all those empty seats on the day before the event I felt sorry for him. I imagined how disappointed he was going to be. There was no way, I thought, that more than a couple dozen people would turn out for this event featuring an English-speaking preschool teacher from a little cooperative school halfway around the world. 

When the day arrived, however, there were people sitting in the aisles. Maybe this idea of play-based learning wasn't so crazy after all.

Over the years, as I've continued to write, I've tried, each day, to share something true, something I've learned, or something about which I still have questions. And nearly every day someone tells me, echoing John, that they want "this" for the children in their lives -- play. Over the years I've received thousands of messages from educators and parents asking how to "do what you do."

This is the motivation behind my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning, in which I share my "philosophy," one that places the pure joy of learning at the center. In this course, I provide the details, insights, and reasons behind my unique approach to child-led, play-based learning, with the idea of helping you to develop your own unique approach, one that honors the children and families in your life.

My career as an educator has been an accidental one in many ways. I was lucky to find my way to where I am. I'm grateful to my readers, my mentors, my blog sisters, and especially the families and children who continue to inspire me to look deeper, to think more radically, and, ultimately, play harder. You have helped me realize that I do have a philosophy, one that has emerged one blog post at a time, one question at a time, one epiphany at a time. I've been sharing it little by little for well over a decade now, scattered over 4000 posts, two books, a podcast, and hundreds of talks. This course is my attempt to pull it all together in one place, not so that you can do what I do, but rather so that you can do what's best for the children in your life, which is, as always, to let them play.

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Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a 6-week course for early childhood educators, parents of young children, grandparents, and caregivers who believe in the radical idea that children deserve an authentic childhood centered around play and wonder. Registration for the latest cohort will begin in the coming days. Whether you're new to play-based learning or are a seasoned veteran, this is a great way to launch you (and your whole team for that matter) into a new, play-filled school year. Click here to learn more and to get on the waitlist.

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!

"Life, in a Most Fundamental Sense, is Playful"

The central idea behind Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution is that it is driven by survival and "chance variation." 

The survival part, and "survival of the fittest" in particular, is the aspect we tend to celebrate in popular culture, such as law-of-the-jungle reality game shows, sporting events, beauty pageants, and all sorts of other winner-take-all competitions. Our economic system is theoretically based upon meritocratic ideals (even as those ideals rarely show up in real life). We joke about handing out so-called "Darwin Awards" for acts of stupidity.

Of course, Darwin wasn't talking about competition, but rather adaptability: organisms that are most successfully adapted to their environment are the ones most likely to survive and reproduce. Adaptability might involve competition, but it more often requires collaboration, cooperation, and coexistence. I mean, without the bacteria living in our gut, for instance, neither we, nor the bacteria survive, not to mention the entire web of life in which all parts are interconnected. As Rachel Carson wrote in her 1962 book Silent Spring, "nothing exits alone."

The part of Darwin's theory that we don't think about as much are the random mutations and what they mean for us. There's nothing fair about mutations. Most of them tend to hurt an individual's chances of survival, but when we step back from considering individuals, we see a kind of trail-and-error process in which each chance variation is tried, and then dropped or retained, depending on whether or not it helps a species adapt to its environment. And our environment, which is likewise the product of this kind of trial-and-error randomness, is constantly changing. A crippling mutation in one circumstance, might be a kind of superpower in another. As the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is purported to have said, "The only constant is change."

I can't help but think about preschoolers at play in this context. When we permit them to engage life according to their curiosity, we see Darwin's theory, at least metaphorically, in action. Yes, there is sometimes competition, but most of what happens is this kind of trail-and-error process of constant change that characterizes adaptability. Children are drawn to novelty (a "mutation" in their environment). They experiment with it, they taste it, they feel it, they throw it, they wrestle with it, they hide it, they destroy it. We call it play and like with the constant, random, and irrepressible mutations that drive evolution, there is no goal or purpose. It happens because it is in the nature of things for it to happen.

As science writer David Toomey puts it in his book Kingdom of Play: "Play gives us a hint not of the nature of all Nature, but perhaps much of it. Although we can’t say with certainty what play is, we can say what it is like. It is like natural selection. Both play and natural selection are purposeless, ongoing, open-ended, and at any given stage provisional. In the short term, both are wasteful and profligate even to the point of extravagance. Both experiment, producing many outcomes that are useless or detrimental, but producing a few that in time prove beneficial and necessary. Both bring order from disorder, establishing basic patterns that are reshaped and reused, but seldom discarded completely. Both create beauty. Both hold forces of competition and cooperation in a dynamic equilibrium. Both employ deception. And both can operate without a material form . . . To many biologists, the best definition of life is that which evolves by natural selection. Since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may with some justification maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful."

Or as the late, great novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it, "We are here on this earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

It delights me to consider, from this perspective at least, that evolution is just the universe farting around. And it humbles me to consider that when I watch children play, I'm seeing into the center of how nature works.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Feeling For One Another

Not long ago, I witnessed a scene in which one boy began to cry because another boy, entirely by accident, knocked over his block construction. The second boy almost immediately broke into tears as well. Then, a third boy who had not been involved in any way, joined the first two. This was a textbook example of empathy in action: everybody feeling with everybody.

Most of us want our children to be empathetic, which is generally understood as the ability to not only sense other people's emotions, but to put oneself into another person's shoes. It's thought that through empathy, we are inclined to be more compassionate, moral, and cooperative and who doesn't want more of that in the world. Empathy is the basis for the Golden Rule -- Do unto others as you would have them do unto you -- which is found in every major spiritual tradition on Earth.

Most of the parents, caregivers, and educators I know strive to be empathetic with the children in their care. It may at times feel nearly impossible to figure out why a baby is fussing. Is it hunger? Pain? Exhaustion? Overstimulation? But we can at least all step into their booties when it comes to feeling fussy, irritable, and generally out of sorts. Indeed, that's often what happens to stressed out parents or teachers as we find ourselves at our wit's end while trying to "fix" whatever is wrong with our babies. In turn, we too become fussy and irritable as their emotion becomes our emotion.

We value empathy, yet when we feel with them -- when we get fussy when they're fussy, when we get angry when they're angry, when we get sad when they're sad -- we render ourselves less capable of being the supportive adult they need. 

In his uplifting book Humankind, Rutger Bregman proposes The Platinum Rule, which does not call for empathy, but rather compassion. He points out that empathy, feeling with others, tends to sap our energy, whereas compassion, feeling for others, does just the opposite. Compassion makes us stronger. What fussy babies need is not an equally fussy caregiver, but rather one who offers their arms, lap, and heart as an alternative, calming, and healing space. Instead of joining them in their emotion, compassion allows us to invite them to join us in ours.

I'm currently reading a book called The Light Eaters, by science writer Zoë Schlanger, that is an exploration of the controversial and mind-blowing topic of the sensory world of plants. We all know that plants can't see, but they are covered with photoreceptors (for the purpose of photosynthesis), which is exactly what animal eyes are: photoreceptors. And there are countless plant behaviors that at least suggest that they may be able to, in some fashion, "see". We all know that plants don't have brains, unless one considers that their entire "body" may act as a brain, which is what neuroscientists are starting to think about when it comes to human bodies. We all know that plants can't think, but there are countless plant behaviors that demonstrate intelligence, if not consciousness. We all know that plants can't speak, but there is ample scientific evidence that they communicate with one another through chemicals and hormones, not just to other plants, but to insects, fungi, and perhaps even mammals. We all know that plants can't tell time, plan, or socialize, but they exhibit behaviors that indicate, after all, that maybe they can.

Most of this is fringe stuff in the scientific community, although indigenous traditions from every corner of the earth attribute these "humanlike" characteristics to plants. Indeed, as Robin Wall Kimmerer so beautifully details in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Western science, one of the few traditions to consider plants as "dumb", is today, finally, slowly, starting to come around to indigenous ways of understanding the world.

My point, however, isn't to argue the science, but rather to point out that despite the possibility that plants are more like us than previously thought, we cannot possibly empathize with plants because we can't possibly imagine their emotional state. Even if they can see, think, and communicate, their internal emotional state -- if they even have an emotional state -- is entirely unknowable to us. The same is true for animals. And while we may genuinely believe we can feel the feelings of other humans, there is no way to really know what they are feeling. Empathy is theoretically about feeling the feelings of others, but in the end, what we feel is our own feelings, from our own perspective, that we, rightly or wrongly, believe coincide with those of others. This is why empathy is so exhausting: we aren't feeling their pain, we are feeling our own as a response to theirs, and now we, like the three boys in my example, also need help.

Compassion, feeling for others, has the opposite effect. 

The last thing those three empathetic boys needed was for me to cry along with them. As I lowered myself onto the floor, I said to the boys, "Everybody is crying." All three immediately moved a little closer to me. I said, "You're all sad now, but when you're finished crying, we can talk about it." Then I calmly waited. First one, then another, then all three moved closer to my calmness, although they were still crying. Soon they were all in physical contact with me. I'll point out that I didn't command them with things like "Come sit on my lap," or "Use your words," but instead trusted that the boys would begin to empathize with my calm compassion, my feeling for them. Before long the first boy managed to say, "He knocked over my building." This set off another round of crying from all three boys. I said, "You're all crying."

It took awhile, but eventually, as always happens, they finished their collective, empathetic cry and we were able to discuss what had happened. The first boy accepted the second boy's offer to help him rebuild, while the third and most empathetic boy, pitched in as well.

I'm not dismissing empathy. The capacity to feel with another person, animal, or even plant, is a powerful and important human capability. It is the thing that most clearly shows us that we are all connected, that we're all in this together, that we're not so different after all. But when we're ready to do something to help one another, compassion, feeling for one another, is the superpower we need.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Fighting for the Radical Notion that Families Should Have Time to be Together

It's odd celebrating Labor Day in this country given the war being waged against labor by many of the most powerful members of our society, and the outright vitriol coming from elected representatives who malign working men and women as nothing more than selfish, lazy, union thugs. At the beginning of summer, on Memorial Day, you will find no shortage of people stepping to the front to wave their flags in honor of soldiers who gave their lives. But at the end of summer, on Labor Day, these very people actually become the "selfish, lazy, thugs" they condemn, enjoying a three-day weekend of picnics and family time, ignoring the thousands who gave their lives so that they can enjoy a middle-class privilege, brought to them by unions.

Indeed the middle class exists because of the Labor Movement, although it's not surprising that so many Americans are unaware of this fact, and can be so easily manipulated by politicians with anti-union agendas, because most public schools have relegated this vital piece of our civic history to a few paragraphs in text books, if it's taught at all.

And just because you don't belong to a union, don't think that your life is not better because of the long fight in which labor has been engaged on your behalf.

The very weekend you are currently enjoying has indeed been brought to you by people who fought and even died because of the radical notion that families should have time to be together, that children should not burn up their tragically short lives in sweat shops and coal mines, that mothers and fathers should expect workplaces where they won't be maimed and killed, that they should not be beaten, have their wages arbitrarily withheld, or be forced to work 61 hour weeks (the average in 1870, meaning many worked far more hours than that) with no hope of a day off. Oh, these were great times for business owners, but they were hell for everyone else.

You can thank labor for your employer-based health care coverage, your living wage, your paid sick leave, vacations, and holidays. Without a Labor Movement you would not have workers compensation for on the job injuries, unemployment insurance, pensions, anti-discrimination laws, or family medical leave. You would have no "due process," living at the mercy of your employer, who may well be a good guy, but just as likely is not.

Wages and the standard of living, even for non-union workers, in states with laws that support unions are higher; states with union-busting laws have lower wages and lower standards of living. That is simple math.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow anti-capitalism. Of course, I see how a strong union might cut into corporate profits, but from where I sit unions are pure capitalism. Why can't individuals with a service to sell, be it teaching or steel working, ally themselves together to negotiate the best deal possible? I mean, it's certainly democratic. And isn't that what corporations do all the time with their mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships? If capitalism is just for those with capital, then it's clearly and fundamentally anti-democratic and should have no place in our society.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow selfish. I find that a singularly silly assertion. Really? Selfish? People getting together for the common good, sticking together, sticking up for one another, acting in the best interests of "we" instead of "me." That's selfish? Yet somehow a corporation seeking to squeeze every nickel out of the hide of its most lowly worker isn't selfish? Please.

I've heard people use anecdotal arguments that union workers are somehow lazy. I have no doubt that there are actually lazy union workers, just like there is laziness in every aspect of life. But you've got to do better than anecdotes to convince me. The actual research shows that unionized businesses are made more productive through reduced worker turnover which leads to lower training costs and more seasoned workers. The result is not only higher productivity, but better quality. Actual research shows that higher paid workers forces managers to actually do their jobs of more effective and efficient planning. Actual research shows that employers who involve union workers in their decision-making process see an almost 10 percent increase in productivity. Companies like Costco with a high percentage of its workforce unionized enjoy 20 percent higher profits per worker hour than anti-union employers like Sam's Club. Productivity statistics put the lie to the claim of laziness.

And as for the argument that union workers are thugs. Look at the history of the Labor Movement and tell me who the real thugs are.

I'm writing about this on my education blog because of the hits teacher's unions have been taking across the country over the past few decades. In fact, more than just hits, they are under full-on assault, and not just from politicians, but by the corporate "education reformers," who seem to find, without any evidence, that those rotten union teachers are the cause of our "educational crisis" (which in itself is a myth made up solely to serve their agenda of high-stakes testing, privatization and the de-professionalization of the teaching profession).

I am not a union member, nor have I ever been, but I'm waving my flag today not only for hard working teachers, but for all of my brothers and sisters who work for a living, who continue to fight for their fair share of this democracy, and who envision a better more egalitarian and democratic future for our children.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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!

Too Many of Us Have Forgotten What Community Is

I've spent my entire classroom career working shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents of the children I taught. As a cooperative school, to enroll children in our classes, an adult, typically a parent, but sometimes a grandparent, nanny, or other caretaker, was required to attend a minimum of one day a week to serve as an assistant teacher.

I would not have accepted a job in any other type of school. Our daughter and I had attended cooperative preschool together. When I observe more typical classrooms, I can't help but think how much easier and better the experience for both the educators and the children would be with more parent participation. For one thing, there's the math: our cooperative enjoyed child-adult ratios from 2:1 to 5:1. The simple presence of so many arms, legs, and laps meant that we didn't need to interrupt our classroom flow every time a child needed help in the toilet or with tending to a scraped knee or simply being supported through an overwhelming emotion.

Because our ratios were so high, and because it was presumed that the presence of loving parents automatically reduced risks of all kinds, we were in a position to develop and enforce our own regulations and policies. Even our insurance company left us alone -- not once in 20 years did a representative of the company feel the need to inspect our school. They just kept renewing our policy year after year no questions asked.

But, the biggest advantage of the cooperative model, from the perspective of a classroom teacher, was that I got to work as a colleague with every child's primary caregiver at least once a week. And once a month, we all came together in the evening for parent education, a time to collectively discuss our children, and the intentions, theories, practices, and practicalities of what was happening both at home and in the classroom.

When I tell educators in conventional preschools about our cooperative, their responses tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they sigh and say something like, "It would be so nice to have more parent participation, but they're too busy," or they roll their eyes and say something like, "I've had it up to here with the parents already." The assumption is that our cooperative must only serve privileged families and/or that I must be some sort of charismatic leader or saint or something.

The truth is that 20 percent of the families we served in any given year received financial aid to pay tuitions that were already among the lowest in our city -- $200-$400 a month. And while there were always a few families that made ends meet on one salary, most were two-income households. The children, however, were privileged in the sense that their families had consciously arranged their lives, often taking pay cuts or working odd hours, in order to spend this time with their children, in a community of likeminded families. Our cooperative was still not right for everyone, but the parents in the co-op were every bit as busy parents elsewhere, they were just able to prioritize their schedule to include cooperative preschool.

As for my own skills in working with parents, I spent my entire first year finding it difficult to even make eye contact with many of the adults in the room. I worried every day that I was being judged, that I would make someone angry, that I'd be accused of favoritism or neglect or not teaching this or that in the right way. And while I certainly received feedback of all kinds from parents over the years, the real sense of things that emerged, and continued to emerge, was one of a community, working together as neighbors and colleagues, under the unifying umbrella of caring for our children. Our children.

For me, this is the greatest beauty of a cooperative. Every preschool becomes a community of children, but a cooperative becomes a community of families. Like the tribes, villages and neighborhoods of bygone eras a cooperative becomes a place where we, together, share the responsibility, pain, and joy of performing the primary function of every civilization that has ever existed: caring for our children. Our children.

For the past couple years, I've been receiving feedback on my posts insisting on the parent's right to bully educators about how and what they "teach" in their classrooms, which includes banning books, forbidding honest discussion of certain topics, and otherwise insisting, as one person recently did, that "Parents, not schools, develop a child's potential." It makes me sad, this narrow focus on my child.

Everyone knows it takes a village to raise a child, but it seems that too many of us have no idea why. Maybe they think it's just about having access to those extra arms, legs, and laps, but the real reason children need a village is that, by definition, a village provides children with an array of values, ideas, traditions and perspectives, many of which differ from those of their parents. That is the strength of community and it is the kind of education our children need.

The children from Christian families enthused about the Easter Bunny, for instance, while the Jewish children insisted that the Easter Bunny was a lie. I once sang a song in class that included the word "hell," and not in a religious sense. As I sang it, one girl's jaw dropped. It was clear that in her family it was a forbidden word. She was sitting on her mother's lap, however, and I read her mother's lips, "It's okay in this song." Some of our families were strict vegans. Some were gay. We all had differing racial and cultural backgrounds. 

That is the purpose of coming together like this, especially in the early years. We're not here to somehow collectively learn to count and recite the alphabet; we are here to begin to move beyond me and mine into the wide, wonderful world of we and us. This doesn't mean that we must change our minds. It doesn't mean that our own family heritage or values or beliefs are wrong. It doesn't mean that the Jewish children must now adopt Easter, that our daughters will now start using the word "hell" as an expletive, or that everyone must become vegan or gay or melting-pot gray. What it does mean, however, is that we must learn to live together, and even rejoice in our diversity.

The sad thing is that too many of us have forgotten what community is, even as, at some level we all crave it. It's sad because it seems that too many parents have the idea that they own their children, that they have the exclusive rights to "develop" them, and that the children themselves have no say in it. And in a misguided attempt to exercise control, these parents have decided that they have a right, even a responsibility, to shield them from anything that differs from their own narrow perspective. They fear diversity, which is to say, they fear community, they fear the village, because, at bottom, they fear that they will lose ownership of their child. It's sad because that loss of control is inevitable. It will happen sooner or later and the more they try to control their children, the more they try to "protect" them from our wide, wonderful world, the more complete, ugly, and painful the break will be when it comes. 

The greatest gift we can give our children is go out into our villages and neighborhoods alongside our children, living and learning as they live and learn. It takes a village to raise a child, even if that child is an adult.

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If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! "Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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, Like Love and Happiness

Play is like love or happiness. We can't define it, but we know it when we see it, when we feel it, when we're in the midst of it. Play is likewise like love or happiness in that if you think about it too much, it has a habit of disappearing or morphing into something else. 

On Tuesday, I mentioned neuroscientist and psychobiologist Jaak Panksepp. He once conducted an experiment in which he invited people from various walks of life to watch video of rats interacting energetically with one another. He then asked them whether the rats were fighting or playing. The adults all called it fighting. The only group that correctly identified the behavior as rough-and-tumble play were young children. Play, again like love or happiness, is a matter of perspective. 

I'm not surprised by Panksepp's finding. Play, like love and happiness, can really only be understood by the person experiencing it. Adults are forever scuttling the games of children because they misunderstand what's happening or because they allow their catastrophic imaginations to get the best of them. 

As a child, I was one of a group of neighborhood boys who enjoyed playing tackle football. One day, Mr. Sain saw his son John, a slightly older and larger boy, dragging a half dozen of us along as we attempted to bring him down. Mr. Sain, on behalf of the entire neighborhood, banned tackle football for all of us. Obviously, he worried that John was going to injure one of us little kids, but he was already too late for that. We already knew that it hurt to attempt to tackle John. We also knew that if we worked together, if we hung on tenaciously enough, we could bring him down. We knew what we were doing was play and we knew that pain was a possible, even likely, consequence of this rough-and-tumble game. Mr. Sain may have saved us a few bumps and bruises, but he robbed us of the joy of successfully tackling John, while John was robbed of the joy of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. As well-intended adults often do, Mr. Sain taught us about "touch" football and "flag" football (non-tackling versions of the game). We tried them, but ultimately moved our game to yards that weren't in sight of the Sain's front windows.

Play, like love and happiness, are states that are achieved and understood through doing rather than through contemplation or study, especially from the outside looking in.

I once taught a group of four and five year old girls who called themselves "Mean Sisters." Their game was, frankly, ugly. They bossed one another around, excluded one another, and even sometimes called one another names. "Let's play Mean Sisters," they would invite one another, agreeing, then find a corner where adult eyes couldn't see them. They often spoke in whispers so that adult ears couldn't hear them. They knew from experience that we were all potential Mr. Sains, adults inclined to put the kibosh on their game. At first, I tried to divert them into more savory play, but whenever I stepped in with my adult observations or ideas or admonishments, they would stop, look at me in collective exasperation, and say, "Teacher Tom, we're just pretending." As you can imagine, the Mean Girls were a subject of much concern and speculation amongst us adults, but ultimately all we really understood was that these girls were all choosing, again and again, to play this game in which they knew that pain was a possible, even likely, consequence.

As important adults in the lives of young children, job number one is to keep them safe, so we step in when we think we see violence or bullying. Sadly, as Panksepp's experiment illustrates, we're not always very good at telling the difference between actual violence and bullying and play violence and bullying. We fear that they will be physically or emotionally hurt. Beyond that, our catastrophic imaginations cause us to fear that if we allow these games to continue, that they will grow up to be violent bullies and we want them to learn just the opposite lessons about life.

But here's the challenge: the world beyond the walls of our preschools is one in which violence and bullying are a reality. One thing we think we know about play is that it is the mechanism through which we've evolved to process what we encounter in our world and by which we practice the skills and habits that will allow us to navigate a world in which everything isn't all play, love, and happiness. As evolutionary biologists see it, this kind of play is the primary way that animals learn about altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, and fairness. By playing with conflict, we are learning to be better people.

After all, how can we ever comprehend light without darkness? How can we ever comprehend love without hate? How can we ever comprehend happiness without sadness? Play is the way we've evolved to explore life from all sides, including, and especially, the perspective of others. As boys playing tackle football with a bigger boy, we were learning, amongst other things, how to work together. As Mean Sisters, the girls were learning, amongst other things, how it feels from both sides. This is how play works . . . like love and happiness.

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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders (like Lenore!) useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast by clicking here or finding us anywhere you download your podcasts.

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