Ridiculous And Sublime

On this Friday, I thought I'd share a couple of lighter side videos that are making the rounds. The first wonders what it would be like if we treated teachers like we do sports stars.

As a sports fan and occasional ESPN watcher, I found this hilarious, even if they do talk a lot about test scores, but I think that can be forgiven. Of course, it did also occur to me that if we really did treat teachers like this, if we recruited them, paid huge salaries, and hyped them up into household names, we would then attract the kinds of people into the profession for whom these things are important. Then those of us who are currently teachers would be forced to become attorneys.

This next video is more on the sublime side. I'm actually not at all surprised that the Vancouver cops discovered this great, heartwarming truth about their fellow citizens. I think we sometimes forget that the bad guys are genuinely few and far between. Most of us are compassionate, helpful, and caring.




Have a great weekend!

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Each Of Them Is Perfect

I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t even hold a degree in early childhood education. I’m just a guy who has gotten to know a lot of young children.

I’ve never met a child who isn’t a perfect specimen of the human species. Some are startled by every sudden movement or noise. Some are oblivious to jackhammers. Some can’t focus on anything for more than a few seconds at a time. Some can lose themselves in contemplation of a mote. Some can scale the sides of a building. Some sit on their bottoms to scoot down the stairs. Some know the names of all the dinosaurs. Some barely know their own names. And each of them is perfect.

I’m speaking scientifically.

We live in an age in which it seems everything outside the norm gets a label. There are so many “conditions,” “disorders,” and “syndromes,” it’s impossible to keep track. All of the kids I've ever known could be placed along one “spectrum” or another: ADD/ADHD, gifted, sensory processing disorder, and autism are among the most common these days, but there are dozens of others we hang on our kids.

Name calling is never okay, and too often, that’s what this is. These diagnosies are medical or academic terms, used by professionals to help guide them through the literature related to specific symptoms and behaviors. In the mouths of the rest of us, it’s name calling. None of us really know what we’re talking about when it comes to this stuff. Indeed, there is the occasional parent who has studied up on a subject because a label’s been hung on her child, and I give her credit for her expertise insofar as her individual, beloved child is concerned, but not much beyond that. Young children are all so different, especially as preschoolers whose development is notoriously “spikey,” it’s impossible for us laypeople to generalize from one child to the next.

Every child arrives in the world as an amazing collection of biological tendencies and potentials. When we teach, we strive through our love and attention to shape those tendencies and potentials. Setting labels aside, what scientists are really telling us is that every child processes information differently, and it’s our job as teachers to figure out how to best teach each child as an individual, not according to stereotypes.

Many children, for instance, need to use their whole bodies to learn, fidgeting around, sticking their noses into this place and that, almost as if they’re hunting for knowledge, which is what author Thom Hartmann (author of 8 books on the topic) says is the core characteristic of people who are often labeled with ADD or ADHD. He theorizes that this is left over from our ancestral hunter-gatherer instincts and it often shows up as a problem in our contemporary “industrial” society. The problem isn’t with the kids. The problem is that we try to get them to sit in desks, facing forward, and learn with just their ears and eyes. These children instinctively know it’s an inferior way for them to learn, so they “rebel” by insisting on learning the way best suited to them and that shows up as a "problem."

Traditional schools with one teacher and 20+ students have a hard time serving these kids, so the children are too often made to fit the traditional school through interventions or medication. Nearly 20 percent of high school aged boys has been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD and one in ten are on drugs that purport to treat the symptoms. That tells me that the problem is more likely with schools than with kids.

Other children have brains ready-made for understanding the physical and theoretical world through its patterns and policies. They readily comprehend order, repetition, consistency, and rules. We often call them “geniuses" (which is a loaded label in its own right). I once sat beside one of these pattern-seeking boys watching other children playing pirates and mermaids on and around a pirate ship built from blocks. He watched thoughtfully for a time, then leaned over to me and asked, “Is this pretend?” This boy upon whom the label “gifted” could easily have been hung, spent his free-play time deftly organizing small objects by size and color, working puzzles, and counting anything and everything, but the behavior of his peers was often a mystery.

Some of their brains crackle with the mathematical foundations of patterns and sequencing, but struggle with the parts of life that involve comprehending the unpredictable complexities of the other human beings, especially their preschool-aged peers. Traditional schools with one teacher and 20+ students have a hard time serving these kids, so they are often ghetto-ized in “gifted” programs full of other children who are equally confused by human behavior or, worse yet, promoted to higher grades where their peers are on an entirely different social plane.

We find other children who sometimes seem locked up within themselves, and often miss the emotional and social cues that other kids more readily interpret. They want to make friends, but struggle to communicate appropriately, not instinctively comprehending the importance of eye contact, proximity, or facial expressions. They might even display behaviors that strike us as awkward, or even bizarre. The labels of “autistic," “Aspergers,” or even “obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)” are whispered about them.

Traditional schools struggle to serve these kids as well, and like the children upon whom is hung the “gifted” label, these children find themselves segregated, very often into programs full of children with similar challenges. How does one ever learn social skills in that kind of environment? These are skills that can only be learned through practice.

At one time or another every child demonstrates symptoms of ADD/ADHD, giftedness, autism and all the other syndromes and conditions out there. I’m not saying these labels don’t refer to real phenomenon, but rather that the “symptoms” are also all part of the normal range of behavior found in a preschool classroom. Because we are a cooperative preschool, with a plentitude of engaged adults at hand, our Woodland Park community represents a good model for accommodating and incorporating these various methods of processing information. We have the ability to work with these children within a community setting, without turning the entire school on its head, drugging them, or segregating them according to their label.

We provide a wide variety of adult-monitored activities for when children need to bounce from thing to thing. On a typical morning we run 6-7 stations, each “staffed” by an adult, and the children are free to spend as much or as little time as they want at each of them. They can sit or they can stand. They can work alone or as part of a large group. They can be loud or quite. They can even choose from a dozen or so other options found around the classroom. And if that fails, I'm happy to go to my storage closet and pull out something else.

We also provide intensive one-on-one attention to the children who have an intellectual need to focus deeply. When a child wants help with a challenging puzzle, for instance, there is always an adult available to guide her through it. When a child wants to quietly study the way sand moves through funnels and tubes, there is an adult there to help hold things and to provide scientific words like gravity, erosion, or consistency. And when children are confused by the behavior of their peers, there’s an adult available to provide social words like sharing, pretending, and joking.

We also have the manpower to provide on-the-spot, individualized coaching when children are struggling with how to appropriately interact with their friends. There is always an adult available to remind a child to make eye contact, touch gently, stand closer, or speak more clearly.

In large part, it’s this ability to teach children as a group as well as individuals that makes the cooperative model so powerful and effective. Our community is not built so much by a teacher or a curriculum or an educational theory, but by our ability to aggregate and accommodate all the strange and wonderful differences found in these perfect specimens of humanity. We get to learn together and learn from each other. Both children and adults are taught important lessons about diversity and tolerance.

I strive every day to avoid treating any child according to stereotypes, and when one comes to me with a label already attached, I take it as a personal challenge to remove it. And it’s not just these “serious” labels with which I take issue. When a parent drops off a child saying, “She’s crabby this morning,” for instance, I set out to prove that label wrong as well.

I’m not saying that parents shouldn’t heed their doctors and teachers when they hang a label on their child. I’m not even saying that these labels, in the hands of professionals, don’t have their clinical usefulness. And I’m aware that there are extreme examples of everything that call for extreme solutions.

But out here in the real world, where everyone is a perfect specimen, it’s important to give all of our children the opportunity to be a member of a robust and diverse community, with all its awkward spikiness, and without labels. Whatever our learning style, whatever our strengths and weaknesses, being together as representatives of the whole world is the only way to learn about each other.

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"They Seem Baffled"

Yesterday, while cycling to school, I ran into a couple of Woodland Park parents on their own bike commute. They've spent time this summer with friends and relatives in other parts of the country, some of whom are public school teachers. They have also been heavily involved over the course of the last year and a half in the creation of our new Woodland Park kindergarten and, as a result, have been educating themselves on the philosophy of education and play-based education even more so than our typical cooperative parents.

"Tom, I'm sure they're good teachers, but they just can't get their minds around what we're doing. I tried to explain, but it was so far outside their normal experience that they seemed baffled."

Now, I recognize that I live and work in a bubble and that those of you who read this blog are, for the most part, inside of it with me, but I like to tell myself that we're starting to get the word out the educational centrality of play. From where I sit, the science is settled, children need free play, and lots of it, in order to become the kinds self-motivated critical thinkers who live satisfying, productive lives. This isn't something I need to "sell" in my day-to-day life: our classes are full because people seek us out.

It's conversations like this, however, that cause me to understand how far we really need to go.

Last week, a colleague excitedly sent me a snap shot she had taken of a paragraph she'd come across in a new social skills curriculum they were going to be using in her school, enthusing, "There's hope!"

. . . Teacher-provided fun, although sometimes initially labeled as stupid or childish, will before long win over the play-loving hearts inside our students . . . Scientists are very interested in the role of play in neurological development, and some researchers see play as a central part of brain development, one important way to build complex, creative, flexible brains that will help them negotiate adulthood. Whatever such research helps us decide, the positive effects of play and other kinds of fun seem to consistently provide us with students who are more interested in life and more engaged. We'll take that quickened state and convert it into learning. And when the learning itself is fun, we have all we need to succeed.

She was excited because it was the first time she had come across the "p" word in a year of educational reading and saw it as a sign of progress. And I'm going to take her word for it that it is, but if this is progress, we still have a shockingly long way to go. It's encouraging, I suppose, that they've got the message that play is somehow linked to building "complex, creative, flexible brains, but it's clear that the creators of this curriculum are baffled by it.

"Teacher-provided fun" is not play. Play is not a Machiavellian tool simply designed to "win over" hearts. It's not just "some researchers" who see play as central to brain development, it's most; those that doubt the importance of play are outliers. "Play" and "fun" are not synonymous, indeed, play is rich, engaging, serious, hard work, full of anger and tears as well as joy: as far as I know there has never been any research done on "fun" as a component of education and to conflate it with play is to suggest that a child's play is frivolous. And the role of play in education is not to use it as a lever to "convert it into learning," it is learning damn it! And to top everything off, the passage ends with the worn-out cliche that teachers need to make learning fun. Reading this, you would conclude that play is just the proverbial spoon full of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

No, play is how we've evolved to learn. The rest is just noise. I'm so happy to be living in my bubble where people are not baffled by this.

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Stupid Questions

They say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but I beg to differ. We hear stupid questions almost every time adults and young children are together. 

For instance, a child is painting at an easel, exploring color, shape, and motion, experimenting with brushes, paper, and paint. There is an adult watching over her shoulder who points and asks, "What color is that?"

This is a stupid question. 

Here's another example: a child is playing with marbles, exploring gravity, motion and momentum. An adult picks up a handful of marbles and asks, "How many marbles do I have?"

The adult already knows the answer. The child probably does as well, in which case, the adult is distracting her from her deep and meaningful studies in order to reply to a banality. Or she doesn't know the answer, in which case the adult is distracting her from her deep and meaningful studies to play a guessing game.

In a moment, these stupid questions take a child who is engaged in testing her world, which is her proper role, and turns her into a test taker, forced to answer other people's questions rather than pursue the answers to her own.

If it's important that the child know these specific colors and numbers at this specific moment, and it probably isn't, then we should do the reasonable thing and simply tell her, "That's red," or "I have three marbles." If it's not new information, and it probably isn't, she's free to ignore you as she goes about her business of learning. If she didn't know, now she does, in context, as she goes about her business of learning.

This is probably the greatest crime we commit against children in our current educational climate of testing, testing, and more testing. We yank children away from their proper role as self-motivated scientists, testing their world by asking and answering their own questions, and instead force them to become test takers, occupying their brains with our stupid questions.

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Thank You TV!

I'm convinced that television is, on balance, a negative thing for young children and, to the degree it has become our national hobby, I bemoan it's mind-numbing, fear-mongering, couch-potato influence on adults as well. I haven't owned a TV for the past five years and the only time I miss it is when there are sporting events I'm eager to view or when something historic is happening. But as for regular programming . . . Well, there was Mister Rogers Neighborhood, perhaps the greatest single argument in favor of serial television, and we would all be poorer, I think, without Mythbusters, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or Cosmos. And then there are those magnificent comedies like M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Everybody Loves Raymond . . . 

Everybody Love Raymond? Okay, so it really doesn't belong on any list, but it was while watching this program that I had one of the most significant parenting epiphanies of my life. I was in Santa Monica, staying in a hotel while working with the good people at Kid's In The House (if you're interested in viewing all of the videos I made, click here) to shoot a series of "parenting tips" videos. Since I don't have a television at home, one of the "treats" of staying in a hotel, alone, is to imbibe in the narcotizing effects of the medium by unwinding with some mindless programming before dozing off. I was not surprised, of course, to discover that there were a 150 channels and nothing on, so I settled on sitcoms.

This particular episode (season 7, episode 15, The Disciplinarian) was about disciplining the children with punishment and as the twin boys sat out a particularly irrational one, the adults debated. As they did, they each, one-by-one, wound up confessing their own youthful indiscretions, carried out despite punishments or the threat of them. In fact, they realized, that the main things punishment had taught them was how to be sneaky in order to avoid or get around them. In the penultimate scene, Raymond says to his boys, "We know that you're going to get older and you're going to do things and we know that there's nothing we can do about it."

There were some jokes and schmaltz after that, but that confession, on a stupid sitcom, was so full of truth that it blew my mind. When Raymond's wife Debra sighs in the final wrap-up scene, "All we can do is love them and set a good example," I realized that my life as a parent had changed forever.

Ultimately, no one can control the behavior of another person. No one has ever stopped another person from doing something they really want to do short of putting them in a cage. Our children are going to rip off their tops at Mardi Gras and sneak peppermint schnapps from the liquor cabinet, and even if we stop them today or tomorrow, there will come a day when we turn our backs or they get too sneaky for us, and that day will always be sooner than we want. We might stop them today or tomorrow, but if a person, even a child, really wants to do something, they will.

I'd rather my child be honest with me, to know that we can discuss anything without histrionics, lectures, or reproach. And the way to do that is to be honest with her and to fortify her my best advice. I won't get that opportunity if I've forced her to be sneaky.

Other than that, all we can do is love them, and strive to set a good example. And we keep doing that no matter what.

Thank you TV!

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I Still Have A Lot To Learn

I teach at a school just north of downtown Seattle and our student population is primarily drawn from the surrounding neighborhoods, which are largely comprised of middle class people of northern European heritage, although there is a sizable population of people of Asian ancestry living here as well. I don't think about race a lot in my day-to-day life and that's because I'm a white male and have that luxury.

I've taken part in several #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and protests over the past couple years, where I become immersed in the subject of race, where I try to shut up and listen, and where I become filled with the sadness and anger that are the natural human response to injustice, both overt and institutional. Then I get to go home and not think about it.

As a third grader in Columbia, South Carolina, I was bussed to a school in a black neighborhood as part of court ordered school desegregation. Most of the kids from my white suburban neighborhood were enrolled in private schools as a response to bussing, so when I arrived at Atlas Road Elementary School, I found myself a member of a racial minority, and had experiences that I imagine are somewhat similar to those experienced by every racial minority. Then I went home and returned to my unconscious life as a white boy in a world in which being white is considered the norm.

Scientifically speaking, race is not a real thing, but racism is. I am aware of my own prejudices, those knee-jerk assumptions I make about people I don't know based upon superficialities like skin color. I wish that I could always be color blind, but I live in a society that is obsessed with race, and I've spent my life marinating in it. As much as I intellectually object to racism, I know that I am, at least in part, a product of my surroundings. I don't think I continue to harbor those prejudices once I get to know a person, because then I have deeper, more concrete things upon which to hang my judgements, but until I do, I strive to guard against allowing my pre-judgements to slip into my behavior.

Of course, I make a fool of myself sometimes in my white liberal guilt, dancing around the subject of race, pretending it's just not an issue for me.

     Me: "You need to talk to that guy over there, the tall one with the earring and mustache standing beside the counter."

     The person I'm talking to: "You mean the black guy?"

     Me: (pretending I just noticed the only black guy in the room): "Yes, I guess so."

It makes me cringe to write it down, but I do this kind of thing all the time, just as I often find myself being overly friendly or solicitous when first meeting a black person. I so want them to know that I'm not one of the bad guys that I don't act like myself, which is an act of racism all by itself. I know this about myself and I'm working on it.

I don't think I'm self-deluded when I tell you that I believe I am truly color-blind when it comes of people of other racial groups, such as Hispanic or Asian or Arabic. Of course, I could be wrong -- there may be a whole new epiphany awaiting me in the future -- but my struggle right now is in overcoming my knee-jerk prejudices about my fellow African-American citizens. I am ashamed to admit it, and even if I am a product of my culture, that's not an excuse: it's on me, it's my responsibility.

I'm also ashamed that our nation is, in 2015, debating the Confederate flag, racial profiling, and the institutional racism that leads to black Americans being grossly over-represented in our prisons, unemployment lines, and soup kitchens. And that's also my responsibility.

My role in this is to listen and reflect, and as ashamed as I am, I am also grateful for our national conversation about race, one that I have too often danced around in my white, male liberal privilege. This doesn't mean I'm ashamed of being a white male, it just means that I know I still have a lot to learn. And learning this will make me a better teacher by making me a better representative of the human species.

The Nightly Show
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This Is Progressive Education

The single greatest influence on me as a teacher was my own daughter's preschool teacher and North Seattle College parent educator Chris David. No matter how many books I read or classes I took, I learned most of what I started out knowing by working as a parent-teacher apprenticing in her 3-5's class for two years. Our daily schedule, our songs, our stations, our over-arching philosophical approach to working with young children are all rooted in what I learned from Chris. For my first year or so as a teacher, I spent a lot of time consciously trying to be her. I found myself constantly searching my mental files for not only the exact words I thought Chris might say or thing she might do, but even trying to reflect her body language, her cadence, and her vocal tone.

Over time, of course, while I believe I've remained true to the core principles I learned from Chris, my teaching style has become my own to the point that I doubt there are many people who would observe the two of us and find similarities beyond the superficial ones of schedule, songs and stations. And that's how it ought to work, of course, Chris and I are different people. It is only natural to expect that we would form different kinds of relationships with the people in our lives. Yet we are both progressive educators.

The biggest challenge in communicating about how progressive education works, I think, is that it really can only be discussed and understood "in context." When guys like Bill Gates (who is the poster boy for a cookie cutter model of education) promote their versions of education, it's a much easier task because it's a one-size-fits-all theory with a pot of gold (in the form of a "job") as a reward. And like all "beautiful" theories (e.g., Marxism, libertarianism, neo-liberalism) it may be made to work in a small scale, well-funded, incubator-like setting, but it will always fall apart when tried out in the context of actual humans behaving like actual messy, wonderful, diverse human beings, and not the theory's concept of how human beings ought to behave.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ~Internet proverb*

Progressive education, by it's very nature, means different things to different people. To me, it starts with relationships among the people involved: the kids, the teachers, and the parents. Alfie Kohn writes, "Progressive education is marinated in community," and that has been my guiding principle since before I'd heard of Kohn, or indeed, ever really thought about progressive education. The factory approach to education that has been largely in vogue since the Industrial Revolution relies heavily on a hierarchical model of a boss-teacher to fill all those empty vessels with the information deemed important by those higher up the chain of command, which more often than not meant the guys who own the "factories" in which these kids were presumed destined to be employed. Up until this point in Western society, education had been a much more free-form, community-based (what we today might call "progressive") endeavor, but people educated in this way simply don't do so well in the mind-numbing repetitious factory jobs industrialists were creating. So even more important than the information they sought to pour into those kids, they shaped schools to reflect what they saw as the "realities" of the modern workplace, making it more about things and specific skills, and less about people and their relationships.

As it turns out, most of us don't spend our lives working in factories, but this rather radical (in the context of history) educational model has stuck with us, serving businessmen, but not necessarily children or our wider community. 

They tell us that public education is in crisis, a gross "Shock Doctrine" exaggeration, but even if it were true, the solution would not be to double down on the factory model, making school more competitive, more standardized, more hierarchical, which is what the Gates-lead reform movement seems to be all about. But, of course, what can we expect from these guys? As reader once pointed out: "Microsoft is just a couple of geniuses and a whole lot of worker bees." In this new age of technology, they still need all the "trained" cubicle drones they can get.

As I see it, we need to return to the traditional models of placing relationships at the center of education which had far more in common with progressive education than not.

When I look at progressive schools, no two are alike. We are Reggio Emilia and Montessori and Waldorf and forest and outdoor and alternative and free and cooperative and every permutation and mixture imaginable. My own school, Woodland Park, is even different from year to year, depending on the relationships that form between the children, the parents, and with me. As a teacher, I play to my strengths, as we all should. I learn from other teachers and other programs, of course, but ultimately there is no "progressive template," no one-size-fits-all. Progressive education is not an off the rack endeavor, but rather a community sewing bee in which everything is custom made. And there are no bosses, only relationships between people, who have equal rights and responsibilities even if some of them are "just kids."

That's the context in which progressive educators teach. When I write about putting children in charge of their own education, I'm writing about the struggle all of us have to "forget" our industrial education backgrounds and treat children not as underlings, but as fully-formed people; not as incomplete adults, but rather equal and free humans with whom we form genuine relationships. From those seeds we grow community, and from that a progressive education.

(*Note: Most progressive educators are familiar with this quote, or something like it. Versions of it are variously attributed to W.B. Yeats, Plutarch, Socrates and others. I've tried to find the proper source many times without success. In the days before the internet, we simply attributed common wisdom like this to "the universe," which is what I've decided to do here.)

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Transition Songs: Marking The Rhythm Of Our Days Together

A reader recently asked me about transitions, and specifically about the songs we use.

I've already written about how we prepare ourselves for transitions in a post entitled, What We Do Together, so here I'm only going to address the songs.

When I was twelve, I was the quarterback of my football team. For those who don't know, before each play starts, the quarterback, while under center, begins the play by calling out something like, "Down! Set! Hut one! Hut two! . . ." and the ball is hiked on a certain count. My coach then had me continue calling out the count, " . . . Hut three! Hut four! . . ." as the play ran its course. He said it was by way of creating a rhythm for the whole team, the way a drummer might for a band or a conductor for an orchestra.

I've never heard of any other football coaches teaching this technique, and Coach Donahue may have either been a genius or a nut, but I'm often reminded of those football days in my current role as preschool teacher where I find myself working to create a rhythm for our day, with our transition songs being a central part of that.

After laying the ground work I described in that previous post (same link as above), I often then stand with my drum for a moment, often several minutes, allowing the children to find me holding it. Some of them always say, in anticipation, "Bang the drum!" This then attracts more children. Then I goof around a little, perhaps saying, "This isn't a drum . . . It's a banjo," then I pretend to "play" a little Dueling Banjos. "It's not a banjo, it's a trumpet," and I pretend to play a revelry the drum stick. I don't do this every time, but quite often, pretending it's a trombone, a tuba, a harp, a piano, until a critical mass of children has gathered around of their own according, most of whom are saying something like, "It's a drum!" or "Bang it!" Other times I might pretend I can't figure out how a drum works, missing my target, attempting to stir instead of hit, just generally clowning around until I have a crowd calling for the transition to begin.

You see, the kids know what's next because this is simply what we do together and most of them are on board with it, especially since we've given them the agency to take part in how it works. Every now and then a child will object, but when they see their friends preparing for it, calling for it, even demanding it, they tend to set their objections aside.

The reader who wrote me, worried that she didn't have a particular large repertoire of songs, but I've come to understand that it's actually better that way. These songs, along with helping to create a rhythm for our day, also become a sort of tradition or ritual that bonds us together, especially in these times of transition. We really only have three transition songs, and we only need two, I just keep the extra one around, I guess, out of sentiment or habit.

This one is the classic "clean up" song we all know, I use this in our 2's class:

As you can tell, one needn't be a particular good singer to do this. This next one, is the clean up song I use in our other classes. I learned it from my daughter's kindergarten teacher:

As I did on my pee wee football team, I usually continue singing these songs throughout the time it takes to make the transition, sticking with the tune, while vamping on the lyrics. I might insert silly rhymes such as:

Clean up, clean up
Everybody, everywhere
Clean up, clean up
Everybody is a bear (jump in the air, do it with flair, sit and stare, etc.)

Other times I insert informative or descriptive commenting, while maintaining the tune:

Sally's picking up some blocks
And Andrew is hanging up the costumes.
Jane is really strong, I see.
And Franky is as well.

I don't worry about rhyming, as you can see, and it can make for some awkward phrasing, but no one cares but me. The kids just care about hearing their names in my song.

Our other transition song is used when I'm calling the group together for circle time. This is the basic "tune" (and I use that term loosely when referring to what I've recorded here):

The "checker board rug" is obviously where we sit together. I've developed a number of silly variations on this song as well, which I've previously written about in this post entitled, "Everybody Sit On Some Broken Glass."

Last year, the kids in our 4-5's class took this song over from me, rushing to take my place, all of them clutching together around my stool, arm in arm, singing this song to an empty rug, sounding like a classic hobo chorus:

Come on over to the checker board rug
Come on over to the checker board rug
Come on over to the checker board rug
And have a seat on the floor.

Over and over they sang it, most of whom had been hearing me sing it for the preceding three years as I marked the rhythm of our days together. Some days last year, singing that song together like this, was all we did for circle time.

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Charter Schools Are Stepping Stones To A Grim Future

I've been writing here about federal education policy for the past six years, mostly as a critic of the Dickensian corporate-style standardization of public school curricula, the scrounge of high stakes standardized testing, the ineffectiveness and punitiveness of "accountability" and "rigor," the de-professionalization of teachers, and the corrosive influence of big money. My views and opinions, at least judging from the feedback I receive from the people who choose to read here, are shared by many, but the one place I tend to receive pushback is when I write about the efforts to privatize our public schools, and specifically charter schools.

As Daine Ravitch details in her book Reign of Error, the endgame for many of the corporate reformers is to destroy public education as we know it, to be replaced by a competitive marketplace of privately run education enterprises, funded by taxpayers, but free from democratic control, in order to unleash "powerful market forces" (to quote Bill Gates, one of their leaders) on our children who will provide free child labor for what will be primarily for-profit businesses. As Ravitch points out, charters are seen as a stepping stone on the way to the grim educational dystopia they've planned for our children.

The pro-charter pushback comes largely from people who have first hand experience with a charter school they love. And admittedly, there are some good ones out there, few and far between, and usually of the small, non-profit variety, embracing the sort of progressive principles I write about here. The problem is that the way powerful market forces work is that the game is always eventually won by those with the deepest pockets, which is why these progressive gems are getting increasingly rare as giant charter school chains, with their greater efficiencies and marketing muscle, and despite their failure to outperform traditional public schools, come to dominate the marketplace, taking over entire school districts in some cases (see New Orleans or the state of Tennessee).

If you're still not sold on the downfalls and dangers of what has become the charter movement, I'll point you to Peter Greene's "Privatization Primer" over on his Curmudgucation blog, where he details what is happening, how it is happening, and why it matters.

And Greene's piece doesn't even touch on the con games, the racism, and corruption that have characterized far too many of these unaccountable schools. Powerful market forces are fine, I suppose, if the goal is simply to make money, but they also bring out the worst in people. And of all the horrifying examples of how public education is being perverted by private operators in the name of a greasy buck, perhaps the worst news is that one of our nation's largest charter chains admits that its approach is grounded in the theories of a psychologist whose work inspired the CIA's torture program . . . I want you to let that sink in for a moment . . . The guy whose work was used to justify things like water boarding, sleep deprivation, and forced feeding, is also one of the guiding lights of the KIPP charter school chain. It says so right there on their website.

The relentless Dora Taylor who writes on the invaluable Seattle Education blog, quotes from a post on Schools Matter:

Dr. Martin Seligman is the man to see if you have questions about how to turn human beings into compliant automatons with persistent positivity. His experiments torturing dogs in the late 1960s was seminal to the development of "learned helplessness," whereby subjects are pacified by repeated and unpredictable electric shocks that cannot be avoided . . . The subsequent "learned helplessness" exhibited by torture victims is countered by another Seligman invention, "learned optimism," which turns compliant human subjects into persistent, self-controlled, and gritty go-getters who will not let any amount of abuse or degradation interfere with beliefs in self-heroic capabilities . . . The Seligman treatment has been used by David Levin at KIPP to behaviorally neuter children and then to have the same children self-administer heavy does of No Excuses positivity in order to maintain high test scores regardless of children's home life marked by pathological economic conditions.

Seligman's work was central in the CIA torture program, a program, by the way, that didn't work.

So, you may know of a good charter school. You may teach at one or your child may attend one. When we write about charter schools and the plan to privatize public education, we are not talking about you. But please know that you are extraordinarily lucky and those schools are unlikely to survive for long in the dog-eat-dog free-for-all future that charter advocates envision. And also please know that your experience is not indicative of what the hundreds of thousands of American children who are now being "educated" by these soulless corporate chains must endure, many under the guidance of a man who taught America how to torture.

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!

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I Don't Know

When I was a boy, grown-ups were always asking kids, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" You quickly realized you had to have an answer, because when you replied, "I don't know," the look of disappointment on their faces told you they expected more out of you. But that was only when I was older, old enough to understand that they were asking for my "job" in the way adults ask one another, "What do you do?"

Preschoolers, however, usually just shrug because it's an unanswerable question. They're often not even sure who they're going to be after lunch, let alone 20 years in the future. For all anyone knows there might be a strong job market for princesses and superheroes, kitty cats and cowboys, so you'd better be prepared.

At any given moment we have dinosaurs and mountain lions in our room, bulldozers and fire trucks, ballerinas and race car drivers, personas tried on for an hour, a day, a week, a year, explorations in the terrain of "Who I am." The children understand that it's not about what they want to be as much as discovering who they are right now, and each time they put on a mask or a costume or just imagine it to be, they find out a little more about themselves and who they are becoming.

"What do I want to be?" is the wrong question. The question is, "Who am I and who am I becoming?" And it's not just a question for children even if they are much more comfortable with the answer, "I don't know."

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!

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Cities Are Our Future

An acquaintance recently informed me that she was moving to a beautiful place "just south of Portland," Oregon. She had been living in a city and was enthused about the opportunity to live "among trees and wild critters." When I asked if it was a suburb, she answered, "No, just outside of the whole suburb hell, but close enough to drive into the city when I need a little culture."

This is a "before and after" picture five years later. Our unnatural natural wetlands in the city look more natural now. 

I didn't say anything because her plans were already finalized, her old home sold and her new one purchased, but I sure wanted to.

Some five years ago, I wrote a piece that was intended to be somewhat hopeful, although it turned out mostly depressing, about our future on this planet. It was in the midst of the enormous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and while that disaster continues to exact a horrific toll, it has since been pushed into the background as there have by now been hundreds of other equally grim reminders that as long as we humans walk the earth, nature will never be what it once was.

In many places, the rectangular marsh ponds are now mostly overgrown, offering only peek-a-boo views of water between the native grasses, plants, and the trunks of saplings.

I made a commitment in that post to try to do at least one thing extra every day to reduce my own environmental footprint, and while I can't say that I've been as methodical about it as I'd hoped, I have, I think, contributed at least a little less to the disaster over the past two years than I did during the two preceding. Pathetic perhaps, but progress nonetheless. I now live in a "green" building, I've virtually stopped driving my car, and I've done my best to eat food produced close to my home. My next step is to attempt to cut sugar and beef from my diet. I expect to enjoy improved health, of course, but mainly I'm doing it because the production of both are, from what I've read, significant contributors to pollution. Please don't think I'm preaching, because I remain a huge "sinner" in this.

I'm an optimistic person by nature, a trait that is strengthened by the fact that I work with young children, and to do so without hope, I think, would be a sort of crime. In that old post, entitled "Unnatural Places," I wrote about a project here in Seattle to restore a small piece of the wetlands that once characterized the shores of Lake Washington. I held it up as an example of the kind of "unnatural"  balance we humans must find with nature if we are to survive.

This is another before and after from almost the same vantage point.

I've been back to check on this "unnatural place" many times over the past five years to view the artwork, for picnics, to walk the dogs, or on field trips with the kids. When we arrive at the wetlands, we are met by a team of docents lead by a naturalist. We divide up into groups to examine the plants and animals that have "moved in." Of course, we don't see many of these animals, but rather the evidence of their existence such as chewed leaves, nests, and scat, including, once, that of a coyote. Animals tend to make themselves scarce when humans are around. This past week I've been there twice. The pictures you see in this post are how these manmade, man-managed wetlands look today alongside photos from that post five years ago.

Clearly, this, in a very small way, is working the way we humans have planned, providing an unnatural natural place for us city slickers to learn without exposing what few natural natural places we have left to our trampling feet and polluting automobiles. I understand why it's hard for some folks to get excited about this sort of thing, why they see it as a poor substitute for actual nature, why they view the learning that comes from it as impoverished and second-rate. That said, it is the responsible thing to do. It is, for the foreseeable future, the relationship we need to forge with nature.

For too long, our solution was to flee cities, to move farther and farther in to suburbia, then ex-urbia, to have country homes and beach houses, pushing humanity increasingly into the habitat of bears and wolves and cougars, to be followed by roads, sewer lines, grocery stores, shopping malls, and gas stations, further destroying the very thing we were seeking to embrace. This is why I am today a committed city dweller. I see now that this is actually the right and proper way for humans to live, stacked up together, rubbing shoulders, embracing social, ethnic and economic differences, linking our fates together to build interconnected lives.

I understand those of you who crave natural nature, but frankly, you're killing it. We need you back here with us, working together with us. When you move "south of Portland," you push nature farther and farther away, and that space inevitably gets filled up with cars, roads, sewer lines, grocery stores, shopping malls, and gas stations.

The last decade has seen a trend of people moving from Seattle's suburbs and into the city itself. I remember when the evening commute saw most traffic leaving the city, but the tide is turning. There is a great deal of construction going on in our city right now: I recently counted 15 construction cranes from a single vantage point at South Lake Union Park. I can see a 41 story apartment building being constructed from my living room window. Indeed, there are thousands of new units being built within a few blocks of where I live and I'm excited for my new neighbors to move in.

I've become increasingly convinced that this, living in cities, big cities, really is the only sustainable future for humanity, and not just for environmental reasons, and the first thing that needs to go are the suburbs.

I grew up in a series of suburbs, having come to city life only as an adult. I used to buy into the whole "concrete jungle" thing, viewing cities as impoverished, crime-ridden places. I still know many people who feel fearful in the city. They'll usually tell you it's crime they worry about the most, but in most places around the US it's not the cities with the highest crime rates. In Washington State, for instance, as our most populous city, Seattle's crime rate puts us in the middle of the pack, pretty average when it comes to crime, whereas bedroom communities with names like Gig Harbor and Wapato and Moses Lake and Burlington are the most likely places to be victimized.

Honestly, I feel safer in the city than I do in the suburbs. I like having all those people around me. I can't even recall which city it was, it might have been Melbourne, a city of some 4.5 million, when Niki Buchan and I saw a young woman stumble and fall in a cross walk. Before we could even take a step in her direction, four other strangers were already there to help her up, dust her off, and inquire about her well-being. It was the kind of thing that only happens in a big city because we live so close together.

This area was originally home to a 15-acre lake. When the Lake Washington Ship Canal was opened 100 years ago, the water level dropped 9 feet, leaving "Mud Lake" dehydrated. It was then paved over to be used as a Naval Airstrip. These wetlands are not a recreation of Mud Lake, but rather something new, a hybrid creation of nature and humans. I live and work along the shores of Lake Union, another of these hybrid places.

I find cites, even with their noise and grit, to be life affirming. Yes, a city puts poverty, crime, and depravities of all sorts in your face, but all of our human virtues are here too: cities also show us beauty and compassion and tolerance. Suburbs, of course, house all these things as well, because there are people there, but they're too often hidden behind their fences, with the primary view into the lives of others being car windows and the fun house mirror of television, views at a distance that too easily breed contempt and envy and, most significantly, fear. The root of most of the world's problems is fear, and most fear is irrational.

I know I'm not going to change anyone's mind by writing this, and I will anger my friends who feel that Seattle is growing too fast, but when I look at humanity's future, if we are to have a future, it is all about thoughtful cities with increasingly dense populations, while allowing the suburbs to revert over time to the natural places they once were, turning them back over to the bears, wolves, and cougars. I imagine abandoned shopping centers overrun with vines, 5 acre parking lots growing meadows through their cracks, and former mini-mansions housing mini-ecosystems.

This is the future of the planet anyway, even in our most populous cities, even if we just continue to spread out until we've made this place uninhabitable for human beings, because nature will prevail. I'd prefer to think we'll overcome our fears and learn to survive, but to do that we'll need you, or at least your kids, to move back into our cities.

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!

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