Our Disconnection Makes Us Forget

During the pandemic, my wife and I have taken to referring to our dog Stella as our "emotional support animal." These have been the best of times for her. The three of us have pretty much been 24-hour-a-day companions for months now. When tensions have risen, as they do amongst humans, Stella has gone into action, providing expert emotional support by making herself available for connection, insisting upon it at times, refusing to be rebuffed because what she has to offer by way of emotional support is too important to be left to the moods of the humans. 

And, time and gain, Stella is always proven correct: when I give in and take her for a walk or play ball or massage her belly, I do feel buoyed. My troubles might still be there, but they seem a little bit smaller. She reminds me to apologize, to repair the damage I've done, and to re-connect. 

That's some pretty expert emotional support.

We all know the importance of connection, but Stella lives it. Wherever my wife and I are in the house, she positions herself at a physical halfway point between the two of us, ready on a moments notice. When we sit down to eat, she sprawls out under the table with parts of her body touching both of us. When we have dinner guests, she makes sure she is touching all of them as well. She reaches out to us several times a day, just to remind us that we're connected, forcing us to take a break from our disconnection, and to live a little. She is telling us, clearly, "This is what it's all about, you guys."

Am I anthropomorphizing my dog? Probably, but that doesn't diminish the deep wisdom in the emotional support she provides us. And what does she ask for in return? For us to connect right back with her.

Maybe you're laughing at me, but I think I'm safe in saying that most mental healthcare professionals would agree with Stella that connection comes before anything else. 

In the aftermath of the Teacher Tom's Play Summit, I finally had a moment to pick up the much praised bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her narrative opens with her own childhood and ancestral stories about wild strawberries. I'm transported back to my own childhood where I find a similar connection to the pine trees that towered over my South Carolina neighborhood. They provided shade, needles, bark and pine cones. We climbed them, tied things to them, and hid behind them. Birds, squirrels, and insects lived in them. Periodically, a branch would fall or be cut and we would get a closer look at life in the canopy. Over the course of weeks, we would play with that branch, building with it, harvesting from it, turning it into wands or weapons. When the winds blew, the pines talked to me, although not as loudly as the chestnuts and cottonwoods I would later know in my life. When it rained, they protected me, although not as well as the cedars and firs amongst whom I live today. When they were wounded, they oozed sticky sap, a scent so heady it made me light-headed.

Those trees were my teachers and, like with Stella, they called upon me to connect by speaking every language except the human one. Indeed, it seems that of all the things that live on Mother Earth, only humans need to remember to connect. It hasn't always been this way, but as we've moved increasingly indoors, as we've told ourselves the divisive fictions about money, commodities, and property, about competition, poverty, and war, we've forgotten the source of all knowledge. 

This is indigenous wisdom, this imperative to connect, with plants and animals, with rocks and soil and the air we breath, with water and fire. When I ignore Stella, when I'm too wrapped up in my disconnection to heed her, she persists. My disconnection stories try to conclude that she is simply being a pest, that she is bored, that she is trying to take something from me, but that's a false narrative. The real story, the story of connection, is that like the rest of nature, she is offering me a gift. She is offering me medicine. Humans, despite our self-aggrandizing narratives are emphatically not the center of creation, we are not the apex. Stella sees that we are in peril, playing on the ledge of disconnection, and she's there to pull us back before we plummet to our certain demise. 

I'm not writing in metaphors here. These are lessons I've learned from Stella, pine trees, and the rest of the natural world. This is the real education. It is connection, not data, not information, not a lesson plan or curriculum. Our disconnection makes us forget. It makes us, frankly, stupid. Connection is the only way that learning ever happens. In our hubris, we've forgotten how to learn from nature, replacing it with the pathetic story of direct instruction, as if our language alone can contain knowledge, that we can somehow measure it with numbers, that bigger, stronger, older people get to tell the smaller, weaker, younger people what to do and what to know. Nature knows what we've forgotten, that all knowledge, all wisdom, all learning, comes through connection. That is how the wild strawberries and pine trees teach us.

When we walk our neighborhood, Stella dives into it with all of her senses, following trails of scent I can't smell and reacting to sounds I can't hear, connecting, fully, and according to her curiosity. Connecting, connecting, connecting. It's what I see the free children do as well, those younger humans who've not yet learned our ugly stories about disconnection and division. They heed the call of Mother Earth: embrace and be embraced.

Dr. Laura Markham said to us at the summit, "Humanity's engaged this big experiment where we remember we're all connected." It's a statement of persistent optimism, one that for me echoes that of Mother Nature. When we finally remember, we will find that the wild strawberries are right, that the pine trees are right, that Stella is right. 

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The live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Laura Markham, Lisa Murphy, Akilah Richards, Maggie Dent, Raffi, Suzanne Axelsson, Peter Gray and the rest of us. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from this event transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!" To learn more and to purchase your pass, click here.

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

A Restless Sea Of Metaphor

Starlings are often called "the mynah birds of the north" for their ability to mimic not just other bird songs, but other animals, including humans. They have even been known to re-create the sounds of telephones, squeaky hinges, sirens, doorbells, and other common sounds they pick up from their environment. No one really knows why they've developed this penchant, although it's been speculated that it allows them to deceive potential predators. I can imagine that a hawk, for instance, might have second thoughts when its intended lunch barks like a junkyard dog. 

Whatever the case, starlings and other birds that tend toward mimicry, are constantly adding to their repertoire from their environment as well as learning from other starlings, passing down certain sounds from generation to generation, often continuing to reproduce sounds from bygone eras long after that sound has disappeared from their habitat. This means that a population of starlings that has existed in a single place for generations has become a sort of data storage system for elements of sound, perhaps even entire soundscapes, from earlier centuries.

I was thinking about this as we sat down to our Thanksgiving dinner last week. 

We tend to think of human language as simply a means of communication, but just as starlings can keep the past alive through their songs, we too, in a way, do the same, even when we are completely unaware of it. For instance, nearly every word we use, can be traced back to a metaphor. Someone sat at the "head" of the table. It wasn't, of course, an actual head, but a metaphorical one that derives from a time when there was no other way to describe that seat of honor. It's "like" a head, we thought, and so it entered the language, subtly shaping generations of humans as we gather together for a repast. Likewise, the chair I sat in had "arms" and "legs." We gathered together to be "in touch" with one another. Some of us had to "handle" a difficult relative or conversation. 

But it's not just when we refer to physical objects that we reveal our linguistic DNA. Our verb "to be" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word blu, which means "to grow" while the English forms of "am" and "is" have evolved from the same root as the Sanskrit asme, which means "to breathe." Even our fundamental word to describe existence hearkens back to when we had no other word for it so we resorted to a metaphor that reminds us to grow and breathe.

Our language derives from our collective experience as a species and has evolved as more than mere birdsong, functioning as a kind of organ of perception, a creator of reality, and a record of our evolution as conscious animals.

As adults, most of us, however, use our language unconsciously and because of this, I think, we often have a tendency to re-create a familiar reality, especially at traditional gatherings like Thanksgiving. We do it without thinking. We do it because this is the way it's always been done. And even when we strive to break away from the old patterns the ancient metaphors steer us back to the familiar.

Our children, however, do not yet know the metaphors we know. They are still closer to the creative potential of language which is why, if we can remember to shut up and listen, we find ourselves so delighted, often profoundly so, by the things they express as they seek to wrap language around experience and vice versa. 

In our current rush to make our children literate, however, we teach them at younger and younger ages that language is a dead thing, mere communication confined by immutable rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. We rob them of something essential when we compel them to, essentially, shut up and listen. It's a robbery that impoverishes all of us. Children are there to make the familiar once more unfamiliar, but the only way this happens is if language precedes literacy. Literacy is a mere workman's plow that bends our backs toward utilitarian ends, while language is a growing, breathing thing, a restless sea of metaphor, a cacophony of birdsong, that is central to what it means to be human. 

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Just in time for the holidays, even if that gift is for yourself, the full content of Teacher Tom's Play Summit 2021 is once more available for a limited time. This is 24 interviews with early childhood and parenting thought leaders and experts from around the world, including such luminaries as Lisa Murphy, Peter Gray, Maggie Dent, Akilah Richards, and the great children's troubadour Raffi. If you're looking for inspiration, ideas, and a deeper connection with young children, you'll find it here. Professional development certificates are available! Together, as Raffi sings, "Let's turn this world around!" For more information and to purchase your pass, click here.

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

Is It About Learning Or The Adult Need To Control Children?

Growing up, I'd get to see my Grandma Magee a couple of times a year. Sometimes we would go to visit her in Nebraska where she was a house mother at the Omaha Home for Boys. Sometimes she would come to visit us. She had a lot of grandkids spread out all over the country and my brother and I were the youngest. One day, we were shopping at Sears when I was around eight-years-old. As we passed the record department she suddenly asked me if I liked music. It was an odd question. Who didn't like music? So I answered that, I did, so she offered to buy me an album.

Now I owned a few small 45's at the time, kids' records featuring kids' songs from performers like Danny Kaye. This record department, however, was a real, adult record department, selling full-sized LPs. I knew nothing about this sort of music. I imagine grandma had scored major points with my older cousins by offering to buy albums. I imagine they had chosen The Beatles or Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles, but I had no idea who these people were. As a flipped through the racks, however, I finally spied a name I recognized: Johnny Cash. I'm not saying I had any notion of his music, but I was aware of him because I'd seen the commercial on TV for his namesake television show. Of all the albums in all the world, I chose Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin, a prison in Northern California, something I didn't know until I got it home and listened to it.

It was a bit of a shock to me. Up until that recording, I'd pretty much dismissed criminals as criminals. There were good guys and bad guys, but here was this man, Johnny Cash, who seemed to think they were actual human beings deserving of, at least, a good time, even if they were doing hard time. I couldn't believe the song he wrote especially for this concert, San Quentin, in which he, to the the cheers of these imprisoned men, channeled their anger and sadness with lines like, "San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell!" Over the course of the next couple years I listened to that album over and over until I not only knew every lyric, but also all the banter between the songs. I was young enough that I didn't even yet know what the bleeps were there to hide, but there was something essential about his message that has stuck with me until today.

"They say old Johnny Cash works good under pressure . . . But put the screws on me, and I'll screw right out from under you . . . I'm tired of all that (bleep) . . . I'll tell you what, the show is being recorded and televised in England . . . They say, you gotta do this song, you gotta do that song, you know, you gotta stand like this, you gotta act like this, and I just don't get it, man, you know? I'm here, I'm here to do what you want me to do and what I want to do, all right?"

I've only recently realized that this is what I really wanted to be when I grew up. And I've only even more recently come to understand that this is the kind of preschool teacher I've tried to be.

In my conversation with early childhood education advocate, author, and Teacher Tom's Play Summit presenter Lisa Murphy, we talked about the "the adult need to control the children." As Lisa says, "I think if everybody spent a little bit of time reflecting on that, quite honestly, we'd never have to go to any behavior modification workshop or seminar or Zoom meeting ever, ever, ever again . . . You don't need 99 rules if you're not trying to control the children."

I found myself reflecting on old Johnny Cash when Lisa told me about her first teaching job: 

"The first women that I was paired up with was a total control freak. I was new and she told me to get with the program . . . she scared me. She put me in timeout one time and told me I needed to think about what just happened. I got with the program . . . I drifted away from what I knew was best practice, even though I didn't yet have the language to articulate it . . . I had one tool in my metaphorical teacher tool belt, and it was "Kids learn through play." This woman I'm paired up with was like, "We don't got time for that." She threw my tool in the trash . . . So I fell into the abyss with the control-freak, poopy-face, laminated ladies." 

That last bit is the part that would have been covered under a bleep on my Johnny Cash album.

Fortunately, a woman named Cindy Scrimsher became my co-teacher, and she led me back to what I knew first. And no joke, man . . . I didn't know at the time she was hired to teach me . . . She walked in. I'm wrangling up these three-year-olds because nobody's going outside until I get a straight line. I'm going to wait here all day, and you're only wasting your own time. She (Cindy) literally walked up to me and said, "What are you waiting for?" I'm like, "Who are you?" I'm like, "I'm waiting for these kids to line up because nobody's going outside till I get a straight line. I could wait here all day . . . And she said, "What are they? Three?" In my head, I'm like, "Who are you? What are you doing? . . .  (She asked) "Why don't you just open the door and let them go?" I swear to God, I stood there for six minutes trying to figure out a reason why I shouldn't just open the door and let them go."

No one responds well to being told what to do, not prisoners at San Quentin and not children in preschool. We are the adults and they are children, so of course there are times, such as when safety is at stake, when we might have to put our foot down, but straight lines? Crisscross applesauce? Eyes on me? Zip your lips? That "crap" (to once more quote Lisa) isn't about learning, it isn't about play, it is about the adult need to control. When we step back and think about what we are really doing it almost always comes down to the fact that we don't have any reason beyond our urge to control children for not just opening the door and letting them go. 

When we try to put the screws to children, they always seek to screw right out from under us. It's the natural, healthy response to being controlled. It's the urge to be free and we fight against it at the peril of everyone involved. The secret to good teaching, says Lisa, is to control the environment instead of the children. When we do that, we become free as well, free enough to say to these free children, "I'm here to do what you want me to do and what I want to do, all right?"

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To watch my entire interview with Lisa, along with those with 26 other early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world, please join us for our reprise of Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these the presenters are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Professional development certificates available. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!" For more information and to purchase your pass, click here.

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

I'm Grateful For Young Children: They Are Our Best Teachers

Author and poet Diane Ackerman writes:

"(I)t probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, and enjoy nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly."

We live in a time of plague, and I don't mean Covid. The virus is called productivity and the disease it causes is an all-consuming sense of guilt or anxiousness whenever we take more than a few moments to remind ourselves that we're alive. Our busy, buzzing minds insist upon reminding us of the tasks undone and challenges ahead, making us perpetually feel as if we're just barely keeping up. It even visits us in our dreams, if we're ever able to go there amidst the tossing and turning. 

Some 2500 years ago, Buddha described our minds as being full of drunken monkeys and the loudest of all is fear, so it's clear that this plague isn't new. And it's a real pity because we've worked so hard over the centuries to protect ourselves from fear. It's unlikely, for instance, that anyone reading this will be eaten by a wild animal. You're probably not going to die in a war or from starvation. Present day challenges notwithstanding, our ability to protect ourselves through medicine has never been better. Yet still the monkeys shriek at us as if it's all a matter of life and death when really it's just about the relentless claims that productivity makes on our every waking moment. The monkey fear that we might fall behind.

Behind what? It's a question we ask about our children and their education, especially now with our schools reduced to video conference calls. I hear the voices of "experts," echoing through our policymakers, warning us that the kids are really going to have a lot of work to do to catch up. Too many children, even young ones, are hearing the monkey's shriek. Never before have so many children, even young ones, experienced the levels of depression and anxiety we're seeing today. The Covid pandemic probably isn't helping. To have experts intentionally stoke the fear-of-falling-behind in parents so that they may infect their children is outrageous.

No matter how hard we scramble to keep up, we will always leave things undone and that guilt and anxiety will, in the end, have amounted to a narrowing of what it means to be alive. As we sit down for Thanksgiving, whatever that means this year, I'm grateful for the young children in my life. They are our best teachers. They are not yet infected with the virus of productivity. Gloriously, they try too hard, are awkward, and prone to caring too deeply. They are driven by their excessive curiosity and that opens them to the totality of experience that comes from enjoying a nonstop expense of the senses in the only human project that matters: to know life intimately and lovingly.

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Just in time for holiday shopping, even if that gift is for yourself, the full content of Teacher Tom's Play Summit 2021 is once more available for a limited time. This is 24 interviews with early childhood and parenting thought leaders and experts from around the world, including such luminaries as Lisa Murphy, Peter Gray, Maggie Dent, Akilah Richards, and the great children's troubadour Raffi. If you're looking for inspiration, ideas, and a deeper connection with young children, you'll find it here. Professional development certificates are available! Together, as Raffi sings, "Let's turn this world around!" For more information and to purchase your pass, click here.

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

How To Raise Children Who Feel At Home With Who They Are

Sofia Minson

When it was time for our daughter to go to kindergarten, my wife and I were in a position to consider alternatives to our neighborhood public school. I was an involved parent, to say the least. Having been enrolled in a cooperative preschool for the preceding three years, I'd been attending school alongside our child, serving, as did all the parents at our school, as an assistant teacher. I'd also, by that point, decided to pursue my own course as a professional educator, so I made it a kind of hobby to tour the multitude of kindergarten options in Seattle, educating myself about models and theories while looking for the "right fit."

My number one priority was "fit." My earliest mentor, Chris David, a veteran preschool teacher, advised me, "Look for a place where your whole family feels comfortable." Her rationale was that most kindergartens came attached to elementary schools, so it wasn't really a decision of a single school year, but rather one that required us to look forward, in most cases, six years. Parent involvement, she reminded me, was the single most decisive factor in whether or not a child thrived in any school, so she suggested that I prioritize a place that encouraged parent involvement. Chris said, "Make sure to talk to the parents of the children already enrolled. Get to know some of them if you can. If you can imagine yourself socializing with them then you're probably in the right place."

It was genius piece of advice, one that I've paid forward again and again over the past couple decades as parents have asked me for counsel. 

I opted out of the one-on-one school tours, choosing instead to fill my schedule with open houses where I made a point of being social with any parent volunteer I could find. As we chatted, I would imagine myself having coffee with this person as the kids played in the garden, or trading child-minding with that person. My focus was on what kind of community this school fostered rather than what kind of curriculum they followed. 

Of course, every school gave lip service to parent involvement. One well-regarded school in particular touted their active parent community, but when I got to talking to one of the actual parents I learned, to my horror, that the school policy was that parents weren't ever allowed to pass beyond the main entrance lobby during the school day. When I asked the head of the school about this, she replied, "We've found that having parents in the classroom is just too distracting." They were the most upfront about it, but I discovered that this was at least the unofficial policy of most of the schools I visited. For these schools, "parent involvement" meant supporting fundraising efforts and serving as chaperones on field trips. That's it. Some of them even sanctimoniously defended their exclusion of families by asserting, "This is the children's place" and "We seek to foster independence."

But children, especially very young ones, don't come to us as individuals, but rather as members of families. As co-author of the latest update of New Zealand's highly-regarded national early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, and Teacher Tom's Play Summit presenter Brenda Soutar says to me, "As Māori we enroll the family, not the child, and that child comes with their ancestors surrounding them." She speaks of school, not as an institution, but as a family, and she tells us that the smallest Māori family unit is 70-80 individuals, and that includes ancestors both past, present, and future. The goal, she says, is not independence, but rather to foster interdependence.

As an American, "independence," has been drilled into me, but the older I get, the longer I've worked with young children, and, frankly, the more divided our world has become, the more I find myself seeing the deeper wisdom of interdependence. At some point, Western society decided that the children were in the way until we arrive at our modern world in which the vast majority of our children spend their days isolated in their walled-off corner of the world that we call school. Our adults, in turn, spend their days in their own walled-off corner that we call work. Not only that, but our grandparents find themselves equally walled-off by geographic distance or simply being left alone outside the walled-off areas, until our "family units" are often as small as three or four individuals that are only really together for a couple rushed hours in the evenings or on holidays. That's not right.

Brenda tells us that a Māori family would be mortified by this. And, honestly, after talking with her, I find myself mortified as well. What would it be like if our preschools adopted the Māori approach of enrolling entire families, let alone making space for ancestors? What if we didn't hurry "independence," but rather allowed it to emerge from the richer, deeper soil of interdependence? What if we prioritized the lessons of connection, listening, and community?

I can think of nothing more transformative for our world than to bring children back into the center of our lives. What a difference it would make if our children grew up knowing that they were always surrounded by their great big interrelated family. What a difference it would make if all children could feel at home. As Brenda tells us, "Your ability to appreciate and open your heart to others comes from your feeling at home with who you are." And that, I think, is a world changing idea, one that can start with us.

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To watch my entire interview with Brenda, as well as those with 26 other early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world, please join us for our reprise of Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these the presenters are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!" For more information and to purchase your pass, click here.

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

This Is How Children Learn Emotional Buoyancy

One of my earliest memories is of a small, plastic mouse figurine. I remember it as yellowish, but otherwise not cartoonish at all, about the size of an adult thumb, hollow, molded from the sort of thin, brittle plastic that characterized "Made in Japan" trinkets of the day. In other words, it wasn't a valuable item, but my love for it, made it precious. 

I carried it in my pocket most days, fingering it throughout the day, sometimes bringing it out to share my meals or to have a little chat in the squeaky voice with which I'd imbued it. One day I carried it out of the house with me. I walked up the Beale's driveway, then cut through the Saine's backyard to get to my friend Jeff's house, who lived one block over on Winston Street. I showed Jeff my mouse, who I'd named, obviously, "Squeaky," and being a good friend he played along with me, finding the charms in it that only lived in my own mind.

Jeff had this cool set of paint pots that I'd seen advertised on television. They were designed to be "spill-proof," a feature that was meant to appeal to parents, but that we considered a "modern marvel," like waterproof watches and push button telephones. At one point, in a moment of whimsy I threw the yellow spill-proof paint pot into Jeff's lawn. He ran after it, returning to show me, angrily, that it had gotten dirty. "There's dirt in it!" he growled. I had placed Squeaky beside where we had been painting on the patio table. Jeff snatched it up, dropped it to the ground, and stomped on it, crushing it to tiny yellow shards.

Memories from before five-years-old are notoriously foggy, but I still remember that moment of disappointment and violation as if it were yesterday. I can still summon up that image of Squeaky in pieces on the pine needle bestrewn slab of patio concrete. The tears were instant. I ran. I ran across Jeff's lawn, through the Saine's backyard. I ran up the Beale's driveway, across the street and through my own front door, bawling all the way. I honestly don't remember whether or not I told my mother what had happened. I must have, but the rest of my memory of that day involved feeling that sense of loss and disappointment,  living with it. I don't remember being angry at Jeff at all. Instead I thought about my own culpability. I'd let myself down and Squeaky had paid the price. 

I have no idea how long it took me to "get over it," although the fact that I can write about it today, more than a half century later, tells me that it will always be with me. That feeling was sharp and painful. It overwhelmed me at first, but slowly, over the course of the rest of the day and into the next, it became more and more bearable until, by the end of that second day, I was once more back on Jeff's patio sharing his spill-proof paint pots.

My feelings are something with which everyone can identify, but my experience of processing it, of contextualizing and learning from it, is something that I fear many children today miss out on. Adults today are far more ever-present than they were when I was young. For many, an emotional moment like this would have been hijacked by a concerned adult, naturally upset that their child is upset. They strive to distract them, to help them, to hurry the process along. These kinds of things too often result in protective-defensive conversations between respective adults with the prospect of punishment or at least a good scolding up for consideration. All of this robs children of essential learning about themselves and their emotions: that I will and can get beyond it. The feeling must be felt, of course, but it will diminish, and I will come out on the other side, knowing more about myself and how to deal with disappointment.

As parent educator and author Maggie Dent told me at Teacher Tom's Play Summit, "If you overprotect children from these moments they do not learn the emotional buoyancy or the fact that this a feeling that does pass. They learn it's wrong."

Of course, we hug them. Of course, we stroke their foreheads and speak soothing words. As Maggie says, we validate the feeling. We might say things like "Doesn't it suck, sweetheart?" or "Doesn't it feel really yucky inside?" But beyond that, it isn't our job to take the pain away. It isn't our job to hurry them through the important and vital process. This, says Maggie, is how they learn that they will and can bounce back.

"Under five is a great time to practice being disappointed," says Maggie. "That's why I really believe you need to marinate in them at times, in these opportunities, because you actually get better at dealing with it when it's not made to be wrong, and it's made to be a normal part of being a feeling human. I think when parents try to step in to avoid their child falling or they only celebrate when they win, we put too much pressure on a developing child."

"Children can learn that a poor choice is a poor choice, and they're going to make lots of them. But when they're shamed," which is often the unintended result of our interventions, "they learn there's something wrong with me . . . The children that struggle the most in teen years are the ones who've been shamed deeply in their early childhood."

Too often, we adults believe that we're making things better when we insert ourselves into a child's emotional life. As Maggie points out, so often in our overprotectiveness the message we send is that there is something wrong and, naturally, the child will come to believe that the thing that is wrong is their feeling. When we understand that our children's emotions are not our emotions, when we are there to comfort them, to be with them, but not to "solve" or "fix" anything, that's when we give them the space to do this essential emotional learning. It will pass and they will be wiser for it.

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To watch my entire interview with Maggie, as well as those with 26 other early childhood and parenting experts and thought leaders from around the world, please join us for our reprise of Teacher Tom's Play Summit. What if the whole world understood the power of trusting children with the freedom to play, to explore their world, to ask and answer their own questions? What if everyone respected their right to learn in their own way, on their own time? What if we remembered that children must have their childhoods and that means playing, and lots of it? Every one of these people are professionals who have placed children first. You will walk away from transformed, informed, challenged, and inspired to create a world that respects children and sets them free to learn and grow. Together we can, as presenter Raffi sings, "Turn this world around!" For more information and to purchase your pass, click here.

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No One Knows More Than You Know

Anthony James

The ancient Greeks, those explorers, traders, and travelers, described consciousness as a kind of space with expansive boundaries that were, as Heraclitus asserted, never to be discovered. 

A thousand years later, St. Augustine, who lived among the cave-riddled hills of Carthage, used the metaphors of "mountains and hills" and "plains and caves" to define consciousness.

In the 1600's René Descarte was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens and thus devised a hydraulic theory of how consciousness was created.

In the age of geological discovery, it became popular to consider consciousness as being layers upon layers in which an individual's past was recorded. As chemistry arose, so also arose the idea of consciousness as a kind of laboratory. We've had theories of consciousness based upon clocks, telephones, electrical fields and other technologies and discoveries as they've emerged, until now we've reached this age of computers. And so, naturally, we're being told that not only are our brains like computers, but that some day artificial intelligence (AI), if we're not careful, will supplant us.

Indeed, last week, in response to one of my posts, a reader predicted that most education will, in the not-so-distant future, be done almost exclusively by the internet and AI.

Humans can hardly think without resorting to metaphor, so I get it. It's part of how we construct the world around us, but it's also clear that we are incapable of thinking of a metaphor that actually gets us closer to understanding what and where this thing called "mind" or "consciousness" is, let alone how it works. The computer metaphor will in the future, if there is to be a future, be supplanted by something we can't today conceive. And the idea that our brains are like computers will seem as preposterous as the notion that it is all a mechanical device operating on the basis of water pressure.

This is, I think, important for today's educators to understand because these metaphors, and specifically this idea that brains are programmed like computers, tend to inform our theories about how learning works. It can't be completely an accident that the dilettantes who have been driving much of our misguided education policies in recent decades have come from computer backgrounds (I'm thinking specifically of Bill Gates here, but there are many others) with their ideas of reverse engineering humans (that is, our precious children) to make them fit, like electrical plugs, into the wall sockets they are fashioning. The fact that they are also business people means that they likewise rely on the metaphors of manufacturing which is as unsurprising as it is horrifying.

The truth is that we are no closer to understanding consciousness than were the ancient Greeks. Perhaps it's because we have no choice but to use our own minds to think about themselves. Maybe Heraclitus was the greatest genius of them all when he asserted that we can never know. 

Yes, I'm aware that neuroscience has made inroads into how the brain works, but honestly, there is scant evidence, aside from electrical activity in certain parts of the brain under certain stimuli, that consciousness is even located in the brain. At best we can say our brains are involved in producing or interacting with what we call "mind." Previous generations located our mind in the spleen. It's quite possible that our individual consciousness doesn't exist within us at all, but rather that our bodies have evolved to channel it. It might sound crazy, but one of the earliest theories of the mind says that what we think of as our "inner voice" is really the voice of the gods speaking to and through us.

Feel free to toss your own ideas in there. They are as good as any of these theories.

My point is that no one who knows more than you about minds, especially if you work with young ones. Having spent the last couple decades amidst young children, observing them, connecting with them, and getting to know them, I've found, as has every teacher worth their salt, that no two are alike. Each human perceives existence from a unique perspective. Each human learns and thinks in their own distinctive way. What works in one case will cause harm in the next and vice versa. This is why the moment we feel like we've figured it out, a child will come along to show us we are wrong. Standardization is for manufacturing, for computers, not for humans who, I assure you, are nothing at all like computers.

This is why learning can never be programmed or engineered and why teaching will always be, above all else, about the relationships we form with one another.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

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There Is No Logical Explanation For This

Peace Child, Sadako Sasaki

There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about the double-edged sword of punishments and rewards, but I've been living with Natalia Ginzburg's words for some time now and as much as I objected at first, I now find myself taking comfort, even strength, from them:

And in general I think we should be very cautious about promoting and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this. (From her essay The Little Virtues)

I don't want this to be true. I recoil at the idea of living in a world without natural justice, but Ginsburg's take explains a lot. I keep waiting for evil to be punished and good to be rewarded in this life, and sometimes it seems to be, but honestly, over the arc of my time on this planet, the distribution of punishments and rewards appears to be random. The evil thrive and the good suffer.

Of course, maybe the arc of justice, as MLK suggests, is so long that it's not possible for any one of us to see it through to the end. Maybe there are punishments and rewards in the afterlife. But here on this earth, in this lifetime, Ginzurg has peeked behind the story we tell ourselves about punishments and rewards and found no cosmic tit-for-tat at work.

The Eastern tradition's concept of karma is thrown around a lot these days, but it's a notion that we in the West have mostly co-opted and misunderstood. Karma, as I understand it, is more akin to Ginzburg's idea in that when translated from the ancient language of Sanskrit from whence it derives, it comes out as "action" or "deed," and it refers to the cycles of cause and effect. Karma really isn't about punishments or rewards as much as it's about consequences. Each religion or philosophy treats it differently, of course, but the basic idea is that we, through our behaviors, either add to the collective karmic good or evil in the world.

"Good is not rewarded and . . . evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil." In other words, we can't punish and reward our way to moral behavior. It is simply not something that can result from behaviorist concepts of "conditioning." Certainly, we can find carrots sweet enough and sticks painful enough to control the behavior of others, but in the end of the day, if the intention is simply to avoid punishments or receive rewards, or worse, the result of pure Pavlovian conditioning, then we are not talking about morality, but rather cynical manipulation.

I don't know how to "teach" anyone to love good and hate evil, but I do know that I can choose good over evil. I haven't always chosen good in my life and I've certainly at times mistaken evil for good, but I've learned over six decades, through those cycles of cause and effect, that I love good and hate evil. And there is no logical explanation for this.

I find comfort in Ginzburg's words because, in the end, my only real moral power is to reject evil with no fear of punishment and be an example by choosing good with no expectation of reward.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

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

"I Wear Darth Vader Underpants Every Day!"

I looked up to see a familiar face. For a moment, however, I couldn't place it, but then recognized my friend who I'd not seen since he was five-years-old.

"I recognize you!" I blurted before his name came back to me. He was standing with his mom, pressed into her legs shyly, a posture I didn't recall from a couple years ago when we had seen one another almost every day. But, of course, he would feel that way. For a preschooler, two years is a very long time, nearly a quarter of his life, long enough to have completely forgotten his old preschool teacher.

Yet he hadn't forgotten me. He was here because he had told his mother he wanted to visit me. When she asked if it was okay, I'd said to feel free to drop by any time. It was the pre-Covid world and I always had an open door policy for alumni.

His mother nudged him to respond, "Hi, Teacher Tom."

I'd met Duncan as a two-year-old who was enthralled with his older sister, often coming to class wearing her old clothes, sharing stories about what Bella had done or said, drawing pictures and making paintings to take home to her as gifts. As he got older, he turned his attention to "great apes," which he taught me included chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. He wore our classroom gorilla costume almost every day, which included an anatomically correct backside that he would shake to make the rest of us laugh. During the three years that he and I were together he took himself along a wandering path of self-directed learning that carried him from Bella to the great apes, then, in a progression that made sense to him, on to dinosaurs, arachnids, outer space, Star Wars . . .

He intuitively signaled his changing interests by changing costumes, using dress-up as a way to embody his current driving passion. And through it all was woven an abiding interest in connecting with the other children, often bringing them along for portions of his journey.

In other words, he was a kid who always made the most of our days together.

I used my standard line that I use on visiting alumni, "Hey, I used to know a kid who looked a lot like you, but he was a smaller."

"It's me, Teacher Tom -- Duncan."

He was taking an afternoon off from first grade to be here. As much as I wanted to spend more time with him, I had other responsibilities so I left he and his mother to nostalgically go through the arrival routine of signing in, hanging up his jacket, stashing his backpack, and washing his hands. We later reconnected up by the cast iron water pump, which his mother had mentioned as something he particularly remembered. By then he had warmed up.

"This pump seems a lot smaller," he said. "Everything seems smaller. My school is huge."

"Yeah, well you got a lot bigger," I answered, "so you need a bigger school. Is your teacher bigger too?"

He thought about it for a second, not hearing it as a joke, then answered, "She's not bigger . . . but she's meaner."

"Oh, come on! She can't be that mean."

He conceded, "Well, she's not mean, but she made a rule -- no costumes except on Halloween."

"That's too bad."

"And she always wants us to tell her math facts."

"Wow, you know math facts? That's pretty cool."

"It's not cool, Teacher Tom. It's stupid."

"I hate doing stupid stuff."

"Me too, but did you know that I'm the smartest kid in my class?"

"I didn't know that."

"I know all the math facts. None of the other kids know all the math facts."

"That must make you feel good."

"It doesn't," he answered while lazily pumping water as the younger kids scrambled to dig channels in the sand into which it was flowing. The kids are always hoping for someone to pump the water for them and Duncan was obliging. "It makes me feel bored, but Bella told me that school is always boring. She's in fourth grade now."

"I'll bet Bella knows even more math facts."

He nodded earnestly, "She even knows more math facts than me. And she gets really good grades, like As and Bs. I also get As and Bs."

"And that's good?"

"Miss Herring says it's good," he answered brightly before glumly adding, "but I can do better."

I thought of the fully engaged boy from a couple years ago. "Good" and "better" and "smartest" and "bored" were not words anyone could ever attach to his learning. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, that I've seen how this system we call school had taught yet another of my young friends to focus on competing, ranking, rating, and jumping through hoops rather than simply engaging the world through their own curiosity.  

I knew that this was why he had remembered preschool, however, and why he had wanted to return. I also knew that this was why his mother had pulled him out of school for a visit. As he reengaged with his self-selected project of being the big kid pumping water for the little kids, I stepped back to stand with his mother.

I asked her about the family and specifically about Duncan. She told me he was miserable at school. I sympathized, then repeated some of what he had said about math facts and grades. She replied, "Oh, he's doing fine. The school work is easy for him. It's this," she said, waving at arm at the playground, "that we're missing. I want that boy back . . . Look at him!"

He was down on his knees in the mud, taking charge of building a proper dam as the little kids swarmed around this big boy, everyone playing the trail and error game, the research technique that underpins most play.

"I won't be able to take him back to school now," she laughed. "They won't let him in the classroom covered in mud. I packed a couple of towels in the car just in case."

We stood together watching Duncan in his element for a long, silent moment, before she added, "But it's still in there, you know? All that time with you is still in there. I know that's why he needed to come back. Thanks for having us."

We send them off into the world, us play-based educators, knowing that while life itself is ultimately self-directed, schooling stands starkly apart as a place of pleasing adults, competition with your peers, and learning to game the system. It is a kind of battle they will be compelled to fight, one that pits their natural instincts and curiosity against tests, homework, and grades. We can only hope that we've fortified them for it. What gives me hope for Duncan and the other children I've taught is that "it's still in there." And because we're a cooperative school, it's still in their parents as well. 

Later, I found Duncan standing in front of our classroom costume rack looking disappointed. "I'm too big," he shrugged, "None of them fit me."

"Yeah, you always liked our costumes. Too bad you can't wear any at school."

"Actually, I do."

"But I thought you said your teacher has a rule."

"She does, but she doesn't know that I wear Darth Vader underpants every day!" We laughed together subversively.

******

 

"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

If you liked reading this post, you might also enjoy one of my books. To find out more, Click here! 

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