That's Why They Talk And Play

"The Thinker," Auguste Rodin

We've all experienced the phenomenon of genius in the stairwell, that flash of brilliance that comes to us when it's a little too late. It's that moment when we realize what we should have said in the job interview. It's when the perfect zinger comes to us after we've already hung up the phone. It's that flash of genius that we experience when we're no longer focused on the matter at hand. 

One of the odd things about thinking is that very often the worst way to come up with a solution is to focus on the problem. It's why it's sometimes best to just go for a walk or take a shower. It's why we need to clear our minds or take a break. We tend to think of thinking as something we do consciously, in the spirit and posture of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker that I've used to illustrate this post. But in reality, most thinking, or rather deep thinking, doesn't usually work that way. We tend not to be at our best when we're furrowing our brows over things, but rather when our minds are in a relaxed or distracted state. Indeed, like with genius in the stairwell, our best ideas are often, when we tell ourselves the truth, the product of our unconscious minds.

When presented with a problem or challenge that our conscious mind cannot easily solve, we have two choices. 

The first is to invite other people to discuss it with us. Neuroscientists tell us that the "window of consciousness," that time during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. The exception is when we are in dialog. In dialog we can sometimes keep the window open for hours on end.

Our second option when dealing with a problem or challenge is to do something else, anything else, just so long as it has nothing to do with the task at hand. Another way to say that is to go play: do anything that relaxes and distracts the mind in order to free our unconscious mind to do the work of genius in the stairwell.

Again, the most difficult way to solve a problem or address a challenge is to sit down and break our brains over it.

The problem is that this is exactly what normal schools expect children to do: spend large chunks of their days in silent, solitary pondering in the misguided and unsupported belief that this is how thinking happens. Indeed, the behaviors that are most likely to get young children in trouble with their teachers are socializing and goofing around, which are, contrary to our school-ish myths, the natural manifestations of thinking. And thinking, I hope, is our goal.

Children are born knowing how to learn. That's why, when left to their own devices, they talk and play.

******

 

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

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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That's The Job

As a preschool teacher, I always tried to keep one thing in mind as a new school year began. My job beyond creating a beautiful, meaningful, safe-enough environment, is creating relationships. I was charged, from day one, with the mission to get children on my bandwagon or, failing that, get on their bandwagon or, failing that, work with the kids to create a whole new bandwagon upon which we could all happily jump.

I reminded myself life is not a journey with a pre-determined destination, but is rather more akin to roaming.

I tried to keep in mind that wondering is the highest level of intellectual, creative, and spiritual activity, far above merely knowing.

And above all, I wanted everyone to understand that we, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, are put on this earth to goof around, and there is no other purpose.

When thought of this way, the job of teacher becomes one of emancipator rather than, as is so often the case, the jailor of young children. When we see ourselves and the children as co-creators of a unique community, one that allows us to get our needs met while also allowing others to get their needs met, we are laying the foundation for a true education. "(L)earning," as Ivan Illich writes, "is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting."

And it all begins with relationship, which is where everything worth doing or experiencing or knowing begins. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, "For what is corn, after all, but light transformed by relationship?" That's all anything ever is: light transformed by relationship. The rest is roaming, wondering, and goofing around. That's the job.

******

 

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

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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

Role Modeling Is The Only Way Morality Has Ever Been Taught

Peace Child, Sadako Sasaki

There are plenty of reasons to be dubious about the double-edged sword of punishments and rewards, but lately I've been thinking Natalia Ginzburg's reflections:

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 choose good with no expectation of reward. And when it comes to the moral values of others, including the children in my life, role modeling is the only way it has ever been taught.

******

 

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

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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

Manipulating Children, Even If It's "For Their Own Good," Is A Betrayal Of Their Trust

This is a fascinating experiment that you can try at home. Ask someone to sit across from you and say words, any words, with the only condition being that they leave time, say three seconds, between each word for you to write them down. If after every plural noun you say "good" or "right," or even if you just smile or repeat the word pleasantly, before long the frequency of plural nouns will increase significantly as they go on.

I'm not sure if this experiment works exactly this way with children because they are still in the midst of learning language, but it sure does with adults. 

This is fascinating to me in a couple ways. First of all, it's an example of unconscious learning or what we more often label as training. That said, I've read that if the subject of the experiment is made aware in advance of the parameters it doesn't work nearly as well. In other words, the conscious mind tends to resist the manipulation, while the unconscious mind is helpless before it. This phenomenon is, of course, well-known to marketers and propagandists who craft their messages to evade conscious thought and appeal directly to our unconscious brain.

More interesting to me, however, is that we are all, every day, in our conversations, not only unconsciously training other people, but being unconsciously trained by them in return. This day-to-day tango is the dance of connection that we call relationship. This might explain why we so often take an instant and "irrational" like or dislike to a person, why we might trust or distrust them with no evidence. This dance of training and being trained is how we get to "know" someone. And it works because much of this process of creating relationship, this mutual training, takes place on an unconscious level.

When one side begins to consciously manipulate the other, the relationship changes. We might go along merrily for awhile, but the moment we recognize that we are being manipulated, we begin to resist. And more often than not we grow to despise the manipulator.

This happens quite often in relationships between children and adults. Young children, spurred by the drive to connect with us, trust us to dance unconsciously with them, but too often, we adults seek to manipulate them, "for their own good," of course. We have behaviors and lessons we want them to learn so we take the role of marketers and propagandists, consciously training them without their knowledge or consent. As they get older, however, they begin to see through our tricks and naturally start to resist, not because our agenda on their behalf is wrong, but because we have an agenda at all. Here they were believing that they were in a dance of connection and relationship only to find it was one of manipulation.

No wonder children consistently, around the world, become less and less fond of school, their teachers, and even their parents as they grow older. This is exactly how everyone feels, no matter what our age, when we discover that we've been consciously manipulated. I will never forget a conversation I had several years ago with a sister and brother I had taught in preschool who were now in seventh and fifth grades. The anger these bright children expressed to me about the "stupidity" of what they were being taught in school, of the "uselessness" of it, was directed at not just their teachers, but the entire "system." I recall feeling similarly at that age. And they are right. It is a betrayal.

In his book The Little Prince, Antoine de Sait-Exupéry writes, "You are only a little boy for me just like a hundred thousand little boys. And I don't need you. And you don't need me either. I am only a fox like a hundred thousand foxes. But if you tame me, we will need each other. You will be unique in the world for me. I will be unique in the world for you."

It's not enough that we cause the children in our lives to need us. Unless we need them as well, we are mere marketers and propagandists, manipulating young minds. We may continue to fool them for a long time, but eventually they will see that they have been fooled, that we don't need them. And it will break their hearts to learn that they are only "a fox like a hundred thousand foxes," subject to the manipulation of our agendas. 

It is wrong when we tame the children in our lives without also allowing them to equally tame us. That is the dance of connection and relationship into which they have, trustingly, entered into. To be unique in the world for one another is what we all most need from life. In many ways it is the only thing. When we forget that, we betray what it means to be human.

******

 

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

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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

"Oh Yeah, It's Spin Time!"

I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us."

I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'll have to find someone else."

As the first boy tried pleading with me, the second said, "I'll get my brother to push us. He likes doing the things I like," and jogged off in the direction of where their classmates where playing. He called out to them, "Who will push us?" They ignored him so he returned to the merry-go-round. As he mounted it, he gave it a little push with his foot and the two boys began turning slowly.

As the momentum began to die, a couple of girls found their way to the merry-go-round. Without being asked, they decided they were going to push it "fast." The boys were delighted. Working together, the girls managed to get it up to speed, then the two of them jumped on as well. More children began to arrive in twos and threes, many pushed before jumping on. One of the original boys, leaning into it, head tipped back, began to chant, "Oh yeah, it's spin time! Oh yeah, it's spin time!"

The children began jumping off and on as they spun. Many of them fell to the ground upon dismount, most doing so intentionally. Occasionally, one of them would be trampled as they lay there in the path of the pushers. Some of them cried out in objection, while others squealed with delight. It was the kind of wild, breathless fun for which these machines were designed, even if adult imposed rules too often forbid it.

They were learning something, because we are always learning something when we play. I could write a list here of all the things I imagine they were learning, or exploring, or discovering. I could put those guesses into a report of some sort. Indeed, if I were so inclined I would have already filed dozens of reports on the children playing together on the merry-go-round going back to September. I could then take all those reports and compare them to today's report and use this data to pretend that I know what they have been learning over the course of months. I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devise a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that these children are merry-go-round proficient . .  .

This is ludicrous, of course. I could do all of that and not only would I be no closer to knowing what these children were learning, I would have wasted vast amounts of time that I could have otherwise spent doing something more productive, like scratching my ass. No one can ever know what another person is learning. Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning often doesn't know what they've learned, and no amount of testing, grading, or data collection will change that.

This is the greatest fraud of our educational system, this hubristic notion that adults can somehow measure learning, yet for generations we have put children through the processing plants we call schools, marching them into the test score coal mines, subjecting them to our experiments like lab rats. It's lead to a grotesque narrowing and standardization of what we call education based not on learning, but on what we can most easily measure.

I am comfortable knowing that children are learning because they are playing, and that's enough. Indeed, I have no choice because to believe otherwise, is to buy into the lie that anyone can possibly know what these children are learning. It would mean that I must take part in sucking the joy out of their lives and I will not knowingly be a party to that.

"Oh yeah, it's spin time!" That's all I need to know.

******

 

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

"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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

"There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth"

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. ~Shakespeare, Hamlet

I recently passed a man on the street, shabbily dressed, shoeless, and dirty. I don't know where he sleeps at night, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he regularly lies down in doorways or under bridges. He was standing in front of a wall of tinted office windows, apparently seeing his own reflection. Both his expression and body were twisted into shapes that spoke of agony. He was soundlessly going through something either mentally or physically painful -- perhaps both.

The sight of him had woken me from a reverie. I'd been recalling a day from my childhood, one that had been perfumed with the scent of pine trees and damp earth. My body had been walking along a city sidewalk, but I'd been far away, both in terms of time and space, but this man's presence, his evident pain, brought me suddenly into the present where the dominate fragrance was heated concrete and exhaust.

As I approached the man whose body writhed, turning first in upon itself then back out, I wondered if I'd been wrong. Maybe he was just playing with his reflection the way we often do as children, making faces, contorting bodies. Whatever the case, he was in his own world, possibly somewhere that was perfumed by pine trees and damp earth. At least it seemed that way because he didn't seem to take note of me, nor any of the other passersby. Whatever the case, his was a place made more profoundly separate from mine, I expect, by mental illness.

The world in which he was dwelling, that place of pain or pine or something else entirely, was the creation of his senses and his consciousness, just as that interrupted place of pine-scented memory had been the creation of mine. Science reporter Ed Yong, in his book An Immense World, writes about the line from Hamlet at the top of this post, "The quote is often taken as an appeal to embrace the supernatural. I see it rather as a call to better understand the natural. Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations. Philosophers have long pitied the goldfish in its bowl, unaware of what lies beyond, but our senses create a bowl around us too--one that we generally fail to penetrate."

He quotes writer Marcel Proust as saying, "The only true voyage . . . would be not too visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes . . . to see the hundred universes that each of them sees."

Yong is writing about the immense world of the senses and how they allow other species to experience the world in ways we cannot imagine. Indeed, most species even possess senses that we can't even imagine, like the ability to map their world through magnetism or communicate through the exchange of pheromones. We cannot comprehend the world of vibrations in which many spiders live or the ultraviolet colors of a hummingbird's. Each species has a unique Umwelt, which is the word scientists use to describe the sensory fishbowl in which we are all confined.

As I considered this man who was clearly going through something, I realized I was contemplating his unique Umwelt, trying to "possess other eyes." Of course, being human, if I had been truly committed to understanding, I would have spoken to him, perhaps asking the question, "Are you okay?" or "Can I help you?" words of compassion that may or may not have been warranted or welcome. "Language," writes Yong, "for us, is both blessing and curse. It gives us the tools for describing another animal's Umwelt even as it insinuates our own sensory world into those descriptions."

But this wasn't just another animal, he was one of my own species. The only way I could have possibly understood what he was going through would have been to engage in dialog. My fear, my selfishness, my hurry, however, overwhelmed my curiosity and I ultimately walked on by, leaving me in my fishbowl with nothing other than my judgments and assumptions, which likely have nothing to do with this man I saw playing with his own reflection. Indeed, in a very real sense, that's what I was doing as well: seeing him as a reflection of me.

As those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are returning to school, we, as educators, are tasked, first and foremost, with understanding the children who are coming into our lives. Perhaps we've read descriptions of the children as provided by their previous teachers or maybe we've listened to parents tell us about them, but if we are going to be any good to these children at all, we must cast aside our assumptions and enter into dialog with each of them. It needn't be a dialog made of language. In fact, when we are talking about very young children, language often only teaches us about the limitations of our own fishbowls. It's a dialog made of all the senses, one that involves as Eleanor Duckworth says, "listening with our entire selves." That's what penetrates and connects our Umwelt with theirs.

It doesn't matter what your curriculum tells you to do, this is where it starts and this is where it ends, with a genuine commitment to understanding these humans. The hallmark of a real education is one that penetrates our fishbowls to discover that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy.

******

The free live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Suzanne Axelsson, Lisa Murphy, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Kisha Reid, Mr. Chazz Lewis, Monique Gray Smith, Vanessa LaPointe 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.  Click here to learn more!

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!

"But, I'm Aways Ready To Agree"

"We're playing Pokemon."

"I want to play Paw Patrol."

"Well, we're playing Pokemon."

"I don't want to play Pokemon."

The boys who had been playing Pokemon all morning, shrugged. One of them said, "I'm Rocky and he's Marshall . . . You can be Chase."

The girl who wanted to play with them insisted, "I don't like Paw Patrol. I want to be Picachu!"

After naming several other Paw Patrol characters, the boys shrugged again. One of them said, "Well, we don't want to play Pokemon. Maybe we can play Pokemon tomorrow."

"I hate Paw Patrol." The girl sulked over to me, "They won't let me play with them." 

I answered, "They want to play Paw Patrol and you want to play Pokemon."

"I hate Paw Patrol."

"I heard you say that." I imagine that some educators would have stepped in, but for me this was a classic example of preschool anarchy, in the best sense of that word; the word I think best describes the natural state of children at play.

The late great folk singer and labor organizer Utah Phillips summed up his idea of anarchy in the phrase, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." That's what was happening here. The boys had listened to her, they had offered her options for entering their game. They had even suggested that they would play her game later. They had shown their readiness to agree, but they weren't going to upend their game entirely.

The word anarchy tends to set people on edge, but it's how most of us experience the parts of our lives not lived under the auspices of some sort of institution. Small groups of adult friends generally don't have rules, but rather an ever-changing set of informal agreements arrived at through a readiness to agree. When someone wants to change those agreements there is a discussion, sometimes heated. Sometimes new agreements can be reached, but when that proves impossible, the ultimate option is to walk away.

I've been married to my wife Jennifer for 35 years. We've never sat down and made rules for our relationship, but almost every day finds us ready to agree. After all those years, our marriage might, from the outside, look like a kind of institution, but one of the cornerstones of what we have together is that we are both aware that either one of us is free to walk away. Indeed, I don't see how it can be otherwise in any relationship between free people. The mental experiment of that possibly happening proves incredibly painful to both of us, but we also both know that the strength of what we have is based on our readiness to agree.

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool where I spent my entire teaching career is officially organized along democratic lines, but in my two decades there, I only recall a handful of instances when any decision was put to a vote. Indeed, most of us viewed voting as a last resort, a sign that we had failed in our efforts at agreement. And almost every time we did vote, someone from the losing side would chose to walk away.

Newcomers often complained that our meetings too often dragged on or went in circles, and frankly they sometimes did, especially when discussing things that mattered deeply to someone. Each year, for instance, we braced ourselves for the discussion about whether or not the snacks we offered the children would be all organic. The families themselves were responsible for purchasing snacks on a rotating basis. Most didn't have a strong opinion one way or another, but there were always those who valued organic foods enough to fight for it, while others felt equally strongly that the added expense made it an unfair financial burden on lower income families. 

These community discussions could eat up hours as everyone made their various appeals, laid out their reasons, and offered their ideas. It could be tiresome for those in the middle. Indeed, there was at least one family that opted out of our school for that very reason: "I can't go through one more of those damn organic snack discussions." But most stuck it out and we always did come to an agreement. There were, however, over the years, other issues that became so divisive, like the children's divide between Paw Patrol and Pokemon, that someone felt they had no choice but to find another school. Most often, however, people would choose to set aside their objections and agree to play Paw Patrol even if they would have preferred Pokemon.

There are those that argue that one of the purposes of school is to prepare children to function within institutions. How will they ever be able to hold a job, they reason, if they don't know how to set aside their own wants and needs in deference to the rules. But most schools, as institutions, are very unlike the real world. In the real world, we all ultimately have the option to walk away. Of course, there are those who feel trapped -- in their jobs, in their marriage -- but ultimately we do have the freedom to find other jobs or  partners. And when someone is psychologically incapable of making that decision on their own, we support them in walking away.

The word anarchy is too often used as a synonym for every-man-for-himself, law-of-the-jungle chaos, which is why I don't usually speak it aloud. It's too easily misunderstood, but when I watch young children play, I see anarchy, in the best sense of that word. As Emma Goldman, perhaps the most famous American anarchist, wrote, "No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure." But she knew, as I do, that the key to that lock is the ultimate freedom and power to walk away.

I could have stepped in on that girl's behalf. I could have, with the power of being an adult in a society of children, contrived to make those boys include her in their game. I would have taught the children the lesson of institutions, which is that no one is truly free, not even to choose the games they play, nor with whom they play. Contrary to the stereotypes about anarchy, it's in this type of institutional captivity that we learn the lessons of every-man-for-himself selfishness. Instead I stayed neutral, allowing the children to follow their anarchist instincts, one of which is to remain ready to agree.

As the boys, having failed to reach an agreement, went back to their game of Paw Patrol, the girl moped thoughtfully at my side. She watched the boys racing about the playground heroically, then, without a word to me tapped another girl on the shoulder and asked, "Do you want to play Pokemon with me?"

The new girl answered, referring to the friends with whom she was playing, "We're playing restaurant. Do you want to eat some soup?"

"Is it Pokemon soup?"

"Yes! It is!"

"I'm Picachu!"

"Here's your soup, Picachu."

******

The free live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Suzanne Axelsson, Lisa Murphy, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Kisha Reid, Mr. Chazz Lewis, Monique Gray Smith, Vanessa LaPointe 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.  Click here to learn more!

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!

Normalizing Conversations About Relationships and Sex

Rog was in love with Marian, who loved him back. It was one of those cute preschool romances where children were exploring the loving adult relationships they see in their lives by acting out one of their own. But one day, Rog arrived to find that Marian had changed her mind. She was, she informed him, going to marry Titus instead.

Rog was frantic. He spent his morning gamely drawing pictures for Marian, offering her snack foods, and otherwise striving to convince her to change her mind. By mid-day, however, the reality had set in. In despair he threw himself onto the floor amidst the costumes, his head pressed into a corner. I went to console him, but he sent me away. When his friends then tried, he ran from the classroom and down the hallway. I found him in tears behind a door.

It wasn't so cute any more. The emotions he was feeling were real. I sat near him until he had calmed himself enough to say, "I want to marry her, but she only wants to marry Titus!" which cast him back into despair.

As he finally emerged into the initial pain of acceptance, I listened to him. At one point he had the idea of talking about it with the whole group at circle time.

This immediately struck me as a bad idea. Certainly, no one wants to share their broken heart with the world, but he was insistent so I told him that if he still wanted to talk about it when we gathered together on the checkerboard rug, he should raise his hand and I'd call on him. I assumed that after some time to reflect he would think better of it. After all, these aren't the sorts of things one wants discussed in public.

His hand, however, was up before we had even all assembled. When I called on him, he declared, "I love Marian but she doesn't love me any more. She loves Titus." I realized even as he said it that he wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. Everything about their preschool relationship had been public knowledge from the start.

Marian confirmed Rog's assessment matter-of-factly from where she sat beside Titus.

One of Rog's buddies said, "That's okay, you can just marry somebody else!"

"Yeah," said another, "Marian gets to marry whoever she wants and you get to marry somebody else."

Rog made some comment about how he didn't want to marry any of the other girls in the class and his friend responded, "Well then just marry one of the boys. I'll marry you if you want."

Someone else chimed in that they were going to wait until they were a grown-up to get married and the conversation took off from there. We discussed relationships, sex, divorce, and how babies are made. We shared what we knew about body parts and their functions. Before long I realized that these children, in many ways, understood more than I had at 18.

You see, I grew up in places and in an era in which talking about relationships and particularly sexual ones was taboo. It wasn't a topic of conversation in my home, my church, or my school. Or rather, it wasn't discussed when adults were present, because us kids tended to share what we knew in whispers, which wasn't a lot, and even that was largely, and often profoundly, inaccurate.

It was an era of children teaching children through trial and error, without even the dubious support of the internet to answer our questions. Pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and toxic relationships were hidden away in the dark corners where we discussed them, in our ignorance, not knowing what to believe. The adults in our lives would have been useful, but for most of us, we feared that to talk with teachers would have resulted in our parents being called in for a "conference," who would, in turn, scold, shame, or even punish us, without really shedding any light on our questions. So we were left alone in the dark with one another.

There are still large swaths of the US where we leave our children to learn about sex and relationships in this way, but I am grateful to have spend my entire teaching career as part of a community in which most of the preschool-aged children in my life came from families who are striving to normalize these conversations.

As these children consoled Rog through frank and honest talk, cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum, supported by adults who corrected misinformation and refrained from judgement, I saw clearly that not talking about sex and relationships certainly stands among the worst ideas humans have ever had.

Rog continued to moon over Marian for a few days, but with the support of the rest of us, including, sweetly, Marian and Titus, he got on with his life.

******

 

"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

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Most People Are Not WEIRD

I am of Danish and English heritage, with some Irish and French mixed in for good measure. I know the most about my Danish background in that my grandmother immigrated to the US as a child and was therefore a bit more connected to her roots than a lot of White Americans. I also know that my English ancestors immigrated to these shores in the late 1800's, then proceeded to the Midwest where they were farmers. I was baptized and confirmed Lutheran; I own a beer glass commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. I am a natural born citizen of the United States.

To be honest, that's pretty much it for my national, ethnic and religious cultural markers. I rarely refer to them when describing myself. This makes me WEIRD, which is an acronym coined by a trio of Canadian psychologists: Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic. 

Most people are not WEIRD. They do not live in the West. They are not highly educated. They do not live in an industrialized or democratic nation. And while I do not feel particularly rich, compared to most people in the world, I am. Not only are most people not WEIRD, but they never have been.

Even within my own country, most people are not WEIRD.

Being WEIRD means that I, and people like me, see the world much differently that most people. For one thing, we don't know or care all that much about our national, ethnic, racial, or religious backgrounds, instead perceiving ourselves as autonomous individuals free to create our own identities regardless of our backgrounds. In contrast, most people around the world and throughout time have more often viewed themselves as woven into the cultural background and social roles into which they were born. Indeed, while us WEIRD-os conceive of the self as something we create from the inside-out, most people see it as something that is forged from the outside-in.

That concept really comes through for me when I interact with educators from indigenous backgrounds as I recently did during Teacher Tom's Play Summit. I find my mind expanding, sometimes painfully, as I listen to them talk about interconnectedness and the importance of honoring ancestors, "past, present, and future" or when they talk about honoring Mother Nature. It's clear that for these people who have learned how to thrive on both sides of the WEIRD divide being Maori or Cree or Aboriginal is central to their identity. This is where they "come from." Within my own country Black and Hispanic adults feel significantly more connected to their roots than do White adults. According to the Pew Research Center, only 36 percent of White Americans saying they feel a "strong connection" to the cultural origin of their family, while 61 percent of Black adults and 71 percent of Hispanic adults feel this way. Over half of Black and Hispanic people surveyed likewise see their origin as central to their identity, whereas fewer than one in four White people do.

Why am I sharing this here on a blog about "teaching and learning from preschoolers"? Because much of what we think we know about human psychology comes from research conducted on WEIRD people, and specifically US college students who participate for class credit. As educators, we tend to rely on psychological studies to shape our approach to children, but since WEIRD folks only comprise about 12 percent of the global population we are missing data on the other 88 percent who tend to view themselves as being created from the outside-in. This greatly impacts such things as moral decision-making, reasoning style, sense of fairness, and even visual perception. In other words, what we take for psychological orthodoxy is really just a deep dive into a narrow, WEIRD, segment of the world's population which is then crudely applied to the rest of humanity.

No where am I more aware of this flaw in our psychological research than when I'm trying to convince a fellow WEIRD-o that children consistently demonstrate, unprompted, traits of kindness, selflessness, fairness, and connectedness. They are so entrenched in their inside-out WEIRD-ness that they simply cannot conceive of humans who are not naturally selfish, covetous, and wildly independent, so they assure me that my approach to young children is doomed to result in some sort of Lord of the Flies or "law of the jungle" scenario. Then they point to "research" that they claim supports their WEIRD view of human nature.

For years now, I've been viewing psychological research through squinted eyes, especially when it doesn't jibe with what I have observed through my own decades of working with developing humans who are not yet fully WEIRD. Specifically, I seek out the make-up of the test subjects. This usually means I have to go beyond the mass media reporting, which nearly always leaves out that vital piece of information. And what I usually discover is that I've just learned something that is perhaps true for a narrow, WEIRD, slice of the population, but not necessarily useful when it comes to understanding young children or, for that matter, most of the world beyond the WEIRD perspective.

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The free live portion of Teacher Tom's Play Summit is over, but it's still not too late to join Suzanne Axelsson, Lisa Murphy, Lenore Skenazy, Maggie Dent, Kisha Reid, Mr. Chazz Lewis, Monique Gray Smith, Vanessa LaPointe 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!" Click here to learn more!

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!