It Needs To Be Enough

There was a time when I kept a collection of styrofoam around the place, but over the years I disposed of it and not just because it takes up a lot of storage space. Sure it's engaging to stick or hammer things into it, like golf tees, but that idea invariably and ultimately turns into a festival of breaking, then shredding, leaving those static electricity filled tiny toxic balls all over the place, which is a mess worse than glitter and not nearly as festive.

Still, when someone from our community purchased new electronics or something that came with large pieces of the stuff, they often thought of us. I didn't even know where these pieces came from, but I'd spotted them stashed where the kids couldn't reach them on the playground so decided to make use of them for a day.

My idea was to combine the styrofoam with pipe cleaners. It was not the first time we'd done this and while there are usually a few kids who get into the process, it's not generally one of the most popular things we did at the art table. This particular day, however, there were even fewer takers than normal. The parent-teacher assigned to the project did her best to role model playing with the things, but the station evolved into a game in which kids were placing "orders" for things like pipe cleaner "bracelets," "flowers," and "glasses," which the adults then manufactured for them. It's a fine activity, I suppose, and I guess the kids had found a way to make it fun so who am I to judge?

That's how things stood when my friend took a seat at one corner of the styrofoam and pulled a container of pipe cleaners toward himself. If he had taken note of what the others were doing, it wasn't apparent. He started by successfully sticking one end of a pipe cleaner into the styrofoam, then another, then another. As he worked, he began to twist the fuzzy wires, bending the pieces together, weaving them together, purposefully tangling them. He didn't say a thing as he worked, concentrating fully on his creation.

I was tempted to sit beside him to narrate his process in the hopes of attracting more kids to the project (because everyone wants to be part of our classroom's ongoing stories) but I didn't. Instead, I left him to his solitary work, a man with a vision. I stopped by several times over the course of the next half hour as his magnificent tangle became increasingly complex. When he was finally finished a half hour later, he pushed himself away from the table and didn't look back.

I gave some 40 kids the opportunity to play with the styrofoam and pipe cleaners over the course of the day, most of whom declined the invitation and even those who accepted it tended to treat it like a kind of drive-by activity, something not worthy of their full engagement. But one boy did and that's enough for me to call it a success.

At the end of the day, we carefully uprooted his sculpture from the styrofoam and put it in his cubby to take home. I'm sure from his mother's end, it just looked like he had simply crushed and twisted a collection of pipe cleaners in his fists, the work of a moment. Most preschool art goes home this way, a product that can't by itself tell the story of how it came to be. I've described the visible part of his process here. I can make guesses about what he learned. I could question him. I could even, I suppose, devise some sort of pre-test and post-test and compare the results to produce "data," but at the end of the day no one but this boy will ever know what questions he asked and answered while creating this purposeful tangle of pipe cleaners stuck into styrofoam. 

It needs to be enough for us to know that it engaged him until he was ready to walk away.

******

 

"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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Not Just Their Right, But Their Responsibility

If there is one lesson I have always wanted the children in my life to learn it is to question those in authority, like their teachers and even their parents. This is not the same as saying defying authority, but rather the intellectual and social practice of doubting those in power when they say or do things that don't match what the children already know about the world. Indeed, I want them to know it's not just their right, but their responsibility to do so.

And any authority figure who denies someone's right to question them does not deserve to have authority over others.

One way I try to teach this lesson is to intentionally be wrong . . . a lot. I will hold up a plastic pig figurine and make it say, "Moo." For most children, this comes off as a joke, even if I'm saying it with a straight face. They laugh and saying something like, "No, Teacher Tom, the cow says moo!" Others just look at me like I'm crazy. 

I might insist it's raining when the sun is shining. Or that the hand drum I use to signal transitions is actually a banjo. Or that the carrot I'm eating is candy. 

I want the children to listen to what I'm saying and if what I'm saying defies the evidence before their own eyes and ears, I want them to know that it is not just their right but their responsibility, as a member or our community, to call me on it. 

This might sound risky to some educators and parents, but the alternative, which is to learn that authorities are to be believed and obeyed, no matter how irrationally they wield their authority, is far, far more dangerous. We know that the habits we develop when we are young tend to carry forward into adulthood. If we teach children to be obedient and unquestioningly compliant, how can we possibly expect them to grow up to be critical thinkers? Do as I say, not as I do and Because I said so are lessons in bullying authority that defy our essential humanity. 

I choose to rely on mutual respect instead. And when I respect someone, I must make room for them to question and challenge me.

As political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt wrote in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." Or as George Orwell writes in his dystopian novel 1984: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears." If the ideal subject of totalitarianism is someone who relies on others to tell them what is true and what is false, then the ideal citizen in a self-governing society is one who has learned to seek truth in their own lived experience and to challenge those who would tell them otherwise.

Perhaps the best way to prepare children to resist those who would wield power over them in the future is to leave them alone to experience the world before them, to shut up and free them to from their own ideas, theories, and understandings. This is exactly what a play-based curriculum does. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book Orwell's Roses, "direct observations and firsthand encounters in the material and sensory world (are) acts of resistance or at least reinforcements of the self who can resist. To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way to step out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up."

Play is how we offer children the kinds of direct experiences they need to see through lies and illusions. Sadly, we live in a time when we must fight for the right of children to play, if only in the name of their mental health. Increasingly, our children are growing up in a world in which all truth comes through authority figures, educators and parents, who are telling them what to do and when to do it. Play is the way we break this cycle. It is how all of us can re-learn how to trust our own eyes and ears and resist those who would command us.

******

 

"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!

That Is What Makes Learning Joyful

Spelling tests loom disproportionately large in my memories of elementary school. That's probably because it was the first, and for many years only, thing for which I had to "study." That is to say, our teachers would hand us a list of spelling words at the beginning of each week expecting us to be ready for the test at the end of the week. This memorizing was to be done on our own time, otherwise known as homework.

My technique was to ask mom to read the words to me. I would make my best stab at the correct spelling, compare the results to the word list, then do it again and again until I was nailing it. I honestly don't know how other kids studied for these tests, although I imagine that many of them didn't have access to an adult willing to help them. These kinds of spelling tests are classic examples of rote memorization, one of the bedrock principles of modern education.

This process is one of storing discrete facts into short or mid-term memory, destined to be eventually forgotten unless the drills are regularly repeated over a long period of time. When it came to the multiplication tables, for instance, we were regularly tested from grades 3-6. The "game" of it was to shout out your answers without hesitation. Any pause, any delay, was seen as evidence that you still hadn't "learned" it. Of course, in real life, hesitations and pauses are usually seen as as evidence of actual thinking. Today, if you ask me to solve 9X6, I have to take a second to think. I still get the right answer, but I do it by remembering that 9X3 is 27, then doubling it. 

Indeed, one of the lessons this kind of rote learning teaches is to not think, but rather to simply react. The other lesson it teaches is that math and spelling are boring. They are also incredibly inefficient ways to force facts into long-term memory, which is, I assume the ultimate goal. (Although most of us learned that the real goal was passing the next test so short and mid-term memory was just fine.)

If you give two groups of people a spelling list of long, unfamiliar words and ask one group to memorize the spelling while asking the other to simply look up the definition in the dictionary, the second group always out-performs the first. That's because, instead of merely memorizing, the second group is actually creating meaning. When we break the world into discrete and separate parts, when we remove them from their context, like we do with spelling tests, we strip them of meaning and it is very, very hard for humans to learn meaningless crap.

On the other hand, narrative or storytelling provides the most direct access to long-term memory. When we can connect information to metaphors, places, people, and cause-and-effect, we are more likely to be able to recall it when it's needed, in context. 

For instance, I never mistake the word "principle" for "principal" because a teacher once told me, "The principal is your pal." I'll never forget that 8X7=56 because my sixth grade math teacher told me that if a kid knew that one, she didn't need to test them on the rest. And, of course, in the meantime, the world has developed calculators and spell check to help me with the rest.

Rote memorization can be an effective way to pass the next test, but without narrative and context, it will be very difficult, inefficient, and tedious to move it into long-term memory. An education separated from life itself is no education at all. The creation of meaning is what human learning really is all about. That's what makes learning joyful.

******

 

"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!

Deer Park

This is the legendary poem Deer Park (Wang Wei):

鹿柴 (王维)

空山不见人,

但闻人语响.

返景入深林,

复照青苔上.

It was written during the Tang Dynasty by a poet who is often referred to as Poetry Buddha.

Here is one translation into English:

On this lonely mountain I see no one,

Yet I hear the echo of voices.

Rays of sunlight enter into the deep forest,

Shining once more upon green moss.

There are, however, many other translations, some that seem to convey completely different, even contradictory meanings. I'm thinking of this poem this morning because among my holiday gifts is a book entitled Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger. It is a look at this ancient poem from nineteen different perspectives, although as the author points out in the introduction there are an infinite number of ways to interpret the poem. These are simply the ones that fit this particular book.

I'm excited to read the book because it is, in part, about the challenge of "translating" a poem that was written using a pictographic alphabet into a phonetic one. There is no word-for-word translation possible because phonetic symbols are visual representations of sounds, whereas pictographic symbols represent ideas, concepts and object. This means that each symbol is open to interpretation. Our English language alphabet is comprised of a meager 26 letters. It's impossible to know exactly how many "letters" make up the ancient Chinese alphabet, although scholars place it as over 50,000 and probably more than 100,000. 

Scientists tell us that new technologies re-wire our brains, which has caused a great deal of hand wringing over how things like computers and smartphones are rewiring our children, but no technology has rewired humans more than the phonetic alphabet. It's hard not to reflect on everything we lose when reducing human experience to a small collection of sounds. It's hard not to reflect on how much richer our understanding of the world would be if we had stuck with pictographs. The phonetic alphabet is an attempt to create a narrow, if not singular, perspective, whereas pictographs seek to create an infinitely wide and inclusive perspective, one that is open to multiple, even infinite, interpretations. A phonetic alphabet is about conveying information as concretely and unambiguously as possible, whereas a pictographic alphabet seeks to create the whole picture, contradictions and all.

I wonder if the exploding use of emojis and stylized selfies in social media and elsewhere doesn't represent a deep desire to create a new, more inclusive way of communicating that acknowledges there is always more than one way to understand our world. A smiley face, after all, says so much more than the word "smile." I wonder if our phonetic alphabet induced prejudice in favor of precision and explicitness, blinding us to the true wonder of experience. I wonder if our reliance on a phonetic alphabet hasn't rewired us in ways that make us believe, falsely, in absolute truth, in right and wrong answers, in my-way-or-the highway.

As an early childhood educator, I've spent my career working amongst humans we label as "pre-literate." In other words, these are humans who have not been rewired by the technology of the phonetic alphabet. All of them begin interpreting images and making meaningful marks long before they can even conceive of what we call reading or writing. When we bend over them with our questions of "What is it?" or "What does it mean?" we are revealing our phonetic alphabet prejudiced brains and the limits of our own understanding, not to mention confusing the children. This is part of how the phonetic alphabet rewires us.

The older I get, the more aware I've become of how literacy, as we currently define it, limits my understanding. This is why, I believe, we must learn to actively seek out perspectives other than our own, and especially look for perspectives that add to, alter, or even contradict what we think we understand. At least this is what we must do if we are truth seekers. Ambiguity is truth and certainty is most certainly a lie.

******

 

"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!

Sitting And Watching

As a boy of six-years-old, I objected to the term "babysitter." For one thing, I wasn't a baby, and for another, the word conjured the image of babies being sat upon. 

By the time I was 10, old enough to be entrusted with the care of children back in the early 70's, it made more sense. After all, most little kids were "babies," with all their whining and fussing, although no one did much sitting on my watch. My counter to whining and fussing was to actively play with my charges. After all, I was, by virtue of being a big kid, a figure of some glamour, someone to be looked up to, and having recently been a little kid myself, I knew it. I would spend the first few hours performing the role of games master, romping right along with them, winding them up, tiring them out, then packing them off to bed, making a big deal of allowing them to stay up past their bed times if only they would agree to not tell on me.

By the time our daughter Josephine was old enough to babysit (which in the 00's was 12), I'd evolved once more. I now placed the emphasis on the "sitting." As a teacher, I'd figured out that a big part of the adult role with young children is sitting (or standing or kneeling or squatting) and watching (another word for babysitting, as in "watching the kids"). I told Josephine that she could entertain the kids if she wanted, but that babysitting was a job with the description in its title. 

The longer I've worked with children, the more time I spend sitting and watching. Of course, there's more to it than that, but the sitting and watching remain at the core of what I do. It's a policy of non-interference, of creating space in which children are free to pursue their own interests in their own way. The watching is, of course, partly about keeping them safe and, in certain circumstances, protecting property, but mostly it's about understanding. Usually, when we assert that "all behavior is communication" we are referring to some sort of misbehavior, but it applies to all behavior, be it building with blocks, hiding treasures, drawing a picture, or running in circles. So perhaps the word "listening" is better than "watching," although it is a listening that is done, as Eleanor Duckworth says, "with our whole being," because that's what it takes to understand. When adults don't make the effort to understand, we react to children based upon our fears, assumptions, and prejudices, thereby misunderstanding, which, more often than not, leads to even more misbehavior as the child struggles to be understood.

Sitting and watching is the not so secret sauce.

We live in an era of adult intervention. The prevailing idea of parenting or teaching or babysitting is that we must constantly be guiding or teaching or correcting, that sitting and watching is laziness, that if we aren't constantly enriching the children's world we are neglecting them. This lies at the heart of much of the stress and guilt parents find themselves feeling. 

Janet Lansbury advises young parents to lay their baby on a blanket on the floor and just enjoy watching them. Professional play workers say that their job is to "loiter with intent." Eleanor Duckworth wants us to shut up and listen with our whole selves. In past generations when stay-at-home parents (usually mothers) were the norm, children were usually left free to entertain themselves, which is to say play in their rooms, in their gardens, or around the neighborhood, without the constraints of adult cautions, corrections, or, heaven forbid, lectures. 

This is the natural habitat of childhood. When we step back, when we sit, we leave a space that is perfectly conducive to the proper development and education of young children. When we watch, when we listen to what they are communicating, we will understand when, how, and if they need us. And most of the time, all they need from us is to know where we can be found and that we love them.

******

 

"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!

Boredom

When I talk to adults about their years of schooling, they rarely talk about what they learned in math class. They talk about teachers. They talk about their social life. And at some point almost all of them talk about the boredom. 

Boredom researcher John Eastwood from York University in Canada defines boredom as "The aversive experience of wanting, but being unable to engage in satisfying activity." He and others have found that boredom is linked to, and in some circumstances potentially the cause of, depression and anger, pathological gambling, bad driving, sensation seeking and impulsivity, and lowered levels of self-actualization. This is unsurprising because, after all, the feeling of boredom is very similar to the symptoms of clinical depression -- emptiness, sadness, lack of focus, limited attention span, apathy, and lethargy.

Other researchers believe that boredom provides the important function of motivating people to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those before them. It is a spur to creativity. This is the thinking behind those who urge parents to "let your kids get bored" over summer or holiday breaks.

So, it seems that some amount of boredom is a good thing, but too much is potentially harmful. This is an important thing to think about when it comes to standard schooling. Because teachers are charged with administering a particular curriculum to all children, whether they are interested or not, we too often place our children in a position of boredom from which there is no escape. If they try to engage in activities that are more meaningful, like fidgeting, goofing off, or trying to change the subject, which is apparently the evolutionary purpose behind boredom, we reprimand and punish them.

Many teachers go to great lengths to make the curriculum interesting in an attempt to curb boredom and many children ultimately figure out how to take an interest for the same reason. But for many children, the boredom begins to affect their mental health.

When I was a boy, adults would tell me, "Only boring people get bored" in an attempt to shame me out of my boredom. There's a lot of that in our society, this idea that experiencing boredom too often is some kind of character flaw. This is how we shift the blame onto individuals rather than admit that our schools have a boredom problem.

This is a problem that self-directed learning (or play-based learning) will never have because when boredom arises, the children have options, as nature intended.

******

 

"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!

Play Is The Greatest Threat To The Status Quo

"Adolescence" was invented in the mid-1800's by the warlike Prussian nation. They had just suffered a humiliating military defeat at the hands of Napoleon and felt their downfall was due, at least in part, to their soldiers not being obedient enough. Some had even run away at the prospect of dying for their nation.

Part of their plan to create a more loyal and malleable population was the invention of schools. As Tyson Yunkaporta writes in his book Sand Talk, the idea was to slow the "transition from childhood to adulthood, so that it would take years rather than, for example, the months it takes in Indigenous rites of passage." The goal was to "create a permanent state of childlike compliance in adults," so they designed schools around the same methods used to break horses and other domestic animals: separating the young from their parents, confining them in enclosed spaces, limiting access to their natural habitat, and using rewards and punishments to force compliance with meaningless tasks. This Prussian method of compliance-based schooling was a boon for both for the military as well as the economy, which is why it became the foundation for most of what passes for education in the industrialized world today.

Shockingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Prussian slogan for their educational system was Arbiet macht frei (Work sets you free), which was infamously employed a century later at the gates of Nazi concentration camps.

We tell children they can grow up to be anything they want to be. We say it even though we know it's a lie. Most of us do not get to be whatever we want to be. We say it, however, because others have said it to us. We say it because we don't want to crush their little spirits with the truth that work is in their future. We say it because it the is one of the mantras we use to inspire them to keep their noses to the grindstone. Oh sure, we allow them to play at being artists, dancers, princesses, and athletes, but only while they are very young. Soon enough, and in some cases even during their preschool years, we begin to pressure them, both subtly and not-so-subtly to at least prepare a "fall back plan," like accounting or computer science. 

I imagine there are some readers here who are thinking, "But, Teacher Tom, you can be anything you want to be. You only have to work hard enough and never give up." How is that different than Arbiet macht frei?

A few days ago US Secretary of Education Migual Cardona sent a message from an official social media account: "Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow's global workforce." People try to tell me that today's schools are nothing like the old Prussian model, but even our top education policymaker seems to disagree. We are here, it seems, to serve the economy, not the other way around. Arbiet macht frei?

Yunkaporta points out that the word "work" does not even exist in many Indigenous languages. Indeed, the "work" his people did do prior to colonization was confined to a couple hours a day and was comprised of things many of us now do as a break from work like gardening, cooking, hunting, hiking, camping, tinkering, and fishing. They spent the rest of their time building relationships, making art, dancing, playing games (almost always cooperative), telling stories, and making music. Indeed, they spent their time doing the very things that our youngest children do when left alone to be whatever they want to be -- not when they grow up, but right now. Play, not work, sets us free.

In many ways, "You can be anything you want" is just the contemporary version of Arbiet macht frei. In many ways, our complaints about children being distracted, not staying on task, and only wanting to play video games all day, are the very complaints the colonizers had about Indigenous people they encountered around the globe. And just as we did with those populations, we are doing to our children, generation after generation. No wonder societal change is nearly impossible. No wonder the rich keep getting richer. No wonder inequality of one kind just morphs into inequality of another. We are taught that a life of work will somehow set us free, when all it really does is sustain the economy.

You might ask: But what can we do about it? After all, this is the way it is. Certainly, we can't tell our children to just stop working. Believe me, I get that. I've spent the better part of the past two decades trying to get people to see that there is a better, more democratic, more equitable, and more human way to do school; that play, not work, is the secret to a population of critical thinkers instead of obedient drones. And I'm not the only one. Yet it doesn't seem we've moved the needle very much, except perhaps in some small corners where play is nurtured and protected like an endangered species. 

And that's what we can do. The Prussian model seeks to create a population for whom work, no matter how mind-numbing or back-breaking, is the only hope. That's why they try to inspire us with the promise of a freedom that will never come. When we keep play alive in our own lives, in the lives of our children, even if it is just in the nooks and crannies, we are creating real hope for freedom. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those people keeping play alive. In this world, play is the one thing that can give us genuine hope. It is the only path to freedom. And that is why play is the greatest threat to the status quo.

It's play, not work, that will set us free.

******

 

"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!

The Return Of Light

I've been awaking to darkness for the last few weeks. I’d have to say that the short winter days are one of the most challenging aspects of life in the northern tier, but things are turning around. The Winter Solstice occurred on the west coast of the US today at 1:48 p.m., marking the end of our ever-longer nights and the return of light.

Not to lessen the significance of Christmas, Hanukkah or any of the other festivals of lights, but this astrological event is the original reason for the season. The Earth is tilted on its axis at, on average, a 23.5-degree angle and today is when the North Pole was farthest from the sun, causing it to appear to rise and set in the same place. We call it the first day of winter, and while the days will now grow longer by increments until the Summer Solstice in June, the average temperature of the “top” part of the globe will continue to drop as the oceans slowly lose the heat they still store from the warm summer months.

Humans can hardly think without resorting to metaphor and there is none more profound than this. It’s not an accident that this is a time for reflection as well as celebrating new beginnings. It’s not an accident that we seek out the people who mean the most to us, family and friends, those we love and without whom we live in perpetual winter. It’s not an accident that Christians retell the story of the birth of a child, the son of God, the light of hope in a darkened world. It’s not an accident that we give one another gifts and wish each other merriness, happiness and cheer – the darkness is passing, buck up, light is returning, have hope.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for death, but the comparison is superficial. The trees may not have leaves, the forests may have been temporarily emptied by hibernation and migration, there may be fewer children on the play grounds and at the beaches, and it may stay that way for some months to come, but we shouldn't mistake stillness for death.

The word “Solstice” comes from the Latin phrase for “sun stands still.” We spend the rest of the year in motion, moving forward, making progress. But if we can hold still long enough to listen, we hear winter whispering to slow down, take stock, cut back, rest, tend to the core of what makes life worthy of its name. All is calm. All is bright.

Even the sun stands still.

******

 

"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!

"This Is How Spirit Works"

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.

As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes."

This ability to make and use tools, like hammers or cars, is one of the things that makes Homo sapiens the species we are. Of course, other species, like apes, otters, and crows, use tools, but none to the extent that we do.

I recently observed a toddler stop to consider a stick on the ground. On wobbly legs, she stood over that stick for a moment, before carefully, awkwardly, bending at the waist and knees to get closer to it. Again, she paused to catch her balance before reaching out her hand, fingers splayed. It took her a couple attempts to grasp hold of it. She fell on her bottom in the effort to stand upright again, but then, without dropping the stick, she pushed herself back onto her feet. She then began testing the world with that stick, tapping it on the ground, poking tree trunks, sticking it into holes. It had become "an embodied extension of (her) neural processes."

We've all observed young humans doing these kinds of things. This urge to extend our bodies and minds out into our environment is, in many ways, what learning is all about. Reggio Emilia educators consider "the environment" be a teacher, equal in significance to human teachers. Indigenous wisdom, no matter where we find it in the world, has always acknowledged the interconnectedness between we humans and the rest of creation.

"At more complex levels," writes Yunkaporta, "the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making, we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places, and relationships with others." (Italics are mine)

Recently, I went golfing for the first time in 30 years. I was concerned I would make a fool of myself, and I did, but not nearly to the degree I'd feared. Indeed, the moment I picked up a club, I was reconnected to the golf clubs of my youth. I thought of my father's persimmon wood drivers, then my father, then of taking those clubs to our local municipal course and the pride of having the pro there enthuse over their rarity and beauty. I thought I'd forgotten everything about golf, but the moment I took my first swing, my body and mind embodied much of the knowledge I had stored away in those clubs from long ago. As I went around the course, I was in the past as much as the present, as the course itself -- the grass, the sand traps, the greens, the balls, the tees -- taught and re-taught knowledge, even wisdom, that I'd left stored there long ago.

Many of us will gather with our extended families over the holidays where we will will reconnect with knowledge that we keep stored in our relationships with others. Perhaps we will spend time in our childhood homes or engaging in rituals and traditions that reconnect us to things we thought we'd forgotten. If the lessons we learned were of kindness and love, those will surround us. If they were harsh or sad, we will resist or avoid the people, places, or things that store our pain, which is probably why so many of us find the holidays challenging.

Our children are just beginning this process of extending themselves into the world, of connecting their neural processes with their environment. They are just beginning to store their knowledge and wisdom outside of their brains. They will learn things in school, although most of it will remain in school, stored there in the classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Their important connections will be made with the people, places, and things from life itself.

"If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning," write Yunkaporta, "then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds." This goes for people and places as well as things. Writes Yunkaporta, "This is how spirit works."

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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

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