Unleashing Our "Unlimited Power"

In Sarah Perry's picture book classic If . . ., she surprises us with illustrated responses to prompts like, "If butterflies wore clothes," "If caterpillars were toothpaste," and "If toes were teeth." Whenever we read that book I suggest that the kids might want to try their hand at their own "If . . ." illustrations.

Once a boy sat down to illustrate "If 1 were 2 . . ." Isak was one of those preschoolers who was teaching himself to read. He had recently discovered the concept of the "silent H." He liked the idea so much that he began writing his own name as H-i-s-a-k, "with a silent H." When he learned that my proper name was Thomas, also with a silent H, we became "silent H brothers."

In other words, he was intellectually creative, the kind of kid destined for "gifted" programs, but this illustration stumped him. He sat in front of a blank page with his pencil poised for a good half hour, often muttering to himself. At one point he seemed frustrated, so I suggested he come up with a different "If . . ." statement to illustrate, but he wanted to draw this one. I joked that he could draw a person with two heads and four arms, but he informed me that this was about numbers, not people. So there he sat, alone in a crowded room, considering what this idea might look like. But try as he might, he couldn't get his head around it. When he finally walked away, all he had managed was a faint, aimless line of graphite.

Imagine a square circle.

Imagine a new color not based on any color you've ever seen before.

Imagine a realty in which the past, present, and future exist both simultaneously and infinitely. The math tells us that this is indeed reality, but even our genius physicists break their brains trying to imagine it.

A person who has been blind since birth cannot imagine the color red, no matter how creatively we try to explain it to them. A person who has never smelt cannot imagine the scent of a rose. A person who has never heard cannot imagine a mockingbird's song.

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man," writes philosopher David Hume, "and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external sense, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision."

"What if pencils had arms"

In other words, it seems that everything that's in our heads must first come to us through our senses, and try as we might, we cannot easily think outside the box of our senses, our sensory unwelt, as biologists call it. Some, like Hume, say it's literally impossible. I hope he's wrong, but I suspect he's right. I might think I can imagine what it's like to "see" through echolocation like a bat does. Indeed, in his book An Immense World, journalist Ed Yong, tells the story of a blind human who seems to have figured it out, but no matter how skilled he becomes, he'll likely never actually "see" the way a bat does and the color red will remain out of his reach. 

Hisak found himself confronted by this limitation of the human perspective.

Meanwhile, the other children were producing silly pictures based on their own "If . . ." statements.

"What if a cow was also a chicken?" resulted in a crazy mash-up of cow and chicken parts.

"What if slides were hats?" resulted in a silly picture of a person wearing a slide as a hat.

"What if clouds were body parts?" resulted in a human made of puffy clouds.

"What if hearts had butts."

These children were creating and imagining from that "original stock of ideas" furnished by their senses. They had experienced cows and hats and clouds which allowed those concepts to be playthings for their minds. 

Hisak disliked mud and mess. He was motivated by abstractions like letters and numbers, while his classmates embraced the mud and mess. It's irrelevant, especially as preschoolers, where they focus their senses. The greater their stock of ideas, the more raw material they have to mix, compound, separate, and divide. This is our "unlimited power" and it's why a proper education must be driven by curiosity and led by the senses, all the senses.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Making Makes Meaning

When children pick up the hot glue gun, many are drawn in simply by the prospect of using this oft forbidden tool. Others have made a search of the junk box and are intrigued by something they've found there. In Angie's case, she had found the plastic housing for one of my asthma inhalers. 

I'd collected a dozen or so of them, run them through the dishwasher, then dropped them in the box only that morning. As usual, several of the children had chosen to construct with them. I've found that children find these particular artifacts uniquely compelling. Perhaps it's because most of them have no idea what they are, which allows them to be anything. 

One boy, immediately identified them as "cannons," then used several them on the "fort" that this idea inspired. He talked of "blasting" invading aliens, pirates, and other assorted baddies as he worked.

Another boy used one as an engine for his rocket. He'd been inspired to make a rocket by a paper towel tube. Discovering the inhaler shell was the final touch. 

If Angie knew what she was making, she didn't say. All we know is that she wanted to use that inhaler. We know because she had said, holding it up, "I'm going to use this." She then spent the morning on her project. Starting from that inhaler, it grew over the course of an hour, taking shape in the way only hot glue gun projects can, into an elaborate landscape? Building? Artwork? People kept guessing. She neither confirmed, nor denied, but rather listened to each guess almost as if she was considering whether or not she agreed.

At the end of the day, we ask the children if they want to take their projects home. It's always surprised me that most don't. They know that if they stay at school we're going disassemble them and return the still usable parts back to the junk box for future projects. Maybe that's why so many are okay with having their work destroyed: they can always make it again tomorrow. After all, for many, the "making" is the fun part.

Angie wanted to take hers home. Her mother, upon seeing it, turned to me bemusedly, "Is that one of your asthma inhalers?" 

A couple days later Angie brought her project back to school. I figured she was ready to dismantle it and start over, but instead she only wanted to repair it. This happened several times over the course of the next few weeks until her mother bought Angie her very own hot glue gun for home use. I never saw that construction again.

Years later, I ran into her mother at the supermarket. She said, "I actually think of you every day," but before my chest swelled too much, she added with a kind of sneer, "I still can't get Angie to throw out your damned asthma inhaler!" 

Making makes meaning. Making makes something, anything, matter.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Racing Heart, Sweaty Palms, Tense Muscles

I once knew a two-year-old who was terrified of pinecones. In nearly every other circumstance, he was a bold, confident child, but when he spied a pinecone he froze in fear.

One day, to his horror, noticed that there were cones on the branches of a scotch pine that lived on the playground. We all know the feeling, racing heart, sweaty palms, tense muscles. That day, he couldn't be outdoors at all. For the next week, it was all he could do to cross the playground to the front door each morning. The tree, he discovered, was visible through the classroom windows, so he attempted to spend the entire day with his back turned to them. He would go outside, he loved playing outside, but avoided the corner where the tree grew. There were moments when he forgot, and glimpsed the pine cones overhead and the fear would overwhelm him. Slowly, however, over the course of weeks, he began to intentionally turn toward the tree and its pinecones. Then he began to talk about them, "I can see the scary pinecones." Since learning of his fear, I'd been meticulous about discarding any stray cones that had fallen to the ground, but one day he asked me to "pick one down" for him. He kept his distance. He definitely didn't want to touch it. But he did stand his ground as he made is study from afar.

Another boy, likewise bold, was petrified by mascots, like the kind you see at sporting events. It normally didn't impact his life. Mascots are generally easy to avoid, but I once went trick-or-treating with him. It turned out that costumes were fine, he didn't bat an eye, but when we came across a person dressed in a full body suit and an oversized head, he freaked. Our daughter couldn't bear the presence of crabs, which is a problem in a seafood city like Seattle where live tanks abound. She would throw herself on the ground and refuse to move which meant I had to make sure our course around the supermarket avoided the fish counter.

One of my own irrational fears is dogs. Growing up in suburbia, my earliest exposure to dogs was being warned about rabies. If we were playing outdoors and a stray dog showed up (and back then a lot of dogs were allowed to roam the neighborhood) we were told to assume it was rabid and get inside, quick! Otherwise, we'd risk being attacked and, supposedly, the only antidote was delivered through a ten inch long needle -- at least that's what the neighborhood kids said. This is obviously the seed from which my irrational fear grew. In fact, it shows that there is nothing irrational about my fear.

It also illustrates that the difference between my irrational fear and yours: mine makes sense. I'm sure the boy who feared pinecones, if he'd had the words, would agree.

Today, of course, I live with a dog, the seventh one I've lived with over the course of my life, and I'm friends with many more. Yet still, when I see a dog running around off its leash, I have a brief physical experience of panic. My heart races, my palms sweat, my muscles tense, but my brain has learned to wave off these physical manifestations of fear, because, you know, it's irrational even if my body remains convinced by those earliest experiences.

I imagine we all have some kind of irrational fear, be it clowns, insects, or the sight of blood. These fears can, of course, be debilitating. In that case, we turn to professional help, but for most of us, we've come up, over time, with our own philosophy or strategy or other habit of mind that allows us to live with these fears. Most of the time it involves some version of ad hoc exposure therapy, often induced by life offering us a choice between our fear and something we value. In my case, it started when Mrs. Beale offered to pay me to care for their German Shepard JB while they were away on vacation. I had to choose between my fear and more money than I'd ever had before in my life. And so it was that I got paid $1 a day to begin what has turned out to be a lifelong process of exposure therapy until today most would consider me a dog lover, having no inkling of the occasional racing heart, sweaty palms, and tense muscles.

The boy who feared mascots became his high school's mascot during his senior year.

In our daughter's case, she still won't eat crab, but she's learned, over time, to be "fine" with other people at her table enjoying it. 

As for the boy who feared pinecones, I was his teacher for another two years and the subject never came up again after the day he had me "pick one down," although I could tell it persisted by the way he would occasionally cast a wary eye toward the tree. The school moved to a new location the following year. Our new playground had no pines, although the ground was covered in cedar cones. I don't know if he had any feelings about them. If he did, he never mentioned it. He was too busy doing what he enjoyed most, playing outdoors, but I imagine there were moments when his heart still raced, his palms still sweat, and muscles still tensed.

Therapists are there to help us overcome our irrational fears, but for most of us, most of the time, just by living, we encounter the exposure therapy we need. Sometimes we just call it experience.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

As a Man Who Can See the Future

Physicists assure us that despite how it seems, there is no difference between the past and the future. The math tells us it's true, even as the perspective provided by the biology of human bodies simply doesn't allow us to experience the past (except through our unreliable memories) or the future (except through even more unreliable fortune tellers). The cliché is to shrug and say that all we have is the present, but even the present isn't truly available to us. It takes a few milliseconds for our sensations to reach our brains, so even what we are experiencing right now is actually occurring ever so slightly in the past.

In his introduction to The Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now . . . To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say: 'Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are.'"

I'll be 63 in a few weeks, more than 20 years older than Vonnegut was when he wrote his great novel. As a young man, I often wondered about what would become of me. I worried about it. I wished for a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of my life as an old man. I thought that if I could see where I live in the future, how I live, who I'm with, I could rest easy in the choices I was making in the present. If I saw my future self as, say, a professional baseball coach, I would know not to quit playing baseball. If I saw my future self as a happily married man, I'd know not to mourn the women with whom I'd already broken up. If I saw my future as a down-and-out drifter, or a convict, or if there was no future at all, I'd at least be able to relax and enjoy myself while I still could. After all, if the math is right, if the future already exists, there's nothing I can do to change it, even if everything I do will help bring it to reality.

Like Vonnegut, remembering the future is now child's play for me, but what never occurred to me as a young man is that there is a future beyond 63. From my younger perspective, life seemed to be about striving to get through school, get on that career track, find that special someone, then, I guess, just coast the rest of the way. If I'd seen myself as I am today, I'm quite certain that I'd have, at some level, neglected to live in the present because what I have now would have looked, on the surface, pretty good to my younger self. If I'd known the whole story from the start, my life would have been a lot of going through the motions which is how people with clinical depression say they experience life. Oh sure, I'd get fired up for the day I met my wife or the birth of our daughter, but every bit of joy would be tempered by the certainty of those times when illness or stupidity or bad luck made life suck. And always, down the road, would be this 63-year-old man that I've become no matter what I did. All this to say that I'm thankful that I never met the genii to grant my wish for a peek into the future.

Schooling, as it's practiced today, is an effort to shape this unknowable future. "We must get our children ready for the jobs of tomorrow" is the mantra of our policymakers whenever they talk about education. It's BS, of course, because no one knows what those jobs of tomorrow are going to be. At best, our schools are preparing children for the jobs of today, most of which are soon be relegated to the past. But really, when we look at what's actually being taught in our schools, we're mostly just preparing children for the jobs of yesterday.

Maybe we shouldn't be preparing our children for anything, but rather give them permission to live the life they are prepared for right now.

As a man who can see the future, I'm here in the present to urge us all to forget this crazy project of 20 years of mandatory vocational training for every child, humans who show they know more than we do. They show us they clearly understand that if they are to be princesses or superheroes, the time is right now. And if a child knows that, right now, they want to be something more pedestrian, like a supermarket cashier or to sell popcorn at a movie theater, not only do our laws forbid it, our entire system of schooling tells them "No." They must first be educated for at least two decades in order to fill their past up with what those of us who do see the future know will be mostly useless. And what bits and pieces that do turn out to be relevant can be more easily learned by simply living, maybe even as a cashier or popcorn seller. We tell children, "But, supermarkets and movie theaters won't exist by the time we're finished with you," "Princess is not legitimate career tracks," and they may or may not know to reply, "Duh! That's why I need to be those things now!"

If I'd gotten my wish and seen myself as the 63-year-old I am, I might well have given up playing baseball on the spot instead of, you know, being a baseball player for as long as I could. I might well have never made all those friends as I waited for my one true love. I might well have never tried my hand at the many "careers" I explored before settling on this one. At the end of the day, the more we cast our gaze on the future, the less we live in the present . . . Or rather that moment a few dozen milliseconds in the past that appears to us as right now.

That dog of the future is curled up at our feet right now. It's always there, knowing and liking us. We ought not have to wait our entire lives to pet it.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 Theory of Collecting

As a boy, I was a collector. Baseball cards and comic books are the specific items around which I most often place the sepia halos of nostalgia, but those collections didn't start until I was eight and ten respectively. By then, I had already developed a theory of collecting. Beginning in my preschool years I collected hats, seashells, rocks, Matchbox cars, flags of the world, and stuffed animals. Indeed, I collected almost any appealing thing to which I had easy, inexpensive access. Rocks and seashells were obvious things to collect, whereas hats, stuffed animals and Matchbox's came my way through the kindness of gift-givers. Once people know you have a "collection" that's what they bring for birthdays and other holidays.

"Almost all children collect something," writes psychologist and philosopher William James and I've found that to be true. A while back, I wrote about a boy who collected sticks. One of the aspects of his collecting was that he had a robust criteria even if he wasn't able to put it into words. Once his collection became common knowledge, people -- both children and adults -- were, in the spirit of gift-giving, forever offering him sticks "for your collection." He would take each offering seriously, studying it for a moment with his discerning eye, looking for whatever it was that made a stick collectable. Most of the time, he would say "No thanks," but every now and then, to the giver's delight, he would add a pro-offered stick to the collection.

This boy's collection endured over the course of months, but preschool collections might just as easily exist for only a few hours. Over the years, our playground has been seeded with thousands of florist marbles. We keep seeding the playground because most of them disappear into the depths of the sand pit or under the wood chips (a delight for future diggers) but many go home in pockets, collections for a day (although a mother once sheepishly returned hundreds of "jewels" in well-sorted jars that her son had been secretly collecting in his bedroom for months). But that isn't all: pinecones, pebbles, leaves, unripe blueberries, rubber bands, worms, and just about anything that occurs "naturally" in numbers on our playground can be collectable.

As a boy, I would play with my collections by spreading them out on the floor or on my bed, organizing them, sorting them, ranking them, experimenting with them, and wondering about them. Not being a child of the internet, I relied on our family's set of encyclopedias (with Mom's help) to inform me about those flags of the world. The seashells could be sorted by shape or size or color or according to the beaches from which they came. Same with the rocks. My stuffed animals were organized alternatively by "personality" (e.g., clever, funny, mean, nice) or athletic ability (e.g., strong, fast runner, high jumper, good thrower). Likewise with the Matchbox cars, although, given their wheels, I could spend hours, building ramps of books then ranking each car based on how far and/or straight each car could go based on gravity alone. This is what I mean by a "theory of collecting." By the time I got to baseball cards, I was ready for all those statistics printed on the back. They could be sorted in dozens of different ways.

James wrote of childhood collecting as the basis of natural history study: "(N)body ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector." In collecting, he saw the emergence of neatness, order, and method as being "instinctively gained." He pointed out that collections, like stamp collections, serve as an "inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information." This was certainly true for me and my collection of foreign flags. But that's far from the only place collecting leads.

For one thing, a collector is exploring basic concepts in mathematics. Collecting is an exploration of how things connect as well as diverge. It is a process of discovering and experimenting with nuance, shades, and subtly. It leads to questions about origins, uses, functions, and beauty. To be a collector means making a study of things, not because there will be a test, but because it's interesting.

As a play-based educator, it's always useful to learn about a child's collections. This is where we see their passion. In a play-based environment, we see this urge to collect as part and parcel with the urge to go more deeply into a subject, any subject. As adults, we are wise to avoid allowing our judgments to dismiss childish collections. That Pretty Pony collection, for the collector, is every bit as valuable as the stamp or coin collection, and can lead to as many places. But that's beside the point. There is nothing I collected as a child that I continue to collect today. In each case, one by one, I lost interest: I'd exhausted each one's capacity to "teach," at least for now, and moved on to the next collectable.

One caution, however. Just because a child shares their collection with you, their passion, that isn't an invitation to attempt to "extend" or "scaffold" their learning. A father I know killed his son's passion for collecting knives by becoming too passionate about it himself. His idea was to "share" something with his son, but instead he took it over. And there is nothing that can put an end to a collector's passion faster than to have it made into a lesson. 

The beauty of collecting is that it must remain self-selected and self-motivated, like that boy and his sticks. Of course, we help them answer their questions, but this is their thing to master. And it is up to them to determine what mastery entails. The power of collecting is that it's not only self-selected, but self-assessed. What is being collecting hardly matters to anyone, but the child. The process of attaining mastery through collecting is vital to intellectual development. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

No One Wants to Raise a Little A--hole

Alfredo Jaar (Mahatma Grandi's "Seven Social Sins")

A little over a decade ago a study led by Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that 80 percent of US children believe their parents are more concerned with their grades and test scores than such things as kindness and compassion.

I don't imagine much has changed in the past decade. Recently, Pope Francis felt compelled to defend Jesus Christ's most famous speech, The Sermon on the Mount, because so many congregants, especially in the US, are objecting to its central message of forgiveness, generosity, humility, and peace as being too "woke." This week, on the day we've set aside to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr., we installed a President who, whatever you think of his politics, is a notoriously boastful bully. Many of his supporters say they see this as "strength."

Selfishness and self-interest are clearly ascendant in contemporary society. Perhaps it's always been this way. I mean, politicians and organized religion don't have a particularly clean track record when it comes to virtues, but it does seem, for better or worse, that we've stopped trying to hide it and our children have noticed. We can lecture them all we want. We can tell them stories of goodness. We can let them know how we expect them to behave, but at the end of the day, our counter messages of kindness and compassion, selflessness and humility, are being overwhelmed by the real world.

Or is it? Yes, it's a problem that children think their parents care more about school success than being kind to others. I imagine that had the Harvard study asked their parents, most of them would reply that kindness and compassion come before grades. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, but having spoken to thousands of parents about their aspirations for their child, I've never met one who placed academic achievement over virtue. After all, no one wants to raise a little asshole.

There are those who believe that humans are essentially evil, of course, and that there is nothing we can do about any of this other than Skinnerian punishments and rewards. There are others who believe that we are essentially good, and that if parents/schools/society could just ensure that everyone is has their physiological needs met (e.g., food, clothing, shelter), are physically safe, and know that they are loved, then virtue will naturally emerge.

A 2007 study out of Yale found that infants as young as six months old possess an innate sense of morality, can distinguish right from wrong, and show a preference for good over bad. Subsequent research finds that children as young as 18 months will set aside their own pleasure in order to help strangers, even if no reward is offered for doing so. On the other hand, when resources are limited, when children find themselves arbitrarily divided into groups, or when they are explicitly taught that their needs are more important than the needs of others, they tend to behave in selfish ways, including bullying. In other words, children tend to behave according to the environment in which they find themselves. But they start on the side of virtue.

Competitive schooling and parents who focus on academic achievement obviously steer children toward selfishness. Children who are raised in a world in which the wealthy and powerful are raised onto pedestals, obviously learn the lessons of wealth and power. Children who see boastful bullies elevated and praised understandably conclude that kindnesss and compassion are weakness.

As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind, "(T)o stand up for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be. For the powerful, a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening. Subversive. Seditious. It implies that we're not selfish beasts that need to be reined in, restrained and regulated. It implies that we need a different kind of leadership. A company with intrinsically motivated employee has no need of managers; a democracy with engaged citizens has no need of career politicians."

To stand up for goodness is to invite cynicism and ridicule, but only from cynics and those whose power is threatened by goodness. As Bergman tells us, a British study finds that nearly 75 percent of us report that we identify more with "values such as helpfulness, honesty and justice than with wealth, status and power," yet almost the same percentage believe that others are more selfish than they actually are. In other words, it appears that we've been "taught" to assume the worst of one another. We've been taught that if we aren't selfish, we're losers. No wonder so many of us behave like little assholes.

It seems that young children are born knowing the opposite. It also seems that most of us grow into adulthood knowing the difference between right and wrong.

I'm taking a break from the news and am trying to manage my social media use in a way that allows me to focus on my friends, family, and the community of early childhood educators and parents who are attracted to the things Teacher Tom is up to. I'm reading more, especially fiction, which is known to increase empathy and compassion. I'm spending more time with people in the real world, my neighbors and friends, and while I might disagree with them about many things, I find that our opinions about values are more similar than not. In other words, I'm being subversive and even seditious.

Our species has always produced selfish people, but for most of our 300,000 year history they were pointed out as such. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were intolerant of boastful bullies, ridiculing them, and even banishing them if it got too bad. So it hasn't always been this way, but we have always had to act against it. As Bergman says, "That's how good overpowers evil -- by outnumbering it."

We have the numbers, despite what the cynics say, and there are more of us being born every day.

As early childhood educators, we must know that not only are the children in our care programmed by evolution for virtue, at least 75 percent of their parents value virtue as well. "Teaching" the virtues, however, is a famously difficult thing to do: we must live it, role model it, and be courageous (one of the most important virtues) in standing up even when those around us are giving in. This is how our children will come to learn not only that we value goodness over evil, but that it's something worth fighting for.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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!

Why We Need Children in the Midst of Life Itself

My brother and I used to fight over who got to sit in the window seat on airplanes. We wanted to be able to look out. The world from 30,000 feet was an amazing thing. And it was all right there through these portholes with double panes. We weren't the only ones. Nearly everyone lucky enough to be seated by a window watched the world from this unique perspective, at least during take offs and landings.

Today, I still tend fly with my shade open, but most people close them the moment they're seated. I've become aware of this because my fellow passengers have actually asked me, if I'm not actively peering out, to close my shade. I understand that for some people the constant reminder that they are traveling in a metal tube suspended at the edge of outer space is nerve wracking. But most make the request because they're planning to get some sleep or the glare washes out their device screen.

I was born in 1962, right in the middle of the so-called "golden age" of air travel. This is when jet engine aircraft with pressurized cabins became commonplace enough that middle class people could take advantage of this awe-inspiring amazing technology. It was new and exciting for everyone. Today, commercial air travel is old hat, except when it comes to young children: air travel still excites them.

Curmudgeonly adults tend to only notice the kids who are having a bad day or the crying babies, but when I look around, I see children who are every bit as excited as we were as everyone was when I traveled as a boy. They're at the windows asking questions about every detail of what they see going on out on the tarmac. They pepper their adults questions about everything. Once on the plane, they keep the shades open . . . then closed, then open, the closed again. Same with their tray tables. "I have my own little table!" "I got a magazine!" "The arm rest goes up!" "We're moving!" "We're going up!" "We're up!" "I can see houses!" "The cars down there are tiny!" "We're flying in clouds!"

Most adults I know today talk about air travel with a cynic's sigh. They gird themselves for hardship. But these children, if we allow them, remind us that what we are doing is still awe-inspiring. It would be enough if all they did was remind us that there is good reason to be excited about living, today, right now. It's something that most adults miss as they spend their days in places where the presence of children is frowned upon, if not outright banned. Indeed, most of society misses this as young children have been more or less relegated to their homes, school, and a handful of other places designed specifically for children.

For most of human history, children were part of every aspect of life, participating in the hunting, gathering, farming, commerce, cooking, and manufacturing. That was their education, learning alongside their elders. Were they underfoot? Did they cry and fuss? Did they run around and behave boisterously? Of course, they're children, they did all those things. They were there to remind the adults that the emerging present moment is the best time to fully engage life itself. To laugh and cry and feel.

Because they are so much newer to the world, young children serve as societal novelty detectors, finding something new in the commonplace. We see it every time we watch a child make a toy of a bottle cap or a stick. We see it when they make treasures of pebbles or maple leaves. We see it when they discover new possibilities for things we've long taken for granted. Having young children in our lives helps us see the new possibilities in the everyday. They paint rainbows through our grayness.

Likewise, their curiosity, their thousand questions, forces us to focus on providing answers. So often, adults, in their hurry, are dismissive -- "Because I said so," "That's just the way it is," "The sky is blue because it isn't green" -- but when we take the time to answer respectfully, we deepen our own understanding of the world by putting what we know into words. And often we discover that we ourselves don't know the answer and we can then join them in their wonder.

In this, early childhood professionals are the lucky ones. We know to keep the shades open on the plane, to appreciate the magic of a leaf, and to wonder at the shape and size and heft of pebbles. I often wonder how much different the world would be if we didn't segregate our young children into pink collar ghettos and instead included them, as they deserve, in the midst of life itself.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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 We Create Ourselves

Our dog Stella is over ten years old and it seems like she's still learning new tricks. In the past couple years, she seems to have taken more than passing interest in how humans use their voices and has been experimenting with her own.

She's always barked, of course, but not long ago, she started howling joyfully whenever we have guests over to the house. I reckon she's noticed that everyone's voices jump up in intensity and volume as we greet one another. I've read that dog's can hear our heart beats. I imagine that she's responding to the excitement or nervousness we all feel about the evening to come. We've taught her not to be reactive to other dogs when we're out walking, but lately I've noticed that as we say "Good morning" to people with their leashed dogs, she's started "talking" as well. It might sound like a kind of whine -- and maybe that's all it is -- but it sure feels like she's also using her voice to greet those we pass. For years, when she wanted something -- to be fed, to go outside -- she would just sit and stare at us, but lately she's added a low rumbling voice to her repertoire. And sometimes, when my wife and I are engaged in a long conversation, she joins us in a way that seems, well, conversational.

We're warned against andromorphizing animal behavior (e.g., attributing human traits, feelings, and behaviors to non-humans) but the more I learn about animals, and plants for that matter, the more I'm convinced that we don't andromorphize enough. 

By now, Stella knows that we're not big fans of wild barking, lurching toward other dogs, and other "unruly" behavior. These are, however, natural ways for canines to connect with the world. My theory is that with those things off the table, she's figuring out new, approved ways of creating relationships with the world around her. Traditional animal behaviorists might insist that it's all some sort of Skinnerian conditioning and that she's really motivated by instincts to, say, dominate or control territory or secure food. But as one of her most constant companions, I see the same thing I see in young children: everything is about relationships, and our voices are a key way that humans do this.

From the moment we're born, we begin creating relationships with people, places, and things. Our voices, a baby's cry, for instance, is one of the first ways we begin to entangle ourselves in the world. We tend to think of our voices as something ephemeral because they lack substance, but from the very beginning of life, we use our voices to move the world. Our cry brings us food, snuggles, and responding voices: connection. This is what lets us know we're alive, that we're safe, that we're real. Maybe I am andromorphizing, but it sure seems to be that this is what Stella has figured out and she wants a little of that for herself.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli, who I've written about on this blog many times before and whose books I enjoy reading and re-reading, has a gift for "andromorphizing" physics. But that doesn't mean he isn't a serious scientist, it's just that he's capable of using, say, the poetry of Dante to communicate about the nature of the universe.

Rovelli argues that the physical world is nothing more than a web of relations. He writes that we live in "a world of happenings, not of things," drawing his conclusions from the study of quantum mechanics where time and space are not objective things, but rather relationships between something and something else. "There is no longer space that 'contains' the world, and there is no longer time 'in which' events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another. The illusion of space and time that continues round us is a blurred vision of this swarming of elementary processes."  In this understanding of the universe, there is no cause and effect, just relationships between things and the stories we tell about them. As science writer George Musser puts it in his new book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, "Not only does a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it make no sound, but it doesn’t even exist."

It sounds fantastical, but these are logical conclusion based on the language of logic: math. Obviously, these kinds of conclusions may very well simply point to flaws in our theories and there are many physicists who think Rovelli and others who think like him are wrong. Still, this notion that even such fundamental things as gravity and magnetism have no properties in isolation, but rather only acquire them through entanglement with other things is one that has parallels in the world outside those ivory towers.

We know, for instance, that humans kept in isolation lose their minds. Their brains literally shrink. They hallucinate, they lose their sense of self. Indeed, when a person is kept in isolation long enough, they come to believe they no longer exist. Babies who are not held roll over and die. Just as the tree in the forest doesn't exist without relationships, we ourselves do not exist without them.

As Musser writes, "By analogy, consider a famous optical illusion by the German psychologist Walter Ehrenstein, in which lines converge on a point but never actually meet, like a wheel with spokes but no hub. We still see a hub, because the brain fills it in. Similarly, we see relations in the world, and our Brians presume those relations must be anchored in concrete objects, but maybe those objects are illusory."

One of the most mysterious things in quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in which two or more particles (e.g., electrons, photons) are connected and their properties are dependent on one another, even when separated by large distances. They are in entangled with one another in a way the defies our day-to-day experience of space and time, suggesting to me that relationship is everything, something our babies know, something Stella knows.

"Children," writes Rovelli, "grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same." At the end of the day, learning is about creating entanglements, or rather playing, with people, places, and things. When we do this, we are not simply seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling, or hearing what is there, but rather creating what is there through the relationship we forge beyond the metaphorical four walls of ourselves. This is likewise how we create ourselves.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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