It's Hilarious

Last night, I attended a community "open mic" event in which our neighbors took turns showing off their talents. I was there at the invitation of my friend Bill, an older man who lost his wife a little over three years ago. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to him were in consolation for his loss. He was going to read some poetry he had written during the intervening interval, although he appended that information by saying, "I think you'll be surprised."

We show up for our friends, even if they're going to read their mournful poetry of loss. And besides, I told myself, he had been a professional writer, a newspaper journalist, so I went hoping for a nice surprise, although a part of me was on pins and needles, worried that I wouldn't be able to sufficiently hide my cringe response.

He was announced by the emcee and came to the mic dressed in black. He began by telling us a little about his journey over the past three years, saying that his wife had specified that she was to be cremated and her ashes scattered in a beautiful place to which she had never been. 

"So," he said, "I scattered them around the kitchen."

There was a pause, then the audience erupted in wild laughter.

As a joke, it was, frankly, hackneyed, even potentially sexist (although she'd been a successful novelist, so it's quite possible she didn't have time for cooking), but the delivery, the set up, the surprise, made it hilarious. He went on to do a full on comedy set centered around his experience as a recent widower.

"Peek-a-boo" is classic, nearly universal game we play with babies. 

We cover our eyes with our hands, wait a moment, then drop our hands to say, with a smile, "peek-a-boo." 

We do it because most babies find it hilarious. Yes, some may startle at first, even cry from the surprise, but once they "get" the game it never fails to delight.

Science reporter David Toomey writes in his terrific book Kingdom of Play, "There is a pleasure in the momentary disorientation of being tricked, or perhaps more precisely, a pleasure in learning that one has been tricked, that one has been, in a word, 'played'."

When we observe young children at play, there is generally a lot of laughter. Studies find that young children laugh something like 300 times a day while a typical adult might make it to 20.  Part of the reason, I'm guessing is this peek-a-boo response. Yes, we seem to take pleasure in being tricked: four and five year olds almost always laugh when I use slight-of-hand to pull a penny from their ears. And being tricked is the slightly gentler cousin of being surprised. Of course, it's possible to take things too far, as chronic practical jokers eventually discover, but most of the time, once our hearts have slowed down, we laugh. 

A big part of the reason children are compelled to play is the prospect of being tricked or delightfully surprised. Indeed, some theorists believe that play is natural selection's way to prepare us for the unexpected.

Our babies genuinely don't expect our face to appear. When it does it surprises and delights them, often even more so as we do it again and again. The open mic audience expected five minutes of melancholy, but were surprised with jokes. The children expect to see a penny in my hand, not their ear. I expect that young children laugh 95 percent more often than adults because they live much more in a world of the unexpected. As adults, we've seen more and so have gotten good at predicting, or, as if often the case, good at missing the surprise because we assume we've seen it all.

For young children, even discovering such fundamental things as object permanence, is delightfully surprising. When faced with the unexpected, when playfully surprised or tricked, we learn the value of staying on our toes, remaining flexible, and never being too certain. Indeed, looked at one way, whenever we learn something new our sense of the status quo is shaken and something new and unexpected has emerged to take its place . . . And play teaches us that it's hilarious.

******

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!

But First We Must Admit We've Been Fooled

I stepped out into a windy morning. The sky overhead was swept clean of clouds, although they lurked around the fringes. But what caught my eye were the ravens. Dozens of them swirling in the wind that came, uncharacteristically, out of the south, wings spread, rarely flapping, but rather subtly changing shape to catch this or that gust. When the wind momentarily died, the ravens turned into it, moving into it like master sailors tacking against the wind. When the wind roared again, the ravens turned and abandoned themselves to it, tipping, flipping, and diving, embodied as acrobatic kites.

Behind them was the dome of blue. And then I noticed that it was peppered with ravens, soaring higher than I'd ever seen any bird before, hundreds of them, playing, there is no other rational explanation it.

Perhaps they were building brains, building muscles, making themselves more fit for survival, but like when humans play, really play, there is no reason other than joy. 

I want the children in my life to learn at full capacity, to soar to great heights, which is why I do whatever I can to set them free to play.

Mark Twain is thought to have said, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled." I think that's the position we are in with schooling. Despite ever-mounting evidence that the way we do schooling -- confined indoors, still and quiet, tested and graded, lectured and bored -- is perhaps the worst possible educational system anyone could devise. As I wrote last week, it's literally based on systems originally created to "break" animals to make them more docile and obedient. 

Things like joy, awe, curiosity, and wonder have no place in a system like this.

If our goal really is for our young to learn at full capacity, very few of our schools, beyond play-based preschools, base what happens within them on the evidence of how humans learn. We've been fooled so long and so thoroughly that we simply can't admit it.

There are those who will read this and strenuously object. They will assert that their children experience joy every day, that they are learning at full capacity. I have no doubt that these educators are doing the best they can, but it's clear they've been fooled. If the kids were experiencing so much joy, then why do 75 percent of them say they have "negative feelings" about school (according to the lead researcher, "they are not energized or enthusiastic," key aspects of joy). If they are learning at full capacity, then why do so many children fail to earn top marks, fall through the cracks, and require remediation?

These ravens didn't need anyone's permission to play in the wind. When joy is at hand, it is their's to embrace. That is how life is meant to learn.

The plight of modern human children is that they need permission for everything they do, even play. In our schools, sequels of joy are stifled, leaps of joy are discouraged. Indeed, almost all expressions of joy, if not immediately curtailed through obedience, are grounds for punishment. 

Going outside to be in the wind, under the dome of blue, is limited to, at best, a few meager minutes of the day. The American Bar Association, the Association for the Prevention of Torture, and other organizations say that humane incarceration requires giving prisoners a minimum of one hour a day outdoors. Most of our schools don't even allow even half that time to elementary school children. Some surveys show that the typical American child spends less than 10 minutes a day engaged in unstructured play outdoors, despite the fact that all the research finds that humans think more clearly while outdoors. Learning, not to mention mental health, demands time outdoors, yet our schools flat out ignore it.

It's a difficult thing to admit, that we've been doing it so wrong for so long. Tragic even, considering all the generations who have been subjected to it. It takes courage and humility to admit we've been fooled, courage and humility that most of us don't seem to have, even as we know in our hearts that it's true.

Can't we even, in the interest of education, give our children permission to play? It's joy that matters, not their damn test scores.

"(T)he imagination," writes George Orwell, "like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."

The evidence tells us that we must set children free, like these ravens, to find joy in the wind, and it's only from this that learning at full capacity will take wing. 

But first we must admit we've been fooled.

******

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!

Parental Rights

Awhile back, I read the disgusting story of a police officer and his wife who were arrested for handcuffing and jailing his own three-year-old overnight, for two nights in a row, for the "crime" of soiling himself. Their defense is that it was their parental right.

Thankfully, Florida state law recognizes this as an actual crime. I suspect the parents, unless there was evidence of other abusive or neglectful behavior, got off with a warning, perhaps a required parenting course, and maybe some sort of probationary period during which the appropriate state agency could keep tabs on them for a time. That's probably what was best for the whole family. Not only was that poor boy traumatized by his parents' actions, he likely feels responsible for getting his parents in trouble, the whole episode will remain with all of them for the rest of their lives, and, thinking rationally, it's probably best to allow them to deal with the natural consequences and move forward.

Of course, it's tempting, in anger, to want those parents punished more severely. How could anyone treat a young child like that? On the other hand, I'm confident there are others who feel that they were within their rights as parents and are outraged that the state would presume to step in to a "family matter." Indeed, these parents obviously felt that way. After all, as the father is quoted as saying, "it worked."

"Parent rights" stands at the center of much of the current controversy swirling around our public schools. The argument being used to ban books and speech is that parents have the right to protect their children's innocence about certain topics, especially with regard to gender, sexuality, and race. There are even some who don't want their child taught anything that smacks of social-emotional learning, sternly scolding that schools should stick to all-academics-all-the-time. And there are some who believe they have the right to jail their three-year-old.

My child is an adult now, but when she was young I also felt that, ultimately, my rights, as her parent, were paramount. I wasn't anti-vaccination, for instance, but I did ask our pediatrician lots of questions which resulted in delaying some and staggering others. I once had words with one of her teachers (firm but without involving his superiors) over what I saw as an inappropriate use of collective punishment. And in that same spirit I tried to respect the rights of other parents. When we invited another girl along on a family vacation, her father gave me long list of dos and don'ts as a condition of letting her join us, a list that contained many things I found ridiculous, but to which I nevertheless adhered. Although had one of those conditions been, say, to spank (or jail) her, I would have let him know that I wasn't going to do those things and let him be the one who told his daughter why she couldn't join us.

There is always a line. Jailing a three-year-old clearly crosses that line. When the line is crossed, the rest of us get to override the parents. The challenge is knowing where the line is drawn and we're not always going to agree on where that is, but let there be no doubt: there is a line beyond which parents lose their rights, even if they cross it in the privacy of their own home. We, as a society, through our institutions, get to decide when a parent has engaged in abuse or neglect. When that happens, the parents lose their rights.

The "parent rights" argument, as currently be used against our public schools, however, is an entirely different thing, although it's not new. Parents who exert their rights to "protect" their children from discussions of gender, sexuality, and race, are in a head-on collision with the rights of parents who see it as essential that their children be educated about those very things. On one side, parents say they are concerned that their white children, for instance, will be made to feel shame and guilt over discussions of our nation's history of slavery. They say that discussions of gender or sexuality will plant ideas in their children's heads, confuse them, and are an attack on their "innocence." On the other, parents are concerned that if these topics are excluded from classroom discussions, their child will grow up thinking there is something wrong with them unless they are white, straight, and identify with the gender assigned to them at birth. Our public schools are currently in the process of figuring out how to navigate this, just as the public at large is doing the same thing.

I was recently talking with my mother about her decision to put me on the bus when the courts ordered the desegregation of public schools in 1970. Most of my neighborhood friends, all white, were pulled from public schools and sent to segregated private schools, many of them citing their rights as parents. I recall a neighbor worrying that if her white child went to school with black children, he might grow up to marry one. Mom told me that she wanted her children to attend pubic schools because "you would be spending the rest of your life in public." She wanted us to learn how to live, work, and play in the real world. She was, and still is, a woman of morals and values, and she definitely wanted us to share them, she told us so, but she also knew that once we walked out the front door, we were in public where we would be not just be exposed to a diversity of people and ideas, but have to learn to share public life with them. When I heard things while in public, either from teachers, books, or other children, that unsettled my worldview, I would discuss them with my parents. They would tell me their views. I can't tell you how often Mom would start a sentence with, "Some people believe . . ." or "Some people don't think . . ." I'll never forget telling her about the Theory of Evolution, a scientific framework that continues to be vilified by many people. She said, "Well, I guess if that's the way God created the world, then who are we to say it's wrong?"

I'm old enough to remember when prayer was banned in school. Our teachers, from one day to the next, were no longer allowed to lead Christian prayers. This was, in part, a parent rights issue. Parents of non-Christian children didn't want their kids forced to pray Christian prayers. When this happened, my Christian mother told us that we could just say our own private prayers, shrugging, "Prayer isn't for showing off anyway. It's for talking with God."

My point is that when you send your child to public school, you don't lose your rights. No parents do. But at the same time, it's in the nature of "the public" to be diverse. Ideally, it's a place where individuals come together as a community that doesn't just make room for everyone, but is created by everyone. Within our own homes, within the confines of our chosen communities, we have the right to exclude people and ideas, but the very definition of "the public" in a democratic society means that our ability to exclude others is very limited. And as for lost "innocence," isn't that just another way of saying lost "ignorance?" 

I understand that in a diverse world, we all draw our lines in different places. In private, we have an almost unrestricted right to decide where those lines go, but the moment we step into the public, we are just one point of view in a world of points of view and it always means a loss of innocence. I'm often critical of public schools on this blog, and I remain so, but it was my experience in public schools combined with my relationship with my parents that taught me how to be myself in this diverse world, while at the same time allowing others to be themselves. My academic education may have been inferior, but my public education was unsurpassed.

Believe me, I understand parent rights. I value them. I strive to honor them. But unless you're prepared to be the jailor of your own child, they will lose their ignorance. It's called education.

*****

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!

Connected, Reflected, Experiencing Lightness and Sweetness, Knowing

In the 1970's, scientists "discovered" that marine animals produce D-amino acids. I put the word "discovered" in quotes because they were hardly the first to know this: catfish have known, and exploited this fact as a way to sense their world, for hundreds of millions of years.

Galileo famously "invented" the telescope in 1609, but he was unwittingly creating a poor copy of the visual structure of jumping spiders who evolved it millions of years before.

Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio states, unequivocally, that bacteria and plants are "intelligent." The fact that they behave in intelligent ways -- turning toward the light, for instance -- is his evidence. Yet many of us discount this intelligence because, while the behavior shows all the hallmarks of intelligence, we do not believe that plants know they are intelligent, and for us modern humans, that makes all the difference. We make the same assumption about catfish, jumping spiders, palm trees, and even our own human babies.

This represents one of the most harmful prejudices of Western culture: we define "knowing" as a purely cognitive function. Perhaps we don't do it consciously, especially with our own babies, but we tend to dismiss most of the world's intelligence as inferior to ours simply because we don't believe that plants, animals, and newborns know that they know. Indeed, even when a plant, animal, or baby behaves in a clearly intelligent way, we dismiss it as mere "instinct," reserving intelligence for ourselves alone.

Other cultures, including many of North America's Indigenous cultures, have traditions of understanding intelligence in a broader sense, ascribing it to all of nature. 

Our Western tradition of asserting "dominion" over nature has separated us from it and this disconnection from nature has set us on a cancerous path.

"There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right, " writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her masterpiece book Braiding Sweetgrass, "the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormone like compound that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning." Our cultural prejudice causes the Western mind to scoff -- "C'mon, trees don't know they're communicating" -- but the trees have been talking in this way for millions of years, while the meager and limited vocalizations we call language only emerged a few hundred thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things.

When our babies turn toward us to suckle, when they cry out for connection, when they seek out the eyes of others, they are behaving intelligently. They are born talking to us, clearly, precisely, letting us know exactly what they need, yet we've become so disconnected that we are often confounded and confused by what they're saying.

Western science, that effort to overcome mere instinct, is, as Kimmerer writes, "rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer." It is an active, overt attempt to disconnect ourselves, to seek some sort of objective, third person perspective that holds true for all things for all times. But as the catfish know, as the jumping spiders know, as the plants and babies know, nothing exists outside of its relationship with the rest of the world. Or at least that is, in a nutshell, the theory being pursued by physicists like Carlo Rovelli.

"(W)e have access only to perspectives," writes Rovelli, "Reality is perhaps nothing other than perspectives. There is no absolute. We are limited, impermanent, and precisely for this reason, to live, to be, as we do, is so light and sweet." In Rovelli's view of the universe, we find that the only place where measurements and observations yield definitive results is in our own subjective experience. We live in a web of relations and when we seek to consider anything outside of those relationships, when we engage in the arrogance of knowing that we know, we disconnect, leaving us farther and farther from the truth . . . Or at least farther from this moment's truth. The question, Rovelli says, is not "What is the state of affairs?" but rather, "How will an object manifest itself next?" What we observe and experience is not a reflection of a world that exited before us, nor will it exist afterward. The observation or experience you are having right now is all there is.

Catfish and jumping spiders, and babies know this without knowing they know it. 

Yesterday, I watched a year old baby, unsteadily walking along the sidewalk in front of my home. The mocking birds have recently returned and they were filling the air with their magnificently varied and cacophonous song. The baby stopped in her tracks, her eyes turned toward a tree that was singing. "You hear the birds," her parents said, before urging her to move along toward the car. But the baby didn't move. She was far too intelligent for that. And, thankfully, so were her parents who left her to stand in the midst of life, connected, reflected, experiencing lightness and sweetness, knowing.

******

    

After three printings, we are getting to the end of our book supply and it's unlikely that we'll print more. We've shipped what's left to Amazon, so here's your last chance to get your copy of Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book. 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D.

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!

Creating a Beautifully Age-Appropriate Curriculum

When I became a preschool teacher, I knew little about dinosaurs. Today, I'm much more knowledgable, not because I've made a study of paleontology, but because I've been present for hundreds of spontaneous preschool conversations on the topic.

Indeed, anyone who has had scores of young children pass their way, is in the same boat. In any group of preschoolers, there are always a few who can't wait to tell us what they know about dinosaurs. These are three, four, and five-year-olds tossing around words like apatosaurus, Jurassic, and carnivore. They bandy about concepts like extinction and evolution. They understand that these creatures no longer exist, although they wonder, like scientists do, whether or not some of them have simply evolved into animals with whom we modern homo sapiens share the earth, like birds or lizards. These discussions divert into geology, volcanism, and outer space, the source of the asteroids that may or may not have triggered a mass dinosaur die-off.

The children come to the classroom with their own bits of knowledge about dinosaurs, gleaned from shows and books and internet searches they've made alongside parents and caretakers and older siblings, all driven by curiosity. Our school is the place where they share their individual perspectives on dinosaurs, mingling it with the perspectives of peers, constructing a collective perspective that approaches closer to the full truth, but, like with all human inquiry, can never reach it. It's a beautifully age-appropriate curriculum.

It's beautiful because it simply emerges from the children, year after year, usually driven by the passions of a handful of kids, while we all, to one degree or another, get swept up in the educational excitement. And there is always excitement because otherwise the topic would die, as it should, for lack of it. When I sit amongst the children as they debate, theorize, make connections, and struggle with unanswered questions, I feel that I'm experiencing the Socratic ideal in which it's not correct answers, but the examination, the thinking, and the wondering that matters.

Contrast this to the way dinosaurs might be taught in a standard school. It begins with the adults who conceive of a set of "facts" that the teachers must impart. The children must then hold whatever the teacher tells them in their heads long enough to prove it on a test they take under the strict command to keep their eyes on their own paper, because in this scenario the urge to "collaborate" is redefined as the sin of "cheating." Educators, who typically have nothing to do with creating this dinosaur curriculum, are then tasked with artificially injecting curiosity and excitement by somehow "spurring" or "motivating" the children. This, of course, is nothing like the Socratic ideal, but is rather just plain old boring school.

I'm using dinosaurs in this example because, as a subject matter, it's universal, but at any given moment, in a play-based environment, the children are collectively cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum on something, anything, about which they are curious. 

One year, a group of four and five-year-olds became engrossed in a game they referred to as "baby snow leopard." They played the game day after day with variations, although it always involved one or two children pretending to be baby snow leopards, while their "owners" (the rest of the children) attempted to keep them in a cage. In this case, it was a literal cage -- a large dog crate that was missing its door. The owners would wrestle the baby leopards into the cage, then block the exit. Eventually, however, the babies would escape and run away. They were chased by their owners who spoke not in the language of jailers, but rather of caretakers or parents.

"Come back, honey."

"It's not safe out here for babies."

"We'll give you a cookie if you go back in your cage right now."

But the snow leopards refused to respond as their owners wanted and, after a long chase, would be forcibly returned to captivity.

Holy cow!

As adults, we can clearly see the all-too-close-to-the-bone curriculum that emerged from the children, from their own questions, curiosity, and experience. It's a curriculum that was obviously vital to them, and I think we all know why. This universal "subject" will never be made part of an adult-imposed curriculum, even as every one of us deals with it throughout our lives, personally, socially, psychologically, and politically. 

I would argue that this baby snow leopard game, or our discussions about dinosaurs, or any one of the infinite other subjects of children's' curiosity and excitement is not just the proper, but the only, curricula that matters. When we quit trying to put them in our cages, even if we're doing it for "their own good," we find that everything worth learning emerges from the children themselves, and they are always perfectly capable of cobbling together their own beautifully age-appropriate curriculum.

******

    

After three printings, we are getting to the end of our book supply and it's unlikely that we'll print more. We've shipped what's left to Amazon, so here's your last chance to get your copy of Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book. 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D.

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!