The Poopie Head Faction

I've always trusted preschoolers to make their own rules, or rather agreements, for the classroom. If you're interested in how this happens, here's a link.

I like this ongoing process of making agreements through consensus for many reasons, but not because it necessarily 'works' better than the typical method of adults imposing and enforcing rules. Just as our adult rules and laws are no guarantee that everyone obeys them all the time, our agreements are likewise no guarantee that everyone will abide by them all the time. 

These agreements are, as I see it, a kind of statement of intent: this is how we want to live together.

Agreements as we do it don't include the cudgel of punishment. The consequence of not abiding by an agreement is that someone -- usually an adult, but often another child -- will remind you. "I want to remind you, we all agreed, 'No hitting.'" Or maybe, "I want to remind you that you agreed, 'No hitting.'" Sometimes a child will need to be reminded more than once, and sometimes, maybe once or twice a year, I will say to a child, "You keep forgetting your agreement. I'm going to ask you to play somewhere else until you're ready to come back."

Most children step outside the play for a few minutes, then decide to return. Every now and then, however, a child will walk away and not return to the game that caused them to forget their agreement. These children are, in many ways, my heroes. These are the children who recognize that there is something about the circumstances that cause them to "break the rules" and choose to walk away rather than stay and continue to cause problems.

And sometimes, they are more creative.

Almost every year, at some point, the children agree to some version of the agreement, "No name calling," which we generally understand to mean that we don't want to be insulted. One time, several months into the school year, a boy I'll call Mike decided he didn't like that agreement. Specifically, he wanted to call other children Poopie Head. I told him, "If you want to change the agreement, we can talk about it at circle time. If everyone agrees, then we can change it."

I was still a fairly new teacher, but I knew that it was very unlikely that any, let alone all, of the children would agree to this. I like to let children learn things for themselves. And sure enough, the next time we gathered, he raised his hand and proposed, "I want to change the rule, 'No name calling'. I think we should be able to call people Poopie Head because some people are Poopie Heads, and I think it would be funny to call them Poopie Head. But I can't call them Poopie Head because we have a rule that I can't call people Poopie Head."

You get the idea. He was using this moment to say the words as often as possible and he was getting laughs, but when I asked the group, "Does anyone want to be called Poopie Head?" the response was a unanimous "no." Mike tried again the next day and the next with the same results.

Then one day, he spent the morning lobbying his buddies and by the time we sat down for circle time, he had formed a pro-Poopie Head faction. This time he got a handful of "ayes," but still far from consensus. After that he let it die down.

A couple months passed. 

One day, he handed me a piece of construction paper on which he had made marks that looked like letters. He was almost five-years-old, an age when some children begin to explore letter writing, so I said, "Wow, Mike! You wrote letters!"

He replied, "Read it."

I was expecting nonsense, but approached it phonetically, sounding out, "Erin . . . picks . . . her . . . boogers."

Mike roared.

I said, "Mike, you broke the rule," to which he replied, "I didn't break the rule. I wrote it . . . You said it!"

I had to hand it to him. He had found a way to insult his classmates while abiding by his agreement, but also, importantly, without hurting anyone's feelings. So we agreed that he could write whatever he wanted, but he was only going to show it to me.

At the end of the day, his mother arrived to pick him up, and, of course, I told her what her brilliant son had done. 

She shook her head, "That damn kid. He's been going into his room after dinner every night to teach himself how to read and write. Now I know why!"

Neither the children nor I see our list of agreements as final. Indeed, additions and improvements are made throughout the year. We often discuss challenges without coming to consensus. These are often our most important conversations because, after all, if we all agree, perhaps we don't need a rule at all. When we can't agree, we learn about the world from the perspective of others, allowing us to at least consider their point of view in everything we do.

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