When We Stop Teaching Children Long Enough For Them To Teach Us

When our daughter Josephine was a toddler, one of our frequent father-daughter outings was to visit art museums. I know this isn't a possibility for every two-year-old, but she was temperamentally capable of looking without touching, moving from room-to-room without running, and generally behaving herself in a way that didn't cause the security personnel to verge on heart attack.

In fact, she is the person who taught me how to enjoy an art museum. Up until the advent of a baby in our lives, I had treated my regular visits to view works of art as a sort of cultural chore, one I found rewarding for sure, but a chore nonetheless. Like most people, I tended to start at the beginning and work my way around the walls, pausing at each canvas to make a study, moving systematically from painting-to-painting, sculpture-to-sculpture, installation-to-installation, getting my money's worth, filling my cultural bucket, which I would later proudly admire being full.

Josephine, however, had other ideas. One of our first museums was the Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus. To my frustration, she chose to move quickly, leading me from room to room, pausing only occasionally to make a comment. "That's a horse!" "Those people are dancing!" "Who is that?" There was one rather macabre piece made from video screens that showed female body parts in a way that made it appear as if the model had been chopped to pieces while still alive. Thankfully, Josephine missed it entirely as we raced past. But she was teaching me how to view art in a gallery. When we were done with the first round, we started again, this time a bit more slowly. Then, after this second circuit, we went around again, and this third time through she saw it.

Artemisia Gentileschi

I was prepared for her questions, for her horror, but instead she approached it with wide-eyed amusement. She blinked at it for a several minutes, then burst out laughing. "That's a funny one!" That was an interpretation that hadn't occurred to me. As a toddler, Josephine was always an enthusiastic and non-judgmental art admirer, never playing the critic, an approach I still strive for today, especially when I find artwork challenging.

We moved on then, returning to our circuit of the rooms for the third, fourth, and fifth times, but now, instead of simply viewing art, we were hunting it, discovering it over and over. "I want to see the horse one again." "Where was the dancing one?" "Let's find the funny one now." Again, it was an approach I'd never before considered, one that seemed to reveal new aspects of the artwork with each go round. "The horse has spots on its tummy." "The dancers are barefoot." "Her mouth looks like a caterpillar!"

Karntakuringu Jukurrpa

We were living downtown, and our most local art museum was the Seattle Art Museum. It was there that she discovered the benches, something I suppose I'd known about, but had never considered in my days of getting my money's worth. We would sometimes sit in front of paintings like one would in front of a television, but instead of a story being told to us, we would tell the story together.

"Why is she looking over there?"

"I don't know. Maybe she's looking at her little girl."

"I think her little girl is telling her mommy that she's hungry."

"I wonder if her mommy is going to make her some lunch."

"No, because she's a queen and queens have to sit on their thrones."

Sometimes that was our entire museum visit, sitting on a bench in front of a painting, musing, which is how Josephine taught me the value of purchasing annual memberships to art museums. Suddenly it was cost-effective to turn into SAM to look at a single piece of art.

Albert Bierstadt

One afternoon, we spent some time with a depiction of Jesus driving the money-lenders from the temple. In the spirit of concocting our own stories, I didn't share the Biblical one with her, although I did tell her the central figure's name. She was disturbed by the image, which seemed to show Jesus angrily flailing a group of cowering men. Her take on the story being told by the painting was not a flattering one, but it clearly made an impression on her. At least once a week for the next couple months, she would spontaneously suggest, "Hey, let's go look at that painting of Jesus whacking those guys." And we did.

Josephine is a grown woman now, but I still visit art museums the way she taught me to do it. With new exhibits, I always start by racing through, taking in the whole show, not worrying that I might miss something. I always then make a second and third round, more slowly each time, finally settling on three or four pieces to really study. I maintain an annual membership to SAM where I visit at least once a month, usually to sit on a bench in front of a single painting, telling myself the story I see there.

Yesterday, I stopped by SAM during my lunch break to sit in front of a single painting for 15 minutes.  And although Josephine now lives in New York, it was like having her with me.

I don't know why I'm telling this story other than, I suppose, because I've been reminded that we can learn a lot when we stop teaching children long enough for them to teach us.

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Making Light From Darkness

During the better part of the 19th century and well into the 20th, the scientific consensus was that we would one day figure it all out. The universe was but a clockwork and given enough time, humans would come to understand it. Today, however, we know enough to know that we will never know everything. We can only know what we can perceive, what our senses can take in, what our brains can interpret, but we are very limited in our abilities, adapted to a certain niche, one that causes us to, for instance, see time as something that flows from past to present, even as we now know that this "understanding" is merely an accident of our unique perspective and the limitations of our senses.

At it's core, life will always be a mystery. Art is the human response to the unknowable: it is how we teach ourselves to live with the mystery.

This explains why humans are driven to engage in art. Since the dawn of humankind, we have made music, danced, told stories, and created physical representations of life as we experience it, both externally and internally. Many of us still place "science" on a pedestal, pushing art aside as a kind of amusement. Increasingly, our schools have done this, replacing the arts with "instructional time," in order to focus almost exclusively on literacy and mathematics, the hammer and sickle of science, tools that are seen as necessary to engage in a clockwork world, a world that we now know doesn't exist. Those of us who work with young children have found ourselves in the sad position of having to defend our work, to defend childhood play, to defend our commitment to filling our charges' world with opportunities to dance, sing, pretend, and paint, to engage with the mystery that will always lie at the heart of life.

As I watch children play, I certainly see them engaged in the foundational scientific process of trial and error. What happens when I do this? I wonder if I can make that happen again. They are scientists for sure, but they are at least in equal measure artists, acknowledging from the start the limits of their own perceptions and learning to live with that by saying to one another, "Let's pretend . . ." When they aren't experimenting, they are making art with whatever comes to hand, arranging stones in a circle or leaves into patterns. Sometimes they paint what they see; sometimes they paint what they feel. They dance even when there isn't music, kicking up their legs, leaping, skipping, and twirling as they perform even the mundane act of moving from here to there. When they sing at the tops of their lungs, when they make rhythms by beating on buckets, they are teaching themselves how to live with the mystery.

Art stands at the center of the human experience: it is how we make light from darkness.

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"I Know This Place!"

We all shape and are shaped by the community in which we live. We are both the cause and effect of, among other things, our local culture, commerce, politics, and religion. Those of us who have always lived in a single place or who have raised children in a place are typically aware of the impact of place in our lives, for better or worse. Transplants and nomads often feel they are more a part of a place they have left behind or that they are the product of many places, never fully at home in any, but our current place, wherever that is, is shaping us nevertheless, even if that shape is into an antithesis.

This is even more true for young children, I think, because this place, right here, right now, is the only place they know: this house, this neighborhood, this school, this town or city. They lack the experience to know other places the way they know this one and they lack the cynicism to be judgmental. This place, its rights and wrongs, its ups and downs, its strengths and follies, is their whole world, and they are, as humans, driven to make it their own, to understand and absorb it. I've known many transplanted parents, aghast at the place they find themselves, who strive to prevent their children from learning certain aspects of the local culture, language, or values, only to find that they've set themselves an impossible task, with their children often becoming more "Seattle" or "American" than those of us who have always lived here.

Last week, on a drizzly day, tourist season and its attendant crowds dissipated for the winter, we hopped a bus for a 10 minute trip to Seattle Center. Our primary destination was the playground with it's giant slides, but we all knew that there was more to this place than that. Of course, we also played in the International Fountain, some of us becoming drenched, which is as traditional an activity as our city offers. We tried to climb the humped backs of the bronze orca whales that emerge from the pavement. We passed through the Center House which is always scented by an overwhelming and familiar perfume of grilled meat and caramelized sugar. We checked out the monorail at its station, enthusiastically telling stories to one another of rides we have taken on it. There was a robot statue there that I had never noticed before, but with which the children seemed to already be familiar. We stood at the foot of the Space Needle, arching our back to take it in.

"I've already been here!"

"I've done this before!"

"I know this place!"

This wasn't the first time any of the children have been here, even if it was the first time this particular group had come together. It was hard to ignore the reality that this place is a part of who we are, as we played in our neighborhood. Making this place and being made by it, knowing it and being known by it, that is what makes a place home.

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An Exception That Proves The Rule

Yesterday, we painted with "long paint brushes." These are regular paint brushes duct taped to lengths of bamboo. 

Sometimes we hang the paper up high so that the use of long paint brushes makes some sense, but on this day our paper was low which means that their length contributed nothing more than to add an arbitrary level of difficulty. Despite this, whenever the long paint brushes are in use, they are in demand. This has been true over all years that we've been painting with long brushes, with children queueing up for their turn, calling out, "I'm next!" and "I want to try it!" Even children who don't normally chose to participate in art typically want have a go with the long paint brushes.

Using long paint brushes requires a level of concentration that isn't necessary with regular brushes. The children tend to move more slowly, more deliberately as they take aim, as they dip the tips of their brushes into the paint pots on the ground, as they strive to control the shape and direction of paint on paper. There is almost a meditative quality to the process as they stand or sit together, shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing a canvas.

I've never witnessed a child attempt to paint "something," like a person or a house or a tree. Getting paint on paper seems to be enough. If there is ever a "goal," it is to "paint all the white parts," something the children often spontaneously decide amongst themselves.

I suppose we could make it an individual project, one where each child gets their own piece of paper on a separate easel in order to manufacture something that they can later take home. I suppose we could offer more than three long brushes at a time to minimize the wait time. But in doing this, I expect, we would lose something. 

Normally, making something arbitrarily difficult is a sure-fire way to cause frustration, ultimately killing enthusiasm, but long paint brushes seems to be an exception that prove the rule.

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The Emotion Called "The First Days Of School"

First days of a new school year can be exciting, but also intimidating. This goes for children, parents, and teachers. It's about stepping into the unknown and it has an effect on us all, even if you, like me, have been doing it for decades.

I've always started the year with easel painting, a kind of personal tradition, one, I suppose, that brings me a bit of comfort and control. Before applying paint to paper, one four-year-old, a veteran of our school, combined red and blue to mix up a proprietary hue, then took a brush in each first and began to paint energetically, swirling her paint into a massive storm of purple. She painted like this for a good twenty minutes. Adults commented on her work, but she barely looked up. Other children suggested adding other colors, offering yellow, red, and blue as suggestions, but she didn't take them up on it. A few people asked her, "What is it?" but she didn't answer.

Last year, I'd not thought of her as a child with particularly strong focus, but here she was, only three months later, pouring every ounce of herself into a self-selected project, indistractable. I stood beside her, for a time, more in admiration than anything else. Occasionally, I thought I saw her entire body quiver, betraying some strong emotion. At one point she began to paint with her hands near her mouth, as if speaking the paint onto the paper. And then I understood: she was painting the emotion that can only be called "the first days of school," a purple storm made with intensity.

As I watched, she spoke, not looking at me, but at the paper that was beginning to wrinkle under the force and wetness, "I can make anything I want." She said it again, "I can make anything I want." She was speaking to herself, to her painting, to me, and to the school. "I can make anything I want." She painted for several more minutes, stopped, decided to add a few dots of orange and green, then declared to the room, "I'm finished. It's time to get it dry."

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Plastic Stuff

I want to save the human race as much as the next person. Despite appearances, I do have an aesthetic sense. And I think it's pretty well established that I want what's best for children. All of that said, we still have a lot of plastic things around the school, much of which is brightly colored.

There's been a movement in the preschool world over the course of the past few decades to do away with the plastic junk that has come to dominate early years environments, with an emphasis upon replacing it with more "natural" materials like wood, fabric, and metal. I support this effort on environmental, aesthetic and pedagogical grounds, yet the plastic remains even as we have greatly increased our use of said natural things over the course of the past 20 years.

One of my personal ethics, one that I think is largely shared by our school community, and I know is shared by most people who call themselves environmentalists, is that we don't throw things away as long as there is still use in them. We have a plastic shopping cart and a toy wagon, for instance, that pre-date my time at Woodland Park, playground workhorses that have managed to survive generations of children. They're garish plastic things, but how can we pitch them into a landfill (where they will remain forever) when they're still going strong? Indeed, even broken things, like trucks with no wheels or dolls with no arms, continue to have play value, I've found, with children using them in creative and unexpected ways far beyond the time that they "should" have been trashed. And even then, even when something plastic is so far gone that even the children aren't picking it up and using it for something new, it can still live on as part of a piece of art. Our "glue gun box" is full plastic items that will find new purpose as parts of sculptures or space ships or doll houses that then go home with the children to be displayed on shelves, played with, and otherwise treasured for at least a little more time before, I presume, finally, winding up as garbage, long after they would have otherwise.

Generally speaking, I do not find plastic things to be beautiful and if I could snap my fingers and turn all the plastics in our school into alternative materials, I would. I would rather spend my days surrounded by the warmth and beauty of wood and stone, and I don't dismiss the experts who caution us about surrounding children with the gaudy colors that plastic toy makers seem to favor. As we purchase new things, I strive for the sort of look and feel of natural things. The set of sturdy tables and chairs we purchased for outdoor use, made from plastic salvaged from recycled plastic milk jugs, are a chocolate brown. Our playhouse is made from untreated wood. Our outdoor environment is dominated by wood, plants, concrete, and brick, but because another of our ethics is that we favor donations over purchasing new stuff (again, I believe, an environmentally, as well as economically, sound choice) we stand as the sort of "beggars" who can't always be choosers. When someone offers their old car tires or the guts of an defunct washing machine or a collection of Disney figurines, we enthusiastically take them. From where I stand, one of the functions of preschools in our society is not to use things, but to finish using things. And while these things may not be "beautiful" to the adult eye (hence our playground's moniker, the Junkyard Playground), they are delights to the children as evidenced by how enthusiastically they incorporate vacuum cleaner hoses, the caps from dried out marker pens, and discarded office machinery into their play, creating the sort of beauty that can always be found in the eye of the beholder.

So while I am in favor of reducing the use of plastic in our environment, and I congratulate those who have achieved it, I will also never be fanatical about it. There is still use and even a kind of beauty in those plastic items, not to mention that they are, for us, free, which is good for everyone except the folks who continue to manufacture ugly plastic things for kids.

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Bridging The Gap To Come

The picture at the top of this post is an end-of-year present I received from a five-year-old. She dictated this message to her mother:

Teacher Tom,

I drew you a picture. It's a dragon with a big eye and a seashell and a rainbow over her head. It's a magic dragon who thinks she can jump over a puddle without getting wet, but even if you are magic you might slip in a puddle! She's a nice dragon, not a mean one. And she doesn't have a belly button.

I love you, Teacher Tom. You are nice an you tell funny stories.

I'm always touched by the thought of a child sitting down to think of me, to create something for me. Creating art is part of what it means to be human; creating art specifically for another person is to share a part of oneself, part of your uniqueness, something that has never been shared before, nor will it be shared ever again. It is a gift of love.

Mister Rogers wrote:

There would be no art . . . if human beings had no desire to create. And if we had everything we ever needed or wanted, we would have no reason for creating anything. So, at the root of all art . . . there exists a gap -- a gap between what the world is like and what we wish and hope for it to be like. Our unique way of bridging that gap in each of our lives seems to me to be the essence of the reason for human creativity.

When this girl sat down, thinking of me, she did so with the knowledge that she might not see me again for a long time, perhaps never again. It's a concept that she perhaps isn't fully capable, at five, to comprehend, but when I think of her creating this for me, I imagine that our impending "apartness" was in some aspect there with her, something that neither of us want, even if we know that it has always been woven into the fabric of our relationship. I likewise imagine that she was thinking of the funny stories, the ones we tell together, and she wanted to leave me with one to remember her by, one embedded with an important message about paying attention, a unique way of bridging the gap to come in both our lives.

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Clearly As It Should Be

Our school is divided into four classes, based on age. There is a 2's, 3's, and 4's class, as well as a kindergarten. There is a lot of data, both empirical and anecdotal about the benefits of mixed age classrooms, but Woodland Park has been doing it this way for a long time, since 1977 to be as precise as we can be, and it can be hard to break with tradition. Last year, as a cooperative community we spent several months discussing the pros and cons of switching to a mixed age format, both in terms of pedagogy as well as logistically, financially, legally, and practically. One of our biggest challenges was that by the time we got around to taking a vote, we had already begun enrolling families for the coming school year, so we felt that a significant "last minute" change of this sort should require the vote of a supermajority, a threshold we missed by a couple percentage points. As a community we tend to value democracy above everything else and so as disappointing as the results were for me, they also affirmed who we are.

That said, I hope we'll re-approach the idea again in the fall, but for the time being, we're still largely divided by age most of the time. This isn't to say that the ages don't sometimes mix on the playground or that both younger and older siblings never attend one another's classes or that elementary-aged siblings don't regularly hang out with us, say when their schools are otherwise occupied with standardized testing or in-service days, but it isn't a formal part of our program. We do have a multi-aged adult community, spanning many decades, and while that also has its benefits, it's not the same thing.

We extended our school year by a few days last week to make up for the unusually large number of days we missed during the winter due to snow. Since many families had already made plans, however, attendance was sparse so we decided to fill up the classroom by making it a sibling day. So we wound up with about twenty or so kids, ranging in age from around 18 months to 10 years. It was, in the words of more than one of the parent-teachers helping out that day, "magical."

One of the concerns voiced by families as we considered a multi-age model last year was how will we accommodate all those ages in a single space. Won't the older kids need more stimulating experiences? Won't the younger kids feel left out? As we saw last week, there are no age limitations on things like easel painting or playing with play dough. Of course, the children used the materials in different ways. A fourth grader, for instance, used Legos to create an elaborate superhero hideout (in cooperation with a preschooler) while a two-year-old transported fists full of Legos from one table to another, then back again. Running, swinging, climbing, pretending, collecting, and bickering are likewise adaptable to all ages.

Older children fell to their knees to help the younger ones. Younger children stepped up their game, stretching themselves to join the play of the older kids. Our summer program is a multi-aged endeavor, with children ranging from 2-6 playing together, so it's not like our community has no experience with the phenomenon, but it was indeed magical to see them learning from one another. This is clearly as it should be.

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