The Lefty Who Threw Me Curveball

Throughout my youth and into adulthood I played and coached baseball. 

Like about 90 percent of the other players, I am right handed, which meant I threw the ball right-handed and batted from the right side of the plate. When I was a young, adults often tried to "teach" natural lefties to be righties: the world was built around right-handedness and the goal was to change the children to fit the world. At Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, SC, third graders switched from sitting in chairs at small tables to chair-desks, most of which were designed for right-handers, but there were a couple in our classroom for the left-handers. This was the first time I'd ever seen an accommodation like this, although those poor kids still had to twist their bodies in order to make their cursive writing slant in the proper direction.

Lefties were considered oddballs, almost like special needs children . . . Except when it came to baseball. In baseball, the exoticness of being left-handed was an advantage. It probably didn't make a big difference when we were young, but generally speaking, left-handed batters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers, which most pitchers are. As I got older, the left-handed batting advantage became more pronounced, and since most pitcher were right-handers, left-handedness was at a premium. Today, my Seattle Mariners professional baseball team trots out seven left-handers to bat against right-handed pitching.

One summer during my years in middle school, my Boy's Club baseball team went up against a rival who had a left-handed pitcher. He had a reputation because he could throw a curveball. It has been half a century since I stood at the plate against that kid, but I can still clearly see that first curveball he threw to me. I see it coming toward me, high and outside, then suddenly changing course, dropping down and toward me for a strike. It was such a rare sight that it froze me completely. Theoretically, it should have been easier for me, as a right-hander, to hit, but the sheer impossibility of it stunned me.

I remember the kid. He was scrawny, with long, mousy hair. I didn't know much else about him other than that he had a reputation as a "Hood," which is what we called the kids who smoked cigarettes and skipped classes. At the time, I'd not really put it together, but these were the kids from the "wrong side of the tracks." I don't know about him specifically, but I knew other Hoods, many of whom dropped out of school, or were expelled, before graduating. The word we used for it back then, was "failed." Most of the Hoods from my middle school had simply "disappeared" by the time graduation rolled around. 

Today, of course, I know that these children didn't fail. School, society, and their families had failed them. It probably didn't help that this guy was a lefty, except when he played baseball. Then he was something special.

He had thrown the first left-handed curveball I'd ever seen. I never spoke with him. The only interaction that I can recall is that game and that curveball.

Memory experts tell us that we can do certain things to increase the odds of us remembering something, but enduring memories like this are complex. For whatever reason the conditions were just right for it to stick in my mind like a short video. They say that we tend to change our memories each time we recall them. Maybe this one has been altered beyond all recognition because I've recalled it often over the course of my life. Indeed, it flashes through my mind each time I see or even read about a left-handed pitcher. I see that ball doing something I'd previously thought impossible. I see that kid out there not rubbing it in, but rather looking confident as if fully in his element.

This boy didn't disappear. I know exactly what happened to him. Later that summer, he drowned in the Willamette River. It made the local newspaper. It was discussed on the local radio stations. He had been there with a group of other kids, probably Hoods. The rumor was that alcohol and marijuana were involved. I have no idea if this was true, but it circulated among the adults as a kind of cautionary tale.

Perhaps this memory became fixed for me after the fact. Maybe it's not a memory at all, but rather a kind of trauma response. I'd known old people who had died, but he was the first young person. It shocked me that he wasn't there any more, no longer throwing that curveball that turned so confoundedly toward me. I can't really see his face any more, but I can see his scrawny body, his long hair, and that curveball that did the unexpected.

This boys lives for me in a profound way. He was labeled odd, a lefty, a Hood, but he was extraordinary. I wonder if off the diamond he felt like a failure, but in my mind's eye, he is throwing that curveball, his curveball, in a world that tries to straighten everything out. 

Our job as educators, as adults, is not to make children fit the world, but rather to create a world that fits them. This is the only way we ever discover how extraordinary they are.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Death Play

Last week I wrote about talking with children about death. Actual death. The kind of death talk that comes up when there is a dead body, like a bird carcass, or a when a beloved person is, from one day to the next, no longer part of your life. 

But there is another more common kind of death talk around the preschool that falls into the theoretical or maybe even fictional category. The kind they pick up from movies or video games or older siblings. The kind of death talk that involves saying, "I'm going to kill you!" or "You're dead." It's the kind of death talk that might even make them laugh together like at a taboo subject, which, to be honest, it is.

I spent some of my own preschool years living not far from Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. I don't remember a time when I didn't know that part of what soldiers did involved killing and being killed. Naturally, we neighborhood kids played soldier games that involved fighting wars. In these games, death involved falling to the ground, then counting to 10. We even practiced dying, making a show of our death throes like we sometimes saw on TV. It's tempting to blame modern media, but, you know, there's a lot of this kind of thing in Shakespeare as well, and before that, there were those Ancient Greek tragedies, and before that I have no doubt that humans acted out death around the campfire.

This kind of "death talk" is related to actual death, but is so abstracted from the pain, the grief, and the permanence, that it's almost a different thing. It's death play. And it's important, just as it's important that young children have permission to play with anything about which they have questions. Actual death, like I discussed last week is only one aspect of death. If we are ever going to understand anything, we must be free to examine it from every perspective. Play is how we do this and death is a subject around which we will always have questions.

It freaks us out when a four-year-old says, "I'm going to kill you!" At best it strikes us as unsavory. We worry, especially when it frightens other children. I mean, even if these young humans are unclear about what death or killing means, part of our responsibility is to ensure that children don't feel unsafe in our environments, and this sounds like a threat. We know that the child making the threat possesses neither the intent nor ability to carry it out. We know it's an experiment. We know it's play. But we worry that the other children won't know that so we tend to intervene. At a minimum we want to assure the other children that they will not be killed . . . whatever that means to them.

It always depends on the specific circumstances, but if a child says to me, "I'm going to kill you!" (and it happens), I'll respond calmly and truthfully, "I don't want to be killed." If they say it to another child, I will turn to the child being threatened and ask, calmly, "Do you want to be killed?" If they say they don't want to be killed, then I'll say, "She says she doesn't want to be killed," although quite often that child will agree to be killed the way we did in our neighborhood games.

In our modern world with what seems like 24/7 mayhem and murder, I understand if this strikes some readers as crass, unsympathetic, or even dangerous. I understand why some of us feel the urge to draw bright red lines about play that involves violence and death. I get it, but I also know that we have always lived in a world that includes violence and death. We might protect young children from it for a time, but it will inevitably get to them, especially in group settings, even if we think it's "too early" . . . And then they will have to play with it. I think most of us understand that when we kibosh anything that children really need to understand, we just push it underground, and then we lose our ability to be anything other than an authority from which to hide.

Better, I think, is to notice it, then before responding, make sure we are reacting to what is happening in front of us rather than our own prejudices and fears. My own racing heart is not an indication of what is going on with the kids. Obviously, we protect children if they feel genuinely threatened, but more often than not I find that no one is taking it nearly as seriously as I am. Most of the time they know it for what it is: pretend, play, words and ideas that are clearly powerful and significant, the kinds of real things that demand to be explored. And the way we explore is through play.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Talking About Death

Many of us are uncomfortable talking about death, especially to preschoolers. Of course, the subject comes up quite frequently, because, well, death walks among us. 

Some of us obsess over death, our own or that of others. Even those who are convinced that they will spend eternity amongst the angels tend to avoid thinking about death more than can be helped. It comes for all of us. When children ask us questions, most of us, most of the time, reply as best we can, then hurry on from the grim subject, often following it up with a joke or ice cream or something else to turn attention back to the sweetness of life.

I was brought up with the Lutheran version of heaven and hell, although we didn't talk much about either. This was just the answer to the question. You want to avoid the bad place and that's where it ended. It always came up when someone died. The living assure one another that they are in a "better place," and that's where it ended.

I was probably about eight when I overheard an adult joke that shifted things for me. The recently departed found themselves in a place in the clouds where there was no fear or pain. All their needs and desires were met before they were even needs or desires. The air was full of wondrous fragrance and beautiful music. At first they were delighted, but as time passed and nothing changed, they began to grow restless. One of them mentioned this to the deity in charge, "I thought heaven would be more interesting." The deity replied, "Who said this is heaven?"

Try as I might, going forward I couldn't conceive of a heaven that would not eventually become tedious. Eternal life sounded like a particularly devious vision of hell. 

I once had a girlfriend who would shut me up whenever I talked about death. We had intimate, honest conversations about everything else, but death was off the table. One time, however, I provoked her to the point that she confessed her fear that death meant that you somehow floated above it all, seeing and hearing life continuing without you, but that you were otherwise entirely disconnected from it. She feared that death would be eternal loneliness. Intellectually, she understood that this was unlikely, but death talk stirred up her fear.

The thing is, it wasn't just her. Few people I knew growing up wanted to talk about death, except through art.

The Bible offered little beyond what I already knew, but art, and literature in particular, provided ways of thinking about death that allowed me to actually consider about what it might mean. In Thomas Mann's novel Joseph and His Brothers, I was introduced to the idea that while we embodied humans may cling to life, the individual atoms in our bodies ache for their release back into their universe. And that is the joy, the heaven, of death, that we return to a perfect oneness with all that is, the opposite of my girlfriend's fear. The only thing that dies is our individual mind, which is the cause of all our misery to begin with. It's the joy of perfect peace and unity.

It was in this same novel that I came to understand that eternal life, as far as we can know, comes from the stories people tell about us after we're gone. How you live directly determines your afterlife. You can be Joseph or Herod depending on your deeds. Your afterlife is for those you leave behind. You, however, are free.

From Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons (or The Possessed) I learned that my own fear of death was not a fear of death at all, but rather a fear of pain.

“Imagine . . .  a stone as big as a great house; it hangs and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head, will it hurt you?”

“A stone as big as a house? Of course it would be fearful.”

“I speak not of fear. Will it hurt?”

“A stone as big as a mountain, weighing millions of tons? Of course it wouldn’t hurt.”

“But really stand there and while it hangs you will fear very much that it will hurt. The most learned man, the greatest doctor, all, all will be very much frightened. Everyone will know that it won’t hurt, and everyone will be afraid that it will hurt.”

When my father-in-law died, we were all grateful for the medicine that alleviated, or at least minimized, his pain. He continues to live with us in the stories we tell about him, which are not about his death, but his life. And he is free.

You may or may not take comfort in the same things that give me comfort. That's because we each must ultimately face our own death alone, even if we are surrounded by loved ones. And even if they are free, we are not, and therein lies the real pain of death: the grief of those left behind.

If you work with young children for any amount of time, you will find yourself discussing death. Hardly a day in preschool passes without someone, often joyfully, shouting, "You're dead!" It's a joke, a concept that is not fully formed, a bloodless, painless thing from action movies or fairy tales. Children may explore it from angles that disturb us. I've written here about a group of girls who took turns cooking one another for dinner. There is talk of killing and drowning and being consumed by lava (which I wrote about just yesterday).

When we scold them, when we lower our brows and try to make them see the grimness, we tend to push it underground. Maybe we've learned that death is a taboo topic, but they haven't and they need to explore it. I feel that it's better that it happen on my radar. I don't have answers, only theology and philosophy, but I can listen and help them when they feel afraid. Otherwise, their guesses are as good as mine.

Young children who have any experience at all with nature have already experienced death first hand. Dead insects. Dead worms. We once came across a dead bird while at a local playground. There might be jokes about insects and worms, but this was a moment of reverence. My first instinct had been to usher them away, to protect them from the sight, but they wouldn't have it. They gathered round like we do around a grave, hushed, each alone with their thoughts. Later, when we talked together I answered their questions with "What do you think?" Heaven was the most common prediction.

When my brother-in-law was dying from cancer, I took our two-year-old daughter Josephine with me to visit him in the hospital almost daily over the course of those last few weeks of his life. They delighted in one another. 

When he died, she asked me where he went. I told her, as my parents had told me, about heaven. Actually, the way I phrased it was, "Some people believe that we die and go to heaven," which was my way of telling her the truth. A few days later, she informed me that Chris was in heaven, drinking coffee, playing his guitar, shooting baskets, and "getting heaven ready for us."

I have no certainty about death, let alone an afterlife, but I sought to comfort her because that's what we do with death, we comfort the living. Looking back, I can see that she wasn't asking for comfort, she was asking for information. She was curious and my answer seemed to satisfy her. He died so young, it made no sense, we all suffered the loss, but I found myself wanting to protect Josephine from the sadness.

A couple years later she confessed to me that she no longer believed in heaven. "I think we all get to come back as our favorite animal. I'm going to be a bunny." I'd not discussed reincarnation with her. She may have come to the idea on her own, but it's more likely it came from another child. I told her that this is also what many people believe.

In her book All About Love, bell hooks writes, "I am continually surprised when friends, and strangers, act as though any talk of death is a sign of pessimism or morbidity. Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment."

I'm not surprised. 

I still fear pain, but, most of the time, as a 64-year-old, I don't fear my own death, although I do sometimes fear the death of the people I love. How will I go on without them? I also wouldn't mind getting to watch Josephine's live continue to unfold, even if it's from that place of my old girlfriend's nightmares.

From my perspective today, I see that the only way to oppose fear is to love people right now. To let them know I love them. To let them love me. Death walks among us, not as a stalker, but as an enhancement to every moment. Death is the ultimate guarantee that life will never become tedious perfection. Death urges us to love right now, to connect right now with that joy of oneness, of peace, of unity. And it whispers to us to strive to live in a way that the stories the world tells about us when we are gone are ones we want told.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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

Play, Reflect, Play, Reflect

I knew that we were going to be spreading a new layer of wood chips over the surface of our junkyard playground, but it surprised me when I arrived at school. My first emotion was one of disappointment, because while it does freshen the place up, giving it a pleasing scent of cedar, I knew that it had also buried a lot of our smaller bits and baubles, things that might not re-surface for months, if ever. On second blush, however, I remembered that the kids had been kicking up quite a cloud of unpleasant dust, something with which this new layer of chips would definitely help.

As the children arrived they likewise had mixed feelings about the changes to their space. One boy hopped on a swing and started bawling, "The swings are too low now! They're for little kids and I'm a big kid!" And he was right, the thick layer of chips under the swings left precious little room for his legs to hang. After his initial reaction, however, he got to work digging out a new hole deep enough to accommodate a full pumping of the legs.

Meanwhile, another group joyfully grabbed shovels and immediately began a digging project, searching for the bare earth below.

But, over all, the new surface was simply remarked upon, then forgotten as the kids settled into the rhythm of their play.

After awhile, I began to hear the diggers discussing the prospect of a hole that penetrated to the center of the earth, perhaps even going all the way through to the other side. The older boy on the swing overheard them and said in a voice of authority, "You better not dig too deep because then you might get to the lava and it will erupt on us."

The diggers paused to reflect on that, then decided amongst themselves that this was exactly what they were going to do, dig to the molten core to release the lava. They dug out a circle of bare dirt, informing one and all to be careful because if they fell in they would be "burned up."

Before long a team of ninja fighters roved into the area, posing fiercely, boasting of their powers, and thereby (from what I could tell) defeating bad guys. The diggers paused to reflect on that, then decided amongst themselves that their pools of lava (by now they had several) were actually bad guy traps. They informed me that as a good guy, I was immune to the lava, and no longer needed to worry about falling in. The lava would only burn bad guys.

It was around this time that a loud wail went up on the other side of the swing set, a boy suddenly bursting into tears as if injured. As I approached, the crying boy pointed at another boy who was standing some distance away, "He hit me!" At this, the accused, behaving very much like a guilty party, took off for a distant corner of the playground. As I consoled the crying boy, I learned that he hadn't actually been hit, but rather had been told that he was going to be hit "a lot of times" and it had, naturally, frightened him. I asked, "What can he do to make you feel better?" to which he replied, "I don't think he'll tell me he's sorry." I asked, "Would that make you feel better?" When he answered that it would, I suggested that we at least talk to him.

By now the tears had ended. He took my hand as we started down the hill, looking for his nemesis, but didn't immediately spy him. I said, "It's like he disappeared," to which the boy replied, "Maybe he's a ghost," a joke that let me know he was no longer harboring a grudge. We made spooky ghost noises together for a minute, then he released my hand and returned to his play.

Back at the bad guy lava traps, I was informed that they had, in my absence, trapped several bad guys who had hit people "a lot of times."

Not long after that, the boy who had earlier been crying was running toward us, his face flushed with joy. He was being chased by the boy who had threatened to hit him a lot of times. "Help! Help! I'm being chased by a ghost!" And behind him, the ghost wailed and moaned in mock ghostly misery. They had obviously made amends, racing away in their game of chase.

The diggers paused to reflect on that, then decided amongst themselves that their bad buy traps were actually ghost traps. "The ghosts fall into the lava and get dead."

The older boy on the swing informed them that ghosts were already dead.

The diggers reflected on that, then decided that their lava traps made the ghosts "extra dead." Then they went back to their project of digging in the new wood chips.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

In Praise of Distraction

I took a book outside, setting up in a shaded chaise lounger with a cup of coffee. The sun was out. It was going to get hot, but would be pleasant for a couple hours yet, especially with the gentle breeze. The mocking birds were talking, creatively mixing their trills and titters. My wife would be with her girlfriend for the next few hours and no other person was in sight. It was, in short, a perfect set up for a morning with a novel. And this was one I was particularly eager to read, the fifth book in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence pentalogy.

As I settled in, before I could even open the book, a dragon fly buzzed me. It hovered before my eyes, its teal and pearly flanks iridescent, set off by veins of pure black, veins that became thin and intricate as they continued into otherwise transparent wings. I noticed that out over the lawn there were dozens more of the species patrolling the area. My insect friend had not come alone. The typical dragon fly only lives for a couple weeks, a bit to trivia I'd kept stored away for just this moment. Later I would look it up, to be certain. (As it turns out the life of an individual dragon fly can range from one to eight weeks.) Such a short life, yet long enough to be born, to feast, to procreate, and to die. 

With a start, I realized that my book was on my lap, unopened. Okay, now for reading. I was a couple paragraphs in, when a squabble erupted in the tree overhead. The mocking birds' song was now a kind of shriek, an alarm, as a pair of them shot from the branches to intercept a crow that was flying past, an innocent passerby mistaken for a nest raider. The crow, much bigger than its attackers, nevertheless took evasive action, diving, circling, flipping onto its back to show sharp talons, while the smaller birds drove it onward and away, chasing it to anywhere but this place. It was a kind of epic battle, fought out against the background of the local mountain, now orange and purple in the rising sun.

The mountains here are protectors. At least that's how they struck me as my attention shifted to their flanks. I was reminded of an idiom I learned from the writer Rebecca Solnit, "(T)he mountain is beautiful in the distance, but steep when you're on it." I was reminded of the idea that if a mountain peak represents human goals, the slopes represent life itself. The life-and-death dance of the birds had, in the meantime ended, as I refocused on the pages of my book, 600 to go, a steep climb before I reached the peak, which would be the end of a reading experience of several months. I flipped to the end of the book to see that my goal was page 612. And then I'd be no where.

Okay, now I read, I told myself, but not before taking a sip of coffee. As I did, a rough gray-brown rabbit emerged from a hedge across the way, followed by a baby, then another. I let the coffee, which was no longer quite hot enough, rest on my tongue, robust, nutty, bitter, before swallowing. The baby bunnies made me scan the sky for birds of prey. Only a few days ago, I'd seen a hawk carry off a ground squirrel. There are so many rabbits around here, of course, almost too many. Bobcats, coyotes, and owls have all been seen hunting in the area, doing what comes naturally to them, while incidentally preventing the rabbit population from overwhelming us. Although it's impossible to not feel sympathy for individual bunnies, like the ones who live in the hedge across the way, it's likewise impossible to not find a kind of peace, which is to say acceptance, in the way nature tends toward balance.

My book rested heavily on my lap. I took it in two hands and began to read, telling myself that now I would concentrate, focus, put my nose to the grindstone. Martha, the protagonist, was making a study of an ancient hunk of wood that had been fished from the muck at the bottom of the Thames River in London, probably a vestige of some long lost ship, that had for a time been part of a stairway prior to the second World War, but was now, more stone than wood, being used as a gate post for protective fencing bearing skull-and-crossbones signs, encircling a bombed out building. Meanwhile she was thinking about the places she needed to be, the things she needed to do, the people with whom she needed to consult. I continued reading the words, but my mind was busy considering a teak sculpture that I once saw daily, and that I thought was stone for the longest time. I caught myself reading without comprehension, backtracked, and re-read. There are curricula that purport to teach children how to read like this, without requiring comprehension, but rather drilling kids on phonics, on sounding out random words as they stand alone; they read sections of books, but not the whole thing; I once heard about a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird, but not all the way to the end. To do it this way is to strip writing of meaning, which is to strip it of interest, as if the mountain peak can exist without its flanks, making reading into a rote task and no one likes rote tasks. What a cold, harsh lesson about reading.

It would be a miracle if any child, taught to read this way, would choose, on a sunny morning to carry a book outside . . . But I'd not read more than a couple pages. 

A "V" of Canada geese flew overhead, squawking. The smell of a neighbor's bacon and egg breakfast curled under my nose. Some doves had joined the mocking birds in song. Yellow butterflies had supplanted the dragon flies over the lawn. And the mountain, beautiful and steep, was now bright in the full sun. The book felt good in my hands, solid, the words on the page taking me from this century back into the last one, into the mind of a young woman from South Africa, a post-war woman on the streets of London being distracted by a hunk of old wood that appeared like even older stone.

In the previous book in the series, Lessing wrote, "The big city's not been with us long enough to be important, we are already beyond it. Because now we think: that star over there, that star's got a different time scale from us. We are born under that star and make love under it and put our children to sleep under it and are buried under it. The elm tree is out of date, it's had its day. Now we try all the time, day and night to understand: that star has a different time scale, we are like midges compared to the star."

Far overhead, a jet was painting a trail of frozen water vapor in the brilliant blue sky from west to east, carrying passengers back because east is the direction of back in this country, just as west is out, south is down, and north is up, points on the map and in the story we tell of how the world goes together.

I'd not given up on reading, but the distractions of the morning were doing their jobs. We say that we live in the age of distraction, but we have always lived in an age of distraction. Seneca the Younger, the ancient Roman philosopher complained, "A multitude of books distracts the mind." Descarte, Mark Twain, John Locke, Tesla, all of them complained of distractions. The challenge of self-important educators throughout history has been how to compel the attention of their students. These teachers are forever trying to force children to focus, to concentrate, which is to say, block out the here and now in order to one day be able to do or know or believe . . . something. They take away their smartphones, they hush the room, they close the doors, they make rules about when the children may eat or urinate or sing or ruminate on the connections between themselves and the world around them. Sometimes this is even enforced with shame and punishment. 

Yet, the children, in being distracted, are only doing what nature has designed them to do. This is how the human brain has evolved: for a world of distraction. That distraction is a bane, is a product of the myth of the mountain peak, the fairy tale of goals and destinations. Reality tells us over and over again to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, to pause on the steep slopes, to experience what is real and who we are in that reality. It's not an accident that what neuroscientists call our "window of consciousness" can only remain open, on average, for about seven seconds. We are not evolved to think in straight lines, and we are especially not evolved for spending our youth attending to the trivia that bossy adults set before us as summits we must attain lest we be labeled failures.

By the time the day grew too hot to continue sitting outside I had managed to read most of a chapter. That was enough. There is no hurry to finish a book, any book, especially when there was so much else to feed the mind, heart, and soul. The only insects out now where pesky flies. The birds had fallen silent. The rabbits were hidden in the shade. My coffee was the temperature of the air. And the mountain still embraced all of us, beautiful and steep. And far above everything was that star, invisible now behind the brightness of the star we call our own, somewhere along its dragonfly journey of birth, feast, procreation, and death: beautiful, steep, present, not a distraction at all, but rather the only thing there is, life itself.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Learning Self-Control

On most days, my classrooms look like "controlled chaos." 

That's not how I describe it, but it's been a common enough observation that I know that's how it strikes adults who don't spend their days in play-based preschool. I take it as a compliment, but a backhanded one. I feel like the compliment part is attained by qualifying the word "chaos" with "controlled." As in, "I don't know how you do it, but you have these rowdies right on the edge of my comfort zone."

Of course, chaos isn't a desired state, although I imagine that most of us have enjoyed chaotic thrills on occasion. But when it comes to day-to-day life we prefer it to be at least somewhat more predictable, reasonably ordered, and, well, controlled. That said, most of us also bridle when the control comes from someone other than ourselves.

Children feel exactly the same way. They are human beings who want to feel that their world is predictable and reasonably ordered, but tend push back when others try to control them. Learning self-control, learning to manage one's own body and emotions in a variety of circumstances, is a prerequisite for all other kinds of learning, and the only way to get there is through practice. Unfortunately, when it comes to young children, we have a bad habit of exerting control over them, "for their own good," matter-of-factly backing it up with threats and even brute force. That's called external control and it's almost impossible to learn self-control from there.

French philosopher Simone Weil defined "force" as "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." When we "thingify" others, as MLK put it, we deny that they are "a human being with the same status and worth as other human beings." Indeed, when we allow ourselves to force others, we make them into objects, something less than human.

Play-based educators don't deny children their basic humanity. That, at its core, is what sets self-directed (or play-based) learning apart from standard schooling. Oh sure, even the most controlling adults will clutch their pearls and assert that they likewise honor the basic humanity of children. No one wants to be on the other side of that one, but the command and control backed up by threats of punishment gives them away: it makes children into things rather than people.

As play-based educators we seek to place freedom at the center of the children's experience. We strive to create safe enough spaces, beautiful, varied, and populated with other people. The project is to then make sure they know they have permission to explore, discover, create, succeed, fail, and, well, play. And, from the outside, that can look like chaos as dozens of independent humans pursue their curiosity. 

But it's not chaos at all, not from the inside.

From the inside, children will bump into one another and the adults' job is to help them figure out what to do about it. From the inside, children will take risks and the adults' job is to help them figure out how to do it safely (or at least safely enough). From the inside, children will experience strong emotions that may cause them to behave in challenging ways and the adults' job is to help them through it. In this balancing act of "controlled chaos," the children make their own agreements about how they want to live together. They learn that the only way out of a battle of wills is through negotiation and collaboration. They learn that when it comes to their own learning, their own curiosity is the best guide. And they understand that the role of adults is not to control them, but to keep them safe and to help them when they ask for it. We will not force them. I will not thingify them.

This is the way we learn self-control.

The most common response from those who cling to their right to exert force on children, is some version of the hypothetical, "But what if the child is about to run into traffic!" As a teacher in a very urban preschool, I've spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours, near traffic with young children, but I don't take them anywhere near that traffic, or any other hazard for that matter, until I'm convinced they understand the dangers. And even then, I hold their hands because my responsibility compels me to ensure their safety. 

Actual safety is the one exception and it's force that is not compelled by the threat of punishment, but rather by a clear and honest explanation of the natural consequences: "If you run into traffic a car might hit you and that will hurt. You might even die." We give them facts to think about, not punishments to fear.

In my course "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Classroom Management," we learn how to break the habits of force and "thingification". It's an approach that recognizes the full humanity of young children. Participants come away knowing that "chaos" cannot be assessed from the outside, and certainly not by adults who cling to their ideas of command. (Registration will begin soon and the course will be completed before the holidays.) 

"Controlled chaos" refers to the balancing act we perform with and for young children, these fully formed humans who deserve order and predictability, but only on their own terms. It's the only way any of us have ever learned self-control.

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Here's the link to learn more and get on the waitlist for "Controlled Chaos: Teacher Tom's Guide to Play-Based Classroom Management."

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Playing With Evil

The best part of my time at university were the dorm room debates.

There was one heated exchange in particular that has stuck with me. It was between a newly-minted atheist and a self-described "follower of Christ." The atheist had provoked the devotee by saying, "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Satan." His joke was that he could take the credit to himself when good things happened, but he liked having a scapegoat to blame for the bad.

Tempers flared. There were good and stupid points made on both sides. Us onlookers enjoyed it immensely, even as a few of us kept our heads down, you know, because of the potential for lightening bolts. The thing that stuck with me, however, was the question,"If you don't believe in the Bible, then what's to stop you from murdering people?"

It unsettled me. I had never had the urge to kill another person. I mean, aside from sibling rivalry wrestling matches, I'd never intentionally physically harmed another person. For the first time, I found myself asking Why? 

It wasn't the fear of God that stopped me if only because murder, in a real sense, had simply never crossed my mind. There was nothing to stop. Perhaps I'd just never found myself in a situation in which I was desperate enough or angry enough to have to be stopped. Whatever prevented me from killing to that point in my life came from a place that preceded conscious thought, let alone action. 

I had, of course, previous explored killing through my play. My toy soldiers killed one another in droves, usually ending in a single survivor left alone in his block fort, a nice metaphor for the ultimate futility of violence. Around the neighborhood we often played games that involved shooting one another, using our fingers as pistols or sticks as rifles. In these games we killed and were killed, deaths that lasted for the count of 10. In these games, dying was an art form, one we had learned from cowboy movies, many of us drawing it out comically, like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But this was different. Were there really people, people I knew, people who lived with me as dorm neighbors, who were only prevented from murder, rape, and pillage because some words in a book -- even holy words in a sacred book -- commanded them not to? I found the whole idea alarming. 

I remember considering the kid who had asked the question with a question of my own. Am I really just a crisis of faith away from being murdered by this guy?

It was an idea that to this day causes me to be wary of anyone who seems overly adamant about their faith. I worry that they're really just trying to convince themselves. And if their faith is all that keeps them from murder and mayhem, then I definitely don't want to do or say anything to monkey with that, which is why I never argue religion with anyone. I don't want to risk being too persuasive.

The atheist responded, "I don't murder people because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison."

Well that was even worse. And this is why I'm equally cautious around people who are too adamant about law and order. Again, I worry they're just trying to convinced themselves.

The truth be told, I wasn't genuinely in fear for my life during this dorm room debate. I knew these guys. I felt safe with them. They weren't on the verge of murder. I understood that we were just playing with ideas in the same way that we had played with the ideas of death and killing as kids. 

But what about the people I didn't know? I mean, I'd recently read Crime and Punishment with its nihilistically murderous protagonist Rodion Raskolnakov. But he was a fictional character, the creation of Dostoyevsky's playful mind, a thought experiment to explore an idea. It hadn't occurred to me that there were real people like him out there contemplating and committing murder in cold blood simply because they found themselves beyond the laws of God or man.

The history of humanity is full of killing. As I wrote yesterday, our nation has been at war for most of my life. There are something like 50 murders in the US every day. But the place with the most murders is my own living room. It seems like half the shows offered by streaming services are some version of a murder mystery or police detective show, most of which start with a dead body. Again, these are fictional murderers, but still . . .

The long term historical trend is that murders have declined dramatically over time. Today's murder rate is something like 1 for every 100,000 people, while some estimates place the murder rate in Europe during medieval times between 10 and 110(!) per 100,000. 

Of course, we rightly fret over murderous violence today, even if it's low by historic standards. We worry that our faith isn't strong enough or that our laws aren't tough enough. We worry that our media is feeding our murderous urges, especially among young men. But what if we have it backwards.

What if those murder mysteries and detective shows are actually giving us an opportunity to explore this darkness, to play with it like we did as children or college students?

When we play, we are free to explore things and ideas from all sides, to consider, bloodlessly, what it's like to both kill and be killed. I often think of play as being the process of considering yet one more perspective. It's unsavory, of course, when we see children "blasting" one another. It's upsetting to think about young men debating murder outside the strictures of the laws of God or man. And it can be disturbing to see all that blood pooling up around the bodies of murder victims on our screens. But ultimately, I wonder if this is a big part of why, when you step far enough back to really look at the historic trends, we aren't killing one another nearly as often as we once did: we have more opportunities to play with it.

When children play, what we see often strikes us as anything but peaceful, but is it possible that it's play, not laws, that leads to peace?

Loris Malaguzzi, Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, and most of the other foundational advocates for versions of play-based learning were all overtly focused on educating for peace. They understood that play is freedom and freedom leads us to explore all things, fully and courageously. When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "man is condemned to be free," he meant that we are ultimately "left alone, without excuse", without laws, and that if we are to have morals and values, if we are to know the difference between good and evil, it will come from what we make of ourselves.

As Natalia Ginzburg writes, "(I)n general I think we should be very cautious about promoting and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punshments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and the evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and that it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this."

But play gives us an explanation, even if it can't be framed as logical. Laws are attempts to assert what is good and evil. But perhaps the way we come to know and live the difference is through play which is how we discover the fullest picture possible, one in which killing is out of the question and peace is the only reasonable way forward.

Play-based learning is educating for peace.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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Allowing Ourselves to Be Awed

Yesterday morning, a pair of well-fed coyotes trotted past my open door, no more than 10 feet from where I sat writing a blog post. They didn't turn to look my way, although they must have smelled my presence. It was only after they passed out of sight that I noticed the shouting of the ravens, a half dozen or more, working together to drive the intruders away.

I hear the ravens every morning during these spring days. They're always going on about something, but I guess I've learned to ignore them because even as they sounded the alarm about predators in the neighborhood, I didn't take note until the danger was literally upon my doorstep. Indeed, I really only attended to their cawing once the coyotes, the danger, was gone.

Or not gone. They had passed from my sight, but I knew they remained nearby because the ravens' intensity didn't abate. Not only did I hear their raven voices, but also the fierce flapping of their wings and the frantic scratching of their talons on my roof as they took turns dive-bombing the canines who must have been along the side of my house without windows. Then one of the coyotes reappeared, not running, but definitely hurrying, once more passing where I sat without looking my way, ravens with wingspans as wide as the coyote was long chasing after it.

It's peak nesting season for the ravens. There is a nest in a tree outside my backdoor. They have been exhibiting courtship and territorial defensive behaviors for months now, all of which they do noisily, which probably explains why I've learned to ignore them.

The ravens, of course, were protecting something far more important than mere territory. They were protecting their loved ones. My heart, of course, was with them.

Shortly after the coyotes had been driven off, I pulled our dog away from the remnants of what I took to be a rabbit not far from the front door, bits of fur still clinging to it. Maybe the ravens weren't protecting their young. After all, if there are any fledglings, they're at the top of a tree, out of the reach of any coyote, which, of course, the ravens knew. Any danger to their young will come from above -- a hawk or a mocking bird. Maybe, after all, they were harassing the coyotes for a share in the kill. 

The local rabbit population has been robust this spring, which would explain the arrival of coyotes, who normally avoid our dog-infested neighborhood, to thin the herd.

The cycle of life is as brutal as it is beautiful.

I've shared in this post a few "facts," but most of what I've written here is what George Bernard Shaw called metabiology. I've engaged in speculative reason about animal behavior from the perspective of a man sitting on a sofa. A proper scientist would likely be disappointed with me as I've cobbled together a story about nature that borrows from observed phenomenon, of course, but also includes such non-scientific concepts as "loved ones," "brutality," and "beauty." But I've gone even more off the rails than that: I've engaged with the mystique of nature.

"Just as the realm of speculative reason lies beyond the facts of science," writes naturalist and author James Wood Krutch, "so also, beyond the realm of speculative reason, lies the realm of emotion. To me that realm is no less important than the realm of fact or the realm of speculative thought, though to discuss what one experiences in the realm of emotion one must either depreciate it and explain it away, as the pure rationalist does, or one must accept what one can only call the mystique as opposed to the rational of the human being's intercourse with the universe around him."

Krutch wrote this some 70 years ago. He wrote in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, blending science, personal experience, speculation, philosophy, and emotion, to create an understanding of nature that places awe, joy, and beauty at the forefront. He writes, "If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."

It's a perspective that borders on what "pure rationalists" mock as pantheism, a belief that the unity of the universe is, for want of a better word, god. 

I've had the privilege of having spent thousands of hours observing and playing with children in natural places, not to mention amongst the cedars, lilacs, insects, raccoons, squirrels and other living things that shared our urban playground. We even once had a bald eagle devour its prey in some overhead branches, showering us with what I believe were pigeon feathers. There amidst the children, I experienced the "mystique of intercourse with the universe," the joy, the awe and wonder, the beauty, which includes likewise those things we sometimes mistake for brutality.

It's only when modern humans are involved that brutality comes into it. The eagles and coyotes may kill, but when they do they are culling the weak, the aged, the sick, and unborn. Our human sadness is mitigated when we know that this ultimately strengthens the herd, helping to insure that the strongest genes survive and that suffering is minimized. They take only what they need for this day. Then the ravens and other scavengers ensure that nothing of those sacrificed lives is wasted. That bit of bone and fur was gone when returned to look for it a few moments later. 

Modern humans, however, shun the "easy prey," opting instead to hunt and kill the strong, weakening the herd, while often taking much more than they need. That is brutality. 

It is the brutality of a consumer society, one that attempts to exist outside the cycle of life.

One of our modern heirs to Krutch, Leopold, and Thoreau, is botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer who writes, "In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

That is what I witness when I'm with children in nature: fullness, gratitude, contentment. Our schools are products of a consumer society and as such the self-styled rationalists, the people who never enter the realm of the mystical, insist on the strictly "practical" -- ciphering and spelling and shaping proper letters. As Krutch puts it, things confined exclusively to that which is 'relevant to the child's daily life.'" This too is a brutality, a severance, one that leads inevitably to emptiness. The economy might need that, but human beings do not.

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written," writes Krutch. "Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature's intentions.

"How could the part be greater than the whole? How can nature's meaning come wholly from man when is is only part of that meaning? . . . Only in nature do we have being." And the simple beauty is that all we need do to satisfy our emptiness is to open our doors, go outside, and allow ourselves to be awed.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 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.

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