Use It Or Lose It

I've come to realize that many people I know can barely tell one plant from another. Yes, they may know a tree from a weed, or maybe a shrub from a cactus. 

According to science journalist Zöe Schlanger, "'plant blindness' is the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout."

To one degree or another, most of us suffer from plant blindness, at least compared to our ancestors. For much of human history, knowing the subtle differences between plants was much more a matter of life and death than it is today. When we lived closer to nature, it was important to know, say, which red berries were delicious and which might kill you; which leaves could alleviate your headache and which could cause seizures; which you could wear and which could cause a rash. 

But today, we tend to come across "plants" as products in the form of berry baskets, medicines, and clothing. The necessity to know the properties of this plant or that plant isn't as vital as it once was, so our ability to do so has atrophied. In our fantasies, we often imagine that if a caveman was transported through time to our modern world, they would be in awe. And I'm sure they would be, although much of that awe would be over how stupid and oblivious we've become. 

As the saying goes, "use it or lose it." We've outsourced plant knowledge to farmers, chemists, and the entire supply chain that manufactures and brings things to market, specialists who supposedly free us up to specialize in our own right. 

Today's children spend significantly less time outdoors than previous generations, part of a decades-long shift of childhood from outdoor environments to indoor ones. Indeed, Americans of all ages now spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. So, of course, this ability is atrophying.

The modern world is built on specialization, on individuals picking what they will use and what they will lose. Unfortunately, that also means we lose our connection to things that may well be important to us. I mean, the smartphone or AI may represent grand, perhaps misguided, definitely uncontrolled "experiments" that may wind up killing us all, but this experiment in disconnecting from nature is, from where I sit, a far more dangerous experiment.

This is part of the reason I feel so strongly that every preschool playground should include plants. A garden is a good place to start, but also trees, grasses, vines, shrubbery, and whatever else will grow in and around the place. Even better, of course, is an adjacent forest or pond or beach or bush or vacant lot where the weeds run wild. Sadly, most playgrounds are soft fall zones and out-of-the-box equipment, with, perhaps a patch of well-mown grass. We think that represents "safety" when, in fact, it represents the adult's ignorance of nature, the full needs of children, and the only real safety that has ever existed: the experience to keep oneself safe. Use it or lose it.

We'll never be as plant savvy as our hunter-forager ancestors, nor do we need to be, but what else do we miss in our near complete inability to recognize these living things that were here for millennia before us and will likely be here for millennia after we Homo sapiens have either died off or evolved into whatever is next? 

What else are we blind to? The evidence is that we, as individuals, are blind to most of reality, even if we, as a species, have specialists who know a lot about a lot.

I often see our youngest children as the last of the generalists, which is why I want them to play. If nothing else, when we let them choose what to explore, what to think about, what to experiment with, we allow them to discover connections with the world to which the rest of us have become ignorant through disuse. We often talk about the early years as a time for building foundations, but maybe a better metaphor is to think of it as discovering how to connect with the world in all its wonder.

In our species' "progress," we've lost at least as much as we've gained as we've leaned into our capacity for specialization. But of all the things we've lost, I wonder if the one indispensable thing is the capacity to connect directly to the rest of the world, freely, without the perpetual guiding hand of for-their-own-good specialists. And that capacity is built through play.

Use it or lose it.

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It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start on Thursday!

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!

Children are Not Nouns. They are Verbs.

"To garden," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "is to engage in a form of coevolution -- not just with plants and pollinators but also with roots and fungi, microbes and microfauna, sun and soil."

Our garden in the center of our preschool playground is a place to play. The plants are there to explore with our fingers, our eyes, our noses, and our tongues. We discovered one year that we enjoyed eating radish seed pods more than the radishes themselves, which we had neglected to harvest, making it possible to experience those pods. 

We tend to think of farmers as people who "work" the soil, who tend and harvest radishes and other plants as food, ripping them by the roots, leaving only a few to serve as seed stock for the next crop. But "to garden," I think, is a wholly different thing: it is a process of existing with these plants, pollinators, fungi, microbes, microfauna, sun and soil. That is to say, to play with them, or put another way, to co-evolve.

When children play together we see them adapt to one another through an ever-moving process of agreement, negotiation, and bickering. Sometimes it all erupts in a kind of supernova of impossibility, everyone scattered, everyone briefly on their own as they seek others with which to play. Other times it dwindles to an end. But if the game is to continue, everyone must find a way to get their own needs and desires met while creating the space for others to get their needs and desires met. This means it must change, must evolve, or die, like everything.

We tend to talk about evolution as something that happened over millennia, or as a competition, or as a climb toward some higher state. When children play, however, they are simply doing it.

They are not nouns, but rather verbs. They are both shaping the process and being shaped by it. They are in the midst of the process that connects us with one another, and with everything. It's a process without beginning or end or purpose other than to sustain itself by becoming something else.

A game of chase becomes a game of fighting becomes a game of "let's pretend" becomes . . . And so on. Play, like learning, like gardening, like living, is a process that interacts with other processes. Children too are processes, not products. 

So much of conventional education treats childhood as a manufacturing operation whose product is a particular kind of adult. School readiness. Kindergarten readiness. College readiness. Career readiness. We're forever evaluating children according to what they're going to become rather than attending to what's happening right now. It's like we see ourselves as farmers producing a crop rather than gardeners tending a garden.

When we're gardeners -- to garden -- we don't have to teach children to understand the assignment. We don't have to get them ready. When they are playing, making art, wondering, talking, building, destroying, rebuilding, running, pretending, they aren't producing things, they are making connections. They are engaged in co-evolution.

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't that we've failed to teach children how the universe works, but rather that we persist in interrupting them while they're already doing it.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

Motivated By Belonging and Doing

Not long ago, one of our toilets stopped flushing: the chain that connects the tank lever to the flapper had broken. I cycled to the hardware store and located the replacement part I needed. Back home, I turned off the water to the toilet, flushed the tank dry, removed the old part, installed the new one, and turned the water back on. Then, although I was confident I'd set things to rights, I gave it a flush, taking satisfaction in watching the tank empty and refill as it ought to.

I've made this simple repair a number of times in my life. I remember my roommates and I panicking a little when it first happened in college. We were all slightly afraid of our landlord, professional plumbing repairs were not in our budget, and the internet didn't yet exist, but between the five of us young men we figured it out. I've not asked any of them, but I expect that the world is today populated by dozens of flappers that we have collectively replaced with our own ten hands.

I'm not a plumber, but I've learned to repair a toilet. I can also snake drains, replace faucet handles, and know when to put my tools away and call in a professional. 

As a boy, I admired my elders' knowledge about the world. They knew how to fix things, cook meals, drive cars, grow vegetables, chop wood, fold laundry, and operate lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and can openers. They inspired me to want to do those useful things myself.

Rudolf Steiner, the founding philosopher of the Waldorf school pedagogy, built his approach upon the idea that young children ought to be be immersed in environments in which they are surrounded by adults engaged in practical day-to-day activities and projects. Rather than assigning tasks to children, the adults' role is simply to go about their business of living, including children when they wish to be included and answering questions. Not only do children learn the basic skills of life in this way, but they also see that participating in practical day-to-day activities and projects are desirable acts of belonging, of community.

Parents often complain that their children refuse to tidy up their rooms or help out around the house, something most of them do, even eagerly, around our preschool classroom. I expect that's because we so often expect them to do it alone, which is unnatural, or we treat it like something undesirable, chores to be done grudgingly as an interruption to, rather than as a part of, our lives. 

As the great John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." I'm happy to be an adult who can do things for himself, but that was never my goal, nor is it the goal of our youngest citizens. They are motivated by belonging and doing which is what makes life worth living.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

Forever Changing

We converted an old, worn out sensory table into a worm bin that lived adjacent to our playground garden.

I began by drilling holes in the bottom so it could drain, then filled it with soil, from a previous garden that had been left to fend for itself for years, maybe decades. A variety of weeds had taken root, native plants hearty enough to survive in our urban setting. The children had already discovered that there were earthworms aplenty, so we filled our aspiring bin one afternoon with spadefuls of dirt, stems, leaves, roots, and worms. 

The worms weren't having it. Within hours they were dangling from the bottom of the table, making their escape from the holes I'd drilled in the bottom. They had found themselves in the wrong ecological niche. Earthworms have evolved to dig in all directions, including vertically. The shallow bin was simply the wrong habitat and they took matters into their own hands (so to speak) by returning to where they belong. 

This is when we learned that what we wanted were red wigglers, which are a compost-dwelling type of worm. Once we introduced a handful of those (donated from one of our families' compost piles), we never had to add another worm on our own. For nearly two decades, from those original worms, we managed to maintain a thriving population in that tiny space, through a move, many freezes, flooding, neglect, and, most impressively, the constant intrusion of curious children. We had obviously created a place in which they could thrive.

Our worm bin was a place of constant change. In early November, for instance, we would toss our rotting Jack-o-lanterns in there, already growing beards of mold, then observe, and actively participate in, their decomposition. We added leaves, apple cores, paper napkins, wood chips, and all kinds of other organic matter (and some not so organic matter), then, day-after-day let the worms and various microbes do the work of manufacturing soil. Occasionally, we would use some of the compost in our garden beds, but mostly it was a kind of laboratory in which we studied the slow, steady process of earth creating itself by transforming one thing into another.

In her novel, The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Bulter's protagonist, Lauren Olamina, creates a spiritual belief system she calls Earthseed:

All that you touch You Change.

All the you Change Changes you.

The only lasting truth is Change.

God is Change.

Some change is sudden, of course, like a move from one house to another or switching to a new school. I imagine it was quite a surprise to those earthworms to suddenly find themselves bin-bound. But most change is like the changes that occurred in our worm bin, incremental, day-by-day, happening right under our eyes, fingers, and feet. The children themselves are growing, transforming at every moment; we ourselves are changing, adapting to the changes around us. We change right up until the day we die, and beyond, our bodies, like those Jack-o-Lanterns, returning to the soil.

I know too many adults for whom change is something to fear, who gird themselves against it. They fight aging, they rage against social or cultural progress, they fear that every new technology is a harbinger of doom. They seek to steer or stop it, hearkening back to the "good old days," shaking their heads over "kids these days." And they're not entirely wrong. Change always begins with the death of something, often something treasured, something precious, something we cannot quite imagine life without.

“The old world is dying," writes Fiamma Montezemolo, "The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.” And those monsters are both real and imagined, even as we, living, as we must, in the present, cannot possibly distinguish between the two. Even a casual review of history tells us that change is always a blessing and a curse for something or someone. The fossil record is a record that tells us that well over 99 percent of every species of life that has ever existed is extinct. So yes, some of the monsters are real.

For our youngest citizens, however, there is no "old" world. They live in the ever-emerging present, part of the world being born, with no foot in either the past or the future. Their only motive is to be a part of it, to grow, to learn, to connect (i.e., to change) and to explore their world as agents of change.

In her novel Eva Trout, Elizabeth Bowen introduces a child by what he has done while the adults fretted over their uncertain future: "The boy straightway tipped his handfuls of treasure on to the rug at Eva’s feet, then crouched down, absorbedly starting to sort things out — half of a mangled teaspoon, a minute wheel off some minute toy, the crushed empty shell of some wild bird’s speckled egg, three or four slivers of splintered mirror, particles of Woolworth willow pattern, flower-pots, Crown Derby and, not least, one orange wooden button. Could his hands have held more, more would have been deployed. What there was, he was making into a pattern."

This is what children have always done and continue to do when we are busy looking the other way. They collect the parts of the world that is dying, the loose parts, and play with them, making new patterns, inventing new things, actively participating in the holy work of change. They dig their fingers into the soil to help the worms transform what is into what will be. We adults would do well to join them more often with no other goal in mind than to live.

"Accept the images that God has provided," Butler writes through the eyes of her young protagonist, "They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God's self-portrait."

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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!

All Work and No Play

I spent an evening at a Memorial Day weekend barbecue in the company of several people I had never met before. We asked one another "What do you do?" which is our culture's short form for "What to you do for work?" Boiled down, it's the question, "How do you go about acquiring food, clothing, and shelter?"

This dawned on me when one of my new acquaintances answered, "I don't do anything. I'm retired, just living off the fat of the land."

Of course, this man spends his days doing something. As we chatted, he mentioned grandchildren, golf, and gardening, he talked of travel and hiking. All of these things meet my definition of "doing," yet in his mind, in our collective mind, he's an idle man. In this, he is very much like most of the children I've known.

Indeed, this may well be the most decisive dividing line between children and adults. Kids just don't take work all that seriously, whereas for most of us grown-ups it's the center of our lives. Even if we love our jobs, we envy the kids their freedom, meanwhile we grind our teeth and wring our hands when they show any sign of being lazy, which is to say being unproductive. We gripe that today's youth feel "entitled," that they don't seem to understand that they must work for their food, clothing, and shelter. We worry that our children are directionless, that they lack grit, or that they are more interested in their friends than their school work. These are all concerns, I would assert, related to answering the question "What do you do?"

Of course, in most cases it's illegal for children to contract to do proper work so we assign them chores -- some parents even pay their kids for completing them -- or we re-define school as a work place with grades as the paycheck. It's not the same, and the kids know it, because at the end of the day, they can't exchange their grades for their basic necessities. They see our re-framing for what it is: a flat-out lie. The consequence for not getting your chores or school work done is, at worst, punishment, whereas actual productive work, the kind of thing we say when someone asks us adults what we do, is life or death stuff.

Years ago, I went through a phase where I consciously avoided mentioning my profession when someone asked, "What do you do? I would say, "I read books" or "I like to cook," and my fellow adults would almost always follow up by asking, "Are you retired?"

It seems so natural to define ourselves by our work that we forget that for most humans throughout most of our history, work, the process through which we acquire the necessities of life, held a relatively insignificant place in the scheme of things. Marshall Sahlins' highly influential 1968 essay "The Original Affluent Society" made the point that despite claims to the contrary, technological advancement does not liberate us from work. Indeed, the story of modern man is one of spending more and more of our waking hours working. What we today call hunter-gatherers spent, typically, no more than two to four hours a day acquiring material necessities. Even Medieval serfs worked fewer hours in a day than we do and had far more holidays. One could argue that nearly every technological, political, or social development over the course of the past several centuries has resulted in us consuming more of our life in order to acquire food, clothing, and shelter.

I'm a big fan of food, clothing, and shelter, but if that's what it's all about, if that's all I "do," then what's the point? This is why we envy children. Life, as we've created it, is increasingly all work and no play. This is also why we worry that our youth won't have the grit or maturity required of our all-work-all-the-time society. What if they are so entitled that they think they get to continue playing?

This is all, however, just a story we tell ourselves. As David Graeber and David Wengrow write in their book The Dawn of Everything: "By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith . . . inevitably put work -- previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern -- centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that -- at the time -- would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labor."

This is the story of colonization. Everywhere Europeans went, they found people who placed art, community, relationships, and play at the center of their lives rather than work. Instead of learning from them, we labeled them as backwards and lazy and sought to correct these flaws. In many ways, this is exactly what we do today with childhood, colonizing it with our grim story about work. We tell them, meanly, that school is their job, that learning is a matter of toil, that they can only play when they have done their work. But as we all know, the work is never done. For most children, when we open the door to school, we close the window of play, allowing it to only re-open again decades later, at life's sunset, the only time when it is acceptable to do "nothing" with our lives.

"What do you do?" We tend to relegate the question to holiday barbecues, but really, isn't it the question for every day. Isn't this the question we should be asking ourselves as we awake each morning? What will I do with my life today? There are valid answers other than work. We see it every day at preschool.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 16 years. I've recently gone back through the nearly 5000 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!

Discovering What Makes Us Come Alive

 

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. ~Samuel Butler

I find that more and more of my peers are retired. They tell me that their plans are to seek their pleasure, to enjoy the grandkids, to golf, to travel, to garden, to paint. In other words, they are doing, or aspiring to do, all the things that our younger selves were told were, at best, a waste of time. Of course, that's why most of these people can afford to retire: they've worked hard, pinched a sufficient number of pennies, invested wisely (or luckily) and now, during what will hopefully be the final third of life, they can, without guilt, take their leisure.

I don't know if I'll ever be in a position to retire. Oh sure, my wife and I could likely figure out a way to manage it financially, but the truth is that I can't quite imagine life without my work. While I've yet to enjoy the fruits of a lucky monetary investment, I have been lucky in how I've invested my time, which has allowed me the great privilege of living a life of purpose, which, at the end of the day is indistinguishable from a life of pleasure. I'm lucky because as many of my peers are just now getting to the part of our lives we set aside for pleasure, I'm decades ahead of them. 

Aristotle believed that our highest calling was for each of us to find our true path in life and that the way to discover that was through the answer to the question "What gives you pleasure?" By that, he proposed that we seek out and embrace those things that we do without prompting, effortlessly. In fact, the Ancient Greek word for leisure, skhole, is the root of our English word for school. That's right, at the roots of Western civilization lies the transformative idea that school should be a place of leisure, a time to discuss and study, not what others assign you, but rather according to what gives you pleasure. And through that, we discover what it is that makes us come alive.

As the novelist Samuel Butler put it in his masterpiece The Way of All Flesh: "Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide."

As a society, we hardly begrudge a retired person their leisure. After all, they've earned the right to it after a life at the grindstone, but there is a tinge of sorrow in it for me that so many of us arrive at that point having never known what it means to have lived a life of purpose. From a very young age, we are taught that the grindstone is our duty. To pursue pleasure, we're told, is selfishness, best confined to weekends and holidays. Many of us even define pleasure as a kind of sin against both man and nature. We're all too eager to subject even our preschoolers to the toil, and it is always toil when we are compelled to do things we'd rather not.

The argument, of course, is that if we allow children to live lives of leisure, they will simply squander their youth on television, social media, and video games. And despite the big talk about painting and golf and gardening, that's where so many of my retired peers wind up. And no wonder: when you've never had the choice, when leisure has always been the forbidden fruit, it's only natural, when finally "free," to gorge yourself. This is especially true for children, who are rarely allowed to forget that all too soon they will be forced back to their duty, back to virtue, and that their pleasure, if not brought to an end, will ruin them.

When we allow young children their leisure to play, however, we seen natural humans discovering purpose through the pursuit of pleasure. Unlike my retired peers, however, or any adult on holiday for that matter, the children's pleasure is not mere rest, escape, and irresponsibility, but rather curiosity and passion. That is the what Aristotle means by the question, "What gives you pleasure?" I don't need to pose it to the children, however, because without the impending and onerous threat of duty to the grindstone, or adherence to some code of virtue, leisure leads inevitably to discussion and study, to learning and action. This is the only way to discover our own unique path in life, that thing that elevates us beyond mere responsibility, to a life of purpose. Of course, I don't expect for preschoolers, through their play, to find their life's work, but I do hope that they learn what it means to come alive and that is exactly what the world needs: people who know how to come alive.

If you ask any elected official or policy maker a question about education, they will always connect it to the economy. "We must get the children ready for the jobs of tomorrow!" "We must out-educate the Chinese!" But they are not alone. Too many of us have likewise bought into this devil dressed as an angel.

I've spent my adult life as a play-based educator and as such I've spent much of my time defending what I know is right from these devils clothed in duty and virtue. Many accuse me of spoiling or ruining the children. Some have even declared that I'm the "problem with America." Through this blog, public speaking, courses, and other endeavors, I've attempted to give them a view from within our bubble, and perhaps some progress has been made. For instance, most reasonable people will today agree that preschoolers should be playing, although it all too often morphs into duty as they take up our words and twist them into "play with a purpose" or "teachable moments" or simply deploying the promise of play as a trick to turn their attention back toward duty and virtue.

Author and educator, John Holt described it like this: "One reason the walled garden of childhood does not work very well is that the people who build and maintain it cannot stay in it. This very often leads them to resent the children for whose sake the garden was built. How many times must adults, comparing the lives of their children and themselves, think bitterly, "Why should they have it so easy when I have it so tough?" Often they say it out loud. It leads to this, that the people who built the garden to protect the children from the harsh reality outside begin in the name of that same harsh realty to put weeds, and stones, and broken glass, and barbed wire into the garden. "They'd better learn," they say furiously, "what the world out there is really like."

This is the natural response of someone who has never been allowed the leisure to discover what it means to live a life of purpose. This is why Samuel Butler dared not publish his greatest novel during his own lifetime.

The biggest challenge faced by so many of my retired peers, from my perspective, is that they don't know what to do with a life that is suddenly free from the "harsh reality" of duty. They are suddenly confronted with the biggest question of all, the very one that preschoolers at play are always in the process of answering: Who am I going to be? It's a disconcerting thing, I imagine, to have lived most of your life only to find that without duty and virtue to hold them back, with the freedom to be anything, they simply don't know who they are. I can't tell you how many of my retired peers have resorted to working part time as cashiers and waiters, not for the money, but simply to feel that their life still has meaning.

As publisher and philosopher Antonia Case writes in her book Flourish (a deep exploration of what it means to live a life of purpose), "We are so governed by our minds that we can fool ourselves into believing that self-change comes from thinking about it . . . We fool ourselves into thinking that we just need a little time, some space, and then, once all the receptors are open, the voice within will tell us the way . . . But this is not how self-change happens. Your footsteps are the road and nothing more."

This is what we were born to do: for each of us to find our purpose and it is never discovered through duty or virtue. Indeed, duty and virtue are the very things that prevent us from enjoying the leisure that we need in order to discover what gives us pleasure (as opposed to escape), and is the ultimate guide to discovering, at any stage of life, what makes us come alive.

I dream of a day when we all understand that this is what it means to be educated.

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into a full-capacity learning environment, one in which children are free to discover purpose, please join the 2026 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join me! To learn more and register, click here.

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!

Teacher Tom's Last Minute Gift Ideas for Young Children

We've been bombarded with "last minute" gift idea promotions since at least mid-November, but now, finally, the last minute is truly upon us. As a public service I offer Teacher Tom's last minute gift ideas for children, most of which won't even require a trip to a mall or an Amazon delivery. I mean, at the end of the day, we all know they're going to be playing with the boxes, ribbons, and wrapping paper anyway . . .

Mesh produce bags.

Things that rot.

A place to leave things to rot . . .

. . . and worms to live there.

Sticks.

An old typewriter.

Concrete.

Dominoes.

Tape.

Sand.

Blocks.

Hammers.

Drills.

Boxes and balls.

Nuts, bolts, wrenches and screwdrivers . . .

. . . rubber bands . . .

. . . and put them all together.

Glue guns.

Cars.

Dolls . . .

. . . who need bandages.

Shipping pallets.

Rocks.

Water, gutters, tubes and shovels.

Paint.

Yarn.

Step ladders . . .

. . . and homemade ladders.

Tree parts.

Ropes.

Buckets.

Plants.

Junk . . .

 . . . and jewels.

Happy holidays!

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

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