A Truly Beautiful Bowl Of Soup

"Oh mother, we must finish making our soup!"

"Yes dear, we will, but first we need some more roasted potatoes."

"Yes mother."

The girls were doing what children have done forever: making mud soup in a bucket. Their game had dramatic urgency as they rushed about gathering ingredients, stirring them in with a shovel, then foraging about for more. I couldn't help but connect their game to our human ancestors who spent their days hunting and gathering: they were playing an ancient game, one somehow passed down through the generations.

No one teaches this to children, but on every playground, in every backyard, in any place where children have access to water, containers, and something to gather, they make their soups and stews. These are typically not solitary games. They are games of community, of working together, of negotiating, and sharing, games that tie us together in the present as much as they tie us to our common past.

"Oh, it's not ready yet mother."

"Yes dear. You have to keep stirring."

This particular game was about a mother and her daughter, about one child pretending to teach and reassure the other the way parents do. This particular game was a polite game, where everyone spoke solicitous words in clear, calm voices. It was both artificial and aspirational, I think, as the girls examined relationship from a dispassionate place, like in a storybook.

This making of mud soup is not mere child's play. It is the work of a lifetime; soup every human who has ever lived must learn to cook.

"Mother, is it ready yet? The guests will be here soon."

"Yes dear, it's ready now."

As they offered me the first bowl of their roasted potato soup, I noticed that it contained dozens of green cherry tomatoes and marigold blossoms from our garden. It was a truly beautiful bowl of soup.

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Speaking It Into Existence

A couple years ago, Tom Drummond, one of my earliest teaching mentors, the man who introduced me to the technology of speaking with children, dropped by the school. He was particularly interested in our green house and our new "farming" program. After about an hour, we parted. As we did, he said, "You're doing great work. I'm glad you're in the world." We were standing on the wooden walkway that overlooks our playground. I replied, "Thank you. And I want you to know that none of this would be here without you. Everything here is a result of how you taught me to speak with children."

We tend to think of reality as a set of facts that exist outside of ourselves, things that are true in equal measure for everyone, and in one way it is, but we also create reality for ourselves, day-after-day, by the way we behave, believe, and especially in the way we speak. When we speak informatively with young children, from a place of warmth and connection, striving to avoid commands and minimizing our questions, we create a certain reality not just for those kids, but for ourselves and those around us. When I look at our playground, our green house, our classroom, I see them as visible echoes and amplifications of the technology to which Tom introduced me two decades ago.

After Tom left, I went back to puttering around, then before leaving went indoors to wash the dirt from under my fingernails. Being a Friday afternoon, the building was empty except for a pair of contractors who we had hired for a project. As I passed by the room in which they were working, one of them called out to me, "Hey, do you work here?"

"I'm the teacher of the preschool."

"Good. You're the guy I need to talk to." As he approached me, I could tell he was agitated. He was moving quickly. I imagine his heart rate was elevated. "Do you know the guy in the dress? The transgender person or whatever?"

All morning long one of our neighborhood's street people, one of Pastor Gay's men, had been hanging around the place, mostly just lounging on the lawn and smoking butts in the designated area. He was wearing a kind of a skirt, more like a small blanket tied around his waist, but I figured that's who the contractor meant. I said, "I think I know who you're talking about."

"Well, he just tried to come in the building and when I told him I couldn't let him in, he threatened me."

"Oh no. Thanks for not letting him in."

"I just wanted to warn you. He seems like he's about to go off."

"Is he still here?

"Yeah, he's just waiting right outside the front door. He says there's supposed to be a meeting here, but I was told not to let anyone in who doesn't have a key."

"Well, there are a lot of 12-step meetings in this building. Maybe he just got the time wrong. Listen, I know him. I should talk to him."

"He seems pretty irrational. We'll come with you."

When I opened the front door, I found at least a dozen people there, all familiar faces, people who regularly attend 12-step meetings at the Fremont Baptist Church in which our school is housed. Amongst them was a very large person in little black dress, fishnet stalkings, and four-inch heels -- one of the regulars.

Someone said, "Oh, thank god you're here. There was no key in the key box and we have our meeting now."

I replied, turning to the contractors who were standing over my shoulder protectively, "I know these people. It's okay if they come in."

Later, after the group had settled in, I stood on the sidewalk with the contractors who still seemed agitated. I said, "You did the right thing not letting them in."

"Yeah, well that big guy in the dress, or woman, or . . . Well they're big and they were mad. I thought I was going to get punched." He went into more details, obviously needing to get his emotions out, to explain himself, maybe to justify his fear. As he did, I was conscious of his struggle with finding the proper pronouns. Our daughter and her friends have been teaching me a lot  about gender and the use of pronouns.  I support this effort to create a new reality through the use of language even as I continue to struggle. .

As the contractor  began to wind down a bit, he shared that he lived in a suburban community a goodly commute from the Seattle city limits. "When I come into the city, I'm always on my guard, you know? It seems like there's always someone ready for a fight. I've even had to pull a gun on a guy."

This isn't the first time someone has earnestly told me about the gun they "had to pull" on someone, and it has almost always been a white man from the suburbs. "I have to tell you," a real estate agent friend from Kirkland once told me, "Some of the places I go in the city -- I'm sure glad I had my gun." Another friend who lives in Woodenville can't stop talking about the "dangers" of the city on those rare occasions that he is willing to come visit. This is a black leather wearing Harley rider, a man who affects the stance of a tough guy (although he's genuinely very sweet), yet he talks as if there is a hoodlum around every corner. Every time I see him, he advises me to get a gun like the one he sometimes carries because you never know when you might "need it."

I've lived in cities most of my adult life, I love living in cities, the more urban the better, and I have never once been in a situation in which I felt I needed a gun, yet over the years dozens of people, mostly white men from the suburbs, but not always, have spoken about "pulling guns" or otherwise having to violently defend themselves in the city. It's clear to me that the city presents a different reality for them than it does for me, and I can't help but wonder if much of the difference comes from the stories we tell ourselves and others, the language we use, to describe our experiences.

The media seems to get higher ratings from portraying urban dystopias. And researchers tell us that the more television a person watches, the more dangerous they believe  the world to be. If you don't live and work in a city, the words reporters and scriptwriters choose for creating their TV realities, I suppose, start to form an actual reality about cities that is distinct from that experienced by those of us who live here. That language of violence and menace becomes part of how some people think and speak about the city, which, in turn, results in a higher likelihood of perceiving threats, engaging in conflict, and even having to resort to "pulling a gun," a reality that is as alien to me as my reality is to them.

Some time ago, I wrote here about an experiment in some Swedish schools to eliminate the use of gender-specific pronouns. I tended to doubt the concept, even as I was curious to see the results. Now my own daughter has come home with the same ideas. These seemingly small tweaks to how we speak are attempts to create a new reality about gender through the conscious use of language. The goal is for it to become something we just all do without having to think about it: the way most of us don't think about our use of gender-specific pronouns. Every social change that has ever happened in our world has only really come about once we've fully adopted the new language that goes with it.

Today, we hear loud complaints about political correctness. It's hard to find oneself living a different reality than those around you. Perhaps for most of your life it didn't matter because most people shared your reality, but then as more and more of us attempt to speak a new reality into existence, you see your old, comfortable reality changing as well. I know from experience that it at first seems ridiculous, then irritating, then even frightening because this new reality will replace your old one.

Every day, the words we choose to speak create the reality in which we live. If we talk of cities as menacing, then they become so. If we talk of cities as thriving, exciting, uniquely human communities, that is what they become. If we speak the language of gender fluidity, then we create the reality of gender fluidity. If we speak to children as if they are fully formed human beings, then we create a reality in which children are free to live as fully formed human beings.

We build reality word by word. We all have the power to create it. Indeed, the reality in which we live is already a creation of our words. If we want a different reality it may well be as simple and as difficult as consciously speaking it into existence. It might take a very long time, but if we keep doing it, we will one day no longer have to even think about it and we will have created a better world.

 I've published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you! 

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!

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The Hallmarks Of A Day Well Lived

We set ourselves a goal. We were going to the Woodland Park Rose Garden, a place many of us had never been even though it's adjacent to the zoo, a place we've all been. The weather has recently turned toward fall, but the last of the roses are still there for the smelling. Not only that, but the park's department has recently added a sensory garden to the the 2.5 acres which includes a small playground and we thought we'd like to check that out.

But first there was the hike to the bus stop, uphill along Fremont Avenue, to the BF Day Elementary School where some of the kids know their older siblings attend. Along the way we spied yellow, orange, red, and purple leaves. Some of us tasted licorice-flavored sprigs from a towering wild fennel plant. Others discussed the grisly prospect of being run over by a car.

At the bus stop, we designated a "calm" zone (next to the road) and a "go crazy" zone (away from the road). A couple kids attempted to climb the cracked and bulging concrete retaining wall that helps hold the soil under the more than a century old school building. One of them succeeded, standing above us, declaring himself "the tallest one here!"

We knew we were waiting for the number 5, a number of significance given that most of us are anticipating our fifth birthday. Riding the bus is usually the highlight of every excursion; sometimes we just go out with no goal other than to ride mass transit. When the bus finally arrived, we filed down the aisle, rushing to find seats near a window or next to our friend or in the "bendy part" (preschool slang for the pivoting section of articulated buses). We were loud with our collective excitement. I imagine we annoyed some of our fellow passengers, but others smiled at us, some even happily giving up their seats, but the children were oblivious either way, up on their knees, pressing their noses to the windows, enjoying the freedom of not being strapped into car seats, some even experimenting with standing as the bus moved.

As we passed familiar sites, children called out, "I've been there before!" or "This is close to my house!" or "That's where my friend Sophia lives!" It's familiar turf for most of the children, made new by the experience of seeing it from the expansive windows of the bus in the company of everyone. As we disembarked at the southwest corner of the zoo park grounds, several children enthused, "I've been here before!"

We knew we were not far from the south entrance to the zoo and our momentum carried us through the grassy, still greenly shady park, in that direction. Arriving at the zoo gates our group broke into two with half the children stopping to play in the leaves that had collected under the large oak that stands there, while the others made a beeline for the brass baboon statues, upon which they clambered. It was a gusty day and we threw leaves, creating small tornados in the swirling wind. Before long we were one big group again as almost all the kids opted for throwing leaves. Then, after some time, we moved on.

The rose garden is a "formal" place as rose gardens tend to be, featuring tidy, well-labeled beds, a gazebo, a couple of fountains, lawns, and maze-like walkways. My idea was for the adults to spread themselves out so that the kids would have the freedom to explore on their own, but the children had other ideas, opting instead to flock mostly together, first to the smell roses (where one boy learned the lesson of roses by breaking off a thorn in his forearm), then to the gazebo, then to each of the fountains, then to the sensory playground. A parent had brought along blueberries and apples from her parents' trees.

The playground became a kind of base of operations, then, with children adventuring off into the wider garden in groups of threes and fours, wandering the walkways, getting "lost" behind hedges. I found two girls meditating upon a woman who was meditating. We talked to gardeners who were weeding the beds. Some of us met the dogs that another patron was walking. We tried out the quirky musical instruments that have recently been installed. We played there, smelling the roses both literally and figuratively until we were ready to go.

We returned the way we had come because we had seen several climbing trees we wanted to try out. We stopped to wonder about the war dead memorial statue that serves as the bullseye to this part of Woodland Park. We then made our way to our bus which took us to the stop at the top of the Troll's Knoll community garden where we ran and rolled wildly up and down the native plant covered hill nestled up against Highway 99.

Finally then, we made our way back to school to find the parents who had not come with us waiting. It was a perfect day of smelling roses. We went home tired, happy, and with stories to tell, which are the hallmarks of a day well lived.

I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you! 

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!

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Eating From The Garden

Yesterday, a parent pointed out that her son was eating raw kale that he had picked from the playground garden. "He won't touch it at home, but here, he devours it!"

This isn't the first we've heard of this phenomenon at Woodland Park. In fact, we see it almost every day. A couple weeks ago, I mentioned to one of the parent-teachers that we needed to polish off the kale and lettuce growing in one of our raised beds in order to make way for different crops. I wanted her to urge the kids in that direction, but instead, she harvested the leaves herself, then took them to the snack table where she arranged them artistically, like a fan, on a plate. The children were avoiding it like it was the plague.

I told her, "If you want them to eat it, try taking it back into the garden." She doubted me, but moments later I spied children queueing up in the garden for their own leaf to munch. When she said, "You were right!" I wasn't surprised because I've seen it so often I no longer doubt it's true.

Children are notoriously picky eaters, especially when it comes to vegetables served to them at the dinner table, yet time and again we've seen that most kids, most days, are eager to eat pretty much anything from the garden. No one is surprised when kids fall on the berries, but our chives are almost as popular. We eat green beans straight from the vine, the seed pods of radishes that have bolted, and green tomatoes because we are so eager we pick them before they're ready. A pair of boys once ate an entire crop of immature beets straight out of the ground causing their parents to panic when they later produced red urine. We've eaten a whole eggplant, raw. And when they are done, they beg for more. Occasionally, a parent will report that this new adventurousness about vegetables has carried over to home, but more often than not it doesn't: they'll eat the kale from the garden, but not off a plate.

I recognize that there is a lot at play in food pickiness, including power dynamics, but I've begun to suspect that this reluctance to trust unknown or unusual food is at least in part an aspect of ancient wisdom, an evolutionary trait that helps to insure survival. I mean, it makes sense to be instinctively suspicious of new food that just appears on your plate, that was previously displayed at a supermarket, after having been transported on a truck or a train or a plane from a different state or even another country. It's adaptive, I think, to want to know where your food comes from, to have seen it grow, to have watered it, and then to have picked it yourself. I wonder if the pickiness of children around vegetables isn't due in part to our modern system of producing and distributing food. We like to know where it came from and there is no surer way to know than to grow it yourself.

Of course, this doesn't explain the popularity of hamburgers and chicken fingers, because, honestly, if children knew how those things are made, they would likely swear off them forever. Still, it seems like a plausible theory when it comes to veggies and is an argument for every child having access to a vegetable garden.

I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!

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"Don't Play With Your Food!"

When we were young, adults would threaten, "You'll eat it and you'll like it," when children recoiled at a meal, to which we learned to respond, "I'll eat it, but I won't like it." Sometimes an adult would remind us that there were children starving in China (it was always China), to which we learned to respond by offering to mail our uneaten food to those starving children. I was never a particularly picky eater, but many of my friends were, so these are conversations I mostly heard around their dinner tables. There was, however, an expectation in my family that we clean our plates, the rationale being that to do otherwise was wasteful.

Perhaps the most common adult caution around food, however, was the universal scold, "Don't play with your food!" And it's true, I and most kids I knew, played with our food. Eating corn on the cob, for instance, was a kind of game in which some of us ate it round-and-round in a spiral, while others went side. We would eat faces into our pancakes. Spitting watermelon seeds was almost a sport. Orange peel smiles have never gone out of vogue. And spaghetti was an endless amusement with all the twirling and slurping and pretending they were worms or brains or hair.

And the adults would say, "Don't play with your food!"

At Woodland Park, our sensory table is often filled with rice or beans or seeds or corn meal. We have play dough available almost every day, we use paper mache paste, and the food that grows in our gardens is as likely to be used as a plaything as it is to be eaten. Some programs have banned food play. Their reasoning varies, but from what I can tell, most of it boils down the same basic idea that children somewhere are starving and to play with food is a kind of insensitivity to their suffering. I'm as concerned about starving children as the next person, but this food we play with, just as the food we left on our dinner plates uneaten, is not food we are taking from their mouths and it is a lie, albeit well-intended, when we tell children otherwise. I understand that the goal is to cause children to think about those who are less fortunate, but to hold their own good fortune out as something about which to feel guilt or shame, is something I think we ought not to do to children. Most kids have enough innate empathy to feel for the plight of starving children without these sorts of ham-fisted attempts to drive the point home through guilt and shame.

Indeed, from where I sit, children must play with their food, just as they must play with everything that is a part of their lives. Playing with the "stuff" with which they are surrounded is how children deepen their understanding of their world, and to forbid their inquiries is akin to commanding them to stop asking questions.

The preschoolers I teach don't eat meals at school, but we do offer snacks in the form of fruits and vegetables. The snack table is like any other "station" in our classroom, one of the places a child may opt to play. Most of their play around food involves the joy of simply sitting around the table together, dining, chatting, joking, and generally enjoying the company of others in the spirit of eat, drink, and be merry. But, you know, sometimes we have to put olives on the ends of each of our fingers before eating them one-by-one. Sometimes the food on our plate does look like a face. Sometimes a banana peel must be worn as a hat. Sometimes food is better used for something other than eating.

And those orange peel smiles are still, as always, a joy to behold.

I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you! 

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!

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What A Teacher Ought To Be Doing

"Teacher Tom, I need a box."

"What kind of box?"

"This is my firing pad and I need a base for my firing pad." We had been dismantling machines all week, then repurposing the parts for our own creations using glue guns. His "firing pad" employed the shell of a DVD player upon which he'd mounted bits from a vacuum cleaner along with a couple wine corks he had found on the ground.

I thought I might have a box that would work for his purposes in the storage room and hustled inside for it.

When I returned, before I'd even handed over the box, I was waylaid by a group of girls who needed duct tape.

"What do you need duct tape for?"

There was a crack in the side of a plastic bucket they were using. When I offered help them find a bucket that wasn't cracked, they insisted that it had to be this one because it "matched." They all wanted to be using the same red buckets. After delivering the box to the workbench, I went back inside for duct tape.

Upon my return, another boy asked me for another box to use as a base for his firing pad. "But a smaller one."

This is how my day had gone, frankly. It seemed as if I'd been sent into that damned store room dozens of times already, fetching everything from fabric and string to drinking straws and "sparkle sparkles," all at the behest of kids. I was feeling a bit irritated, not at the children, of course, and not really even at myself, but rather at my "third teacher," and her inability to make all those supplies more readily accessible. I love her, but she's far from perfect.

Our supply of cardboard boxes was at an ebb, so this mission required some rummaging around. As I searched, I ground my teeth at the fact that this was what I was doing with my day rather than, you know, actually teaching. In my internal grumbling, I asked myself why the kids couldn't just stick with using the huge supply of materials I'd already provided and that's when it hit me: I was, in fact, doing exactly what a teacher ought to be doing in a truly child-lead environment. They were out there, fully engaged in their self-directed projects, and when they came across an idea or obstacle I'd not anticipated (and in all honesty, most are of that variety), they were using their knowledge of the storage room supplies to ask me, the teacher, the one with the keys, the one tall enough to reach the top shelves, to help them.

After retrieving an acceptable box, one I'd made available by moving its contents to a different container, I heard a couple kids chanting, "We need more water, we need more water, we need more water," the way they do when the cistern over which our cast iron pump sits is dry. An adult needs to go outside the playground gate to turn on the hose that refills it, so I headed that way, not plodding as much as I sometimes do, understanding in this moment that this is what I get paid to do at our play-based school: supporting the kids as they pursue their self-directed projects.

A group of children had earlier gone around to the greenhouse to plant a few seeds in hope of some early crops. A clutch of them were standing at the gate, wanting to come back in. "We need watering cans!"

"Okay," I said as I let them in, "but first I have to refill the cistern."

"Don't worry, Teacher Tom, we'll get them ourselves. We know where they are," and off they race, down the hill, fully engaged in their project, and all they had needed me for this time was opening the gate.

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Truly Last Minute Gift Ideas

I've been hearing "last minute gift ideas" advertisements since at least mid-November. Pfft. But now, finally, the last minute is truly upon us, so 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.

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.

Pallets.

Rocks.

Water, gutters, tubes and shovels.

Paint.

Yarn.

Step ladders . . .

. . . and homemade ladders.

Tree parts.

Ropes.

Buckets.

Plants.

Junk . . .

 . . . and jewels.

Merry Christmas!

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