Because We Live in a Society

My wife and I have lived with dogs for most of our 40 years of marriage.

Our first dog came before our daughter was born. He was our gateway "child." One of the responsibilities of a dog owner in an urban or suburban place is to pick up after it. The concept disgusted me: turning a plastic bag inside out, grabbing it with my hand, and carrying it until I came across a trash can. Honestly, I often skipped it when I didn't think anyone was watching.

That said, it irritated me when I came across unpicked poo. What slobs, I would think. Don't they realize they live in a society? Then one day, my hypocrisy hit me. How can I expect other people to pick up after their dog if I myself sometimes let it lie?

Today, I always pick up after my dog, not because I've come to enjoy it -- it's still an annoying, unpleasant task. And not because I'm worried about any kind of punishment or public shame, but because, well, we live in a society. 

At preschool, one of our health and safety requirements is that every person who comes into the school starts by washing their hands. This goes for both children and adults. Indeed, we enter our school through a room with a sink. At the beginning of the school year, we remind the children, "Don't forget to wash your hands," but typically, by about this point in the school year, reminders are no longer necessary: they enter, stash their stuff, then hop up on the stool to wash their hands. Often, you hear them reminding their parents.

They do it because it's what we do; because they are part of a society. They are not doing it to avoid punishment. They are not doing it because they are concerned about being shamed. It's a responsibility that each of them has assumed. I suppose you could say it's part of the price of entry into our little community. Or perhaps more accurately, hand washing could be understood as one of the small daily rituals that hold us together.

Parents and educators often want their children to be responsible. We assign them tasks or chores and tell them that they are "responsible" for getting them done. We scold them for being "irresponsible" when they fail or neglect them. But I don't think this is how responsibility works. We assume responsibilities, not because others are dictating to us, not because we will otherwise be punished or shamed, but because, quite simply, we live in a society, and this is what we do.

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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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I Fought the Temptation to "Correct" Them

When my grandmother-in-law died, she left us with a set of The Great Books, a 54 volume set of renowned works by European men, from Homer to Freud. Published in 1954 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was meant as a comprehensive study guide for adults interested in learning about intellectual underpinnings of the Western world. The idea was that students would encounter the original works, rather than textbook summaries, and, more importantly, the curriculum was built around conversation, debate, and inquiry rather than to simply deliver direct instruction.

The Great Books approach to higher education had been underway decades before this set was published, versions of it having been adopted by several respected universities, including Columbia, University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and St. John's College, which to this day organizes its entire undergraduate program around it.

Over the years, I've cherry picked volumes to browse, reading, say a bit of Plato here or a passage from Goethe there, but largely they've lived with us ornamentally, or, as I often say about books on the shelf, aspirationally. 

My attention was drawn to these books recently when I read that schools in South Korea have begun adopting the Great Books seminar approach by partnering with St. John's. Hwacheon High School began offering the program as a two-credit course in 2025. Five other schools in Chuncheon offer seminars using readings from Plato and Thomas More, and the Incheon National University has adapted it for Korean students and is currently extending it into local schools.

At first, this confounded me. Why would Korean schools be embracing a deep dive into this curriculum of "dead white guys." I mean, certainly Korea has its own rich intellectual and literary tradition to draw from, and apparently they have included Asian thinkers, but the point isn't the specific content. The stated goal, according to educators, is for Korean students to discover a new way to learn. They want their students to learn by speaking as equals, questioning one another, and exploring ideas without being expected to reach a single correct answer. This, of course, is a reaction against school cultures that have traditionally been more hierarchical and lecture-based.

Equally important, I think, is that they are consciously seeking to move away from vocational training and toward supporting students to become facile, confident critical thinkers.

This is happening in Korea as US universities and high schools are moving away from reading entire books altogether. 

Of course, as a preschool teacher, I've always worked in schools in which the students don't read any books at all. Or rather, books are read to the children. And then, invariably, they are discussed, not as lessons to be learned, but very much with the goal of becoming facile, confident critical thinkers. 

One of the greatest reading episodes of my life involved a reading of The Little Red Hen. This classic morality story involves a hen who finds some grains of wheat and decides to do the work of planting, tending, harvesting, grinding, and ultimately baking it into a loaf of bread. At every step of the way, she asks the others, "Who will help me?" to which they reply, "Not I." As an adult, I know the intended moral of the story, but when we got to the end where the hen, justifiably, refuses to share the bread, the children were confused and outraged.

"Why didn't she share?"

"They're hungry and she's eating all the bread!"

"That's not fair!"

I fought the temptation to "correct" them, but rather allowed the discussion to unfold as the children, together, determined that the little red hen was a jerk.

Another time we were collecting books for a fundraiser. The intent had been picture books, but one of our families donated a bunch of paperback novels, among them William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. People my age know that this book is difficult and dense, made particularly confusing by the fact that the narrator of the first quarter of the book is a grown man, Benjy, with a severe intellectual disability. A five-year-old brought it to me. I told him, "That's a grown-up book. You'll probably have to read it when you're in high school."

"Let's read it now."

It was a sunny day, so we took the book outside and I began reading it to a small assembly of preschoolers. I figured they would wander off before I'd reached the bottom of the first page, but I was wrong. For the next week, we read and discussed this book on the playground, as a group. Not only that, but the children, together, were able to discern exactly what was going on ("They're playing baseball." "No, they're playing golf." "He's hiding from them." "He's trying to get their golf balls."), something I'd struggled with as a teenager. They made me stop to define words, and they were particularly interested when I skipped over the N-word. "What's so bad about it?"

Our policymakers are forever talking about the "jobs of tomorrow" and how our schools must "prepare" our children for them. What BS. No one can possibly predict what jobs our preschoolers will be applying for 20 years from now. They're just blowing smoke. They're, at best, talking about the jobs of today, but more often than not, they're talking about the jobs of yesterday. It will be today's preschoolers who will be inventing those jobs of tomorrow.

What we do know, however, is that whatever the future holds, we will need those critical thinkers. 

That's what educators in South Korea are thinking about. Maybe we should too.

******

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!

"That's What's Cool, Teacher Tom . . . Look!"

The biggest social event of our preschool year was always our annual all-school Halloween party, a typically raucous affair attended by most of our 65 or so students, their parents, siblings, and often grandparents. All three classes "practice" our Halloween songs at circle time, which are mostly variations on songs we've been singing together for as long as I've been at Woodland Park.

Easily the most popular, for all ages, are a pair of ditties that involve holding up jack-o-lantern faces to our own, then removing them as a surprise ending.

The first we talk about as a song for the "babies," one we sing gently and sweetly while thinking of the "little kids" who will laugh and laugh when we sing it for them:

Someone is hiding, hiding, hiding

Someone is hiding

Who could it be?

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

The second, however, is for the grown-ups and "big kids" who we intend to scare:

Halloween is coming

And this is what I'll do

I'll hide behind this pumpkin face

And then I'll say, "BOO!"

We practice this over and over in all the classes, getting louder and louder (which we equate with scarier and scarier) with each successive iteration, until we're frightening the aliens in outer space.

I have a small set of 25 practice pumpkin faces that were created years ago, but for the big event, what with all the siblings, we're going to need at least 125, which requires a manufacturing process. We use paper plates for our pumpkin faces, with eyes, noses and mouths precut, and each class takes a turn cranking out as many as they can.

Teachers often complain about the challenge of getting older boys to the "art table." Well let me tell you, I've found that manufacturing processes are a great lure, especially if they involve glue guns, although in this case we were just using tempera paint in the colors we all agreed are "Halloween colors": orange, black and yellow. I've found that one of the key parts of making an art project into a manufacturing project is to say, "We won't have time to put your name on any of them. You're making them for everyone." There's something about speed, efficiency, and teamwork that hooks them.

As a swarm of boys descended on the table, I had to wait awhile for a chair to open up for me. When I finally took a seat, the first thing I commented upon were the stenciled pumpkin faces the kids were leaving behind on the table top.

"Hey, there are pumpkin faces on the table."

Wyatt said, "Yeah, you make them like this, Teacher Tom," and he showed me by quickly painting a plate solid black, then lifting it up for the big reveal.

"Thanks for showing me," I said, then got to work painting orange outlines around some triangle eyes.

"No, Teacher Tom," said Yuri, "You have to paint right across the eyes . . . Like this," and he showed me on his own pumpkin face.

I said, "But I just want paint around the eyes."

"That's what's cool, Teacher Tom . . . Look!" He picked up his plate and held it into my face, "The paint that's in the eyes stays on the table. Only the paint that's around the eyes stays on the plate."

I thanked the boys for their help, then got to work manufacturing my pumpkin face, employing the scientific magic of the simple stencil, chatting with the guys about making babies laugh and grown-ups quiver.

*****

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!

We Had Built a School and We Were Our Own Teachers

When I was a college sophomore, I had four roommates. We'd all been randomly assigned to the same dormitory floor as freshmen and liked each other enough to give it a go in a large two-bedroom house just off campus.

Many of our other friends from the dorms had joined fraternities, but none of us saw ourselves as the frat boy type. Our house was located to the west of the majority of the frat houses, so we mockingly called ourselves Frat West. Our joke caught on. One evening, while I was there alone, an entire sorority stopped by to serenade me: just me alone hanging out a window with 30 young women singing to me. 

My roommates and I made an agreement to start the year: we would create a schedule that required one of us to be responsible for a dinner for all five of us each evening, Monday-Thursday. That left us with a schedule that meant we each got an occasional week off kitchen duty. Our other rule was that you were allowed one "cheat meal" per quarter. A cheat meal was anything that we collectively agreed was not "real cooking" (like frozen pizza), but even then it had to be balanced according to government guidelines (e.g., dairy, meat, vegetable, fruit, grains). None of us were seasoned cooks, although my mother had taught me a few of her recipes, which gave me the reputation as the "gourmet" of the bunch.

Our friends predicted the schedule would fall apart within weeks. Even my own mother later told me that she doubted we'd be able to stick with it. And I don't blame them. Here we were, five young men, responsible for preparing our own food for the first time in our lives. No one expected young men to manage a household. Certainly studying and social life would come first. 

That doubt unified us. By the end of the school year, we could tell the story of each of our collective meals together. 

There was the night that Mike made "rhino burgers": burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. 

Kevin tried his hand at Chicago style pizza. It's still the standard by which I judge deep dish.

Dan disliked salad dressing, so one night I served him an unaltered head of iceberg lettuce in his salad bowl, which he gamely consumed in its entirety.

Brian got us to agree that he could be replaced one evening by guest chef Father Patrick from the Catholic House. Father P complained about our dull knives. 

Friends often asked to join us as a sixth or seventh, which we typically accommodated.

Between defying doubt and our friendly competitiveness, we stuck with the program from September through June. And even when one of us failed, we praised or panned accordingly, but we always ate the food. 

Looking back, I can see that the year was the product of accidental genius. We placed constraints on ourselves through agreement -- dinner for five, balanced, Monday through Thursday, only one cheat per quarter -- but within those constraints we'd given ourselves enormous freedom. And we had the most useful, and brutally honest, feedback mechanism imaginable: people who knew us well actually eating the entire meal. 

I didn't see it at the time, but I now recognize that we had created a functioning anarchistic community, in the original sense of the word. Or in less controversial language, we created a pretty sophisticated cooperative labor system.

Those balanced dinners became more than mere healthy eating. They were community meetings. They were events in the shared history of five people. Remember the turkey-extra-crappy? The meals became landmarks.

Nobody taught a course called Cooking 101. Together, we constructed an environment with real responsibility, meaningful constraints, repeated opportunities, natural consequences, and a community that depended on us. We all learned because learning was a necessary part of living together. In fact, I know that I learned at least as much from this experiment in community as I did in any of my classes.

This is where I first really learned to cook, but it was much more than that. We had a communal need. Rather than each of us solving it individually, we created a cooperative system into which everyone contributed, and from which everyone benefited. Responsibility rotated. 

This isn't far off the kind of cooperative preschool community in which I spent my teaching career. It's where I got first-hand experience with rules designed not to enforce obedience, but as agreements that allowed our community to function. We didn't do any of it to avoid punishment or earn praise, but rather because the other four guys were counting on us. The original goal might have been to eat decently and save money, but the real outcome was learning about one another, developing traditions and stories, and creating community.

Every Sunday at midnight we would do our grocery shopping. We chose that exact time because we agreed that none of us would have other plans. There was a big, no-frills grocery store called Waremart, known for its low prices. We each contributed $20.

We took a single cart through that virtually empty store and together shopped for the ingredients we needed for our meals, but also what we individually wanted to have around for breakfasts, lunches, and weekends, not to mention household necessities like toilet paper. We were in a constant state of negotiation as we jockeyed to stay within our collective $100 budget. One thing we all agreed upon was that we each got our own loaf of sliced bread, white or wheat, for the week. Another was that the common budget could not be spent on dessert . . . Unless it was ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, which would be made, and consumed on an evening when we were all at home.

I'll never forget the cashier, a middle-aged woman, checking us out after our first group shopping expedition. When the final bill came due, we were within pennies of $100. She said, "You boys made good choices." 

The best part is that even at the time, we all approached it as a kind of lark, a challenge, an adventure in which failure was always a possibility. Even our midnight shopping felt like a night on the town with friends. 

In other words, we were playing.

It was just a bunch of young men experimenting with life, creating it together to suit ourselves and one another. It's kind of stunning to think about how much learning was embedded in our play: budgeting, meal planning, nutrition, compromise, division of labor, accountability, generosity, cooking, economics, shopping, conflict. We needed no other curriculum because we had something to accomplish together. That's what we play-based educators call project-based learning.

In Frat West we had built a school and we were our own teachers.

But most importantly, I think, is that we were learning that autonomy isn't the opposite of community. Indeed, we were learning that a healthy community is what makes autonomy possible.

******

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!

Extending Themselves Into the World

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.

As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes."

This ability to make and use tools, like hammers or cars, is one of the things that makes Homo sapiens the species we are. Of course, other species, like apes, otters, and crows, use tools, but none to the extent that we do.

I recently observed a toddler stop to consider a stick on the ground. On wobbly legs, she stood over that stick for a moment, before carefully, awkwardly, bending at the waist and knees to get closer to it. Again, she paused to catch her balance before reaching out her hand, fingers splayed. It took her a couple attempts to grasp hold of it. She fell on her bottom in the effort to stand upright again, but then, without dropping the stick, she pushed herself back onto her feet. She then began testing the world with that stick, tapping it on the ground, poking tree trunks, sticking it into holes. It had become "an embodied extension of (her) neural processes."

We've all observed young humans doing these kinds of things. This urge to extend our bodies and minds out into our environment is, in many ways, what learning is all about. Reggio Emilia educators consider "the environment" to be a teacher, equal in significance to human teachers. Indigenous wisdom, no matter where we find it in the world, has more often than not acknowledged the interconnectedness between us humans and the rest of creation.

"At more complex levels," Yunkaporta writes, "the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making, we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places, and relationships with others." (Italics are mine)

A while back, I went golfing for the first time in 30 years. I was concerned I would make a fool of myself, and I did, but not nearly to the degree I'd feared. Indeed, the moment I picked up a club, I was reconnected to the golf clubs of my youth. I thought of my father's persimmon wood drivers, then my father, then of taking those clubs to our local municipal course and the pride of having the pro there enthuse over their rarity and beauty. I thought I'd forgotten everything about golf, but the moment I took my first swing, my body and mind embodied much of the knowledge I had stored away in those clubs from long ago. As I went around the course, I was in the past as much as the present, as the course itself -- the grass, the sand traps, the greens, the balls, the tees -- taught and re-taught knowledge, even wisdom, that I'd left stored there long ago.

Many of us will gather with our extended families over the upcoming holidays where we will reconnect with knowledge that we keep stored in our relationships with others. Perhaps we will spend time in our childhood homes or engaging in rituals and traditions that reconnect us to things we thought we'd forgotten. If the lessons we learned were of kindness and love, those will surround us. If they were harsh or sad, we will resist or avoid the people, places, or things that store our pain, which is probably why so many of us find the holidays challenging.

Young children are just beginning this process of extending themselves into the world, of connecting their neural processes with their environment. They are just beginning to store their knowledge and wisdom outside of their brains. They will learn things in school, although most of it will remain in school, stored there in the classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Their important connections will be made with the people, places, and things from life itself.

"If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning," write Yunkaporta, "then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds." This goes for people and places as well as things. Writes Yunkaporta, "This is how spirit works."

******

Books, like Sand Talk, 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!

A Stone Like All the Others

I picked up a small stone and performed some sleight of hand for the children. I then handed the stone to a girl, saying, "I'm giving this to you." Our playground is bestrewn with stones and pebbles. Any one of them would have served my purposes, but I'd selected this one. Now this girl had it. The other children gathered around her, requesting a turn with this "special" stone.

"It's funny how the nature of an object . . . is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or a commodity," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. This stone was just a stone until I picked it up, then gave it to someone else. Now it's a treasure.

After trying to make it "disappear" several times, in imitation of me, she passed it along to a playmate, who squealed. The first girl had not squealed when I gave it to her. It had become even more valuable as children jockeyed to be next. 

"The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes," writes Kimmerer.

The stone passed from hand-to-hand over the course of the next half hour or so. Some held it for a few seconds before passing it along. Others took time to cherish it. But they all paid it forward. There was no adult coaxing them or praising them. They knew exactly what to do.

"Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again."

Eventually, the last child took his turn with the stone. He had waited a long time. Only he could say if it was worth it, but he seemed as pleased as the others. 

"From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships." And the obligation to give it away again.

I figured the game was now done, but I was wrong. After several minutes the boy began to look around until he spied me. It had started as a stone like all the others, but as it passed from person-to-person as a gift, it had become a talisman, a symbol, and a ceremony. He completed the circle by handing the stone to me. And I returned it to the Earth, who had given it to me.

******

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!

Toward Wisdom Rather Than Mere Education

It's "fire season" here on the West Coast of the US. Currently, there are 32 active "large" fires burning, not to mention the dozens of smaller fires or the 50 or so large fires currently burning in other regions of the US.

The whole idea of a "season" during which destructive fires burn out of control is a modern invention. Up until the late 19th century, Indigenous people across the US, but especially on the West Coast, regularly engaged in prescribed or cultural burning as a tool for tending the landscape. These intentional small, low-intensity fires cleared undergrowth, encouraged grasses and other useful plants, improved forage for game, maintained open woodlands, made travel easier, stimulated plants used for basketry, and reduced insects and disease. And, of course, one of the consequences was that these small burns done during cooler, wetter months, consumed the fuels that otherwise accumulate and feed the catastrophic fires we today experience every summer.

When Europeans began colonizing North America, they thought they were "settling" pristine, untouched, wilderness, when, in fact, for thousands of years, the native population had been responsibly working cooperatively with the land, not just with fire, but in countless other ways. Europeans missed it because it simply didn't look like the sort of clear-cut and plow methods of "dominating" or "subduing" nature employed back home. They missed it so badly, that they criminalized Indigenous fire practices, creating the "fire season" that is currently destroying thousands of acres of precious forest and filling our air with toxic smoke.

Every species shapes its environment at least as much as its environment shapes it. Beavers are a famous example. They have been at work engineering and shaping the planet's surface for some 8 million years. 

And it's not just animals. Plants also "tend" their environments. "When grasses emerged between 100 and 70 million years ago," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "Rather than rely on robust and elaborate defenses (as did their plant predecessors), certain grasses negotiated a symbiosis -- an ecological partnership -- with large herbivores. These grasses offered grazers endless fields of tender green leaves that quickly regenerated when shorn (or burned). In exchange for this perpetual sustenance, mammoths and the megafauna trampled, ate, and otherwise deterred the grasses' main botanical competitors, such as shrubs and trees, and fertilized the fields with their copious dung." 

Humans seem to be unique in that we are able to be conscious about our efforts to shape ourselves and our environment, both for good and bad. 

Cultural burn practices emerged over centuries during which conscious humans observed and experimented with fire, not as a destructive force to be feared and fought, but rather an essential aspect of a thriving environment. It was an ongoing process of learning to, not manage, but live reciprocally with a fire-adapted landscape. 

This process led to a kind of collective wisdom that wasn't just passed down from generation to generation, but rather continued to grow and evolve, through the conscious practices of observation and experimentation.

In our rush to fill our children's heads with "knowledge" in the name of mere education, we continue the colonizer's practice of domination and management. So much of what passes for schooling is the intellectual process of clear-cutting and plowing in order to plant the crops we think we prefer. When a child isn't compliant, when a child is incapable of being a docile empty vessel to be filled, we treat it like an emergency, a fire to be doused or a weed to be eradicated. Many of the mental health and other challenges our children face today, are the result -- the wildfire -- of this approach.

The practice of observation and experimentation, however, causes us to ask, "What is this child telling us?" The practice of observation and experimentation leads us to explore how we can work with children rather than attempt to somehow manufacture them. When we place observation and experimentation at the center of our work, we discover that the children are likewise observing and experimenting: adapting and tending, which is the essence of all human wisdom. 

At the core of this wisdom is the awareness that there is always more to learn from observation and experimentation. It's the process of living, one that cannot be undertaken alone, but in cooperation, collaboration, and reciprocity with the other people, animals, and plants, not to mention the earth, the wind, and the fire.

******

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!

Is Play the Creative Process of Our Universe?

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle."

I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us that the theory of quantum mechanics, the core theory of modern physics, "does not describe things as they 'are': it describes how things 'occur,' and how they 'interact with each other'." In other words, our entire physical universe is not comprised of things at all, but rather interactions, processes, and systems, which is to say verbs. We don't live in a world of objects, but rather "a world of events."

The language of the Potawatomi people of what is today the Great Lakes region of North America, is a language of verbs. It's estimated that 70 percent of their words are action words. "When bay is a noun," writes Wall-Kimmerer, "it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegadmaa -- to be a bay -- releases the water from bondage and lets it live."

The people who brought English to the Americas didn't just colonize land. The Potawatomi weren't the only Indigenous people whose language and traditions reveal an understanding of the universe that Western science is only now coming around to embracing. Western culture still has a long way to go. Around the world, we find Indigenous cultures understand that humans cannot be separated from the rest of nature, that nothing exists without relationship and connection, that nothing can be thrown away because there is no such place as "away."

Our young children, if we avoid colonizing them with our thing-based way of viewing the world, seek to understand their world through relationships. Most conventional schooling expects children to categorize things like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and facts that can be tested. Play-based learning is much more about verbs than nouns: exploring, negotiating, building, pretending, wondering, arguing, balancing, inventing, and connecting. Learning in this context isn't something they acquire, but rather something they do. 

This is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed lately that many of my former preschool students have chosen educational and career paths that study the earth itself, like environmental science, climate science, Earth systems science, sustainability, and interdisciplinary environmental programs. These are all disciplines that ask about relationships: how to the atmosphere, oceans, soil, plants, animals, microbes, and humans interact? I like to think that their play-based foundation played a part in this. 

Play is how we learn about how the world works, how the different parts, the loose parts, play with one another, and we too are a part of it. 

In her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she writes of a "world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events." 

It strikes me that this would make for a good definition of play.

She points out that Indigenous creation myths tend to be about "trickster creators" who argue and improvise a world that is "never perfect, never finished," and, most telling, "never fell from grace." This is how I view the young children with whom I work, these natural humans, these creators, who evoke the entire universe as they play. 

Maybe what we see is that play is the creative process of our universe. I don't think it's a stretch to at least wonder about it.

******

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!

Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.

Much of what we talked about were our collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.

If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.

At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say, where they found food or where they encountered danger, it increases the overall odds of collective survival.

The fascinating thing is that, as Charan Ranganath writes, "Our personal memories do not exist in a vacuum -- they are constantly being influenced and reconfigured as we interact with family, loved ones, friends, and our larger communities. The science of collective memory . . . is still nascent, but we have discovered that the very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it."

I recently wrote a post here about an accident I had while riding my bike. In a nutshell, a man had been flying a kite in a field adjacent to the bike track when a gust of wind knocked his kite to the ground, causing the string to stretch tightly across my path, something I didn't see until it was already cutting deeply and painful into my arms, ultimately sending me to urgent care. 

At the time, I was in the midst of reading Ranganath's book (Why We Remember) and decided that I was going to experiment with taking charge, or at least being as aware as possible, of my memories from this traumatic experience. One of the ways I did this was by telling the story to everyone I knew, focusing on the bizarre and even humorous aspects, showing off my scars, and generally turning it into a kind of heroic yarn. Writing about it here on the blog was, in fact, one of my first attempts to shape the memory. When people asked, I told the truth about the pain, the anger, and the gore, but most of my attention has been on turning it into a story of bouncing back from a strange accident. I know that some will say that I'm consciously practicing "denial" by repressing memories, but it feels more like I'm taking charge of the narrative memory. 

The fascinating thing is that from the moment I arrived home after the accident, my wife began to share the memory with me. Then as I showed the fresh wounds to friends and neighbors, they became part of it. The story of the accident itself is one about which I've maintained awareness and some control, even if I'm fully aware that I tend to leave out certain parts and focus on others. But the memory of how my friends and family got me to finally take the injuries seriously and seek medical attention, is one that has entered the realm of collective memory. In this collective memory I come off as somewhat naive and foolhardy; a man who's putting on a brave face or even indulging in a show of machismo. A man, in fact, who is consciously practicing at least a little bit of denial.

It's now been around six weeks since the accident occurred and my experiment began. When I re-read that post, I'm reminded of details I've already dropped from the memory while there are new aspects that have "emerged" in the meantime. For instance, I'm now convinced that I subconsciously leaned into the string with my biceps out of concern that it would slip up to my neck, causing more grievous injury. Is it true? In my memory it is. I mean it makes sense.

And that's exactly the point of memory. It's not there to accurately record events, but rather to help us orient toward the future. That's why our memories are typically more about what must have happened than what actually happened. And a big part of how we cobble our memories together is in dialog with others which is why I see some of my behaviors, in hindsight, in memory, as something I'd do differently in the future.

That is the great power of family dinners when it comes to our memories.

According to Ranganath, psychologist Robyn Fivush "found that children whose mothers asked open-ended questions . . . and elaborated on their children's answers . . . tend to remember more of their life experiences and put them together in a more coherent narrative than those whose mothers ask their children to recall specific information. These kinds of interactions can significantly impact a child's self-concept. Children who are encouraged to have a voice develop more ownership over their sense of self . . . because they are allowed to be authors of their personal narratives."

When I read that, I realized that this is what I'm attempting to do with my own memory experiments: become the author of my own personal narrative so that I can use it to inform my future behaviors. For instance, in the future, I won't wait 24-hours to go to the doctor.

"Conversely," writes Ranganath, "disallowing certain stories to be told or . . . disputing a child's perspective can undermine their sense of the experience and be detrimental to the development of self." Fivush has found that when families make a habit of discussing shared memories collectively, their children tend to have higher self-esteem and are less likely to be anxious, depressed, or to have behavioral issues. 

Collective memory may be a relatively new area of study, but its practice is at least as old as language itself. When we talk about our shared memories, be it around a modern dinner table or hunter-gatherer campfire, we are in a very real sense preparing ourselves for an unknowable future, coming to a kind of collective agreement, not about what happened, but about what must have happened, connecting the past to the present in a story of which we are the authors.

Advocating for family dinner time, one without screens or other distractions, seems so cliche as to be fuddy-duddy, but these moments of talking about our memories are more important than we realize. When we share our memories with our loved ones, we are allowed to become the authors of the narrative of our own lives.

******

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!