This Is Too Much For Me

I first became aware of the now infamous Steubenville rape case last December. Maybe it's because my own daughter is the age of the victim, that she goes to parties with her friends, that I no longer always know exactly what she is doing at any given moment, but I found myself, off and on, obsessively reading anything I could about the case: crying, raging, then reading some more.

If you're one of the few people who haven't by now heard about it, here is one of the better written pieces I've come across. Before you click on it, please be aware that it will boil your blood, make you cry if you have an ounce of decency, and, as they say, potentially trigger some nasty stuff if you've ever been a victim in your life, and there are far too many who have. Hell, I'm fighting back tears as I write.

And damn it, I don't want to write about this. I've been fighting the imperative for four months, and particularly the past several days since the verdict, which found two teenaged boys guilty of the crime of carrying a drunk (possibly drugged) girl from party to party like a trophy, raping her in public, letting their friends take pictures, humiliating her, treating her like . . . No, that's not what I'm going to write about. Others have already done it far more powerfully than I could ever hope to. Again, if you click, please be careful. It's awful.

I just finished watching a long, unedited interview with a man whose home was where some of the teenage boy witnesses retired to apparently revel in what they had seen their friends do to this poor girl. There is a video shot in his basement of one boy in particular who seems to be in utter joy about it all, hardly able to contain himself as he details what he saw. It's so horrible that I will not provide a link. I wish I'd never seen it. I will forever be cursed with a memory of that kid's tomato red face as he mocks this girl in the most vile terms imaginable.

I was a teenaged boy. I was, like these boys, a high school athlete in a small town. We sometimes drank too much and I was there as both girls and boys reached a blackout state of inebriation. When that happened, we always, always, always either found someone sober to drive them home, or put them to bed, on their sides so they didn't choke on their vomit. This was a small town. Everyone knew each other. That meant everyone took care of each other. And being an athlete meant you had to be extra careful not to get into trouble. We were all always aware that the bar was set higher for us. One of my friends was kicked off the team for intentionally breaking a bottle in a parking lot. He told me later that he felt he deserved it.

Apparently, the Steubenville High School football coach actually tried to help his players cover up their crime. Apparently, in this small town, there was, and still is, little an athlete can do to bring shame on themselves or their team, with the exception, I suppose, of losing or getting caught. From many of the things I've read, from the reactions of students and residents, it seems that many still see the greatest crime as being that they were stupid enough to post the evidence on the internet.

People are writing that all of this is evidence of a "rape culture," and while there was a time not long ago that I'd have felt that description to be an exaggeration, I now think I understand what it means. It means that there are still far too many people who believe that girls and women somehow invite rape, that they deserve it for their mistakes of drinking too much, or showing too much skin, or for simply flirting. Frankly, I've been shocked at the number of people who have blamed the victim in this case. I thought we as a society were far beyond this. Two 16-year-old girls, presumedly her classmates, were arrested earlier this week for making death threats against her. According to the girl's mother, her friends have left her. Indeed, two girls described as "former best friends" testified against her in court. She is being blamed for ruining the lives of these "promising" young men.

This is all too much for me, really, too much for me to bear as a parent, yes, but also as a human being. This is obviously a failure of the adults in Steubenville, not just of those, like the football coaches and others in the community who actively aided and abetted these local heroes, but also the ones who looked the other way. It was these adults who taught their children to stand by, to say nothing, as they witnessed "Jane Doe" being abused before their very eyes, to think all was normal, nothing was wrong,  to lack the ability to empathize or the courage to step in. I'm not talking about the kids who joined in by taunting and shaming the girl: these kids may already be beyond hope. I'm talking about the majority of the kids who saw what was happening and did nothing. I'm talking about the boy who testified (and many refused to testify) that he saw it all and didn't do anything because he didn't even know it was rape. I can't get my mind around this sort of mass sociopathy -- and that's what it has to be. How could there not have been one kid that night able to step forward to help this girl no matter what her reputation, no matter what side of the tracks she was from, no matter who was committing the crime, no matter how drunk she was or how she was dressed? 

It's too much for me. The story of Steubenville is apparently one that's far more common than I knew. I've often admitted to living in a bubble, one in which we bend over backwards to teach empathy, to teach fairness and equality, to place social and emotional needs above the rest. People in our school get frustrated sometimes that our meetings can get bogged down in discussions of how people "feel," but man, look at the alternative.

I fear that this is the story of modern America: a small town in which the factory has closed, unemployment is high, families are struggling, a place in which the only thing left holding things together is the high school football team, a collection of young men in whom a community desperately places its hopes for a better future. That's much of the narrative, at least. I hope it's wrong. I hope that these are the people living in a bubble.

To assert that this is a failure of the adults in these children's lives is an observation so obvious, I think, that it's barely worth asserting. I don't know what to do for them. But it is equally obvious that the school has failed the children. I can't help but save my most intense outrage for the football coaches, administrators and teachers, many of whom seemed to know, even condone, the behavior of these boys, to even celebrate them. If this were my call, the sports teams would be shut down for a generation, and all of those resources would be put into a curriculum of social and emotional education, with the idea of replacing a state championship football team with world champion human beings.

But I'm not in charge of anything but myself. So I talk to my daughter about this and redouble my efforts to teach children to play nicely with one another and hope that our bubble is bigger than their bubble.

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Worthy Of A Standing Ovation

Each year we either visit the our local fire house or the firefighters come to visit us. Last week they brought their truck and equipment to the school. Even though most of the kids have already had a number of direct interactions with real fire fighters, through school or other venues, it's still always a thrill. The announcement that they had arrived in our parking lot, for instance, spread like an actual wildfire as children raced up and down the halls, blatantly breaking our no running indoors rule, shouting, "The firefighters are here! They're here!" causing most to drop what they were doing to join the impromptu celebration.

I'd been preparing the kids for over a week for this day, running through a boxed curriculum the SPD provides for teachers, the core of which is a collection of discussion cards, addressing what to do should your clothing catch fire (stop, drop, and roll), what kinds of every day adult tools can be the cause of accidental fire (e.g., matches, lighters, stoves, candles, etc.), and, most importantly, I think, what to do if there is a fire in your own home. Apparently, each year dozens of children, frightened by the appearance of fully turned-out firefighters in their home's hallways, hide in fear. This, I've been told, is one of the primary objectives of their outreach to schools: to familiarize young children with the realities of modern firefighters and the equipment they might be wearing, and in particular the oxygen masks they routinely use over their faces. 

"What do you do if you see a firefighter in your house?" I prompt. And the children respond together, "Go to the firefighter!"

And, even so, even amidst our excitement last week, with actual firefighters on the scene, several of the kids, some we wouldn't have suspected, hung back, becoming suddenly timid. At least one burst into tears upon spotting fire fighters in our parking lot even though they weren't at the time wearing any special equipment at all. The point is to get to see these larger-than-life figures, the characters we mostly know as heroes in our books, as regular guys, daddies themselves, friendly, smiling. We then watch as one of them, item-by-item, dons his entire turnout suit, even talking to us through the amplification system that makes his voice sound a little like Darth Vader's.

Still, as the firefighters ran through their questions to the kids, "What do you do if your clothes catch on fire?" "Why do you crawl when there's a fire in your home?" "Where do you go if you see a firefighter in your house?" they shouted out the answers we'd been practicing at circle time, taking part in the give-and-take performance I'm sure these guys are accustomed to at each of their preschool stops. It's a kind of drilling, I suppose, but an important one, and one the children seem to thoroughly enjoy.

We've also lately been visited by another kind of community helpers: nursing students from North Seattle Community College who, as part of their education, are putting together presentations for preschoolers on the importance of, and proper techniques for, washing hands. The first group came through about a month ago to present to our 5's class. They had put together a presentation chart depicting such things as the reason we want to wash our hands (to prevent the spread of illness) times when one ought to wash up (e.g., after playing with pets, before eating, after toileting or sneezing into your hands), and the proper techniques. Good stuff, even if it is a bit of kubuki at this age.

The students got their points across, but it wasn't such smooth going as they attempted to inject direct instruction into this collection of play-based kids. I could tell they were a bit put-off by how far off topic some of the kids took the discussion, for instance, sharing with us something cute or naughty their own pets had done while in the midst of discussing why it's important to wash hands after touching animals, or giving details about green snot while being reminded to wash up after blowing one's nose. It was a typical child-directed circle time, one that often feels a bit helter-skelter to the uninitiated. I felt a bit sorry for the nursing students, who, I'm sure, had envisioned things going a bit more, shall we say, concisely.

The second group presented to our 3-5's class yesterday. What they didn't know, and what they'll never  know unless they read it here, is that I'd used the presentation board left behind by the previous group of nursing students to prepare these younger kids for this day. It was sort of a test on my part, I suppose, of the efficacy of this kind of teaching in small, tight doses. But mostly it was because I know that some of the kids really like showing off as "experts" and I thought is would be a kick to give them some limelight, and because I thought I help these nursing students experience the kind of presentation they were expecting, one with a clutch of focused, on topic, children.

When the nursing student asked, "When do you need to wash your hands," she promptly got the full list of circumstances, with few diversions.

"After you play in the sand box!"

"After you play with a kitty!"

"Before you eat food!"

"After you go to the bathroom!"

"When you get blood on you!"

"After you blow your nose!"

I don't know if she knew to be impressed or not, but I was. When the second nursing student asked why we wash our hands, I was likewise gratified as we answered entirely on point.

"To get the germs off!"

"So that you don't get sick!"

"To wash off the dirt!"

"To wash off the blood!"

When the third student asked them how long they need to wash their hands, none of them knew the "correct" answer as noted on their presentation board of "20 seconds," but when she suggested we practice by pretending to wash our hands by singing the "Happy Birthday" song twice through, the kids knew there were alternatives.

"You can also sing the A-B-C song!"

"Or Row, Row, Row Your Boat two times!"

"Or you can count to 20!"

It was when Luella tried to over-ride their Happy Birthday plans by insisting, "Let's sing the A-B-C song!" that I realized that maybe I'd taken things a little too far in pre-preparing them. After all, this was the nursing students presentation and I had usurped them. I overrode Luella by quickly saying, "Today, let's sing Happy Birthday," and we did. Since this was likely the only preschool presentation these nursing students had performed, I doubt that they appreciated the performance they'd just witnessed from their audience, but it was worthy of a standing ovation.

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High Heels

When our daughter Josephine was 12, she and I decided it was time to give her bedroom a good purging, with the main objective being to get rid of "toys." To expedite things, I emptied all her shelves, drawers, boxes and bins onto the floor, making a pile of everything that I felt she'd outgrown. I then called her in with the idea being that we'd turn that into three piles: keep, pitch, store in the basement. She took one look at the pile and said, "Let's get rid of all of it."

I was stunned. "Don't you want to at least keep this? No? How about this?" Impressed by her lack of sentimentality about stuff, it was then left to me to play a new game of sorting into four piles: save as a keepsake, donate to Goodwill, take to the school.

For the most part, this explains why Woodland Park has such a large collection of shoes, the core of which I've augmented over the years with interesting cast-offs from other sources. We've mainly used them over the years for purposes of counting, matching, and sorting, as well as to use as painting tools -- the soles make interesting prints. We have sneakers, and wooden clogs, and soccer cleats, and tap shoes in there as well, but much of the stash are of the fancy, girly variety, and when I pulled them out last week to put with our day-to-day dress up clothing, it was a set of cheap, plastic "princess" high heels that got most of the attention.

In fact, when the 3-5's class convened last Monday, we saw the kids fall out by gender in a way we've not seen so much of this year, the boys on their knees pushing around the toy fire trucks, while the girls tried on shoes, who then began tottering around the place like stilt walkers. There was a certain amount of quiet joking among our parent-teachers about the cliche of women and shoes. And I'll admit, it's a bit hard to watch these little girls, their lower torsos angled into uncomfortable shapes that have become equated with "feminine," their feet pinched and mangled, too reminiscent of those bizarre looking junior beauty queens, all in the name of "fashion." My own daughter, of course, is now wearing real heels to dances and other fancy events, having practiced in these very toy shoes. 

A couple of the boys tried out the shoe box, un-ironically giving the heels a try, even going about the business of pushing their fire tricks with them on their feet. When the Pre-3 class had their turn, many more of the boys tried walking around in them. But it was our boy-heavy 5's class that surprised me the most, as many of them, without joking or even any outward acknowledgement that they knew they were gender-bending, slipped on those shoes for a turn around the classroom. 

But, you know, it was mostly the girls who were drawn to these shoes. And despite the joking that "she came out of the womb loving shoes," it's obviously not nature that causes them to seek out body deforming fashion, any more than it's nature for boys to be drawn to superhero play. In fact, I guess it's more or less the same thing: for better or worse we've managed to imbue high heels with a certain symbolic power and children will always be drawn to that in their dramatic play.

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Learning Responsibility

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." ~Declaration of Independence

Our Pre-K class starts its Tuesday afternoon by eating lunch together, each child bringing something from home to eat. I take note as they arrive of their lunch boxes and bags: "I see you have a fire fighter lunch box today," or "I'll bet you have sushi in that bag." 

It's clean-up time and most of the kids, most days get to work when I announce it by

beating my drum and singing our clean-up song. I ask the adults not to help, at least

when it comes to things the kids can do themselves. We are learning what it means

to assume responsibility, but it's hard when grown-ups (as you can see in this picture)

do it for us.

Often, a child will arrive at the table without a lunch and I'll ask, "Where's your lunch?"

"Mommy has it."

"Why does mommy have it? Is she going to eat it?"

"No, I'm going to eat it, Teacher Tom." They think I'm clowning around, but I'm not. I answer matter-of-factly, something like, "I carry my own lunch."

I love this picture in which the adult is sitting with her hands in her lap, probably making

informative comments like, "The trains tracks go in this box," or "I see my friends picking

up the blocks."

By the end of the school year, all of these kids will have assumed responsibility for carrying their own lunches, taking their lunch box from their mothers' hands of their own accord because that is what we do in Pre-K.

When we're doing this right, we're not even asking the children to clean-up. They are

doing it because it is clean-up time, not for approval, not to make someone happy.

It's simply what we do. That's how one assumes responsibility.

We all want our kids to be responsible: we want them to carry their own things, to dress themselves, to pick up after themselves. We nag them when they don't do those basic things we know they're capable of doing. Or maybe we're more sanguine, shrugging our shoulders and doing it for them, not up for the battle of wills this time. Still, we know they're going to have to learn it sometime. We see what's in store for them if they don't. We fear they'll show up in the world as some sort of entitled prima donna, going through life expecting others to do everything for them.

Adults sometimes get caught up in getting these things done quickly, but that's an

artificial condition. Doing things correctly sometimes takes time. For instance, we need

to make sure we are putting the right things in the right places, comparing them to what

is already there. This is not necessarily where I think these keys ought to be, but it is

where the children decided they ought to go, together, in a place up off the floor.

Even enlightened parents try rewards (e.g., if you get yourself dressed, you get hot chocolate) and punishments (e.g., if you don't pick up your coat, you won't get hot chocolate) and they can appear to work for a time, but the external nature of the motivation makes it a temporary fix, one that stops working the moment the reward or punishment isn't present. Some of us try the route of natural consequences, but who among us can abide a messy bedroom longer than a child? They easily outlast us, their standards being much lower, and besides they possess the knowledge that Aunt Milly will soon visit and that mom will do it for us in the flurry of housekeeping that always precedes the arrival of guests, often muttering something like, "This is the last time . . ."

We show that the sensory table is closed by covering it with this orange

cloth. He found an item on the floor that goes in there and 

assumed the responsibility for putting it where it belongs. It
was closed, but he knew he had the right to re-open it.

I told people this holiday season that the gift I most wanted was that they take a $20 bill, find the most unapologetic street person they could, and hand it to him with a cheery, "Merry Christmas!" fighting any temptation to place conditions on its expenditure. I'm certain that none of them, even my most liberal or most Christian friends, took me up on it. (And in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't do it myself.) Many of them asked, "Why would you want that? They'll just use it for booze." Most informed me that the money would do much more "good" if funneled through a responsible charity where it would get spent on things they need like food, clothing, and shelter.

Yes, there are some things we're not ready to fully clean on our own, 

but that doesn't mean we can't be responsible for doing what we

can to make it a little easier for the adult who will take it from here.

Irresponsibility, the unwillingness to take responsibility for oneself, at least according to our own standards of what that means, be it a clean room or clean and sober life, grates on us. When it's our own kids, we grudgingly do it for them, telling ourselves that "this is the last time." When it's an irresponsible adult, even the most nobel of us hold back, not wanting to "encourage" them, thinking somehow that our $20 will just perpetuate their bad choices, their profligate ways, their degeneracy. 

It's what we want. And that's really the challenge: the conceit that we know best.

We live in a society of rights as well as responsibilities and one of those rights is to not live up to other people's standards of responsibility. In our self-righteous quest to teach lessons, we forget that responsibilities, like rights, are not something we learn, but rather something we assume. And the two, rights and responsibilities, go hand-in-hand: they don't exist independently, but rather emerge from one another.

Assuming responsibilities together is the foundation of community

.

All of us, pauper or king, are born with the three rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence, in what I consider to be among the most perfect sentences ever written in the English language: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

"Life" has certain requirements that we are bound as parents and as a society to provide, among them food, clothing, and shelter. To that I would add such things as medical care, clean air, and physical touch. These are the rights every child already has to the degree that our families and society lives up to their promises, because to do otherwise is to deny this unalienable right.

Responsibilities are not chores to be undertaken reluctantly, but rather part of the joy of

being together.

"Liberty" is more challenging. Rightly or wrongly, our laws recognize an age (or ages, in the bizarre practice of granting voting rights at 18 and drinking rights at 21) at which his right of "liberty" is fully granted. This is equally challenging for parents, who with good reason fear their inexperienced child, if granted full liberty, will make dangerous, even life-threatening choices, so we must, for a time, limit it in the name of sustaining their first right of "life," at least until they're old enough to assume the full right of liberty. But at the end of the day, most of us are able to grant that all adults, whatever their station in life, have an equal amount of unalienable liberty. 

It's through the right to pursue happiness that responsibilities emerge. This is the part of the promise of democracy in which we acknowledge that we must engage with one another, accommodate, share. School is the first place most of us get to practice this right and experience the responsibilities that go with it.

As I assume my right to pursue happiness within a community, for instance, I must also assume the responsibility of following its rules: not hitting or taking or screaming in someone else's ear. As I assume my rights, I also assume the responsibilities that come with community property like sharing or taking turns. As I assume my rights to freely play and explore, I also assume the responsibility to help clean up those things when it's time to move on to something else.

These are not things I assume because I've been nagged into it. I do not assume them because of some external reward or punishment. I take on those responsibilities because "that's what we do in Pre-K." Responsibilities are not the consequence of my pursuit, they are a part of my pursuit.

If my pursuit leads me to join a church, I take on the corresponding rights and responsibilities to live according to its creed.

If my pursuit requires me to have a job, I take on the corresponding rights and responsibilities of fulfilling its obligations.

If my pursuit causes me to have a family, start a charity, organize a party, or buy a house, I also assume those rights and responsibilities.

If my pursuit requires me to stand on a street corner and panhandle, I may assume few responsibilities, but I also assume few extra rights beyond those that are unalienable. (For the sake of this argument, I understand that I've set aside the realities of homelessness and poverty, and am stipulating for a moment that living on the streets is a "choice.") 

I've written often here on the blog about how the children of Woodland Park, even our youngest members, take on the responsibility of cleaning up the classroom. Each time I do, people write me, asking what I do about the kids who "refuse" to help. And it's true, there are always on any given day, a few kids who opt out altogether. What I do about them is nothing other than to not allow them to interfere with the community project of clean-up. I say, "We're putting that away," when they continue their play. I say, "That is closed," when they try to get out a new toy. I reply, "We're cleaning up now," when they try to engage me in conversation. You see, participating in clean up is one of the responsibilities that comes with the right of being a member of our community and you simply are not a full member unless you take that on. It's what we do in Pre-K.

That still doesn't answer the question of how to get the kids to carry their own things, dress themselves, or pick up after themselves at home. But I do know that responsibilities are not things into which one is commanded or shamed, rewarded or punished: that's called obedience. Responsibility emerges only from the unalienable right to pursue happiness.

I am the parent of a teenager now, not legally an adult, but no longer a child. I've noticed that the more rights she assumes, the more responsibly she behaves. That's what we do in a democracy.

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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Teaching Genius, I Tells Ya'

I sometimes worry that I think to much about what the kids are going to do at school each day. I mean, I suppose that has something to do with the fact that I'm "the teacher," and thinking about what the kids are going to do at school each day is a big part of the job. In fact, that's pretty much what my employment agreement boils down to: come up with stuff for the kids to do and we'll pay you. 

The truth is that the best I can do is provide opportunities for the kids to do stuff, but it's really up to them whether or not they do them. And typically, enough of them engage enough of the "activities" I've planned that it looks like I know what I'm doing, but the best stuff . . . Well, for the sake of my family, I guess I ought to take credit for that too.

The big deal activity for the 3-5's class in the outdoor classroom these days is for anywhere from two to ten kids to grab ahold of a rope, then follow one another, usually quickly, all around the space: a version of follow-the-leader that the kids seem to be calling "Zoom" or "Zooming." On Monday, it was just one group of guys with one rope. Yesterday, there must have been four or five Zooming teams racing around the place.

Now, I am responsible for those ropes being out there, but those particular ropes, the long, yellow nylon ones, have been there quite a long time, doing nothing more than being a pain in the neck. We've long had a collection of 3-foot long ropes out there -- those get used for all kinds of things -- but since I've added the long ropes, they've really been more of a nuisance, regularly being pulled out, found too unwieldy for practical purposes, then left in the middle of a walkway to trip the next passerby. I'd made a mental note just last week to toss the ropes back in the shed, forgot, and so they were left out for just that one extra day which made all the difference. Teaching genius, I tells ya'. 

One of the things I've started doing each Friday is to finish our week by asking the kids in our 5's class to help me with my curriculum planning (the fancy term for "stuff for kids to do") by helping me compile a list of activities they'd like to see in the near future. One such wish was for a return of the ever popular tennis balls and cardboard tubes set up. I obliged that request last week.

This is something we've done a lot over the years, kids setting the tubes on blocks to create ramps and angles, then studying how their balls roll through them. It's usually one of the most reliably successful activities I plan, but last week it felt like a mess in all three classes. I don't know what was different, maybe there were too many tubes, maybe not enough, maybe it was because we used the large wooden blocks instead of the cardboard blocks, maybe it was the weather. Really, who knows, but in the 5's class the kids were really more focused on hoarding the balls than actually playing with them, the 3-5's wanted to build with the tubes and ignore the balls altogether, while the Pre-3's -- at least a few of them, and that's really enough to dominate an activity -- were hell-bent on just knocking everything down then, I guess, rolling around on the floor amidst the debris.

At one point as the Pre-3's played I tried to get things back on track by holding one of the longer tubes in my hands, thus foregoing the easily knocked over block tower, and role model rolling balls down it. Before I could roll the first ball, however, one of the boys picked up the lower end and peered into it. I peered back at him. We shouted a few words to one another through the long darkness, then I said, "I'm going to roll a ball to you."

He didn't move his face, so I said, "If you don't move your face, the ball will hit you."

He smiled at me through the tube.

I said, "I'm going to roll the ball. I don't want to hurt your face."

He answered, "I want to see the ball coming."

"Okay." I adjusted the angle so that the ball wouldn't be going too terribly fast and let it go. I'd anticipated him moving at the last moment, but no, the ball hit him square in the nose. I was now expecting tears, but instead got a giggle. He then returned the ball to me via the long tube and waited for me to once more roll the ball down into his face. We repeated this several times. Soon there was a clamor of 2 and 3-year-olds who also wanted a tennis ball to hit them in the nose. This is what I'd managed to role model.

So again and again, I rolled balls into the noses of young children, who then returned the balls to me for "more." Teaching genius, I tells ya'.

Sigh.

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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I'm Playing

One of the more pleasant aspects of being a teacher is being acknowledged around the holidays by the families. Now I'm an enormous fan of baked goods and other sweets, most of which don't even make the trip from the school to my home, but this past year, they were generous enough in the form of gift cards and cash that I was able to purchase the new bicycle for which I'd been hankering. 

It's a pretty ride: gun metal gray with orange wheels, hand grips, and brake cable housing. This is a single speed road bike, meaning that I've dispensed with shifting gears, relying solely on the strength of my legs. It comes with what's called a flip-flop hub. This allows me to ride it either with a flywheel, which means I can coast down hills and around corners, or I can ride it as a fixed gear bike, which means I'm pedaling all the time I'm on it. For the past few weeks I've been riding it as a "fixie."

If you're unfamiliar with Seattle and it's environs you should know that this is a city built on hills. The ability to downshift to make it to the top of say, Queen Anne Hill or Capital Hill, is generally considered to be vital if you're going to actually use a bike for transportation and not just recreation. So you'll probably not be surprised to learn that the first question everyone has asked me about my new bike is, "Why?" Why would anyone attempt to navigate Seattle on a single speed bike that forces you to keep pedaling at all times, even around corners?

I've developed a sort of vague answer, one that involves having grown irritated with the need to constantly be fiddling with derailleurs, cables, squeaky pulleys, and doubts about which of the 21 gears really is best for this or that assent, which has the benefit of being part of the truth. Another part of my answer involves a confession that I'd been noticing that fixies were the bikes of choice for all those lean, mean 25-year-old bicycle messengers charging up and down our hills, and this old man wants to show those whippersnappers a thing or two. And then there's the whole "spiritual" part, where I talk about feeling a "direct connection" to this simplified machine, my standard line being, "Riding my new bike feels the way I always knew riding a bike could feel." It's at this point that people realize that I really don't have a good answer.

Last week I was sitting in the sandpit near a wide, deep hole that children from all of the classes had been working on digging over the course of the preceding few days. Ben said, "Watch this, Teacher Tom," before toeing the edge of the hole, taking a moment to gather himself, then leaping across it.

"You jumped over that hole."

Then it was William's turn who also wanted to test himself against the hole.

Before long it was a game with a half dozen 5-year-olds taking turns. It reminded me, as many things do in our preschool, of similar games of jumping over road side drainage ditches as a boy. 

As the kids jumped, I recalled a moment earlier in the day when the kids in our 3-5's class were playing with one of our giant tubes and tennis balls. They'd stood the tube on its end, filled it with balls, then when the balls ran out, they tossed in a whicker basket. Luella had moved a block over to the tube to stand on as she peered inside, "Oh no, Teacher Tom, look!" She pointed into the tube. "I can't reach it!" She demonstrated by dangling her arm into the hole, but coming up short. "How are we going to get the basket out of there?"

It was an invitation that the other kids took up right away, each of them taking a turn standing on the block trying to reach the basket. At one point someone suggested they just lift up the tube in order to get at it from the bottom, but this idea was rejected out of hand, "No! If we do that the balls will get away! We have to reach it." They kept stacking more and more blocks in tackling the challenge they'd set for themselves, one they never accomplished, but that occupied them for a good 15 minutes.

It wasn't long before the kitty joined the basket.

It would be easier, more practical, to walk around or even through that hole in the sand pit. It would, of course, make more sense to just reach that whicker basket from the bottom, then refill the tube with the balls that escaped. However, I never once thought as I watched these efforts to ask the kids "Why?" because we all know, this is what play looks like, and play is why we're at school.

And honestly, that's the answer I ought to be giving people about my new bike. I'm not riding it to make life easier, because it doesn't. I'm not riding it because it's more efficient, because it's not. I'm not even riding it because it's safer, because, frankly, it isn't. I'm riding it because it's way more fun. I'm playing, and that should be the satisfactory stand-alone answer we give for our nonsense, whatever our age.

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