Sucking The Joy Out Of Their Lives

Yesterday, I was sitting on a bench near a playground merry-go-round watching our three and four-year-olds play. A pair of boys decided they wanted a spin. They mounted the apparatus, then one of them turned to me, "Teacher Tom, you push us."

I answered, "Sorry, I'm busy sitting here. You'll have to find someone else."

As the first boy tried pleading with me, the second said, "I'll get my brother to push us. He likes doing the things I like," and jogged off in the direction of where their classmates where playing. He called out to them, "Who will push us?" They ignored him so he returned to the merry-go-round. As he mounted it, he gave it a little push with his foot and the two boys began turning slowly.

As the momentum began to die, a couple of girls found their way to the merry-go-round. Without being asked, they decided they were going to push it "fast." The boys were delighted. Working together, the girls managed to get it up to speed, then the two of them jumped on as well. More children began to arrive in twos and threes, many pushed before jumping on. One of the original boys, leaning into it, head tipped back, began to chant, "Oh yeah, it's spin time! Oh yeah, it's spin time!"

The children began jumping off and on as they spun. Many of them fell to the ground upon dismount, most doing so intentionally. Occasionally, one of them would be trampled as they lay there in the path of the pushers. Some of them cried out in objection, while others squealed with delight. It was the kind of wild, breathless fun for which these machines were designed, even if adult imposed rules too often forbid it.

They were learning something, because we are always learning something when we play. I could write a list here of all the things I imagine they were learning, or exploring, or discovering. I could put those guesses into a report of some sort. Indeed, if I were so inclined I would have already filed dozens of reports on the children playing together on the merry-go-round going back to September. I could then take all those reports and compare them to today's report and use this data to pretend that I know what they have been learning over the course of months. I reckon I could even devise some sort of pre and post-test that would allow me to compare the children's progress, identify those who are behind and assign those poor kids some merry-go-round homework so they could catch up with the others. I might even decide to rank the children on various measures that I have identified as important about merry-go-round play, assigning each of them grades based on my assessment of where they fall on an arbitrary scale of learning I'd devised based on data that I and others have collected over generations. I could then use this data I've amassed to devise a merry-go-round curriculum, one that allows me to "teach" children how to play on a merry-go-round, imagine myself an expert, seeing to it that these children are merry-go-round proficient . .  .

This is ludicrous, of course. I could do all of that and not only would I be no closer to knowing what these children were learning, I would have wasted vast amounts of time that I could have otherwise spent doing something more productive, like scratching my ass. No one can ever know what another person is learning. Each of those children on the merry-go-round are learning something different, something unique, something that applies only to them and their lives, and even the person doing the learning often doesn't know what they've learned, and no amount of testing, grading, or data collection will change that.

This is the greatest fraud of our educational system, this hubristic notion that adults can somehow measure learning, yet for generations we have put children through the processing plants we call schools, marching them into the test score coal mines, subjecting them to our experiments like lab rats. It's lead to a grotesque narrowing and standardization of what we call education based not on learning, but on what we can most easily measure.

I am comfortable knowing that children are learning because they are playing, and that's enough. Indeed, I have no choice because to believe otherwise, is to buy into the lie that anyone can possibly know what these children are learning. It would mean that I must take part in sucking the joy out of their lives and I will not knowingly be a party to that.

"Oh yeah, it's spin time!" That's all I need to know.

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Professional Patience

When I tell people that I'm a preschool teacher, among the most common responses is something along the lines of, "You must be a very patient person." Indeed, among the most common compliments I receive from the parents of the children I teach is about my patience.

I had ample opportunity to reflect on my own patience during the past week as I spent two full days traveling to Athens, Greece and back in order to take part in the Play On Early Childhood Education conference. Air travel is a great tester of patience and as I found myself grinding my teeth as I dodged through crowded concourses, tapping my toe while waiting on queue, and being filled with tension by flight delays, I recognized that contrary to popular opinion, I struggle with patience at least as much as the next person.

Patience is tested by feeling thwarted in our attempts to achieve something or get somewhere. We have a goal, and circumstances, usually of the human variety, are preventing us from attaining it on our schedule. I suppose this is why I can so readily exhibit patience while working with children: I generally have no particular goals nor other places to be. I'm not beholden to learning objectives passed down from on high. I'm not required to produce test scores or grades. I'm not expected to document learning nor in any way hurry children through a curriculum. The institutional drive to compel children to learn specific things according to an arbitrary schedule, and in ways that we can "measure," makes patience a near impossibility.

If there are goals in our classroom, they come from the children themselves. If there are schedules, they likewise emerge from the children. In fact, a big part of my job is to be patiently present with the children, available should they need me, and any agenda of my own tends to get in the way of doing that.

During her keynote address at the Athens conference Suzanne Axelsson (Interaction Imagination) discussed the concept of "professional love," as explored through the research of Dr. Jools Page, lecturer at the University of Brighton's School of Education. It occurs to me that this patience for which I'm sometimes praised could be similarly labeled "profession patience," and is probably an aspect of professional love.

I know that I'm fortunate, that not all teachers are in a position to simply be with children as they pursue their own goals in their own time, directing their own learning. Not every teacher has this luxury, but if we are going to create the kinds of learning environments children need in order to achieve their highest potential, they should. And this isn't to say that there are not times when I feel impatient during the school day, like when we're out on a field trip, there's a bus to catch, and the kids are stopping to smell the flowers, but for the most part, patience or impatience does not come into it because my goals don't come into it. I'm not a patient person, but my job, if I'm doing it professionally, requires it.

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Either Or Both

In yesterday’s post, I shared a story from my own childhood growing up here in Athens, Greece, where I’m currently taking part in the Play On Early Childhood conference, and where I will later today have the honor of introducing Peter Gray. 

One my fondest memories of having lived here as a boy is what I think of as “taverna culture.” Our family had never been much for dining out, probably no doubt due to the fact that it can be difficult, not to mention expensive, with three children. But when we did go out during our years in Greece, it was often to a taverna where the adults could sit at a shaded table eating and drinking a while we, the children, ran about with the other children in an adjacent park or any other scrape of land, returning occasionally for a bite or a sip before heading back to the games we had cobbled together. Our parents could more or less keep an eye on us, but they were mostly engaged in their adult pursuits, leaving us to our own devices.

There is a pedestrian “high street” near my hotel that is perfectly set up for families to do this, with tavernas, coffee shops, and cafes lining both sides, while down the center is a casually maintained median of grass, trees, pavement, and fountains. And sure enough, when I walked along it on the weekend, children of all ages were everywhere, chasing, shouting, singing, hiding, startling pigeons, and playing ball games. Most of the adults, as taverna culture would dictate, could be found chatting while nursing their coffees or lingering over a glass of wine.

In this spirit, I took an afternoon a couple of days ago to nurse an espresso for a couple of hours in the shadow of the Parthenon. This was in a busy tourist area rather than the more out-of-the-way places that the taverna culture thrives, but there were still plenty of kids running around as their parents imbibed. Across the way from where I sat, a family of tourists took a table under an umbrella. There were four adults and two children, an adolescent girl and a younger boy. While the girl remained at the table, the boy began to roam, gathering stones of various sizes from the ground. He then fell to his knees and began to arrange his collection on a large brick of marble that he proceeded to use as an anvil in an attempt to break smaller stones with larger ones. For an hour he pounded rocks, chanting something to himself as he did so, perhaps counting the number of strikes it took or maybe just singing in the vein of whistling while you work. The adults ignored him, except when he would occasionally force himself into their attentions with the enthusiasm of a Eureka moment: he would show them this or that stone, obviously detailing how it had broken and what he had noticed.

His older sister, however, this girl standing on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, was less successful in ignoring him. She continually turned to keep track of her brother’s pursuits, sometimes bouncing out of her seat to stand near him, sometimes even finding a stone for him, unable to fully suppress the girl that still lived inside her. I had been about her age, 13, at the end of our family’s time in Greece, being pulled across that divide between playing with the children and sitting with the adults. No one was scolding her to stay in her seat, nor were they urging her to run off and play. This was her trying to decide where she now belonged and from where I sat the answer seemed to be either or both.

Of course, these weren’t her thoughts, but rather mine, tinged in the melancholy that often accompanies later-in-life reflections. Still, my heart went out to her as she wiggled in her seat, not  fully listening to the adult conversation nor fully engaged in the play of her brother, not knowing if she belongs in the taverna or outside it.

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Still There For The Taking

As a ten, eleven, and twelve-year-old, I lived with my family in the Kifissia suburb of Athens, Greece. Those were formative years, ones I often look back upon with nostalgia, but never so acutely as when I find myself back in my old stomping grounds as I have been for the past couple of days. I’m here in Athens to take part in the Play On Early Education conference with such luminaries as Peter Gray (US), Suzanne Axelsson (Sweden), and Meynell Walter (UK) as well as a score of other presenters, but I’ve spent the last day and a half revisiting my childhood.

Back then, one could actually clamber about on the ruins of the Parthenon, something that was undoubtedly a disaster for preserving one of the greatest achievements of ancient architecture, but that created for me a connection to the place that could never have been achieved by viewing it from afar as one must today. I still remember the cool smoothness of the columns and the god-like height of the stairs that lead into this temple to Athena herself. I often imagined myself to be a child of the time, fantasizing about what it must have been like to live in the age of mythology. Yesterday, I walked to the Plaka, the old maze of a marketplace at the base of the Acropolis where I emerged into Monastiraki Square.

The past was suddenly and overwhelmingly upon me. I was probably 11-years-old. The “cool” kids that summer were making their own “worry beads” by stringing colored beads on leather string. I had an idea for a pattern I wanted to try but was out of the leather. The only place I’d ever purchased it was at a kiosk right outside the train station here in the heart of Athens, so I set out on my mission. I didn’t tell Mom where I was going, and while that was normal in those days, I have serious doubts that she would would have permitted me to travel alone into the city. But, I’d made the trip dozens of times, I had the cash in my pocket, and it just seemed like something I needed to do. So off I went, walking the mile or so to the Kifissia train station, jumping on the next train, and emerging, unaccompanied, into Monastiraki.

It was then as it is today crowded with vendors and tourists. Perhaps I should have been nervous being all alone there, an anonymous child in the heart of a big, foreign city, but if I had by doubts it hasn’t remained as part of my memory. The kiosk is still where it was in 1973. In fact, everything is the same, I think: the train station, the monastery, the stone paving, the sign at the entrance to the Plaka calling it a “flea market,” the backside of the Acropolis looming above it all. The only thing that has changed is that the kiosk no longer sells leather string, I asked. But the distinctive co-mingled scents of newsprint, slightly melted chocolate, and cigarette tobacco that is characteristic of every kiosk in Athens almost convinced me that I was once again a boy on an adventure.

I returned home that day, string in hand, without saying a word to Mom about where I’d been. She didn’t ask because she had assumed I’d just been playing in the neighborhood as usual. I still have the “worry beads” I made with that leather, stashed away in the back of a drawer, a pattern of reds and oranges that reminded me somehow of bacon. As an 11-year-old, I’d worn it daily as a bracelet, a reminder of my secret journey.

I told my story to a Greek acquaintance yesterday who informed me with certainty that it would be far too dangerous for a child to try today, although I have my doubts. I think our perceptions of the world have changed far more than the world itself. That train trip to the Monastiraki kiosk and back is still there for the taking and any childhood that doesn’t include it is the poorer for it.

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This Fellowship Of Love Cat

Love Cat is a tradition that goes back to my first year teaching at Woodland Park. A strangely realistic stuffed pillow, Love Cat resides in a cheap suitcase, the only surviving piece from a set of five that I received as a high school graduation gift. She goes home with a different four or five-year-old each week for a seven night stay, returning to class with a page or two added to her My Visit With Love Cat notebook, telling the story of her adventures. She or he, as it is alternatively called, depending on that week’s guardian, has been to the supermarket, out to dinner, to the top of the Space Needle, and to Mexico twice over these 20 years of service as our mascot. She is tattered and torn, stained and worn, mended by needle and bandaid. She looks her age, which is by my estimates at least 45-years-old.

I introduce LC near the beginning of the school year. Each week’s destination is determined by a blind drawing from “the hat” so to speak. Needless to say, there is both great joy and tears during the first few weeks, with a least one child needing to be consoled. I hear parents whispering to their children, “Maybe you’ll get it next week,” sharing wisdom about having to sometimes wait for good things.

This year was no different. There was disappointment and confusion, dashed hopes and envy during those early weeks of LC, but as the shape of the project began to become familiar, philosophy began to emerge. Children started saying things like, “Maybe I’ll get Love Cat next time,” and “That’s okay, I’m going to have a play date with (fill in the blank with whoever was this week’s lucky one).” Tears disappeared entirely as the weeks passed and as more and more of the children gained the experience of having already had their turn. Children began to turn to one another just before we drew names, saying, “I hope it’s you,” or “That’s okay if you don’t get Love Cat, it’s better to be last,” and otherwise demonstrating that they understood their classmates feelings, empathizing.

A commradery as emerged among the children, the kind that can only come from the shared ups and downs of an emotional rollercoaster. If there had been competitive or selfish feelings in the autumn they have by now been replaced by a sense of everyone being in this together, the product of this journey they’ve been on through one of life’s more challenging aspects: not always getting what you want, when you want. They agree with one another that this is a “fair” process, that everyone will get a turn, but that waiting can be awfully hard.

By this point in the school year, we are down to just a couple more children still awaiting their turn. For the last several weeks, something has begun to happen that I don’t recall from previous years: those who have already had their visit have begun to spontaneously erupt in cheers as I show them the name of who is next, leaping of their feet, hugging and congratulating their lucky friends, overwhelming them with well-wishes, while simultaneously encouraging the few who are destined to wait for another week with the good news, “That means it’s almost your turn!”

It’s a beautiful thing, this journey these children have been on together, this fellowship of Love Cat. Where it once divided them, it now unites them. They have traveled the peaks and valleys together and now it is clear that we will any day now find ourselves in the promised land, a place we only arrive at by putting our arms around one another’s shoulders, whatever may come.

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It’s Upon Us To Figure This Out

Our school is located in the Fremont neighborhood, just north of downtown Seattle. It’s a thriving community of small businesses, artists, and technology, a great place for families. It is also a great place, apparently, for some of our city’s homeless population, or at least a subsection of it that has been forced to live in their vehicles and tents. It’s a problem in every American city (and I’ve traveled enough to know that our nation is not alone, having encountered similar circumstances almost everywhere I’ve been). These poor people are often blamed for creating health hazards, engaging in drug use, and committing petty crimes. Having gotten to know many of them over the years, I know that this is true for some of them, but not most, which makes it an unfair brush with which to paint them all.

Recently, the city removed a tent encampment not far from the school. I, and others, were worried that this was just a ploy to move them along to some other less visible place, but the city officials with whom I spoke, which was later confirmed to me by the police officers who were charged with keeping the peace as it happened, assured me that they offered beds to every one of them, even though many, the cops said, had refused. There has been an attendant increase in foot patrols in the neighborhood. I’ve seen officers handing out business cards with contact information for services, gently trying to persuade people to take advantage, even offering to make the calls for them. I heard some people refusing so I know this is not a made-up excuse.

A couple weeks ago, one of our local homeless population, a man I’ve known for years now, had a significant mental health crisis in the alleyway behind our school. I could see him from the classroom window: he was shouting, cursing, jumping about, and seemed to be hell bent on breaking things. I know that he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and I also know that most of the time he refuses to take the medications that his family sends from Southern California where he is from. During his more lucid moments, I’ve had long discussions with him about all sort of topics, from politics to science to literature. He’s well-read and articulate, but then there are moments like these. I don’t think he has ever intentionally injured anyone, but he does engage in property damage and his behavior can be frightening. He’s not the only one. There is another man who is also likely schizophrenic who is even more of a menace these days, although again, I have not heard of him being violent toward people, only property. My point is that from where I sit, it’s not the “homeless” who are causing the problems in Fremont, but rather these few mentally ill folks who, for whatever reason, have been left to fend for themselves.

I’ve gone out of my way to create personal relationships with the men (and they’re mostly men), in the spirit of “connect to redirect,” and even as it seems to mostly “work” it’s nothing more than a stop-gap solution. Not long ago, I discussed the problem of these mentally ill men with the current president of our neighborhood chamber of commerce. I had expected him to be a big fan of the city’s recent activity, but he was as torn as me: on the one hand we have a right to a safe community, while on the other these men, our fellow citizens have their rights. We could jail them, but their actual crimes are minor. We could institutionalize them or force drugs on them, but again, that doesn’t sit well with most of us. We may offer them beds, even homes, but many of them are incapable of caring for themselves, let alone an apartment. In other words, we, as a society are at a loss for what to do.

I’m currently in Athens, Greece, where there are, like back home, people sleeping in doorways, many of them mentally ill. Over dinner last night we found ourselves discussing what we could do. We tried to imagine a world in which, money being no object, there is a solution. What if we could provide these mentally ill people with the choice to leave their life on the streets for a place apart, where no one was forcing them to be medicated, where the police do not hassle them, where they could continue to self-medicate under the supervision of medical professionals, where their drive to destroy was accommodated. What if it was a place where mental health professionals were readily available, where food and housing were provided. There is something creepy about this idea, I’ll admit, something like the artificiality of the “Truman Show,” but is it any creepier than what we’re doing now? And honestly, I can’t imagine it costing society more than what it is costing us now. 

Maybe this isn’t the solution, but just sweeping human beings along is also no solution. What I do know is that we need to be talking about this, every day, with everyone we know. We can’t just sit around blaming others, which is mostly what we are doing these days. We cannot continue to conflate mental illness with homelessness — they are distinct problems that require distinct solutions. We cannot simply wait for our elected representatives or philanthropists or some other genius hero to do it for us. This is our problem and it must be our solution. There must be a better way and being democratic societies, it is upon us to figure this out. 

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That Daring Young Girl

When the two-year-old girl first caught my eye she was standing directly beneath the trapeze bar, craning her neck to look up at it. She reached upward, stretching on tip toe, her fingers opening and closing as if trying to grab hold, but coming short of her goal.

She dropped her arms and looked around, spotting a stool some ways off. Retrieving it, she attempted to position it under the trapeze bar. It fell over. She attempted to right it. It fell over again. She tried again, finally succeeding in getting it in place. 

Climbing atop it was no easy feat. There was nothing to hold onto for support and the step up was higher than was comfortable for her little legs. Twice she toppled onto her seat in the effort, but she persevered, crawling onto the stool's platform on her hands and knees, squeezing her body so it all fit there, then carefully standing to her full height.

She looked up at the trapeze bar now, but couldn't at first see it. She had positioned the stool too far forward. Arching her back she spied the bar behind her. She made one reach for it, but realized it was too far away, so dismounted the stool, reversing the process she had developed for mounting it.

This time when she moved the stool, she repeatedly looked up at the bar to ensure that she was directly beneath it. Again, she had trouble getting it to remain on its four feet. Again, she toppled to the ground in the effort, twice, picking herself up each time, her expression of concentration unchanged by any of her tribulations. 

Now she climbed onto the stool, employing the crawling technique she'd discovered from her previous attempt, rising to her feet, finding the bar overhead, then reaching up to grasp it.

I had been sitting a ways off, but when she got hold of that trapeze bar, I stood, an involuntary act of celebration on her behalf. I was driven to get closer to her. She stood with her feet on the stool and hands holding the bar for several seconds. When she noticed me nearby, she smiled up at me like a champion, then launched herself into her swing, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze.

I know it's often hard for parents to not help their children when they struggle. After all, it was only a few months ago that these people were newborns who needed the adults in their lives to do virtually everything for them, but it's also vital that we teach ourselves to allow them their struggles, even if it means letting them fall down. It would have been so easy for me to see failure in her first attempts to launch herself on that trapeze bar, to right the stool for her, to move it into its proper place, to interfere with nonsense words like "Are you okay?" when she fell, to even lift her up to the bar. But there was not a single moment of failure here. Each fall, each repositioning of the stool, each reach that came up empty were all necessary steps in her process. 

And when she launched herself, she beamed. She didn't need my support, she didn't need my help, she didn't need me to tell her "good job" or "well done," none of it, because what she had done was all her own and she knew it, that daring young girl on the flying trapeze.

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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Forged In The Furnace Of Conflict

Yesterday, a group of four and five-year-olds were once again bickering over the nature of their relationships with one another. They were going back and forth about who was part of the game and who wasn't. A couple weeks ago, as an aspect of this exploration of relationships and in response to an uptick in exclusionary play, they had all agreed to abide by the rule: "You can't say you can't play." I had suggested that specific way of phrasing it (borrowed from the great Vivian Paley) by way of helping them put words to a concept that they were struggling to articulate, but it had been fully their idea.

As they argued, their newly-minted agreement was evoked by both sides, sometimes in ways that made perfect sense, but often in ways that showed me that some of them were still confused about exactly what it was to which they had agreed. 

Relationships should stand at the center of our school life, because it is only through relationships, through other people, that we can understand the world which is the essence of education. Occasionally, one of the children would appeal to me, but since they were doing exactly the work I expect them to be doing while at school, I turned it back on them, usually by simply repeating what I'd heard one or the other of the children saying, not taking sides, not intervening. Adults often step in during these sorts of intense, but non-violent conflicts, seeking to help the children settle matters, and sometimes they need us, especially when there is an imbalance of power or when children start to gang up on a single child, but most of the time we intervene simply as agents of efficiency as we attempt to rush them through the conflict. But relationships are made of much more than playing harmoniously with one another: getting to the other side of conflict is gratifying, but relationships are usually forged in the furnace of conflict.

Around and around they went, sometimes raising their voices, sometimes offering possible solutions, sometimes accusing one another of bad faith. This was not an interruption of their play, this was their play. They were doing the vital, often hard work of figuring out what it means to have a relationship with other people, one that is negotiated on a daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute basis.

Finally, someone suggested, "Hey, I know, you can be our superhero baby!" There was a pause as the parties involved considered it, then collectively sighed their agreement that this was the moment they had all been waiting for. They then returned to their game as they bickered over where their new superhero baby was going to sleep.

If you or someone you know is interested in joining the Woodland Park Cooperative School in Seattle, we are currently enrolling for the 2019-20 school year. Click here for information. There are still spots available for 2-5 year olds.

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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