When the Sun Stands Still

I've been awaking to darkness for the last couple weeks. I’d have to say that the short winter days are one of the most challenging aspects of life in the northern tier, but things are turning around. The Winter Solstice occurred in Seattle on Monday at 2:02 a.m., marking the end of our ever-longer nights and the return of light.

Not to lessen the significance of Christmas, Hanukkah or any of the other festivals of lights, but this astrological event is the original reason for the season. The Earth is tilted on its axis at, on average, a 23.5-degree angle and yesterday was when the North Pole is farthest from the sun, causing it to appear to rise and set in the same place. We call it the first day of winter, and while the days will now grow longer by increments until the Summer Solstice in June, the average temperature of the “top” part of the globe will continue to drop as the oceans slowly lose the heat they still store from the warm summer months.

Humans can hardly think without resorting to metaphor and there is none more profound than this. It’s not an accident that this is a time for reflection as well as celebrating new beginnings. It’s not an accident that we seek out the people who mean the most to us, family and friends, those we love and without whom we live in perpetual winter. It’s not an accident that Christians retell the story of the birth of a child, the son of God, the light of hope in a darkened world. It’s not an accident that we give one another gifts and wish each other merriness, happiness and cheer – the darkness is passing, buck up, light is returning, have hope.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for death, but the comparison is superficial. The trees may not have leaves, the forests may have been temporarily emptied by hibernation and migration, there may be fewer children on the play grounds and at the beaches, and it may stay that way for some months to come, but we shouldn't mistake stillness for death.

The word “Solstice” comes from the Latin phrase for “sun stands still.” We spend the rest of the year in motion, moving forward, making progress. But if we can hold still long enough to listen, we hear winter whispering to slow down, take stock, cut back, rest, tend to the core of what makes life worthy of its name. All is calm. All is bright.

Even the sun stands still.

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I'm excited to introduce my brand new 6-part e-course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, in which I pull the curtain back on the magic that comes from treating children like fully formed human beings.. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, 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!

The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think

It was in one of Tom Drummond's classes more than 20 years ago that I first heard about the "technology" of speaking with children so they could think. Tom was explaining the ultimate ineffectiveness of "directive" statements. You know the kind -- "Sit over here," "Stand there," "Pick that up" -- the sorts of adult communications with which most of our childhoods were filled. He then gave us an assignment, which was to simply keep track of the number of directive statements to children we made during a single classroom day. This assignment was simply about ourselves, about listening to our words, practicing using this new technology, not being burdened with the complications of having to make judgments about how the children were responding, just focusing on ourselves and the words we were using, but it was impossible to not notice the immediate impact that it had on my relationship with the young children in my life.

Although, this was my first formal exposure to the "technology" of treating children like fully formed human beings, I'd previously been exposed to this technology "in the wild," so to speak, via our daughter's preschool teacher, with whom I'd been working as a cooperative classroom parent for a couple of years. But, as technology often does for the uninitiated, it had just looked like magic, something Teacher Chris was able to do because she was Teacher Chris. 

One of the goals our classwork was to replace our directive statements with informative ones and it was awkward and unnatural at first. For instance, instead of saying, "Pick up that block," I would try to make the more cumbersome informative statement, "I see a block on the floor and it's clean up time." One of the basic ideas, Tom explained, was that unlike directive statements which tend to shut things down, informative statements create a space in which the kids get to do their own thinking, make their own decisions about their own behavior, instead of merely engaging in the power struggle that inevitably emerges from being bossed around. It made sense to me even while it felt strange and artificial. It was true, I couldn't help but notice, that when I took the time to be informative, children were far less likely to push back, and instead take a beat (which, I've learned means they are taking a moment to process the information you've given them) then pick up that block and put it away. 

I discovered, on my own, the truth of Tom's assertion that the ultimate weakness of relying upon directive statements is that, over time, they need to be escalated in intensity. I recall standing in our school's parking lot with a much more experienced parent as she yelled angrily after her kids, "Get your butts over here!" only to have them giggle and scamper away. When she grumbled, "I never thought I'd be the kind of parent who spanked her kids, but I'm almost there," I saw a glimpse of a place I didn't want to go.

And I still had doubts, however, even as I began to practice with my own preschooler, who soon detected the change in my approach and began to object to it as "teacher talk." I felt a little guilty, like a magician letting the public in on my trick, as I explained to her what I was trying to do. I remember my five-year-old nodding along, agreeing that it sounded like a good idea. She especially appreciated that I wouldn't be bossing her around, even suggesting she would be happy to help me by pointing out when I slipped up. I thought for sure that I'd ruined everything by letting the cat out of the bag, but if anything, the opposite happened. She became my ally in making "teacher talk" a more natural part of my day-to-day language until I've arrived at a point in my life when parents refer to "Teacher Tom magic." 

But none of this is magic. Like all technology, which is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, it still works, often even better, when everyone knows how it works.

I've now come to a point at which I have complete trust in the technology of treating children like fully formed human beings. Indeed, it's a technology that works with all fully formed human beings no matter what their age and it starts with the assumption that I can never, whatever your age, command you into doing anything. My primary responsibility is to speak informatively, and to leave a space in which thinking can take place. It's not magic, but it sure seems like it.

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For anyone wanting to learn more about The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think, I'm excited to introduce my brand new 6-part e-course in which I pull the curtain back on the magic. This course is for educators, parents, and anyone else who works with young children. It's the culmination of more than 20 years of research and practice. I've been speaking on this topic around the world for the past decade and know that it can be transformative both for adults and children. For more information and to register, 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!

A Profession in Crisis

The pandemic notwithstanding, if 25 percent of our nation's doctors were planning to quit the profession, it would constitute a national crisis. If my neighbor Amazon got word that one in four of their professional employees were going to walk away, it would be a disaster. Indeed, if any profession or employer had that much of their workforce ready to walk away, not for "better jobs," but because their current job was too dangerous, stressful, or demoralizing, it would be time to call in the cavalry. 

According to a recent poll of public school K-12 teachers, a full 27 percent say they are considering leaving the profession due to the the pandemic. This is on top of pre-pandemic polling that found that half of all teachers were already considering a job change because of low pay, bad working conditions, lack of respect, and an ongoing degradation of learning conditions for students. This is not a new crisis, it's an old one on steroids.

In our state, there are, as far as I know, exactly zero plans to address this issue. The obvious answer of increasing pay, bolstering psychological and mental health support, and providing more autonomy for educators to teach the way their students learn, is apparently not being seriously considered. Nope, as far as policymakers are concerned, it seems that the only options on the table are to keep schools open with all the extra danger, work, and stress or to continue with the mind-numbing drudge of attempting to educate through a computer screen for hours a day. The testing must go on. The out-of-the-box, top-down curriculum must still be adhered to. The children must not be allowed to "fall behind." Heck, yesterday there was a blizzard in New York City, closing the schools, but no "snow holiday" for the kids and their teachers, as remote learning continues unabated.

Oh sure, there are a lot of people patting teachers on the back right now, and they deserve it, but at best that will serve to keep them hanging on for a few more days. The problems in our profession are chronic and they were getting worse even before the coronavirus added "and you might die" to the list.

Our local school district is warning parents that the schools won't likely fully re-open, even with the good news of a vaccine, until at least next fall. In other words, we are only about halfway through this. If they didn't understand it before, those in power now know that there is no getting back to "normal" without our schools, but our schools are nothing without teachers. If we don't focus like a laser on teacher retention, and that's going to mean money, support, and, perhaps the most difficult of all, the willingness to allow teachers the autonomy to do the right thing by the children in their care, there won't be any schools to get back to. 

Of course, teachers are already saying this, loud and clear. We have been saying it for a generation as the crisis worsened. Obviously, we can't do it alone. What we need is for parents to join us as advocates for their children and for employers to join us as advocates for their employees. Together, I believe we can force change for the better. Education historian, author, and activist Diane Ravitch reminds us that "teachers' working conditions are children's learning conditions." If those conditions are so bad that most are looking for a way out, just think what that is doing to our children who have no choice. 

We're all tired of it. We all want good news stories. I hate to be gloom and doom, but we also have to face the truth. This is something we created together, it won't go away at the end of the pandemic, and the only way to solve it is to work together. Parents, please, listen to what teachers are saying. Employers, please listen as well. Our unified voice is the only way we're going to get policymakers to listen. We need each other and our children need us all.

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

Projection, Empathy, Compassion

During my first year as a teacher, I had a student, a two-year-old, who loved her hugs. She would hug me hello in the morning. She would hug her mother and father goodbye. She would hug total strangers if given the chance. It was a charming instinct, one for which she had grown accustomed to receiving praise. "She is such a loving girl!" "Oh, how sweet!" However, her hugging did not always go over particularly well with her peers. Indeed, more often than not, her unsolicited hugs, which were generally quite enthusiastic, bordering on tackling, would frighten other children, often causing tears.

The Golden Rule, most commonly cited as "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is one of the underpinning principles of many of the world's major religions and cultures. As a moral guide, it relies on individuals to look inside themselves, to perform the mental experiment of putting themselves into the shoes of others, and to act accordingly. The problem, of course, is that the way I want to be treated isn't necessarily a good guide to how others want to be treated. This little girl enjoyed a good hug, but doing unto others was, in this case, obviously the wrong thing to do.

Over the next couple of years, with the support of the adults in her life, she learned to become more gentle and discerning with her hugs. One might say that she had learned to be more compassionate, thinking not about what she would or would not have done and projecting it onto others, but rather taking it beyond the Golden Rule and actually considering the needs, preferences, and desires of others, then choosing to act accordingly. Projection is the opposite of empathy, and compassion, which is feeling for others rather than with them, is what stands beyond empathy.

One of the most important public discussions we have been having in recent decades is the one about consent. Most often, it is applied to sexual relations, but it goes beyond that and the ongoing, often contentious, debate has highlighted the fact that we, as a society, are not particularly good at compassion, too often confusing it with projection or even empathy. Perhaps our biggest challenge as human beings is that our brains have evolved to believe themselves. Our prejudices and opinions feel like facts. We might be born empathetic, but compassion is something that must be learned and it can only be learned through the process of listening. 

As we helped that two-year-old learn to express her affection in appropriate ways, we did so by redirecting her focus from her own feelings to those of others. "He's crying because your hug frightened him." "She said 'stop it' because you were hurting her." It wasn't an easy leap for her, this learning how to "listen," to objectively evaluate the behavior of these other humans who perceive the world through different eyes and interpret it with different brains. We offered her alternative ways to show her affection. "You can use gentle hands." "Maybe he doesn't want to be touched, but you can smile at him or wave to him." As she got older and more verbal, we included the idea of asking, "May I hug you?" and then encouraging her to listen to the response.

This is not an easy thing we are doing, teaching ourselves to be compassionate. Projection is so much easier. Empathy comes much more naturally. "It's for your own good." "Don't be so sensitive." "We've dropped bombs on your fellow citizens so that you can be free, like us!" The Golden Rule can only take us so far.

A few years back, a group of Woodland Park preschoolers, while struggling with this exact thing, made a rule for themselves, Don't do anything to anybody before you ask them. It meant that we were all committing ourselves to listening -- a lot. It was an amazing challenge they set for themselves, one we could all stand to embrace.

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

How We Become Wiser, Gentler People

It happened in a flash. He wanted to dump the bowl of "jewels" (florist marbles) that he had collected into the mud. She wanted them to remain clean. He dump the jewels. There were loud voices and when I looked from across the sand pit I saw her push his face, then storm off.

Both children were upset. The boy's mother was nearby and after checking to make sure he wasn't hurt, engaged him in a discussion, so I followed the girl whose body was tense with rage. She marched this way and that for a moment, jaws locked in anger. As I approached, she turned her back on me, so I stopped in my tracks.

What was I going to say to her? Maybe I was going to remind her of the rules we had all agreed to some weeks ago, specifically mentioning the one that goes, "No pushing." I might have been preparing to say something like, "When you pushed his face, you hurt him." She walked slowly away from me, her shoulders hunched forward. When she got to a corner formed by a railing and a random cart that has found its way onto our playground, she knelt on her knees, nose in the corner.

I looked back at the boy who was now chatting easily with his mom as he bent down to the mud handling the jewels he had dumped there.

I didn't say anything to the girl because, frankly, there was nothing to say. Or rather, anything I said would be redundant at best. There was no question that she was already feeling remorse, regretting her action, mulling it over in the quiet of the corner she had found for herself. I stepped away and left her to her conscience. After a couple minutes, she moved herself into a more distant corner, although this time she faced outward, her face a study of sorrow, staring into the ground.

Again, I began contemplating words I might say to her. Maybe I could comment on her emotional state. Or perhaps there was something I could say to help her understand the cause and effect of the affair. But again I realized that anything I said just then would be a mere distraction from the important work she was doing, sitting alone, calming down, and painfully reflecting.

Moments later the boy approached her, hand outstretched. In it was a jewel. He offered it to her saying, "I cleaned this one for you."

She took the jewel and held it in the palm of her hand. The boy shifted from foot to foot as if waiting for her to say something. When she didn't, I softly said, "That was a kind thing to do." He went away then, back to his play. The girl watched him go then looked back at the jewel in her hand, contemplating it for a moment before clutching in her fist. She stayed that way, thinking and feeling, until she was ready to return to her own play. It's from these moments that we become wiser, gentler people.

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

What if Being Good at Things Wasn't the Point of Doing Them?

Our daughter played on a middle school soccer team in a league that didn't believe in keeping score. The kids, of course, simply kept score themselves, always knowing in the end who had won and who had lost. They knew that not keeping score wasn't part of the real world and they mocked the charade.

That said, her team was not very good, losing all of their matches, often by double digits. The girls were aware of this and mocked that too. I played on losing sports teams as a boy. Adults would try to buck us up, to assure us that today was our day, that we possessed the talent to win and we would win if we just stuck to it. They assumed that we must be down in the dumps from all the losing, but I don't recall feeling that way. Sure, I would have preferred to win, I suppose, but more important was getting together with my buddies and playing baseball or football or basketball. The camaraderie was everything and I saw that with our daughter and her friends. They loved playing bad soccer together, even as we adults worried about their self-esteem.

We ought not to have worried, of course, but it's hard. We live in a culture that emphasizes winning. It's not enough to be good at something, let alone to merely dabble in it. One must strive to be best and when someone falls short, we think, it must have shame attached to it. In school, we grade our children, ranking them according to how well they do some on some arbitrary thing like math or spelling or self-control. Indeed, our schools are in many ways set up as judgement factories. What else is this fear of "falling behind" all about if not winning and losing? Why else is failing the worst thing you can do? How else to you explain adults telling children, "You can do better." It's so embedded in our mentality that many of us can't imagine education without the competition.

Author Kurt Vonnegut told this story: "When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of 'getting to know you' questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What's your favorite subject? And I told him, 'No, I don't play any sports. I do theater, I'm in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.'

"And he went, 'Wow, that's amazing!' And I said, 'Oh no, but I'm not good at any of them.'

"And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: 'I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you've got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.'"

What if, as educators, we were all free to take this approach? What if the point wasn't being good at things and rather simply doing them? What if we stopped keeping score? What if the goal wasn't creating winners, but rather interesting people? 

"And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn't been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could 'win' at them."

What if we understood education this way?

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

I See It Every Day in Preschool

Former Federal Reserve Chair and Joe Biden's nominee for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has expressed the opinion that it's okay for the US to add trillions to our nation debt in order to improve education. 

Yellen is an impressive person. She is respected on both sides of the political aisle, having served at high levels under both Democrats and Republicans and she has been talking about the importance of education for most of her career. One can use your favorite search engine to go back and time to find her regularly saying things like this from a 2016 speech to graduates of the University of Baltimore:

"Economists are not certain about many things. But we are quite certain that a college diploma or an advanced degree is a key to economic success."

And from a talk to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition:

"Probably the most important workforce development strategy is improving the quality of general education."

She's said similar things about education from preschool through high school, touting spending on schools as a way to close the wealth gap in our country, addressing poverty as well as to stimulate the economy overall. Her elevation is a reason to celebrate, right? Our schools have long been underfunded. Finally, someone in high office is speaking our language. And best of all, she seems to have the ear of both sides, which means that maybe, just maybe, we can make education funding one of those rarest of birds in the political aviary: a bipartisan issue.

The truth, however, is that education, in my lifetime, has always been a bipartisan issue. Both sides are equally wrong. I've been listening to public officials talk about education for decades, and whatever their political stripe, none of them speak of education without connecting it to the economy. "We have to out educate the Chinese!" "We must prepare our children for the jobs of tomorrow!" "We need to emphasize STEM education because that's where the jobs will be." They talk about education, but only as a "workforce development strategy." It's as if our children exist to serve the economy rather than the other way around. 

In this relentless, bipartisan support for education as vocational training, we lose sight of the real purpose of public education, which is not to produce good little workers, but rather to educate good citizens. Self-governance stands at the heart of democracy and the skills required to succeed in the workplace are in many ways the exact opposite of those required to be a good citizen. For one thing, a good citizen is someone who thinks for themself, who is a critical thinker, and who questions authority. Those traits don't go over too well in a corporate hierarchy. Insubordination gets you fired. A good citizen speaks up for what they believe even when those around them disagree. A good citizen knows that they contribute to society in ways far beyond the merely economic. A good citizen rabble rouses, holds leaders feet to the fire, and knows that there is more to life than earning a greasy buck. Democracy can't work without educated citizens, which is why we publicly fund education in the first place. If it's just about job training, then I say we save the taxpayers' money and let the corporations train their own damn workers.

I respect Janet Yellen and I join her in calling for increased spending on education, but our children are more than workers, they are citizens. We are all counting on every "next" generation to have the skills required to join us in this project of self-governance. We won't get there with top-down job training. We won't get there with economists running our schools. We won't get there as long as we attempt to manufacture children the way we manufacture widgets.

Our schools need more money, but even more importantly we need transformation, one that puts the children and their curiosity at the center, one that sees them as fully formed human beings, capable and self-motivated. Our schools must become laboratories of democracy, places where children are free to challenge, think, and explore, to ask and answer their own questions, where they learn to work together cooperatively, to come to decisions through discussion, debate and agreement. Our schools must understand that in a democratic society, authority requires the permission of the governed and that obedience has no place. It's a transformation that flies in the face of everything today's political leaders believe about education.

It's easy to become cynical. There are too many of us who want to just blow the whole thing up. That, I believe, is one of the products of our current system of "workforce development" that stands in for education. We are producing citizens who feel hopeless because they are lacking the traits, knowledge, and skills necessary to fully embrace self-governance. We don't know how to engage with one another cooperatively, in the spirit of democracy, because we spend the first 18 years of our lives being trained to keep our noses to the grindstone, laboring in the test score coal mines, rather than engaged with one another on self-selected projects, learning to create our community together.

I'm often criticized for getting out of my lane when I discuss politics and other social matters, but to me that merely points out how far we've strayed from our ideals. There are no lanes in democracy. We are all responsible for what happens, which is why Yellen is not out of her lane to discuss education. We need each and every one of us to speak our minds, to listen to one another, and to work together toward agreements. And we must do that over and over again. That's how transformation happens among the self-governed. I see it every day in preschool.

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

Worrying About Using the Words of Diagnosis

Several years ago, the mother of one of my students became convinced that her son, a smart, quirky five-year-old, was autistic. Having known him for three years, she asked me what I thought. I told her that I had known many children on the autism spectrum over the years, but that I wasn't qualified to make a diagnosis. When she pressed me, I told her that her pediatrician, if he thought it warranted, would refer her to someone who could give her a more definitive answer. After consulting several psychologists and other specialists it turned out he was not on the spectrum, but during that period of several weeks his mother had turned her life over to autism, reading and researching, increasingly convincing herself of her own erroneous diagnosis, growing increasingly anxious and distraught, which, naturally, infected the entire family. This is why I had refused to even speculate: amateurs are often wrong.

It had been a brief, but incredibly stressful and unsettled time for this whole family, which is why I remain cautious about speaking to parents about things like autism or sensory processing issues or ADHD or any of the many other conditions with which children might be diagnosed. Rightly or wrongly, even the mere suggestion that a child is not "normal" (another nonsense term) throws an entire family into chaos. Rightly or wrongly, we live in a world in which these conditions strike fear into the hearts of parents: they've heard the stories, the jokes, and they've seen the cruelty of a world that just won't understand. 

In this case, the mother came to me, already working herself up, and I did what I could to calm her down, to assure her that the boy I knew, whether or not he could be diagnosed, was a delightfully unique human. He had a sense of humor that went over his classmates' heads, he had a natural interest in scholastic pursuits, like reading and science, and he demonstrated an incredible capacity for joy. She pointed out that he often played alone and that when he did attempt to enter into play with other kids he tended to do so in ways that provoked them. I, in turn, pointed out the other children who tended to play alone and and would draw her attention to other children who frequently found themselves immersed in conflict. My point was that normal (that word again) development in young children was often spiky, that no child hits all the benchmarks on schedule, that they were all struggling with the challenging lessons of living in the world with the other people. My goal wasn't to dismiss her concerns, but rather to soothe her and to let her see that children's differences are cause for celebration. Autistic or not, her son was special in the best, non-condescending meaning of that word.

This whole area is fraught. I've known parents who refused to have their child diagnosed despite their doctor's recommendations. I've known others whose lives were turned upside down by a diagnosis. I've seen families struggle with misdiagnosis. I've watched some parents who seemed to be diagnosis shopping, making me wonder if we were dealing with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I've seen treatments that were worse than the disease and none that "worked" overnight or completely. What I've never seen is a family that was not thrown into turmoil by even the suggestion of something diagnosable.

This is not to say that I've never been concerned about individual kids. In those cases, I ask other teachers or parent educators to spend some time observing the child. I try to make time for "How's it going?" conversations with the parents to learn what they are seeing. I avoid the language of diagnosis because not only am I not qualified to make those assessments, but I know the maelstrom that certain words can cause in a family. Instead, I focus on what I do know, which are the trials and tribulations, the successes and joys, of this individual young human. Only if there is consensus among my fellow professionals do I broach the subject with a parent, and then very cautiously.

I understand that this approach can be criticized as denialism that treats these types of diagnoses as somehow shameful. I mean, denial and shame are often at the core of what messes so much with families. That said, we can't ignore the fact that denial and shame are real, that a diagnosis in today's world is almost always perceived as a declaration that one's beloved child is "abnormal" and that their life will be more challenging because of it. This is the world we live in even as we hope for a better, more inclusive future. Indeed, I've known many families who have come around to finding that better world in their own lives, but only after years of heartbreak.

I'm reflecting on this because it feels to me that many early childhood educators, parents, and other non-professionals have gotten in the habit of tossing the terms of diagnosis around (as I did above with my mention of "Munchausen syndrome by proxy"), using them to label children and behavior in a way that strikes me as cavalier. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is part of how we normalize these things, but at the same time, I feel, at least in part, that it's irresponsible for dilettantes like me to throw around terminology that has a specific medical definition that I'm not qualified to assess, especially since in today's world those words, used incautiously, have the power to cause extreme stress to families.

That boy who was not autistic continues to be a smart, quirky kid. The last I heard from his family, he still tends to provoke conflict, is often misunderstood, and spends a lot of time playing alone in his own world. He is different from all the other kids. All of them are. In that way he's typical. And that's always a reason to celebrate.

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Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

Sucking the Joy From Their Lives

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 all the children became 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 great 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 from 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.

******

Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!

Getting on the Same Bandwagon

There are few more gratifying things than when the experts tell you something you already know. For instance, throughout my teaching career, I've always said that the first step with every child is getting on the same bandwagon, by which I mean, essentially, to befriend them. Once we're on the same bandwagon, once they know I like them and I know that they like me, behavior issues don't exactly go away, but they become manageable because you're working from a foundation of mutual respect and love. So when Dan Siegel and Tina Payne's book The Whole Brain Child came out in 2011 with it's concept of "connect to redirect," it didn't hit me as an epiphany, but rather as a confirmation.

"Connect to redirect" is a bedrock principle in preschool. If I want to help someone alter a behavior or make a transition or engage some other sort of change, my first step is to re-invest in making sure that we're still sharing a the same bandwagon. When I'm working with children with whom I have a long track record, like our five-year-olds, it might only take a couple seconds, some genuine eye-contact and an inside joke, for instance, and we're good to go. Children I'm still getting to know might take a bit more effort, but the goal is to make sure the trust is there first. But again, I don't really think about it as much as just do it: I think it's become part of who I am.

Some time ago one of our parent groups spent an evening discussing challenging behaviors during their monthly parent education meeting and the concept of "connect to redirect" was discussed. Afterwards, a new parent came up to me and said that the concept struck a cord with him and that during the meeting he realized that I had given him "two clear examples of how well it works."

His first example was a small one. That morning had been the first time he had seen me prepare the children for clean-up time. I typically take a few minutes to connect with the group, usually in some sort of silly, playful way, getting them on my bandwagon before officially signaling the transition. In this case, I'd goofed around with the hand drum I use to signal the end of one thing and the beginning of the next, making a show of pretending that it's a banjo, then a violin, then a flute, and so on, until most of the kids had gathered around, almost literally on my bandwagon, insisting that it's a drum and demanding that I "bang" it. (For a more detailed version of this, click here.) I had never thought about it in the context of connect to redirect, because I normally think of that in the framework of one-to-one interactions rather than group ones, but essentially the dynamics are the same.

His second example was one that I had told the group about during an earlier discussion on health and safety, one that had stemmed from desperation. We're an urban American school which means that we have occasional problems with our local population of homeless people who live in tents and under bridges. Over the preceding weeks, we had been dealing with a large number of hypodermic needles in the parking lot, been forced to clean up human waste, and had discovered items vandalized and stolen from our playground. As a community we spent a great deal of energy trying to figure out what we could do, most of which involved getting the police or the city involved. Of course, in a city like ours, we all knew the response would likely be some polite version of "get in line."

I always feel it as a failure when the authorities become involved: it always represents for me a breakdown rather than a solution, so I was dissatisfied with our plans. I began to ask questions and after a few days narrowed the problems down to single guy, a man with whom we were all familiar: we had all seen him sleeping in doorways, behaving in ways that indicated he was mentally ill, often walking around with his pants down around his ankles. He was new to the neighborhood, but by talking with members of the Fremont Baptist Church from whom we lease our space, I discovered that his name was Jason. Knowing this didn't solve anything, of course, but it was somewhat comforting to know that our problems were with a single guy rather than a legion.

I made up my mind that I was going talk with him. It worried me because some of his behaviors had appeared violent to us, as if he were physically fighting his demons. The next couple of times I saw him down by the stores, I chickened out, but then one day, he caught me off guard by grumbling at me as I exited a shop, "Spare change?" This was my opportunity.

I asked, "Are you Jason?"

He seemed stunned, then smiled, "Yes, I'm Jason."

"I'm going to give you five dollars." I opened my wallet and handed him a bill. It disappeared into the tangle of clothing he wears.

"I work up this hill over there, at the church," I said, looking him in eyes, smiling, striving for a warm, conversational tone.

He nodded his head. "Yeah, I know the church."

"I know you do. I've seen you around. I'm the preschool teacher there. That playground is where little kids play. Lately, you've been leaving your needles there and defecating there and stealing things from there." I tried to say it in a matter-of-fact, rather than accusatory, manner. It was an accusation without real evidence, but since he didn't deny it I went on. "Listen, I know things are hard for you." I patted him on the arm.

He muttered something I didn't understand, but he maintained eye contact and curved his lips into a smile. I said, "I just want to ask you to try to be a little more respectful of the place we play with our kids. Okay?"

He didn't respond, but it seemed like he heard me. I walked away saying, "See you later!" and he replied, "Yeah man, see you later."

That night, nothing bad happened around the school. Two days later, he panhandled me again, not seeming to recognize me, so I said, "Hey Jason! Remember me? I'm Tom, the teacher from the preschool in the church. We talked a couple days ago." He looked at me with recognition, "Oh, yeah." I gave him a dollar unsolicited, saying, "Good to see you."

Weeks passed without any of the problems. Jason was still around. I'd given him a few more dollars, but some days we just nodded at each other like friends and acquaintances do when they meet on the street.

It seemed like he was on my bandwagon now. The curious thing is that whereas I once hurried past him, I now found myself looking for him. I guess I was on his bandwagon too.

******

Teacher Tom's Second Book is now available in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US, Canada, the UK, Iceland, and Europe. And if you missed it, Teacher Tom's First Book is back in print as well. 

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!