"Don't Worry, Dearie, We'll Eat You First"

Three girls were playing together on the outdoor stage. I approached just as a fourth girl asked them, "Can I play with you?"

This is tricky question to ask around a preschool because the knee-jerk answer is most often "No." Normally, I advise kids struggling to enter into an established play group to start by asking, "What are you playing?" or to simply state, "I'm going to play with you," or best of all, to simply drop to your knees and start playing. It still doesn't always work, of course, but I've noticed that kids who approach others like this are far more likely to have success.

In this case, however, one of the girls answered, "Sure, if you want to be an evil unicorn."

"I'll be an evil unicorn."

The girls then continued where they left off with both me and the newcomer listening on.

"Okay, pretend I'm on the bridge and you come along and push me off."

From what I could gather, the girl asking to be pushed off was a good unicorn. For the most part, she was directing the evil unicorns in how to torment her. They pretended to push her off the planks of wood they had arranged as a bridge, then she said, "Okay, now pretend you're going to roast me for dinner."

There was an old bicycle tire on the stage. The good unicorn knelt down inside its circle. One of the evil unicorns held a couple of florist marbles. She put them on the good unicorn's back, saying, "These are so you'll taste better when we eat you."

"I'm already going to taste good."

"Yes you will, dearie, but these jewels will make you taste even better."

The evil unicorns went through some motions around their roast while the newest evil unicorn looked on, still studying the game before leaping in.

After a few seconds, the roast popped up, "I'm done now. Now you have to wash me off." She retrieved a faucet set up (a spigot with hot and cold knobs mounted on a board) that had appeared on the playground some weeks earlier. The evil unicorns used it like a hose. Then the good unicorn said, "Pretend the bridge is the table and you're going to slice me up." She walked out on the bridge again and curled up under the spigot, repeating, "Now slice me up for dinner, dearie."

At first, the good unicorns used the sides of their hands to pantomime slicing, then one of them said, "Pretend I'm going to slice you with my staff," referring to the large stick she had been wielding. They were interrupted by the newcomer who finally joined the game by calling out, "I don't want to be an evil unicorn. I want to be a good unicorn!"

"Okay, if you're a good unicorn then we're going to have to roast you for dinner. Get in the oven." The newly be-monikered good unicorn dutifully took her spot within the circle of the bicycle tire.

"But first you have to eat me," insisted the other good unicorn.

"Don't worry, dearie, we'll eat you first."

Then the newest good unicorn called out, "And eat me too!"

"Of course, dearie, of course."

(Fairy tales) tell children what they unconsciously know -- that human nature is not innately good, that conflict is real, that life is harsh before it is happy -- and thereby reassure them about their own fears and their own sense of self. ~Arthur Schlesinger

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

"Eat This Food, Then You Can Have Some Ice Cream"

The two-year-old said to me, "If you eat this food you can have ice cream." She placed a plate in front of me on which she had positioned a glob of purple play dough. 

I said, "What is it?"

"It's healthy food."

"What kind of healthy food."

"You just have to eat it."

"I'll need a fork."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She dug around on the shelf until she found a plastic one. "Here's your fork, now eat your food."

I pretended to take a bite. Sometimes when kids want me to taste their imaginary food, I make a comical face and say, "It's yucky" or "It's too hot!" but this time I said, "That is so good! I'm going to eat it all!" I stabbed the play dough with my fork pretending to shove the whole thing in my mouth, then hid it on my lap while mimicking chewing and swallowing. "Now I'm ready for my ice cream."

The "ice cream" was more play dough she held in a container. For a moment I thought she was going to serve it to me, but then she said, "First you have to take your bath, then you can have some ice cream."

"I don't want to take a bath."

"You have to take a bath if want to have some ice cream."

"I'll need a wash cloth."

"I'll get one for you, Teacher Tom." She found a small blanket in our cradle of baby dolls. "Here's your wash cloth."

I mimed bathing, then said, "All clean and fresh, now I'm ready for that ice cream."

"No, first you have to put on your jammies."

"I don't want to put on my jammies."

"You have to put on your jammies, then you can have some ice cream."

It went a couple more rounds like this. It was clear that I wasn't going to get any ice cream.

It was all pretend. The food wasn't real, the bath wasn't real, the pajamas weren't real. Even the ice cream wasn't real. Nothing about this was real, it was all a child's game, yet as she dangled that reward always just out of reach, I found a thread of growing annoyance and helplessness underneath my play. I felt manipulated and controlled. I'd jumped through her hoops, yet there was always another placed before me. The game was pretend, but the emotions it evoked were real.

Just think how much stronger those emotions would be were I the child, she the adult, and it was not a game, but rather a part of my day-to-day reality. 

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Strong, Demanding Love"

"I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love: I'm talking about a strong, demanding love." ~MLK

"The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them." ~Thomas Merton

"Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward on "object" of love. If a person loves only on other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not the faculty." ~Erich Fromm

"The teachings about love offered by Fromm, King, and Merton," writes bell hooks, "differ from much of today’s writing. There is always an emphasis in their work on love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world. In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important politicization of love is often absent from today’s writing."

I have always loved the children I taught. I love them now that they are out in the world, beyond my reach. I loved them, I realize, even before they crossed my threshold. And I already love the future children that will come my way.

I know I'm not alone in this. I've spoken with countless early childhood educators who feel the same way. Indeed, love is a prerequisite. This is not emotional bosh for us, but rather, a hooks writes, an active force. As Mister Rogers put it, "Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."

Love is what demands that we forget the lessons that tell us that adults must command children, that we must shape and correct and teach them obedience. It demands that we be the soil in which they can continue becoming the person they are, right now. Love is not the easiest path. The world wants these children moulded into a safe kind of sameness, to be guided toward predetermined ends, but love celebrates their uniqueness, their eccentricities, their right to be free, to live fully and well, to come alive with purpose and meaning.

It takes courage to love in this way. Thomas Mann writes, "It is love, not reason that is stronger than death." Love is the antidote to fear and fear is, as hooks puts it, "the primary force upholding structures of domination." When we love like this, we are taking a stand not just for the children, but for life itself.

"Learning to face our fears is one way we embrace love," writes hooks. "Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way." This is what is meant by a strong, demanding love.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

"Reasoning is a Social Activity"

Humans have large brains, at least compared to other animals. We generally associate this relatively massive brain size with higher intelligence, which may or may not be true depending on our definition of intelligence. Not to mention that we are increasingly coming to understand that the thing we call our mind may not even reside in our brains, or at least not entirely, but is rather found throughout our bodies, even extending into the world beyond ourselves.

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, argues that our species evolutionary advantage is the result not of our individual intelligence, but rather our capacity to coordinate and cooperate. He points out that Neanderthals were likely individually far more intelligent than Homo sapiens, but we left them in the dust because of our ability to work together. They were old-style mainframe computers while we were networked PCs. 

Indeed, many scientists now believe that our oversized brains are a direct result of the need for extra brain-power in order to deal with the complexity of our own social groups. 

We are not, as it turns out, particularly good at thinking about abstract concepts, but when it comes to thinking about people, we're whiz-bang. Indeed, when we must consider abstract concepts, we tend to think more clearly and accurately when we are interacting with other people, say, through in dialog.

It's this phenomenon that thrills me most about working with young children. The stereotype is of adult teachers conveying learning to their young charges, but the most profound learning usually happens when I know nothing at all about the topic at hand.

Take dinosaurs, for instance. I know little from my own education. And much of what I do recall is so outdated as to be useless. But when the subject comes up in preschool, the children themselves are fully capable of cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum on dinosaurs. First one child will share what they know, then another adds on, then another. They question and debate. They use big words like Tyrannosaur and carnivore, in context, often pausing to define them for those who don't know. They discuss complex concepts like evolution and extinction, often arguing over exactly the same points that scientists argue over. They discuss spans of time, geological processes, and even the genealogies of species. The level of discussion soars well beyond what is typically expected from individual preschoolers as they teach and learn from one another.

This is how humans evolved to learn. Our brain-bound approach to learning asks individuals to noodle things out on their own, but we when we are engaged in social interactions with other people we enter a higher state of alertness that sharpens both attention and memory. This is how we are driven to educate ourselves: through and with other people. It's why we grow bored with directive lectures, for instance, because it forces us to sit quietly within our own heads where psychologists tell us we're only capable of attending to a single train of thought for about eight seconds. It's why kids start goofing off with one another when we expect them to spend extended periods of time attending to instruction without interacting with peers. They know that if they are going to really pursue a thought, it must be done in conversation. They intuitively know that in dialog, our so-called "window of consciousness" can stay open indefinitely.

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind, "We did not evolve to solve tricky logic puzzle on our own . . . so we shouldn't be surprised by the fact that we're no good at it, any more than by the fact that we're no good at breathing underwater. What we did evolve to do is persuade other people of our views, and to guard against being misled by others. Reasoning is a social activity, in other words, and should be practiced as such."

This is the central advantage that play-based learning has over standard schooling where we are scolded to keep our eyes and hands to ourselves, focus on the teacher, and "do your own work." In play we are free to learn and grow as we've evolved to learn and grow, engaging with our fellow humans in a state of heightened alertness and connection that makes us far bigger than our individual selves. 

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Speaking Sentences That Began With , "Let's Pretend . . ." and Ended With, "Okay?"

The wire and fabric "Play Huts" can be folded flat for storage and that is the condition they were in on the table at the top of the hill along with the collapsable wire and fabric tunnels, likewise condensed. I released one of the tunnels with a flourish, allowing it to launch dramatically from my hands like a large spring, sort of shooting it down the hill, landing it on the head of one of the children who laughed at the surprise.

Behind me, however, the children were less joyful, rushing the table asserting, "I want a house," each taking a flattened square. There are only six of the huts, two large ones and four smaller. The supply ran out quickly. When the seventh child came up saying, "I want a house," I said, "That's all there are. I guess you'll have to figure out a way to share."

This was a dissatisfying circumstance for all but the six children who were now wrestling with their houses, trying to transform them from two to three-dimensional playthings. Some managed it on their own, while I helped others, and soon there were six kids sitting in six huts with a half dozen other kids standing on the outside looking in. Some of the outsiders dropped to their knees in an effort to crowd in only to be scolded, "No! This is my house!"

I said, "There are three tunnels that no one is using," motioning toward them, but only the huts were in demand.

After several minutes of turf defense, including some yelling, one of the kids cried out to me, "Look, Teacher Tom, we're sharing!" And sure enough I saw two faces smiling out from within one hut. I said, "You are!" If I was expecting that the other hut hoarders would see the wisdom in this solution, I was disappointed as they continued to bicker and bawl until they had chased most of the younger children away, leaving them all together, separate, sitting cross legged, not willing to leave their huts lest they be commandeered by squatters.

That is, with the exception of the two who were sharing their hut. They were scheming and planning and playing, speaking sentences that began with, "Let's pretend . . . " and ended with, "Okay?" They were not in fear of losing their hut because one of them could always stay behind while the other scavenged for loose parts they could deploy as household items. "Pretend this is our bed, okay?" "Pretend this is where we keep our books, okay?"

One of them dragged an abandoned tunnels over, saying, "This can be how we get in." He connected it to one of the four sides of their hut. By now, neither of them were spending any time inside of their hut, but were rather busying themselves with the game, collecting their furnishings, discussing their plans. They had no fear of losing their space to an interloper because all the potential interlopers were protecting their huts, unable to do anything but sit.

At one point, one of the partners considered the tunnel they had connected as an entryway. "I wish this connected to something."

There was a long silence, then a hopeful voice came from one of the separate fortresses, "You can connect to my house." This was agreed upon and enacted, which then lead to another of the solitary children calling out "You can connect to my house." So they did, using another tunnel. And then another asked to be included, then another. Soon they had pushed their huts together, connecting them with the tunnels, crawling from space to space, chattering, declaring one another "best friends," and employing sentences that began with "Let's pretend . . . " and ended with, "Okay?"

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Not Instruction, But Connection

Human history is full of life-changing, species-altering innovations. Language, the wheel, the printing press, electricity, telephones, air travel, transistors, the internet: we recognize these developments as having transformed not human life on the planet, but our species itself. I imagine other species have had their breakthroughs, but I think it's safe to say that no other species has had such a direct hand in shaping its own evolution, for better or worse.

An innovation that we often don't think about is the simple wall. It's thought that walls were among the first things we constructed, with evidence of defensive walls going back to the 10th millennium BCE. Not long after that we began building multi-room structures that were presumedly used for rituals and dwelling, but those were relatively rare in human experience as most of our ancestors slept in one-room shelters, from tents to igloos to Viking longhouses. We spent most of our waking hours outdoors, of course, living our lives beyond the confines of walls and ceilings, but when we slept it was within walls that framed a room containing as many as 50 other people.

This is significant because it meant that most humans, most of the time, were within visual and auditory distance of one another. This meant that privacy wasn't really a thing, just as it isn't a thing for most pack and den animals today. This obviously became a form of social control in which the ever-present eye of "society" kept certain anti-social behaviors in check. This is probably why codes of law didn't emerge until relatively recently in human history.

John Locke, a professor of linguistics at Lehman College, asserts that the adoption of walls as a way to create privacy represents a revolutionary development that transformed our minds. "Our distant ancestors could see each other at all times, which kept them safe but also imposed a huge cognitive cost," he writes. "Walls eliminated the need to look around every few seconds to see what others were doing." This, he maintains, freed up hours and energy that could now be used by early humans to think more creative and individuated thoughts.

When parents complain that their young children, say, wait impatiently for them outside the bathroom door, it occurs to me that we are seeing the instinct of "original humans" on display. They feel unsafe when not directly connected to other humans. After all, co-sleeping is not some modern innovation, but rather a return to the practices of our earliest ancestors, one that emerged as an evolutionary strategy for survival: everyone looking out for one another.

It seems to me that it could be argued that many, if not most, of our innovations are extensions of the wall, which extended our minds, but, like with every new technology, likewise caused us to leave something, in this case a sense of safety and connection, behind.

Verbal language pushed non-verbal communication to the background, robbing us of the depth and nuance of other types of communication.

The wheel meant we could transport objects and ourselves over greater distances with less effort, while creating greater spaces between us and our communities.

The printing press removed the necessity of gathering together to listen to stories.

Electricity, telephones, air travel, transistors, and, obviously, the internet have each, in their way driven us farther apart from one another, while at the same time extending our minds, freeing us up for increasing individuality and divergent thinking. Today, for better or worse, more and more of us are spending more and more of our lives behind walls, often in our own rooms.

I have no doubt that there are smarter people than me who can counter my musings, but as I find myself worrying about the state of the world, I keep coming back to disconnection.

Mark Twain wrote, "Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction." Issac Asimov but it slightly differently, "To bring about destruction . . . there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally -- and breed."

Within each of us lingers the need to be in physical proximity with people who we know and who we trust. Psychologists and philosophers have long warned us that we moderns are suffering the effects of alienation. Despite all of our modern conveniences and innovations, and perhaps because of them, we are suffering from anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses at rates never before seen. Alarmingly, we are now seeing it manifest in children as young as two and three as the walls of innovation and technology increasingly enclose every aspect of our lives.

We aren't going to turn back the clock. We are doomed to always move forward, but our children, these "original humans" still need that sense of safety and connection unmitigated by our technologies, including walls. This is what our preschools must provide. Forget reading and math; not instruction, but connection. This is how we will prepare them for a disconnected world, by fortifying them with the security, strength, experience, and assurance that they belong. This is how we prepare them to know they must seek connection in a world of division. This is what will allow our children to thrive.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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 Wonder if That's True"

When our children were young, a group of families with similar aged children would occasionally vacation together for spring break. Usually, it was about taking turns watching one another's kids at a swimming pool or beach while the adults did adult things, but we would also sometimes pack up the cars and go on outings together. One year, we were in Palm Springs and decided to make a day-trip to the Joshua Tree National Park.

It was hot, the cars were crowded, the drive was a little too long, and the kids were frustrated at missing their day of unstructured fun. By the time we arrived, none of us were open to the strange, unique beauty of the place to which we'd come. The kids were complaining and the adults were bickering as we unpacked our picnic lunch.

I asked our daughter Josephine to take a walk with me. We headed off on a faint trail. After about 100 yards it led us around the corner of a Flintstone-esqe pile of boulders and suddenly we found ourselves alone in this magnificent, surreal landscape. Our pace instantly slackened and I felt my tension drop away as I involuntarily gave myself over to awe. Josephine must have felt similarly because after a moment of silence, she asked, "Do you ever wonder if we're just like tiny ants in a whole universe of giants?"

Awe is something we can't plan for. It always comes upon us unexpectedly. We can't force ourselves or our children to experience it, but we can venture out into the world. Indeed, that's the only way to experience awe: to leave the familiar, to separate from the mundane, to round a blind corner and encounter something bigger than ourselves. Awe is never found in the day-to-day familiarity . . . Unless you're a young child for whom the whole world is new. Then, a mirror or a ray of sunlight can stop us in our tracks.

It's sometimes said that the experience of awe is a reset button for the brain. It causes us to momentarily drop our preconceived notions and stereotypes, to become more curious and open-minded. Biologists and psychologists believe that the experience of awe makes us more likely to set aside our selfishness and band together for the common good in the spirit of survival.

Those of us who work with young children, I think, are more inclined to these experiences than adults who spend their days with other adults in hushed, predictable, indoor spaces like offices; routine, mechanized, repetitive places like factory floors; or noisy, whiney, customer-facing environments like shops and food service. Our modern economy is largely built upon eliminating surprises, which is to say we minimize the opportunities for experiencing awe in the service of profit.

But those of us with young children in our lives have direct and regular access to awe. Their awe at every day things inspires us, but more specifically we are awed by what they do and say and think and create. We find ourselves awed daily by their capacity to conceive of the world anew. It often takes our breath away.

When Josephine asked her question, I could answer "yes," because I had wondered the same thing, but in her company, in this unexpected place, I found myself wondering it again. Perhaps our entire universe is just a molecule in the bottom of a bowl of soup and the entirety of its existence occurs in the time it takes a giant to eat its lunch. Perhaps we are nerve cells in a giant's fingertip sending impulses of heat or cold or softness or pain along a chain of other universes that make up its nervous system. 

When we are awed, we cannot help but wonder, and it's impossible to not, in the midst of our awe, perhaps even as the heart of our awe, to see that we are all in this together.

As we walked in silence, our minds open, I said, even before the thought was fully formed, "Everything is either infinite or impossible." I wasn't even sure what I meant, it just came to me. I wasn't even sure I'd said it aloud.

After a moment, Josephine, replied with the voice of a great teacher, "I wonder if that's true."

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

There are Times When It's Okay to Say, "You Can't Play"

We were playing with cardboard boxes and cardboard blocks. A group of three-year-olds discovered a game that involved standing in a rough circle around a box while drumming on it together with long blocks. Before long they began to chant which allowed them to find a mutual rhythm. Periodically, they would then all fall down on the ground in a kind of pig pile. After a lull they began their drumming again, repeating the cycle over and over, joyfully.

It was a noisy, full body game that attracted others, both as participants and observers. Before long, we ran out of long blocks. Some children allowed this to be their barrier to entry into the game, so they either moved on or griped while watching the game as an outsider. A few, however, simply picked up shorter blocks and attempted to join in. Unfortunately, the nature of shorter blocks meant that they had to stand closer to the box that was the target of their drumming, placing them in position to be hit and jostled by the longer blocks. Each time this happened, and it began to happen a lot, the child with the shorter block complained, "Hey, you hit me!" which meant the game had to momentarily stop.

Before long, this previously fun game was paused as often as it was in motion, which caused the game to lose much of its savor for the kids who had originally begun playing it. Not only that, but those complaining about not having long blocks began to become louder and more insistent. First one, then another of the long blocks were dropped to the ground as the game was given up by those who had discovered it. These abandoned blocks were then bickered and tussled over by the remaining children. The game resumed with an altered cast of participants. There was no chanting. They were not smiling. The joy had been sucked out of it.

Meanwhile, the three kids who had originated the game, moved off together to an empty space, picked up short blocks and began to play their game together, just the three of them, joyfully, beaming into one another's faces and chanting as they had when the game first spontaneously erupted. They were clearly having more fun than the others, whose game had devolved into a kind of dreary contest. 

Before long, however, a fourth child attempted to join this new game, to the annoyance of the three short block drummers.

"You can't play with us," one of them said. "You have the wrong kind of block."

The ground was covered with dozens of blocks identical to the ones being used in the game, but no matter which one the newcomer tried, he was told, "You have the wrong kind of block." They were excluding him based on what might have appeared to be arbitrary grounds, but having witnessed the entire episode, I knew that their exclusion was based on experience. The previous game had been fun until it had gotten too big and even though the children weren't able to put it into words, they had learned that three was the right number for this game of drumming with cardboard blocks on a cardboard box.

Few things in preschool are more icky, emotional, and complicated than when children exclude one another. Had I only tuned in during the second phase of this game, I would have likely interpreted their attempt to exclude as unfair and would probably have intervened in some way on behalf of the child being left out. But as it was, I knew that their reluctance to add another child to their game had a basis in reason and experience, even if their way of expressing it, of drawing the line, appeared arbitrary. This isn't to say that children (and adults) don't sometimes exclude one another arbitrarily, but only to point out that there is more gray area here than not, which is why children must explore it if they are to ever understand it.

I helped them with their words, "This game is a game for three people." Then I supported the boy who had been excluded, for a perfectly acceptable reason, to find two more children with which to play their own game of drumming on a cardboard box with cardboard blocks.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Telling Our Stories

Yesterday, my wife Jennifer and I went to a local happy hour and enjoyed two hours re-living old stories. We've been together for over four decades now, so there are a lot.

We've experienced our share of highs and lows, but there has never been a dull moment. We've moved households and changed jobs dozens of times. Our lives have been touched by barons and divas as well as oddballs and crackpots, often embodied in the same person. We've taken wild risks, made stupid decisions, failed, floundered, and f---ed up. Yes, there have been high points, successes, and joys, but the stories we re-told last night, the ones we smiled and chucked over were objectively pretty awful as we lived them. Today, they're vital chapters in our story, ones we would never wish away. 

"(W)e think we tell stories, but often the stories tell us," writes Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, her brilliant exploration of the human capacity for narrative.

We are all storytellers, it's what our minds do. The world we "see" around us is really nothing but a collection of photons bombarding our eyes. It's our minds that make sense of them, that assemble them into something we can understand. We tell the story of those photons, just as we tell the story of the molecules, vibrations, electricity, gravity, and other phenomena that the totality of our senses take in. We create our stories both alone and in collaboration with one another, weaving together our agreements and disagreements, our insights and misunderstandings, making a reality that is nothing more or less than the story we tell.

And sometimes, like Jennifer and were doing, we tell the story, while other times it tells us. Much of what we remembered together last night were stories that had told us in the moment, but now, decades later, we have mastered them for better or worse. In therapy, we're meant to dig into those old stories, to disassemble them, to discover the "truth" that will bring us to a place where we can then heal through telling our story in a different way. As we told our stories together last night, it was obvious that this is exactly what we were doing.

Sitting with our memories is the domain of the old. Among writers it's said that the young write of feelings, while the old write of memories. The preschoolers in our lives are only just beginning their lifelong narrative, and it is one made largely of emotion and direct experience rather than sepia-toned reveries. As adults, we study children for clues as to what kind of adult they will become, what story they will tell. Sometimes we can guess at parts of it, but more often we can't. One of the children I was certain would one day become an attorney, did just that. The other became an actor . . . But they're young yet, so who knows, there are many chapters to go.

Some adults are desperate to tell a child's story for them. We see it all the time from parents who envision their baby at Stanford or starring in the movies. Our we see them helicoptering over their babies trying to somehow guarantee that there will be no disappointments or injuries or failures to mar their nascent narratives.

When we see this in parents we may have compassion for the instinct, but we worry that they are creating false or harmful narratives that their child will one day have to painfully rewrite if they are to be truly fulfilled. Or, perhaps worse, we worry that they are robbing their children of the opportunity to tell those vital stories of their resilience, recovery, and persistence.

Solnit writes: 

"I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter. Early on, she assured me that she had measured me as a toddler, doubled my height, and deduced that I would be five foot two, seven inches short than her, when I grew up and that my hair — white blond in my first years, lemon and then honey and then dirty blond streaked by the sun with gold as I grew older — was going to turn brown at any moment . . . This short, brown-haired daughter she decided upon was not terrifying, and she envisioned a modest future for me and occasionally tried to keep me to it."

We see this tendency more easily in parents, but it's likewise a pitfall for us educators. We often can't help but try tell their story right through to kindergarten, first grade, middle school and beyond. We see our role as getting them "ready" for what we think is next in their story. Indeed, we are often explicitly told that this is our job, but it is not. It's each child's job to tell their own story.

These young children have many chapters to go. They will tell and be told. They will sooner or later, whatever we do, find their own narrative. 

I often think that our most reliable guide in interacting with our fellow humans, young or old, is to consider how we will show up in their stories. Will we be friend, villain, or something else, like the Mad Hatter? I certainly don't want to be anyone's Herod or Voldemort or Uriah Heep. Let me be Joseph or Hagrid or Miss Betsy Trotwood and decades from now, when they sit with their memories, let them see that I was one of the people who helped them.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!

Where Questions are More Important Than Answers

Nothing destroys the love of learning more completely than the academic tradition of cramming for tests. Indeed, those last minute, late night cram sessions have very little to do with learning, and everything to do with playing the game of schooling. I would even argue that the very existence of cramming is evidence of the failure of modern schooling.

"Ideas, fact, relationships, stories, histories, possibilities, artistry in words, in sounds, in form and in color crowd into a child's life, stir his feelings, excite his appreciation, and incite his impulses to kindred actives," wrote mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. "It is a saddening thought that on this golden age there falls so often the shadow of the crammer."

That said, I was an excellent crammer as a student. I was an excellent test-taker in general, because I enjoy puzzles and games, which is how I approached them. I don't know exactly when it happened, probably around middle school, but at some point I came to see school as hoops to jump through rather than an opportunity to learn. It wasn't until I discovered play-based learning in preschool that I came to understand that becoming good at schooling had caused me to waste so much of my "golden age." 

We focus on the children that school is obviously failing, but we often don't see that are likewise failing our "good students", teaching them that this game is anything more than a game.

When I started attending cooperative preschool with our daughter, I discovered what school should and could be. By dropping to my knees to be one with the two-year-olds, joining them under tables, in rolling down grassy hills, in entering fully into a doll house, I re-discovered my preschool self, the self that had not yet embraced, like a good boy, the cynical games of school. I found myself inspired by the children's curiosity, their capacity for wondering at the smallest of things. And that incited me to wonder what else I'd missed. I became a willing student, not just of play-based learning in preschool, but learning in general. 

As Whitehead writes in his 1929 essay "The Aims of Education", "We should banish the idea of a mythical, far-off end of education. The pupils must be continually enjoying some fruition and starting afresh." This is what was happening to me during what I now look back on as my awakening, the real beginning of my "education". I was a 35-year-old preschooler starting over by being awed and inspired by dust motes in sunbeams.

School taught me how to get good grades and pass tests, but I wish that it had instead allowed me to see that the joy in learning is, well, the learning. "(A)ll training . . . should begin as well as end in research," writes Whitehead, "and in getting hold of the subject-matter as it occurs in nature." In other words, as it occurs in life itself. As Whitehead's contemporary John Dewey wrote, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

Today, I see myself as a life-long researcher, a collector of perspectives. I still like my puzzles and games, but solutions and victories and good grades and passed tests, are falsehoods that create the illusion of wisdom, of knowledge, while blinding us to what ties it all together.

For too long, the academic game of schooling has been ascendent, deceiving us into thinking that it represents learning and even life itself, attempting to replace each child's self-motivation, their wonder, with an empty series of meaningless external hoops. The children who cannot or will not play the game are deemed failures while those, like me, who embrace the game, are tricked into believing the lie that their success equates to learning.

The real lesson of learning is found in our play-based "pre" schools, under tables and on the slopes of grassy hills, where we finally find life itself, a place where questions are more important than answers. No cramming required.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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!