Teacher Tom

Greatest Hits

2012-05-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I could have told you the exact anniversary, but it was sometime during the early summer of 2009 when I started blogging. I fretted so much over those first few posts, striving to keep them rather bland and non-controversial, worrying about being attacked from all sides by those angry people on the internet, dreaming about being feted as the next great thing by the mysterious internet image-makers. Then, heart in my throat, I'd click the "publish" button and . . . Then what?

It didn't take me long to discover analytics, the tools out there for variously measuring the crude demographics of your readership: what they read, how long they read, where they live, and so on. If you're a blogger yourself, you likely know all about these statistics and their strange allure, these numbers that come to represent the people who come by your little corner of the web. Before long I was obsessively spying on my readers via those numbers several times a day, often just leaving the window open on my computer to track every nuance. I distinctly remember the first day I surpassed 200 readers in a day, driven by a post about health care reform, my first toe in the pool of water outside the straight early childhood eddy. I must say I was giddy and a little afraid. (This post did attract the attention of angry internet people, even though looking at it now it's was a rather mild post compared to some of the things I write now.)

I'm happy to report that my obsession with you as a statistic has faded. It's exhausting living on that kind of they-love-me-they-hate-me roller coaster. For the past year or so, I've been checking the numbers, maybe, once a month and then only when something strikes me as particularly odd, like it did a couple days ago when my volume of email suddenly began to overwhelm me. It seems the post Seven Things To Say Instead Of "Good Job!" struck a cord with many of you, causing it to make the rounds in a wider circle than my writing normally does. Yay! Thank you for sharing!

While I was there, I got curious about my "greatest hits," so to speak, and found that this post has already risen to number 2 on the all-time charts. And while I have a few end-of-the-school-year type posts I'd like to get to, I also know from my years looking at the statistics that weekend readership tends to fall off, while depth of readership rises. So instead of "fresh" material, I thought I'd put together a reading list based on Teacher Tom's all-time most popular posts.

1) "Spoiled Brats" I'm quite proud of this post and it remains at the top of the charts. It was nominated for Most Influential Post in the 2011 Edublog Awards and lost out by a single vote. It's a sort of treatise on how to treat your child like a fully-formed human being without resorting to the command-and-control awfulness of what is often referred to as "tough love."

2) Seven Things To Say Instead Of "Good Job!" I wrote this post around a collection of photos that got me reflecting on the interactions I'd had with kids who had been eager to include me in their accomplishments. Many readers seemed to think that the objection to the phrase "Good job!" is that it's simply overused, thus rendering it meaningless. That's part of it, but the real reason I try to avoid it (along with such pronouncements as "That's beautiful!" "You're so smart!" and "I love it!") is that it puts the focus on external validation (i.e., adult approval). Making informative statements instead of praise is how I acknowledge a child's effort, their internal drive, rather just "rewarding" them with my opinion.

3) Hitting In this post I offer practical tips for what to do about 2-year-olds who hit, including an 8-step plan for learning through conflict. I'm a little embarrassed to see that the entire post is in some odd typeface. I don't know how that happened, but I'm too lazy to dig through the html code to figure it out.

4) Watching Television Is Relaxing This post exploded for a few days and brought me many new readers, largely because some nice folks with much larger audiences than mine linked to it. In it, I use science and research to show how TV is no different than any other narcotic, at least in how it affects the brain. I received a lot of praise for this piece, but it was tempered by some very, very angry responses as well, mostly from people who either felt they had no other choice (for their own sanity) than to put their kids in front of what my mom called "the boob tube," or who were exasperated with me for giving them yet another reason to feel inadequate as a parent.

5) Our "Tall Paintings" I'm soooo happy that one of my preschool art project posts is in the top 5. I'm particularly happy that it's this one. Although there was a great surge of readers during the first few days it was up, this post has picked up "hits" almost every day for over a year.

6) If You Really Want A Smart And Happy Kid This post, in only a few words, really does say everything I know about being a good parent.

7) The Language Of Command This post, in which I forcefully advocate speaking informatively with young children, preceded the "Spoiled Brats" post by a day. It was reader response to this post, especially from those who worried about "spoiling" children, that prompted me to expand upon and clarify my thoughts the following day. I'm quite proud of this post as well. This, along with "Spoiled Brats," forms the basis of not only how I try to work with young children, but with people of all ages.

8) I Have This This post is about the limits of "direct instruction" (the method of teaching being used in most schools in America) and the expansive nature of play-based or inquiry-based teaching.

9) This Is What We Are Up Against I've written, to date, 70 posts in which I discuss my opposition to corporate education reform and my thoughts on what real, positive, research and data based education reform might look like. This is the one that readers seem to like the most. Warning: I pull no punches. People with Libertarian tendencies really don't like this post.

10) This Is What Math Learning Looks Like People who are not entirely sold on a play-based curriculum often ask how children, if left to pursue their own learning in their own ways, ever learn math. In this post I show you what math learning looks like in pictures and in words.

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 Seriousness Of Play

2012-05-25T05:52:00.001-07:00

I feel blessed to work in a place where the inherent educational goodness of play is a given; a place where parents are right there with me as daily witnesses to their children’s learning. As a teacher, I’ve never felt the compulsion to “sell” our program or its benefits in any way other than to be the best teacher I can be.

Up until relatively recent times, the attitude at our school was not an anomaly. It was widely understood that play was the “work” of childhood. The Industrial Revolution, however, did a number on Western society’s thinking on educating children, changing it from its historic roots as a play-based activity into a factory-style one.

But the great educators have never forgotten that at its core, true education, education for the whole child, is play:

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” –Heraclitis

“The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” –Plato

“Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” –Mister Rogers

“For truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.” – Michel de Montaigne

“Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.” –Joseph Chilton Pearce

“The very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.” –Karl Groos

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain at artist once he grows up.” –Pablo Picasso

“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.” –Ezra Pound

“Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.” –Jean Jacques Rousseau

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” –Plato

“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task-garden; heaven is a playgound.” –C.K. Chesterton

“Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” –Diane Ackerman

“Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.” –Kay Redfield Jamison

“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.” –Brian Sutton-Smith

“It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” –D.W. Winnicott

“Pausing to listen to an airplane in the sky, stooping to watch a ladybug on a plant, sitting on a rock to watch the waves crash over the quayside – children have their own agendas and timescales. As they find out more about their world and their place in it; they work hard not to let adults hurry them. We need to hear their voices.” –Cathy Nutbrown

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Once The Marketing Has Rubbed Off

2012-05-24T06:33:00.000-07:00

I know people my age and older who swear that as children they owned, perhaps, a handful of toys: a doll, a ball, maybe a wagon. I was not one of those kids. My bedroom had much more in common with today's children with their dozens, if not hundreds of toys: a resource both cheap and plentiful. It's probably not a coincidence that I also recall our first television set, then our first color set, the second of which brought lots of toys into our home for trail runs in the form of commercials.

But TV commercials probably weren't the biggest driver in our household, at least during my early years: mom was. To this day she's fond of toys -- not the big expensive ones, but all those small gadget-y things that get carried around in pockets for a few days before being allowed to filter their way down to the bottom of the toy box, left there to be re-discovered at intervals separated by months, incorporated into some sort of play, then forgotten again.

When I worked for "the man," my cubicle was decorated with a large assortment of toys, including many that still live with me at the school. If I were a childless, unmarried man, I'm pretty sure my apartment would today be entirely furnished in toys and plaid sleeper-sofas (thus guaranteeing my continued bachelorhood).

But I'm not a childless, unmarried man and I've seen toys from both sides now. I witnessed marketers spark the flame of craving in my daughter, causing her to desire some piece of crap or other, setting her up for life in the consumer society in which we live. And I've not been a curmudgeon about these things, giving in often enough. She will not, I'm certain, grow into an adult who remembers her father as an "old mean-y," neither will she curse me for having been over-indulgent. I feel pretty good about the sweet-spot we hit through most of her girl-dom.

When we moved from our house of 13 years a year ago last January, part of the process was to purge her bedroom of the things she'd outgrown. It looked like it was going to be a daunting task, so I helped her by taking a first cut at things, disposing of some, but collecting and organizing everything questionable into piles on the floor, the plan being for us to go through them together one-by-one. She came in, looked at my handiwork and said, "Throw it all away." I was struck by a mild panic, "Are you sure? All of it? What about this? This? Certainly not this?" But she was firm and we saved nothing.

You see, that's the way humans are about cheap and plentiful resources: easy come, easy go. I didn't actually throw away much of the pile, divvying most it up between the school, Goodwill, and Woodland Park families with older children. Not all of the toys that came and went in our life were brought to us by TV commercials, in fact, as I went through them I was conscious of how many of them were marketing items themselves -- cereal box and Happy Meal toys -- "free" things designed to sell us on movies or lure us in for a junk food lunch, items that have by now lost their commercial viability and are now loose parts in the world, there for children to pick up and use as their imaginations dictate.

It's both easy and correct to critique our culture as a "throw-away" society, to point out the environmental, economic, and social damage of rampant consumerism. Parents should worry about the impact of television and that their children will become afflicted with the psychological disease that causes us to always want the next hot thing, often to the point of sacrificing necessities to have them.

One of our most popular sensory tables at Woodland Park is what I call "the bottom of a kid's toy box," our huge collection mostly made up of these junky, temporary, free and inexpensive items, almost all of which are there by virtue of having passed through my own life. I'm struck that none of the kids any more recognize the characters from Barney or even The Teletubbies, figures that played huge roles for a time in my life. The movie-linked merchandising items mean nothing to them. Occasionally, they come across something they recognize, but mostly they see dolls and wheels, shapes and colors, containers and sparkles, balls and things that jingle when you shake them. The children make collections, take things apart, create games, and generally fiddle around with what they find there.

Working with children, I've lost my love for toys: at least in the way I loved them before. I now see them as inevitable and even useful. They're not going away.

I don't really have a conclusion for this piece, other than that I've found that my daughter had it right, "Throw it all away," because there's always more where that came from and, you know, once the marketing has rubbed off, they're not so bad.

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"You Both Want This Toy"

2012-05-23T05:39:00.002-07:00

It was a classic preschool stand-off: a one-of-a-kind object and two 3-3/4 year-olds who wanted it.

They've been calling it a "lawn mower" all year long. As a boy we called our classic Fisher Price toy the "popcorn popper," a push toy with a clear globe in which, as you wheel it along, the balls inside are "popped" by a mechanism attached to the movement of the wheels. We've taken ours apart many times to have a look at that mechanism, one time adding several tiny devil duckies to pop along with the balls.

There's another "lawn mower" as well -- a wooden Ikea toy with smiley figures that pop in an out of a cylinder as it gets rolled along. We've gone entire school years when these items get played with, maybe, a dozen times; this year they're used every day. The problem is that the "lawn mower" gang tends to be a group of 3-4 boys, which means there is always one or two of them wishing for a turn.

Sometimes it turns into this, a slow motion tugging match between two good friends, both scowling, both determined.

I didn't see it start, but I had seen L. with his hands on the Fisher Price toy only moments before. In addition, we'd not long ago talked at a parent meeting about how P. had in recent months started to assert himself more at school, standing up for himself, speaking out, feeling more confident and in control. We'd even celebrated the fact that part of how this was showing up was by him occasionally trying to snatch toys from his friends.

I put my hand on the toy, holding it with enough firmness that both boys could stop worrying about the other "winning." Their hands remained on the toy, but the tugging stopped. "You both want this toy."

Neither of them said a word.

"I saw L. playing with this lawn mower earlier." That's when I noticed that P. was holding the Ikea toy in his free hand. "You both have lawn mowers."

They remained silent. I tried remaining silent as well, trying to leave space for their own words, my hand still controlling the toy. After a minute or so, I could feel them beginning to tug again: not violently, but steadily.

I said, "I think L. had it first," looking at P. who kept his eyes fixed on the bone of contention.

Finally L. said, "I did have it first."

P. responded by attempting to hand the less glamorous Ikea lawn mower to L, both conceding L.'s point and offering a solution. I said, "It looks like P. wants to trade with you, L."

L. brushed away the offer with his free hand, rejecting the offer. I said, "L. doesn't want that one."

My usual goal in these preschool conflicts isn't to solve the problem, but rather to encourage the children to engage in dialog. It seemed that they both knew what was going on, that at least as long as I was involved, might was not going to make right.

Since my earlier assertion had gone without refutation I said, "L. was playing with it first. We all made a rule," pointing to the list of rules on the wall, "that there is no taking things."

As we waited in silence, I could feel the tension slowly drain out them through the toy we all held together.

Finally, P. released his grip and we all went back to playing.

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!

Giant Foam Blocks

2012-05-22T06:20:00.001-07:00

I've written before about these giant foam blocks and I went back and read that post before bringing them out last week.

Playing with them can be crazy. They create a challenging environment, at least at our school, one of risk and conflict with the ever-present possibility of wildness. I know I have a tendency, honed by experience, to anticipate "problems" with these blocks, so I try to stay out of the area at first, counting on a parent-teacher to help the kids settle into some kind of play. Sometimes that means cooperatively using all the blocks to construct a parking garage or a castle. Sometimes that means launching bodies impulsively into them, pig piling, and tears.

It's hard to have both kinds of play going on at once, and therein lies the challenge of the giant foam blocks. It really only takes one or two body hurlers to make all other efforts for naught. It really only takes one non-cooperative block hoarder to do the same.

Everyone spends a lot of time negotiating when the giant foam blocks come out. There are a lot of declarations of, "This is not a knocking down building," but unless you say it frequently, it's the kind of thing that this environment makes easy to forget. The energy not being put into negotiating is more often than not put into assessing risk.

I suppose if you asked me what I "expect" the kids to do with these blocks, I would say, "Build," but from the moment I saw them in the catalog, I knew there was another side to them: a wild side, a dangerous side, the side that would have appealed to me as a boy. I usually tell the parent-teacher responsible for the block area that I consider playing with these blocks to be the single most dangerous thing we do at Woodland Park. Heads collide. Smaller children have blocks, along with bodies, fall on them. Structures that look both soft and stable, topple over when we try to climb on them.

Their greatest danger, however, lies in their apparently safety. They're soft and light, right? There are no sharp corners, no hard parts. Inexperienced children and adults alike tend to "let down" when they see them, as if these pillow-like qualities reduce their own responsibility be cautious, to assess risk, and consider others. I once made the mistake of laying gym mats down under them: never had we had more tears than on that day as caution was thrown to the wind.

I'll admit there are times when I wonder why I trot these out 2-3 times a year. They're exhausting for all of us, and they occupy a great deal of my precious storage space when not in use, but then I think of how it's an environment in which we hone those aforementioned negotiating and risk assessment skills, how we get to practice studying our friend's faces and bodies for how they might be feeling, how we find ourselves on both ends of the play if we put any time into it at all. As the teacher, I come prepared to work.

Yesterday, for only the second or third time this year, I made it all the way through to the final step in the Descriptive Cue Sequence: setting a condition, which always carries with it for me the stench of failure. I said, "I've seen you knock down a whole bunch of 'not knocking down' buildings and people are feeling angry because they've asked you to stop doing it. If I see you do it again, you'll have to play somewhere else. If you want to knock down a building you can build your own." Like I said, for some of us, the giant foam blocks create an environment in which it's hard to remember things, even important things, and when I saw him launch himself into yet another "castle rampart" I said, "I saw you knock down another 'not knocking down building.' You'll have to play somewhere else." He started to object, but one of his friends chimed in, "I want you to play somewhere else," and that did it.

The way this condition works, the only condition I've ever needed to set out in over a decade of doing this, is that he must leave the area. I watch him do it, escorting him if he needs the help. It is then up to him to decide when he's ready to return. Sometimes that means right away, sometimes that means never. Only once do I remember a child returning before he was ready to play cooperatively and that boy was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Yesterday, our friend returned within minutes, but with a focus on building. I later returned to the area and saw him in the midst of the construction. I said, "I'm going to knock this down," and he answered, "Don't, Teacher Tom, it's not a knocking down building." Nice.

Luca's mom Megan was our parent-teacher on the blue rug yesterday and although these kids played with the giant foam blocks last week, it was Monday which is typically our most high energy day. The first time I checked in with her, she answered, "I'm hanging in there." Later she answered, "I'm having fun."

That's why we keep playing with them.

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 I Learned To Give Up

2012-05-21T06:17:00.003-07:00

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the Pre-K kids re-assumed control of our classroom agenda through doodling together.

For me, however, there was more to it than just what happened on that day. Those kids opened my eyes to a reality I'd been blindly bumping up against all year long hoping, I guess, that it wasn't a reality, expecting that if I just approached things from the right direction, with the right attitude, with the right back story, we could manage to skirt around it. When they all got down there with their tidy markers and drew, I came to a place of acceptance -- late, but I finally got there.

Specifically, I've been frustrated all year long in my attempts to engage this particular group of 9 older kids in messy art projects. At one level, after all, that's kind of what we're known for at Woodland Park: a willingness to, nay an affinity for, giving children the opportunity to freely explore art materials, which usually means getting paint or clay or shaving cream or whatever all over ourselves in a full-body exploration while the adults celebrate, or even participate in, the fun.

From the start, however, these kids have been averse to messy fingers. I first noticed it last fall when we all gathered around the sensory table to mix of a batch of what is commonly called gak: a fascinating mixture of white glue, warm water and borax. They gladly helped dump two gallons of glue into our basin. They had no problem with measuring and adding the water. And they did the same with the borax. But when it came to sticking our hands in there to harvest the gak, the 9 stood there with their hands at their sides, leaving the actual hands on phase to me.

The same thing happened with a paper mache project a couple weeks later. They were all fired up about making a "new planet" to hang from our ceiling by forming a cardboard shell around a balloon, but the reality of the paste was too much.

I hadn't notice it when they were younger, although I knew a couple of them were decidedly mess averse -- there are some in every group. Perhaps it was because last year's older kids were such messy art role models or because their younger selves hadn't yet developed this sensitivity, but whatever the case, things like fly swatter painting, finger painting, hand prints, paint walking, and even pendulum painting were kind of off the table for these kids this year. They'd gladly watch their younger classmates (who, as a group, love to get messy) and adults getting slimy up to our elbows, often offering advice and instruction, but when it came right down to it the answer was, "No thank you. I already washed my hands."

On any given day, especially when the art or sensory table was particularly messy, I'd find a few of my Pre-K friends gathered around our do-it-yourself table happily cutting, stapling, taping, and drawing, making art, but doing so in the tidiest of ways. When the Pre-K kids took to the floor to doodle amongst themselves, that's when it hit me that they had been taking charge of their own art explorations all year long, carefully stepping around the spatter to make things their own.

On the following day, we just kept right on drawing. We rolled out a large sheet of butcher paper and broke out the markers. I fought down the temptation to add bells and whistles. Like in the Pre-K class the day before the older kids fell on it, crowding in at every vacant spot to add their marks to the community drawing project. As some point, they began to add their own bells and whistles by commandeering shapes from a building set around which to trace shapes.

The following day I added rulers, stencils, draftsman's triangles, protractors and other fancy drawing aids. I felt kind of like a slouch, as a teacher, offering up these simple things, but this, I could see is one of the places the Pre-K kids have been taking us all year long.

A couple days later we just used tracing paper over some of our big books and they were at it again, using these drawing aids with focus, concentration, and enthusiasm. I've learned from these kids that I have, at least on this subject, let my own ideas of what Woodland Park is, stand in the way of what it was trying to become. I'm glad these kids finally got through to me.

All year long, with each birthday we celebrated, I've noted aloud to the kids that our paper mache birthday throne is ready for repairs, hoping these Pre-K kids would take up the challenge. They agreed the work needed to be done, but it wasn't going to be them who did it. In fact, one day recently Sylvia informed me that she felt the "little kids" ought to do it.

So that's what we'll do.

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!

Seven Things To Say Instead Of "Good Job!"

2012-05-20T08:33:00.000-07:00

"Teacher Tom! Look!"

"Look, Teacher Tom! Look what I can do!"

"I didn't know you could flip your tummy up on the table and balance with your legs up in the air."

"Look what I figured out, Teacher Tom! I can pop the bubbles by tearing my finger through them. Watch."

"You did that. You figured out how to pop it by tearing your finger through it."

"Teacher Tom, I'm popping them by jumping!"

"I heard it pop! And I heard it again! You're jumping high and coming down hard to make them pop."

"Did you see what I can do? I'm making shapes! Let me show you."

"You're using your finger to hold the plastic circle in place and drawing around it! It looks like you're really concentrating."

"I can do it with other shapes too."

"I have something I want to show you, Teacher Tom. When I pull out these plugs the cars don't race any more and when I plug them back in they work again."

"Hey, you broke the circuit when you unplugged it, and you closed the circuit again when you plugged them in"

"Teacher Tom, Teacher Tom, we made this house."

"Who said that?"

"We did! We're inside here."

"Now I see you. You made a house with a sheet and clothes pins. You must have worked together."

"We did."

"Look what I made."

"You cut out all those shapes with pinking shears and used a glue stick to stick it all together. That was a lot of work. It looks like the two shapes are looking in a mirror."

"A crazy mirror!"

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!

No Place To Raise A Kid

2012-05-19T07:45:00.001-07:00

In Philadelphia the five year plan is to essentially privatize the entire school district, closing 64 schools (25 percent of the system), move nearly half of the kids into charter schools, cut administrative staff by 20 percent, and divide the rest of the district into privately-operated "achievement networks." This is being done, apparently, because the district is in "near collapse" according to very serious people, who are attempting to ram this through because URGENT CATASTROPHE DON'T THINK FOLLOW TRUST US WE KNOW WHAT WE'RE DOING IT'S ALL FOR THE CHILDREN AND KEEPING UP WITH THE CHINESE (cap lock typing and fear-mongering word salad intentional).

This is what author Naomi Klein calls "The Shock Doctrine." Practiced by doctrinaire free-market types who attempt to take advantage of a crisis to step in and implement, wholesale, their brand of "supply side" idealism (other aliases include Reagonomics, trickle down, Friedmanism, Chicago School, laissez fair, and neoliberalism). Again and again during the past 30+ years, we've seen these disaster capitalists, casting themselves in the role of white knights, racing to the scene of "crisis," (e.g., the Falkland Islands, the nations of the old Soviet Union, Iraq, New Orleans after Katrina) where they attempt to use the supposed "clean slate" to impose, while the people are distracted and against popular opinion, their vision of economic Darwinism in which the weak are essentially killed and eaten.

And if there is no actual crisis, they're not above creating one by simultaneously hyperventilating in public and playing the part of stern patriarch, just as Philadelphia's "chief recovery officer" Thomas Knudsen is doing when he says that those who are opposed to his plan need to "grow up and deal with it."

Do not buy their "wise daddy" stance. These guys do not know what they are doing other than to put themselves and their buddies in a position to make buckets of money. Their economic theories may look pretty on paper, but they have failed tragically everywhere they have been tried in the real world. The nation of Iceland is currently in full on citizen's revolt against the neoliberalism that tanked their economy. Iraq was going to be a free market paradise. Somalia is a prime living example of what a low tax, small government, unregulated economy looks like. The end result is always to enrich a few and leave the rest as an empty shell of their former selves.

Now they want to privatize our schools and they're not going to leave us time to think, debate, understand, or look at alternatives because THE WHOLE THING IS ABOUT TO FALL DOWN AROUND US OH DEAR HELP US DEEP POCKET PRIVATIZERS!

I'm not saying our schools can't be improved, nor even that some of them aren't failing, but just as unregulated capitalism has failed everywhere it's ever been tried, there is absolutely no real evidence that privatizing our schools has ever worked to improve educational outcomes. (In fact, the real data indicates the opposite.) Nor is there a lick of proof that doing so will even be cost-effective: Philadelphia officials have even sheepishly admitted that their shock doctrine plan will not save the taxpayers a penny.

For a full dismantling of the Philadelphia plan, please read this excellent, excellent piece by parent activist Helen Gym.

The part about democracy that people often forget is that we don't elect leaders, we elect representatives, at least in theory. That puts the pressure on us to tell our representatives what we want them to do, because if we don't, if we leave a vacuum, our elected officials will listen to someone else and it's quite likely to be someone out to make a buck. This seems to be what's happening with our schools . . . Or at least what the so-called education reformers hope. They hope that we buy their analysis of "crisis." They hope that we look to them as saviors. They hope that we don't question, push back, or offer up inconvenient things like facts based upon research and experience because disaster capitalists can't make money off schools that actually deliver a high quality education. They hope we buy into their shock doctrine.

In fact, the drill-and-kill, Tiger Mom approach favored by these guys and their privatizer buddies actually "harms children" and inhibits creativity and inventiveness in the name of cramming children's heads full of trivia to be regurgitated on standardized tests because that's the most cost-effective way to measure "learning," actual education be damned. It's a model that turns teachers into a kind of burger flipper charged with cranking out the lowest common denominator product. It's an entirely unproven approach, an experiment that doesn't even show promise, that their own acolytes admit can't be supported by data, but from which enterprising disaster capitalists can chisel off chunks of our education dollars for themselves, so they're going for it.

Our elected "leaders" are listening, but not to parents and teachers. Our schools can be better, much better, but disaster capitalism will only gut public education while making a few guys richer, doing, at best, nothing to make our children better educated. Don't fall for the shock doctrine: Somalia is no place to raise a kid.

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Facing Truth

2012-05-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

(After yesterday's post, I thought it would be appropriate to return to this post from last December, edited for today.)

Daddy's gone.

My brother's out hunting

in the mountains.

Big John's been drinking

since the river took Emmy-Lou.

~Neil Young (Powderfinger)

When my daughter Josephine was 6-years-old she reacted strongly to learning that the catastrophe of 9/11 had happened during her lifetime:

"You mean it happened since I've been alive? Why didn't you tell me?" I explained that she had been too little, just 3-years-old. She scolded me, angrily, "I want to know these things! I want you to tell me the truth about these things!"

It's a story I've told before, and one I'll certainly tell again. It was a moment that changed me forever; my wee, innocent baby demanding truth. Until then, I thought I'd been the epitome of an honest parent, never shying away from her questions, but that moment, a moment that occurred as we approached the hole in the ground where once the towers of the World Trade Center had stood, caused my own conceit of integrity to collapse within me.

I hadn't told her about it, I thought, because I hadn't wanted her to be afraid. And now not only was she afraid three years removed, but feeling betrayed by her own father. I'm just glad she had the awareness or courage or whatever it was to call me on it. I don't want to ever again be in that position, not with my child, my wife, or anyone for that matter. It's one thing when the world is crap, it's another to make it crappier.

When we lie, either overtly or by omission, especially to a loved one, we might tell ourselves it's altruism, but at bottom it's almost always an act of cowardice. It's us who don't want to face truth. When we say, "She's too young," we're really saying, I'm not ready to face the pain or the shame or the fear.

We skip pages in books. We fast-forward through the scary parts. We distract their gaze from road kill.

I'm not saying that we should, unsolicited, lay out the whole unvarnished horrible mess before them, if only because we don't need to. It will reveal itself to them soon enough. Our job is neither to distract their gaze nor draw their attention to it. It is rather, out of our love for them, to answer their questions, to speak the truth as we know it, and to say, "I don't know," when that's the truth.

What anchors our children is not a sense that the world is perfect. They already know it isn't. They don't need more happy endings. They need to know we love them enough to tell them the truth, and to accept their emotions, to hold them or talk to them or just be with them.

It's adults, not children who worship the false idol of childhood innocence. It's only adults who don't want to grow up.

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The Troll

2012-05-17T06:26:00.000-07:00

I expected to have done this before now, walked up to play with our neighborhood troll. When we moved to The Center of the Universe last June, I'd envisioned regular visits with The Troll, but as luck would have it, the Seattle Department of Transportation spent most of this school year working on reinforcing the Aurora Bridge under which he lives, making it not impossible to see him, but awfully noisy and dusty to visit.

When I told the kids we were going to walk up there, they all, of course, knew what I was talking about. Many of them pass him every day and judging by our discussion they're all familiar with playing on him. Elena informed me that her mom is "uncomfortable with her climbing to the very top of his head." Archie told us about the great fun we would have "skidding down the hill." Sena said she was a little afraid of him saying, "Every day when we come to school we drive by him and I see him outside the window of the car. I look at him like this," and she showed us how she looks out of the corners of her eyes.

I envy my colleague Jenny of Let the Children Play for many things, but perhaps most of all is that when she takes her kids for a walk, it's in the Australian bush. We have wonderful wild places around here too, but not right outside our fences. What we have is a city, with it's own wonders and hazards, traffic being the ever-present one. But just as Inuit children must learn to safely use a sharp knife by the time they're 3-years-old, city kids need to be able to safely navigate traffic.

There are other special cautions too, especially when playing under a bridge. We decided to "close" the area around the back side of The Troll because, for one thing, it provides access to the top of his head, and I too am uncomfortable with children climbing up there: there are few hand-holds and it's a long fall down his concrete face. Also, the unmistakable signs of recent habitation -- a sleeping bag and a sack of half-consumed groceries -- coupled with warnings from a tourist that they'd seen a syringe nearby gave us all the extra incentive we needed to keep the kids on the light side. Although it was awfully thrilling for a moment when I stood with a small group of kids as they realized that cars were racing past just a few feet over our heads.

The Troll, made of concrete and steel, the stuff of the city, forever emerging from the shadows, feeding off the VW Beetle he's apparently snatched from the bridge, both forbidding and beloved, I think is a perfect metaphor for life in the big city. Those of us who live in the Seattle's houses and apartments, find magic and whimsey in his presence, evoking for us traditional fairy tales, like "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," the Scandinavian folk tale from which he was conceived. But like those ancient tales, The Troll has his dark side as a refuge for those who tragically don't have a roof to call their own or who need a place to hide in order to carry out nefarious activities. The Troll endures, like a brothers Grimm fairy tale, because he speaks a great truth.

When children asked why they couldn't come around to the back side, I simply pointed to the sleeping bag and groceries and said, "Because this is someone's bedroom and I don't want us to mess it up." They all accepted that and went about their play, climbing on those skeletal fingers, scooting along his arms, staring up into his massive nose.

Jenny's kids Down Under must watch for venomous insects and other dangers of the bush. We have our own cautions.

We didn't stay there for long. Violet started to climb on his head, but stopped herself. Archie showed us what it means to skid down the hill.

And Sena set aside her fears to clamber around with her friends. We had our fun, but never forgot the sense of caution that fairy tales teach us. And that is exactly how fairy tales so perfectly reflect what we know is true about the real world: we play in the light, but there is always darkness behind or underneath. Every person who will be well-educated knows this, takes measures against it, then gets about the business of living.

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The Story Of Civilization

2012-05-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

I urge the families that come to Woodland Park to think of our school as an old fashioned neighborhood, the kind that I know existed because I lived in one: a neighborhood in which children spent their days roaming from yard to yard, gathering up friends and playing with them.

In one sense we felt we were alone out there with the other children, as we practiced being human beings together, but we also knew that everywhere we went, there was a mom standing in the window, keeping an eye on us as she washed the dishes or folded the laundry.

That was our preschool and so long as there were other kids, we were learning what we needed to know to build civilization.

"Civilization is a stream with banks.

The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record -- while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, whittle statues.

The story of civilization is what happens on the banks." ~Will Durant

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The Vertical Life

2012-05-15T06:23:00.000-07:00

There's always sadness mixed into this time of year; the melancholy of approaching the end of the school year, knowing that some of these kids, these families, many of whom I've known for 3 or more years (in some cases many more) are moving on. I take comfort, of course, in knowing that every year, most of the kids are returning or that younger siblings will guarantee I stay in touch, but there are always a few of them I'll never see again.

It's in the nature of being a teacher to be a rock in the stream, standing in one place while the river races by, tumbling over and around you, shaping you while you're shaping it.

We started our 3-5's parent meeting last night by going around the circle, remembering nine months back to what we said were our hopes and dreams for our children, then reflecting on the year, what our children learned and what we, the adults, learned as well. There were some tears, as their ought to be, and we laughed a lot too, especially when we thought back to who we all were back then and comparing that to who we are now.

One of the themes of Thomas Mann's great novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) is the passage of time: how when one lives life "horizontally" (reflectively, disengaged, in repose) the time may seem long as you live it, passing slowly, yet when you look back, you see a largely empty blur of sameness that, in fact, passed in flash. When, on the other hand, you live "vertically" (active, engaged, moving forward) the time passes in a flash as you live it, yet seems impossibly rich, full and long in retrospect. As we passed the hopes and dreams torch around our little circle last night, I couldn't help but recognize that we've definitely lived a vertical year together. September was just yesterday, but from the perspective of May, I can't believe all that we've done both as a community (moving to new digs, building a new outdoor classroom, starting a new school) and as individuals. How could we possibly have done all that?

I may, on another day, wind up pulling out some purple-tinted prose to finish writing a sappy piece about all of this, but what I mainly want to do is bask on the best and most concrete reward of being a teacher in this community: the kind words and acts of appreciation that come my way as we wind down for the year. I've had a few other jobs over my half century -- baseball coach, salesman, junior businessman, writer -- none of which provide, like teaching does, this natural, emotional, even cathartic moment in May when we're all still together, but knowing the time is short.

I'm looking forward to summer, but I'm also clinging to these people and their children for two more weeks; and I know I'm not the only one who looks forward to the future, but wishes that the next 14 days would pass as slowly as it passed for Hans Castorp as he lay, horizontal, in his sanatorium bed running the mildest of fevers. But that isn't who we are. We are always vertical together and it will be behind us the next we blink. But oh it will be a time to look back upon and think what fantastic adventures we shared.

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Cleaning Up After The Volcano

2012-05-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

Over the course of Wednesday and Thursday last week our 3-5's class went through two gallons of vinegar and 8 pounds of baking soda in the process of performing free form experiments with the world famous chemical reaction. I'm not counting the two bottles of pink liquid water color they went through as well, mainly because we went through it so fast on the first day that it really wasn't a part of what we did.

We do some version of this several times a year. Typically, I introduce the materials by erupting our homemade paper mache volcano to much fanfare. Then I repeat it, this time waiting for the kids to instruct me on the proper step-by-step method: baking soda, dish soap, paint, then vinegar. (For those of you who don't know, the dish soap makes it a frothy, long lasting eruption.) Then the materials are turned over to the kids.

There's probably a better way to do this. It's certainly tidier when performed in our sensory table, but that's a heavy piece of furniture that only really only comes outdoors in the summer when I know it can stay out there for awhile. I try to control their use of baking soda by giving them specimen cups for scooping it and asking an adult to dole out the vinegar one specimen cup at a time, but there are usually so many of them working so fast creating this fast chemical reaction that we typically burn through the materials in a half hour or less.

In the end, we had several large yoghurt containers partially full of left over pink goo, and a workbench covered in a thick, pink paste of baking soda. Normally, being Seattle, we just let messes like this ride, relying on the rain to wash it clean, but we're currently enjoying a run of warm, dry weather, requiring us to take matters into our own hands.

But that's okay: the Pre-3 class got the job of cleaning it off, employing warm soapy water and sponges for the job. It wasn't the big time popular activity that the previous experience had been, but a crew of four worked hard, for at least as long as it took to make the mess, scrubbing away the "pink snow."

In fact, they cleaned the table several times. They found the yoghurt containers (which I'd sat a few feet away, hoping they'd discover it) and used plastic spoons to scoop more onto the table for a second and third cleaning.

We then discovered that a wet sponge, when first applied to the ground or other surfaces, could be used to transfer some "real dirt" to the already messy table top. So there we were for a good half hour, cleaning, dirtying, then recleaning the workbench, wringing out sponges . . .

. . . playing with bubbles. . .

. . . and scrub, scrub, scrubbing all the while.

Before we left the scene, we sloshed a couple buckets of water across the table top to rinse it off.

In the meantime, over the shoulders of the crew that had taken on the task of cleaning up after the older kids, a fairy and a pirate played in the cabin those same older kids had built for them the day before.

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Verbs

2012-05-13T08:41:00.001-07:00

How do I know what I think until I see what I say. ~E.M. Forster

You can't read and write as much as I do without thinking a lot about words and one of the things I think about the most are verbs. Specifically, I think about the verbs we use to describe exactly what it is teachers do with children.

As I've often mentioned, this blog is, before anything else, is my own personal reflection on what I do as a teacher, what we do as a class, what we do as a school, and sometimes (like yesterday) what we do as a society. Most mornings when I sit down, I usually know what topic or event or activity or photographs I want to explore, and I sometimes have my first line in mind, but it's not until I'm in the midst of wrangling the words into place that I discover what I think.

I often write about things that didn't work, or that didn't work the way I expected them to. And more often than not, I discover that the culprit is that my adult agenda, an agenda I often didn't even know I had, has come into conflict with the children's own agendas. Sometimes I realize this on the fly, but frequently it isn't until I sit down to write, that I discover, usually through the verbs I'm using, what was going on.

For instance, the verb have is a warning signal. I know I'm in trouble if I find myself writing sentences that begin: "Have the children . . ." or "I had the children . . ." This tells me that I've attempted to compel or otherwise get or make the children do something that they don't otherwise want to do. In an emergent, play-based curriculum, this shouldn't be happening, and it tells me that I'm going to have to let go of my own ideas before the children's ideas can emerge.

Likewise, I learn a lot when I'm writing sentences like: "Encourage the children to . . ." or "I urged the kids to . . ." I may be stepping back from the coerciveness of have, opting instead for persuasion, but that still tells me I'm working an agenda not of the children's making, that I'm attempting to pressure or trick them into something that they either aren't willing or able to do. It's an approach that injects unnecessary stress into our relationship as they resist my rhetoric. I've often noticed that it's only when I drop my persuasive efforts that the children relax and then fully engage in what I have to offer.

The other verbs that I watch for are allow or let, as if I'm somehow in a position to give them permission to learn. It suggests to me that I've engaged with them from a position of greater power somehow, of being, by virtue of my size, age or experience, their superior. Ideally, child-led learning calls for teachers to be partners rather than bosses.

Verbs, the action words, I feel embody the essence of the real relationship between the children and me, the teacher. Have, urge, and let are verbs that tell me I've not listened enough to the children, that I've not followed their lead, that I've not observed closely enough. Those verbs tell me that I need to get out of my own head, that my relationship with them is not what it needs to be for our curriculum to work. I'm not here to boss them around, to allow them anything, or to even cajole them into something. I am both a partner and servant: the one who helps them think what they need to think in order to learn what they want to learn.

Now there's a good verb for what a teacher does with a student, help, although it has two sides. When I see that one in my writing I ask myself, "Did I help too much?" The verb help can sometimes tell me I've intervened or directed, but it can also mean that I've provided the tip, or the vocabulary word, or the concept that opens a whole new world for a child.

I often understand what went right when I see my relationship with the children embodied in the verb create. That's definitely part of what what teachers are here to do; to be creative partners. This verb has another side, too, of course. I don't want to be creating on behalf of the children, but it does work for me to create for or alongside them, such as when I create a challenge, or create an environment, or when I sit with them at the art table painting my own painting or sculpting my own artwork from toilet paper tubes and glue.

I also like see the verb invite appear on the screen. I've seen lots of my ECE blogging colleagues describe their art or other activity set ups as invitations. I like that. I still examine it, however, knowing that it's easy to slip into trying to convince them to accept my invitation or that sometimes invitations are really a kind of summons one can't ignore.

Help, create, and invite, therefore, are the double-edged swords of the verb world.

So what verbs best describe my relationship with the children when I'm at my best?

Be.

Play.

Love.

I don't need to examine those verbs. When those verbs are turning up in my posts, I'm golden.

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Competition

2012-05-12T10:51:00.001-07:00

During the course of most of my adult life, I would have answered, "I'm a competitive person." I grew up with a younger brother and we were, much of the time, quite competitive. I played all kinds of sports throughout my youth and reveled in the competition. I loved nothing more than to have the highest score on a test. I still enjoy winning at board games, cards, and even make competitive games out of routine activities. To this day I defeat teenagers at public basketball courts in one-on-one pick up games (it must be humbling for them), enjoy the back and forth of political debate, and strive to catch up to, then re-pass, cyclists who pass me. But I no longer answer, "I'm a competitive person."

A two-track slot car set up might at first appear to invite a classic invitation to compete.

Although I still considered myself competitive, playing both baseball and soccer, my transformation began when I hit the University of Oregon campus as a freshman thinking, "never again," never again would I allow myself to be sucked into the kind of icky social competition in which I'd become mired during high school. You know what kind I'm talking about; it's that rule-less competition in which you must constantly worry about being at the right party, hanging with the right people, dating the right girls, and wearing the right clothes. I'd been reasonably successful at this competition for coolness, I suppose, although I never enjoyed the satisfaction of success to counterbalance the heartbreak of losing, because winning in this sort of game has no definition, the rules are in constant flux, and there is never a moment when you put your hand on your worthy opponent's shoulder to say, "Good game." I was never able to get my mind around that kind of competition and so made a conscious decision to not participate.

This was 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president with his message of free market competition. I was "all in" at the time, still considering myself a competitive person. I figured this brave new social Darwinistic vision for America would especially benefit me, having honed my competitive nature on the field and pitch, as well as in the grade-on-a-curve classroom. I'd read my Ayn Rand, a little Milton Friedman, and my 18-year-old self listened to the things the new president said, re-defining democratic freedom to mean the freedom of enterprise, worthiness as a measure of how much money one could make, and fairness as a new social contract in which we were going to let the invisible hand serve as umpire.

The way the children used it in our preschool classroom, however, it was an exercise

in turn taking, sharing, and cooperation.

Back then, competition was defended as a manifestly good thing, a character builder, an important part of growing up. It's how we learned about winning and losing, discipline, teamwork, and a certain type of focused fierceness. This was the common knowledge and for the most part I agreed, although my support was shaded by the knowledge that competition only worked for me when it had clearly defined rules (like in sports, board games, or this apparently tidy economic model of supply side Reagan-omics), when those who lost were not labeled as "losers," and when the people involved could, after the dust had settled, shake hands and thank one another for the effort.

Today, most developmental experts (and by that I mean those who base their views on research rather than nostalgia) turn a skeptical eye toward competition, at least for children under 10 or 11, especially when adults place too much emphasis on winning. There is still plenty of research out there that points to the benefits of competition for older children, such as learning about abilities and limitations, setting goals, handling loss, developing skills, working together, and enhancing popularity, indicating that organized competition with clearly defined rules, an emphasis on civility, and a concentration on best-efforts over winning, makes it beneficial for a certain type of child. But it also must be emphasized that competition is not the only, or even the best, way to learn these things. And there are always the potential pitfalls of competition, like physical and emotional injury, the humiliation of losing, the ethic of winning at all costs, the undermining of self-confidence, and the emergence of hostility and aggression.

We had to concentrate on the physics of the action and strategize in order to decide

where we were going to position those little yellow guard rails to help keep our

cars on the track.

So even while I maintain a fondness for competition, and still engage in it, we try to keep it out of the preschool classroom as developmentally inappropriate. As children get older, and competition becomes somewhat more appropriate (again, for some, but not necessarily all kids, and in limited doses) it remains important that it not devolve into a kind of free-for-all. Rules still must be clear and strictly enforced to ensure fairness, civility and sportsmanship still must be maintained, and effort still must be emphasized over winning (process over product). This is what I would call "healthy competition," a term that Alfie Kohn calls an oxymoron. (In fact, Kohn makes a strong case against competition altogether, both in this essay to which I've linked and in his book No Contest: The Case Against Competition.)

Our Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll talks a lot about healthy competition, how he wants his players to prove themselves on the field; may the better man win. I have no doubt that these young men compete both honorably and fiercely in practices for their "job," then again on Sundays as part of a team competing against an opponent. These are cream of the crop athletes, guys who've already learned lots of lessons about hard work, setting goals, and handling loss. At the end of the game you see them, helmets off hugging their opponents, smiling, chatting, thanking, congratulating, making plans to meet later for a drink. There are, I'm sure, many unhealthy aspects of this professional competition as well, but mostly it works because rules are followed and sportsmanship is valued. Winning is important to these guys because, well, it's sports, but I assure you that none of them would be out there without having strong internal motivation that drives them to be their very best.

We fiddled around with the electronics to figure out how the system worked.

I'll tell you, however, that from where I sit, it seems that healthy competition in our society is more the exception than the rule. The Reagan Revolution has turned into little more than a bare-knuckled political and economic brawl, in which "survival of the fittest" is achieved by any means possible, rule-lessness (deregulation) is the goal, selfishness is a virtue, and civility is for losers. Corporations have become places in which human beings are merely another resource, in which tricking grandma Millie of her retirement savings is rewarded, and the common good is not even an afterthought in their unhampered pursuit of profit. Government is a place of partisan stalemate, in which the "winners" get whatever they want at the expense of the "losers," and so-call leaders let shouts of "Let them die!" pass without comment while the audience cheers.

This isn't just unhealthy competition, it's a full-on cancer. It rewards viciousness and punishes kindness. It's war. Competition is a very shaky, unreliable, even evil, foundation upon which to organize a society.

We could never have played with this toy if competition had been our guiding

principle. But with cooperation, teamwork, strategy, and compassion for our

friends, we were able to make it work.

Of course, it's not possible to eliminate competition from our society entirely, nor should we seek to. Like it or not, it's a part of human nature and like most of the things that make us human, it's a two-sided coin. Unfettered competition is without a doubt the maw-like gateway to the dark side. Competition with rules, however, designed to serve the common good, competition on a level playing field, competition that embraces fairness, competition that honors sportsmanship, can and does elevate humanity.

But competition, like NFL football, is really just a sideshow in the real course of human progress. An economy or government based upon Randian competition will inevitably kill its host, but only after years of suffering. We must find a way to turn this corner as a society. We must find a way to push back this cancerous revolution and replace it with the certain values of the common good, cooperation, teamwork, sociability, empathy, mercy, and love. These are the real American values: not this Johnny-come-lately fantasy of every man for himself competition.

I'm not a competitive person, but I can appreciate a little one-on-one basketball every now and then, if only for the exercise, to test my skills against those of another, and to prove to myself I haven't lost it. And if I send those teenagers home with stories about the old man who beat them . . . Oh, who am I kidding, they'd never admit it. But in the end it's only something I do as a pass time: it's not important. It's not the core of who I am. It ought not be the core of who we are.

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How To Make School Relevant

2012-05-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

Looking back it seems like life during my school years, sports excepted, was about individual achievement: test scores mostly, and grades. My adult life, however, has been almost exclusively about working with other people to accomplish something. I think this is true for most of us, most of the time, be it in our job, church, hobby, or family.

If education is a preparation for life, then it makes sense to me to model our schools after what our children will actually find themselves doing throughout the rest of their lives: people accomplishing things together. And that's what young children tend to do when left to be themselves.

When I arrived at school yesterday morning, I noticed right away that the outdoor classroom's chairs and benches had been rearranged. There was a chair in the sand pit and the benches were perched along its edges. I wondered if we'd had a midnight visitor, which happens in a city. I returned it all to its regular spots.

I later learned the truth when a couple of the boys started shifting the furniture, moving it first to the sand pit, then eventually up the concrete slope, under the lilacs, continuing the game they'd started after school the day before.

"Teacher Tom, this is our cabin."

As they hauled the furniture across the space, up the slope and then wrangled it into place, they chattered, argued, questioned, and agreed. They thought, problem-solved, joked, and listened. No one expected anyone else to obey. As their mutual vision began to take shape, others joined them, finding roles in the project.

When they ran out of furniture to move, they incorporated our planks, the marimba, a fire truck, and then they started hauling logs.

One of the most universal, time-tested, and I would argue valid, complaints that children have always laid at the feet of traditional schooling is the charge of irrelevancy. My daughter Josephine is on the staff of her school's annual art and poetry publication. She and another student were responsible for tracking submissions and managing the process of acceptance or rejection. Yesterday, when she came home from school she regaled my wife and me with tales of their challenges, debates and resolutions, calling this past week "the most stressful week of my life." She had gone in early on a couple of mornings to get a running start. She had stayed late. They'd developed their own process that involved the prolific use of post-it notes, anguished over the language in their rejection letters, and drank too much coffee. As she told us about her week, I couldn't help but reflect on how incredibly relevant it all was. This is what the great John Dewey talked about when he wrote:

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Josephine also said about the most stressful week of her life, "It was fun." That's what relevancy will do for you.

Instead of teaching children about the world, abstracting it into lectures, worksheets, textbooks or iPad screens, a progressive play-based eduction places children in the actual current of the stream of life, putting them where they engage directly with life itself instead of one step removed.

That's how to make education relevant, which in this case means building a cabin with your friends at the top of the concrete slope among the lilacs.

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The Giant Pillow!

2012-05-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

The educational process has no end beyond itself; it is its own end. ~John Dewey

If it's possible, the Pre-3 class had even more fun than the older kids with our "giant pillow," which is what we've been calling it.

This appears to be some sort of reusable, inflatable packaging for shipping large items. It's strong and lightweight; so light weight that our youngest students can manhandle it, even while it dwarfs them.

And so strong that on Monday a dozen 4 and 5-year-olds reacted by repeatedly pouncing on it. I was both surprised and pleased to find it was still inflated when I returned on Tuesday morning.

The younger children did their share of pouncing as well, but they were more interested in moving and manipulating it. Not only did we discover that a single child could easily move the giant pillow, but that if we worked together we could roll it over, flip it on end, and with a little adult help get it up into the air.

One of us turned it into an impromptu somersault trainer, launching herself right over the top. It was a slow motion trip, giving her plenty of time to get her hands down and tuck her chin.

We had it positioned on a lightly sloped piece of wood chip covered ground, in the top part of the outdoor classroom, near our swing set.

Naturally, it wound up moving in that direction and the swingers knew just what to do . . . Kick!

I know what you're thinking, but this really is such a lightweight balloon-y thing that even when it hits another kid at full speed its an impact without any sort of force or sting, kind of like being hit with a length of foam pipe insulation. We threw it to the swingers to kick back at us over and over as everyone laughed wildly.

I threw it into the air several times. The children jockeyed to make sure it landed on them.

I wonder what this piece of inflatable packaging was originally used to protect. Whatever it was, I'm confident it did the job. I love that it's not only reusable, with a valve for inflating and deflating, but it's ultimately recyclable.

We'll eventually use it up, I'm sure, it's just a matter of time before it receives a puncture, but it made it through some pretty rough play again today, so I'll bet it survives this week. I'm already thinking about ways to use it in combination with the giant tubes.

Maybe we'll throw in some bubble wrap and the spinny barrel thingy and make it a packing material theme. In the meantime, we'll just move it around and keep it away from thorny plants.

We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. ~John Dewey

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Experimenting In A Frictionless World

2012-05-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's post I mentioned our ongoing need to suck water out of rugs. Well, this is a big part of the reason why.

This is our 2-liter bottle based water play set up.

We've cut several bottles in half, leaving us with an equal number of "funnels" and containers to which we've added some lengths of flexible blue tubing from the hardware store, and "fittings" for connecting tubes together as well as to the bottoms of the funnels. We chose tubing that was the same diameter as the bottle openings so the same fittings work on both.

I've found that milk crates are a great way add height to these set ups, not only because they are plastic and allow water to pass through them, but because it's fun to weave tubes through their holes.

I usually start things off with a rig like this: funnels on top that are connected to tubes that emerge from all four sides of the crate. Kids are forever pouring water into the top, then studying to see where it comes out.

We also have a couple of old Brita brand water cisterns.

It's a wonderful free-form experiment station, primarily involving preschoolers handling 1-liter containers of water, which is probably all you need to know to explain the need to suck water from our rug. And without the rug, we just wind up with a slippery floor.

I know you might be thinking that this would be a station better left for outdoors, and we do move it out there sometimes, but doing that, I've found, really changes the play as massive amounts of organic matter gets included in the system. This is all well and good, and quite educational, one of the primary lessons being in clogging and unclogging the works.

Physicists, I'm told, will sometimes need to postulate a frictionless world in order to better understand the dynamics of the rest of a system. Playing with all this indoors, to me, is our version of "frictionless" water play. We have plenty of naturalistic water experimentation outdoors anyway with our cast iron pump set in a world of absorption, mud, and wood chips.

This works more like a laboratory, one in which we've controlled some of the variables in order to develop and test theories about how things work.

"Look, Teacher Tom, I captured water!"

In addition to the basic supplies, we also, over the years have added a number of odds and ends: other gauges and types of tubing, as well as other kinds and sizes of fittings, and full-sized 2-liter bottles.

These are in a box nearby and usually don't come out until the second or third day of play with this apparatus.

I love watching the kids stick things here and there, perhaps not as systematically as a professional scientist, but still taking mental notes, noticing what happens, developing theories on the fly, and always testing.

And then repeating these experiments until they're certain they'll get the same result each time.

There's really not a lot for the adults to do here but provide vocabulary and towels . . .

. . . and to, at the end of our play, suck the water out of our rug.

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Teaching In The Real World

2012-05-08T06:26:00.003-07:00

For quite some time now, I've not myself opened any of the boxes that arrive at our school, instead bringing them into the classroom, enjoying a bit of speculative conversation with the kids about what might be inside, then turning them loose on the project of testing their theories while building their self-contained classroom democracy.

So when our new shop vac arrived, a gift from Addison's grandma Arthea, I said, "Hey, look what we need to open." Judging from the graphic on the outside of the box, a few of us thought (hoped) we'd received an R2D2 style robot, but once Rex told us it was a new vacuum, we rallied around that point of view.

Our old one crapped out on us last week, and we're the kind of school that really needs a way to pull water out of rug, so we're quite grateful for this kindness from across the country.

I asked George and Vivian's dad Terry to keep an eye on the project and when it turned out there was some assembly required, he coached the kids through that as well. And now we once more have the ability to suck a carpet dry.

I'm sure I'd be incapable of working in another kind of school, the sort in which the pedagogically correct thing to do when a box arrives isn't to just turn it over to the kids on the spot. I plan, of course. In fact, I spend the better part of 2 hours each morning planning with my full body, hauling things in and out of the storage room, shifting furniture, pulling out boxes of this or that, but that's all really only in case nothing better pops up during the course of our time together.

Yesterday in another part of the room I'd set up an old battery powered slot car track. I'd tested it, but as it turns out only one of the tracks was working properly. Slot car tracks are a popular challenge, requiring a careful finger on the trigger if your car isn't going to go flying off the track, but that's not what the kids worked on. As the children arrived, they crowded the table, the assembly quickly devolving toward a pushing, demanding mass of humanity. Our full contingent of adults hadn't yet arrived and I was being called elsewhere, so instead of staying to manage the process, I said, "I have to go over there. You guys need to figure out how to take turns or no body's going to have any fun." I then left them. A little later, Luca's mom Megan arrived to take her spot as parent-teacher responsible for our "table toys" station. When I checked in, she said, "It's amazing how well these guys are taking turns."

I'm sure I'd be incapable of working in another kind of school, the sort in which slot car tracks can never be a part of the curriculum, in which broken things get tossed in the trash, and in which children's conflicts require adult management. I don't know how they worked it among themselves -- no one does but the kids involved -- but let me tell you, it wasn't magic, although it was still amazing. I've spent the better part of two years (or more in some cases) working with these children, repeating myself over and over, having my word then walking away. I now work in a school in which the children know what to do when there is only one of something and 20 of them.

On the weekend I grabbed a large brown paper sack, one that looked like an oversized yard waste bag. On it someone had taped a note, "Up for grabs. It inflates!" I almost didn't snag it. In fact, I forgot it the first time, then only went back the following day because I was killing time and saw it again.

Yesterday, I got out the foot pump and we went to work attempting to inflate it, again with Terry's help. The idea was for the kids to do it, but it quickly became clear that they weren't going to be able to pump fast enough to fill the thing as almost as much air was escaping back out through the valve as was going in. So I took on the job. The larger it got, the more the children gathered around.

"What is it?" "Why do we have this?" "It's a big pillow." "I want to jump on it."

I'm sure I'd be incapable of working in another kind of school, the sort in which large, inflatable paper bags don't come into play. At first children were bouncing off the thing, hitting it with their bodies, then being bounced either back or over the thing onto the ground. Terry and I caught the ones we could, but they soon figured out the physics of the thing. We couldn't do much about the ones who knocked noggins, although they soon figured out that the best plan was to all go around to one side, pointing their heads in one direction.

I'm sure I'd be incapable of working in another kind of school, the sort in which problems are just theoretical things to solve on paper or white boards or iPads; the sort in which adults make the rules instead of the kids.

I'm only capable of this, teaching in the real world, and I'm so happy about that.

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Zen And A Visit To The Fire Station

2012-05-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

We recently took a field trip to our local Fire Station 9. Every year we either visit a fire station or fire fighters bring an engine and visit us.

Apparently, it's quite common for young children to run away, or even hide, from fire fighters when called to their homes in emergency situations. So as far as the fire department is concerned, the primary reason for entertaining groups of preschoolers is to familiarize the children with the reality of fire fighters, and to help them understand that even if they look frightening in their turn-out suits, helmets, and oxygen masks, they are, in fact, just regular folks underneath it all.

Usually, one of the fire fighters dons the full suit while the children watch, talking his way through putting on each piece, winding up a fully outfitted fire fighter right before their very eyes, then sort of just hanging out with the kids for a few minutes, letting them touch and talk. This year, however, they wanted an adult volunteer from our group and that turned out to be me. I was fine with it until we got to the oxygen mask. I've never experienced the sensations associated with claustrophobia before, but this gave me some of them. I felt as if I couldn't take a full breath, a fear made worse when fire fighter Joe put is palm over the intake nozzle to make sure we "have a good seal." I held myself together, trusting they knew what they were doing. Things got better when they turned on the oxygen, but needless to say I was eager to be back on the outside.

Because of the size of our group, we visited in two shifts, a second group playing in a nearby playground, then trading places with us. Knowing what was coming, as I lead the second group to the fire house, I made sure to secure a parent volunteer commitment in advance. One of the moms fell for it.

Actually she seemed fine inside the suit, joking around, making Darth Vader sounds through the built-in speaker, but it was instructional for me to see that even though it was his own mom inside that suit, even her own son was clearly frightened by the prospect, not wanting to touch even her gloved hand when she offered it. This is good stuff the fire department is doing.

Before entertaining us, we are expected to run through a bit of curricula that includes a few games and circle time activities focused on fire safety. After a decade of running through the materials, I've adapted it to suit the way our class operates, focusing mainly on what to do in case of a fire ("Crawl under the smoke," "Go outside."), what to do if your clothes catch fire ("Stop, drop, and roll."), what to do if you see a fire fighter in your house ("Go to him."), and a run down of various tools that could start a fire or burn you if used as toys (matches, lighters, stoves, candles, etc.)

We then spent last week trying to reinforce what we'd learned through dramatic play by breaking out our fire fighter toys, which mostly means the fire engine collection.

It's mostly boys who fall on these things and I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I point out that some of these vehicles are more popular than others. This one, in particular, is regularly fought over:

It's desirability was enhanced this year when one of the kids discovered a tiny button that activates the flashing lights, something we'd never known about before. Every now and then a pair of kids would agree to share it, which meant we could have four hands on it at once, but most of the children wanted their own turn. There was a time when I made lists and timed these things, and I still have that tool in the belt should it come to that, but I've found that most of the time it's unnecessary. It usually goes something like this:

Child 1: "I want to use that truck."

Child 2: "I'm using it."

Child 1: "Teacher Tom, he's not sharing."

Teacher Tom: "He's using it. Maybe you can use it when he's finished."

My goal is to try to get the kids discussing this idea, usually with the result of Child 1 agreeing to turn it over when he's finished. Sometimes that's a long wait, but more often than not, I find the truck (or whatever) in the hands of Child 2 within 5 minutes. It doesn't always go this smoothly, and the conversation-process is usually longer and more involved, but turning responsibility for turn taking over the kids works more often than not. They understand, I think, the inherent fairness of taking turns, but tend to push back when they feel they're being strong-armed into it.

Of course, this is a talking process and for many young children the cure is far worse than the disease, so they find work-arounds that often warm my heart. Luca, for instance, is not a big fan of talking things out. He likes to speak is mind, then get back to work, not typically making a big deal out of not getting what he thought he wanted. After an early in the week go-around about the big engine, he decided to go another way, instead adopting this "pumper truck" as his own:

It is an objectively low-appeal vehicle, frankly. It long ago lost all it's parts, including even the roof over the cab. It has no ladder, no equipment, just six wheels and a few stickers to indicate what it once was. It's appeal, however, the charm that Luca found in it, was that when he wanted to play fire fighter, it was always available. By the end of the week he was making a beeline for it the moment he walked in the room. Several times he brought it to me to tell me how cool it was: often saying it just like that, "This pumper truck is cool."

At one point I pointed out to him that he was the only kid playing with the fire trucks and that he could "drive all of them" if he wanted. He surveyed them as if considering my words, then said, "This pumper truck is just like the one at the fire station," then drove it away to put out a fire in a block building.

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Doodling

2012-05-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

One of the defining characteristics of our cooperative preschool is that each class has an evening parent meeting once a month. The first hour is parent education while the second hour is our business meeting. For those of us on the board (as a paid employee, I'm a non-voting member) there is typically another hour of meeting thrown in there. I've written before about how much I struggle, perhaps now more than when I was a boy, with sitting in chairs for long periods of time, so for me these meetings can be challenging. It has nothing to do with the subject matter or the people; it has everything to do with working through an agenda not of my own making.

If you're sitting beside me, you're probably aware of my discomfort as I shift and fidget, cross and re-cross my legs, sit up, lean forward, tap my toes, and doodle. I do a lot of doodling during meetings.

As a boy I loved to draw, usually taking myself into my bedroom when I needed time alone or to re-set myself emotionally, working on detailed drawings that told some sort of story, often war scenes in which I drew the trajectory of each individual bullet with a dotted line as it travelled through space, ricocheting several times before reaching its target. As a younger boy, preschool aged, I spent several solitary drawing sessions attempting to work out the problem of drawing an accurate human figure, one that was more than a face with arms and legs. It was a real ah-hah moment when I realized I'd been neglecting to include a torso (or "tummy" as I then phrased it). It was a discovery that came out of that urge to doodle.

As all our Pre-K classes have for the past decade, this current one is working on a play that will be performed as a treat for our younger classmates, siblings, and parents at the end of the year. With only 3 classroom sessions left before the actual production and still a lot to do, we enter a difficult phase for me as an educator in a play-based curriculum. The children have been creating their vision since January, thinking through every detail of their play, always with the luxury of all the time in the world in front of us, but no longer. Now is crunch time. I don't want to stress them out, but at the same time an agenda has emerged from their efforts and I'm responsible for helping them carry it out. The problem is that this agenda, the children's agenda, has now become my agenda at least insofar has executing it. There are things we want to get done by a certain time. Pretty much everything we've done together for the last few weeks has been about the play: from costume designing and rehearsals to constructing sets and props. The kids, however, lacking my grown-up sense of urgency, aren't always so gung-ho about getting the stuff done when we have the time to do it.

Last Tuesday, for instance, I was performing one-on-one "costume workshops" with each of the kids, trying to get them to commit to details of what they were going to wear in the play. In the meantime Sylvia's mom Toby was working with the kids on making a "fire," while Sena's mom Ann was managing an activity that involved attaching dozens of wax paper butterflies to one of our large set pieces. My head was down during most of this time, but when I did look up, there were kids milling around the room, chatting, twirling, being silly, being kids, and with only a few exceptions not at all tending to the tasks at hand. Toby and Ann were doing much of the work themselves, role modeling like crazy, but it was that whole agenda thing taking over.

The butterfly project, one way or another, did get finished, so I said to Ann, "Now we need to make a building backdrop so the Panther has a target for the webs he shoots out of his mouth." (We all know what that means!) She rolled a long sheet of butcher paper out on the floor, drew a rectangular border around the whole thing, then invited the kids to finish the "doors and windows" of the building with Sharpies.

I went back to my one-on-one "workshops." When I looked up, I no longer saw kids milling around the room. For a moment I thought that a bunch of them must have gone together to the bathroom, but when I stood up for a better view, there they all were, on the floor around that piece of butcher paper. Ann asked me, "Is it okay if they're not drawing doors and windows?"

I could hear them down there in that little world of their own, their heads together, chattering amongst themselves, telling each other about what they were drawing, telling stories about what they were drawing, stories that twined and intertwined, stories with dotted lines connecting this thing with that, including all the ricochets. It was like a gigantic, group doodle, a reaction, I think, to too much time being expected to adhere to an agenda that was no longer their own.

I said to Ann, "Oh sure, whatever they do. It's their play."

It felt good to get back to that place.

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What We Do In School

2012-05-05T07:08:00.000-07:00

Today I want to write about this photograph.

It was a picture I took by accident the other day. It shows a segment of our outdoor classroom in action from the perspective of our workbench. In the foreground you see a couple of girls riding their stick ponies. Those stick ponies are outdoors every day, mainstays of our school, abused by the weather, their fabric heads probably damp from the last rain storm. The girls are engaged in an adventure story they are spinning together, probably about princesses. You see they're moving from one level to the next, I'm guessing they're on their way up into the lilacs, perhaps to the top of the concrete slide.

Behind them is a boy, digging through a tub that is perched on the edge of the sand pit. He's holding a piece of pipe insulation in one hand, which the kids mostly use as fire hoses. There are some toy fire fighter helmets in that box as well, which is probably what he's looking for. Unlike the stick ponies, the box has only been out there for a few days, ever since our field trip to the local fire station. There is another group of boys you can't see in this picture. They're already wearing helmets and holding hose. This boy is preparing himself to enter their game.

Up behind the trees there at the top of the hill, you'll see two children at the cast iron water pump. One is holding a bucket in which he's been collecting "jewels" (florist marbles). The other is pumping water. They appear to be engaged in a conversation. I know that washing the jewels has been a self-selected activity lately, so it might be about that. One of our parent-teachers is making her way up there, perhaps anticipating some sort of conflict and so putting herself in a position to help them through it, but probably just heading to where the children are to be nearby.

There on the left edge of the photo, you'll see a couple boys testing themselves on some of the planks we've placed as bridges to create a more challenging way to move between the upper to the lower levels of the classroom. One of them appears to be approaching cautiously while the other seems to have already completed his traverse, perhaps having inspired his friend to give it a try.

There are more than a dozen other kids and 5-6 other adults you don't see in this snapshot of what we do in school.

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The Gift Of Motivation

2012-05-04T05:37:00.001-07:00

When my wife Jennifer and I were kindergarten shopping one of the schools we looked at required an I.Q. test. I recoiled at the idea, phoning a child psychiatrist friend, looking for support for my knee-jerk response. Of course, testing the intelligence of a 5-year-old is a bad idea.

Richard responded by saying he’d spent his entire career around these tests and had never seen them damage a child in any way. In fact, the kids he tested usually enjoyed taking them. “But,” he added, “I’ve see a lot of parents use the tests to hurt their kids.”

He explained that parents who have their children tested also tend toward being of the high strung, hovering variety, and that these tests just give them one more way to pass their anxiety on to their kids. That’s kind of what I’d expected him to say, but then he went on to add that these tests are just snapshots of a period in time and not predictors of the future. “I try really hard to make sure parents hear me say that I.Q. test results for a 5-year-old are only valid for 6 months." If they get a high score, he said, some parents stick the genius label on their kids as if it’s a badge they get to wear for the rest of their lives. "Then they burden them with praise."

Praise is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to our children.

A 10-year study of New York City 5th graders conducted by Carol Dweck while a professor of psychology at Columbia University, found that praising kids for their intelligence might actually be causing them to underperform academically. It seems that children who have been praised for their innate intellectual gifts tend to give up more easily when challenged, suffer more emotionally when they fail, and avoid taking risks when they perceive there is a chance their genius could fail them.

As Dweck puts it:

Teachers should focus on students' efforts and not on their abilities. When students succeed, teachers should praise their efforts or their strategies, not their intelligence.

I would assert that this is not only true for intelligence, but also for anything that could be construed as “innate,” like beauty, athleticism, or artistic ability. Effort is where praise is best applied because unlike inherent traits, it is something a child can actually control. In Dweck’s study, the children who were praised for their effort rather than intelligence were far more likely to persevere, try new things, and be less hard on themselves when they failed.

But what about self-esteem? How do we help our children build that without praising them?

Researchers at Florida State University concluded:

. . . it is more likely that good performance leads to high self-esteem rather than the other way around . . . (T)he researchers found that efforts to boost self-esteem have not been shown to improve academic performance and may sometimes be counterproductive.

In other words, self-esteem is not built though hollow praise, but rather from mastering skills, which can only be done through experience and hard work. We help our children build confidence by giving them the opportunities to try, try, try again. Encouragement, not praise is our greatest tool.

Retired North Seattle Community College Instructor Tom Drummond takes it one step further. He recommends avoiding praise altogether unless it's spontaneous and genuine, claiming that children, even very young ones, know the difference between sincere and insincere praise. He asserts that an endless barrage of “Good jobs!” teaches children to seek external validation rather than looking into themselves for motivation. Instead, he advises teachers and parents to concentrate on observable facts about a child’s activities.

Instead of, “What a beautiful red circle!” one might simply say, “You used a red crayon to draw a circle.”

Instead of, “You’re a terrific jumper!” one might say, “You’re jumping up.”

Instead of, “You’re so smart!” one might say, “You worked hard at that.”

In the end, it seems to me that this is the gift of motivation: the capacity to continue to strive even when things are difficult. And ultimately that can only come from within.

So now you’re at the end of this post. “Good job! You’re so smart!”

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What Arrogance It Would Take

2012-05-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

I receive quite a bit of communication from businesses that want to sell us educational products, the key part of their pitch being a long lists of what children will learn. I know that school districts, like the Seattle School district, purchase math, literacy, and other curricula from businesses that sell such things, and I'm quite certain that the sales people are very specific about what it is the children will learn, probably on a month by month, chapter by chapter, step by step basis.

I'm kind of baffled by this. How do they know what the kids will learn? And if they really somehow can know what another person will learn, how do they know that this specific knowledge-product is what they really ought to have in their heads and on that particular schedule? What about all the other stuff they could be learning instead? It seems like such a gamble to me; a huge opportunity cost. I mean, what if they're wrong? How can anyone know what specific knowledge will be important in a future that none of us can predict 5 years down the road, let alone 20 or 30 when these kids are out there in the middle of the world?

I think this piece of art, and I'm not exaggerating, is a work of genius.

There seems to be a kind of hubris in this way of approaching education, the idea that the grown-ups get to decide what children will learn. Adults have never been particularly good at predicting the future, especially those of use over 40. And while there is something to be said for the wisdom that comes from experience, if that experience has taught me anything at all, it's that I better be prepared to keep right on learning because the specific set of things I need to know changes year by year, month by month and even day by day. What I needed to know yesterday is obsolete today.

As a teacher, I never (or rarely) pretend to know what the kids will learn, but I do know that they are learning. I know this because what we are about within our four walls is building a community, and in that process, every day, children bump up against their limits, find that there is something they do not know, something they need to know, want to know, and so set about learning it. A progressive, play-based curriculum never needs to be updated, we never need to download a version 2.1 or 2.2. It's always cutting edge because the children are always learning exactly what they need to know to answer the questions they have, to fulfill their self-selected role in our community, to scaffold their way to the next step in their ongoing inquiry about themselves and how to work with the other people.

Our role as experienced adults is not to package up and spoon feed them whatever it is that we, in our own unique process of living for decades in this world, have found useful, but rather to observe carefully and then to make our best guesses about not what they ought to learn, but what they are learning right now, then to be there with vocabulary, a hand, an observation, or, if we are very careful, perhaps a question that will support their inquiry.

When I do something as simple as putting pinking shears, scissors, construction paper, and glue sticks on a table, I don't need a list of what the children will learn. In fact, what arrogance it would take to assume I could make such a list before they have even begun their exploration of these materials.

The object of education is not to fill heads with our predictions about what we think they will need to know, but rather to create a clear field in which children can practice the lifelong habit of learning.

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"And Then A Spider Eats The Mean Witch"

2012-05-02T06:17:00.002-07:00

I haven't shared any of these for awhile. This batch of stories is from waaay back at the beginning of the school year. We've become quite a bit more sophisticated since then. If you want to learn about our storytelling process, click here.

It's just plain silly. Once upon a time there was a princess that lived with an eyeball. The eyeball kept jumping all around the castle and then it was the princess' birthday. And the eyeball was jumping around the castle too much because it was excited. And then the princess said, "Oh, please would you stop jumping around because I have my first guest." And then the eyeball said, "Sorry, this trampoline is so springy that I can't stop jumping up an down on it." And then the eyeball said, "Woo hoo! It was also my birthday present because don't we have our birthday on the same day?" And the eyeball said, "My family is coming for my birthday." The princess turned 11-years-old. ~Sylvia

"Eyeball" has become an automatic "laugh line" in our stories this year.

It's about a eyeball and a princess. And the princess' name was my name. And I had a pet chameleon dressed as the eyeball. And then he loved to bounce around. And the princess didn't mind because she liked to bounce around too. And then -- this is the part when it gets really nice -- I need a bunny and a chameleon. Only the Bunny and the eyeball knew what was in store, except for the princess who was doing what she did the last day. And they just did reminded the princess that she did it the last day. ~Sienna

The word "toilet" is, of course, another way to make sure your audience will enjoy your story.

My story is about Monster. Then a monster creeped into town. Then Jody bumped into the monster. Then the real Jody fell into the book. And he didn't know he was actually in there. And then a eyeball bumped into the wall. And then he bumped into a piece of glass. And then he bumped into toilet! And then he bumped into the words. Then he bumped into a bear. Then he bumped into the wall again. And then he bumped into the ground. And then he bumped into eye glasses. Then he bumped into the ground again. Then he bumped into the letter "J." Then the letter "O." Then the letter "D." And then he bumped into the letter "Y." ~Jody

Some of our stories are non-fiction. I particularly love how this one seems to capture the emotional content of the experience.

Play with Henry, Henry, Henry. Even longer than him. We play and play and play. And then he goes home. And then Calder does the solar system puzzle. ~Calder

A elephant comes and tries to eat a giraffe. Yes, and a monkey comes in and tries to eat a elephant. A monkey comes and tries to eat a whole jungle. Yes, and what is it down there? ~Lily

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess that was named Aurora. The princess had a crown, even the fairies. And the fairies came and said, "Why don't you fly?" The princess said, "Because my wings are broken." They went out to the pond and they got their bathing suits on. One was sparkly and one had butterflies on it. ~Sadie

When our real life friends are included in the stories, we always have to ask permission first.

My story is about me and Sadie going to pick cranberries. And then we went home to make cranberry shortcake. And then we both ate it and we both kept doing it again and again and again. And then a mean witch come. And then a spider eats the mean witch. And then there was a mean prince kitty. And then the spider ate the kitty's eye. And then the wicked witch ate the sparkles off my dress. And then she just ate you! ~Elena

Someone named Strawberry. And someone ate the strawberry. And someone ate poisonous. And they decided to paint a picture for their mom. And that's not the end. Then Calder took the strawberry. And they tried to look for a worm, but they couldn't. And then they builded a block tower. And then they painted a wall. And then they took a pen they were not supposed to have. And then they pick a flower for their mom and dad. And then Sasha came and took the strawberries. ~Simone

Sometimes you can tell what the kids did on the weekends . . . And how their parents felt about it.

Redskins beat the Seahawks. Game stole. ~Luca

And here's one with a surprise ending!

Once upon a time there was one unicorn bunny, one horse and one unicorn and pegasus. And they went everywhere they could, but each once of them got trapped in some kind of trap. The trap was too small for them all so they just stretched out. And then they got free. Then the BlahBlahBlahBlah came and said, "You can't get out of my next trap!" And they got the next trap and he opened up the bottle and they growed small and got trapped. The second trap was their home. The BlahBlahBlahBlah got the keys that they had and locked them all up. So they had a different idea and they got a golden car. And they drove to their house. And then the kitty went jumping and flipped on each of their heads. And then a big gigantic drum came and drummed them really loud. So they put their ear plugs in. And then a truck came and put them in the zoo. And a truck came and bumped them in the head. Then then end . . . Wait! There's still more. And they got free and played and played, but they never went anywhere but home again. And then they travelled again. ~Violet

If you want to read more of our stories from our 3-5's class, here are the links:

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories

And Now The Children Tell Their Stories 2

"There Was A Bad Dream In My Bed"

Where The Wild Things Are

Stories From The Edge

Short, Smart, Sweet And Silly

A Muddy Puddle Of Morality

Wearing His Cape Every Day

One Thing At A Time

And Now For Something Completely Silly

"I'm Thinking Something To Ella"