Teacher Tom

Mouse Trap

2012-01-27T06:24:00.000-08:00

I suppose we all do this, buy toys from our own childhood with which to play with our own children. One of the many I purchased like this was the board game Mouse Trap. I'd always thought, even as a boy, that it was poorly designed as a game, but as a Rube Goldberg Contraption it is magnificent, failing just often enough, even when apparently set up perfectly, to create tension among all the players each time one turned the crank to set the whole thing in motion, which caused wild cheering when it did work.

That the trap would fail to operate properly each time, was built into the game, but even more importantly, it forced the players to observe closely, theorize, and continually tinker with it so as to make it operate just right. When I bought it for my daughter, she was too young (the recommended minimum age is 6) to build the apparatus herself, which was fine with me, I liked doing it for her, but in the crush of all the other things we did together, Mouse Trap got pushed to the back of the game closet and really didn't get used much.

Sadly, it has had a similar experience during its life at Woodland Park. I knew it could only possibly be used with the oldest kids in our Pre-K class, and even then it would require fairly intense adult participation, not only to get it built, but also to manage all those little pieces, any one of which getting lost would render the machine inoperable. It had found its way to the back of a shelf and forgotten, but when we moved in June and I un-boxed it at the new location I told myself, "We use it this year or it's gone."

I found my chance last Tuesday when the public school had an early release and a couple 7-year-old siblings were going to join us for the day.

Time was somewhat limited and I didn't want them monkeying around with playing the game, so I "sold" it as a puzzle. When I pulled it out in front of the assembled group there was a general cry of, "Mouse Trap!" which I might have expected had I thought of it given that most of the kids this year have older siblings.

Sena's sister Ava elected to do other things, so that left Sylvia's brother Zachary to be our resident kid expert on Mouse Trap. And, oh was he a saint about it!

When the box was opened, little hands immediately started grabbing the many small plastic parts, examining them, talking about them, trying to make sense of what they were looking at. "It's stairs!" "Here's a bucket!" "I have a blue mouse!" "A stop sign!" Zachary, however, was all business. I heard him inform the group, which was at that time not apparently paying attention, that they had to start with the board which he unfolded on the rug.

I wasn't there for the whole process, but each time I swung by a few more pieces were in place. I heard Zachary's voice all the while coaxing and commanding. Addison's mom Jen was the parent-teacher overseeing the activity. She seemed to spend most of the time either laughing or amplifying Zachary's words -- "Does anyone have the boot?" "We're looking for the long pole with the hand on the end." "Is anyone sitting on it?"

Frankly, it was a sort of chaotic scrum, with Zachary remaining mostly calmly in the midst of it, trying his best to lead this project through to completion. No one asked him to take on that role, but he did, I suppose, by virtue of his personality and slightly advanced age. The children didn't seem to be paying attention to him as they chattered and tinkered on their own, but the trap was getting built, one precarious piece at a time. Many of the parts had to be re-built over and over as one child then another would bump it or simply move it to where she thought it might better belong. It was the kind of situation that had I been leading might have turned into an adult-directed "Let's take turns" kind of thing.

But from my vantage point standing above it all, I watched a process not work through the step-by-step approach I would have favored (and I suppose Zachary would have preferred as well), but rather through a kind of ebb and flow. At one point he did raise his voice, but I could hardly blame him.

Several times they got to the point that the contraption seemed ready to activate, all those little pieces balanced in place, only to have one child or other reach across the board knocking a piece askew or accidentally activating one part of the machine before its time. Some of the kids were playing games with the small mouse shaped tokens, dancing them around the trap end of the machine, pretending to eat cheese. This was clearly fun, but didn't help.

We were starting to run out of time. At one of the points when the machine appeared ready to go, I intervened, commanding, "Okay, everyone back up! Don't touch anything!" Zachary sat with his fingers on the crank. I whispered urgently, "Now, Zachary, turn the crank," but he didn't. Instead, all his hard work as leader before him, a precarious puzzle at the mercy of any one of his team of lurch-y preschoolers, he paused and said to the children playing with the mouse shaped tokens, "If you want your mice to be trapped you have to put them there." Naturally, as he waited for that to happen, the post holding the cage got bumped and it rattled down. In the excitement of trying to get it back in place, several of the other pieces got jostled, bumped, and otherwise required resetting.

Finally, we thought we had it once more. This time Zachary didn't hesitate. We watched the boot kick the stop sign, causing the little ball to roll down the stairway and into the winding gutter. It got stuck at the bottom, so Zachary, with his finger, nudged the hand that caused the second ball to drop into the sky-high bathtub, it plummeting through the hole in the bottom, landing on the diving board, but failed to launch the man into the round basin. Zachary again jostled the thing, causing the trap to descend and finally capture the mice.

Everyone cheered, except for Zachary, who wore an expression that looked proud, but not completely satisfied. And he should have felt proud. I doubt there is an adult in the world who could have managed this project so well while allowing the children so much freedom for their own expression. Everyone felt involved and engaged. Everyone felt part of the success.

And that was it. It was time to put it all away.

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Skiing

2012-01-26T05:59:00.000-08:00

We were standing in the upper part of our two-level sand pit. I perceived that a pair of plastic gutter lengths were in the way. I nested one inside the other and tossed them a little ways down the hill, out of the way. When they hit the ground, they popped apart, landing side-by-side pointing downhill.

I think it was Grace who said, "Those are skis."

We gathered around to look at them, 2-year-olds, wondering about what Grace had told us.

I waited until I was sure that no one else wanted to speak first, then asked, "How do they work?"

"You get in them and go down." Grace stepped into them, facing down hill. She then walked, carefully, a foot in each gutter, down the hill.

I didn't say, "Be careful."

Others wanted to try it too, spontaneously queuing up to take a turn on the skis. Yes, 2-year-olds queued up on their own without an adult coaching them into it. They carefully scooted down the hill in them, their feet moving in the gutters while the gutters sunk deeper into the sand, as cautious as any first time skiers on a bunny slope.

It was over in about 5 minutes, each of them taking two or three turns skiing down the hill. Some of the children chose to watch: maybe next time.

Lilyanna discovered the game just as the others were moving on, the gutters now containing a healthy sprinkling of sand. She stepped into them, then sank into a balanced squat, actually sliding down the hill in those sand-slippery gutters.

She did it two or three turns. On the fourth and fifth, she fell on purpose, laughing joyfully. No one loves a controlled fall more than Lilyanna.

Then we were done skiing.

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But We Still Have Soooo Much To Do!

2012-01-25T05:46:00.000-08:00

A big part of celebrating Chinese New Year is cleaning up in preparation for the big day. (Since we missed a week of anticipation due to snow, we're actually celebrating next Monday.) I picked up a few child-sized whisk brooms, dust pans, and feather dusters at Daiso, the Japanese $1.50 store.

We were using rice in the sensory table so I knew there would be plenty of opportunities to use them.

Clean up time already stands at the core of our curriculum, the time when the children truly claim ownership of their school, but this is different. There is no drum and song to announce the proper time for cleaning up; there are simply tools to do the work and work to be done.

When a little rice was smuggled in a box to the top of the loft, then accidentally spilled, I said, "Don't worry, we have a brooms," and a team was on it instantly. I won't vouch for their effectiveness in getting all those grains into those pink dustpans, but I will for the diligence with which they endeavored to be effective.

There's hardly been a moment these past two days when there wasn't a child down on her knees, working to get that rice up off the floor. In fact, the two year olds, as one might have anticipated, made a game of it, dumping it intentionally on the floor, then sweeping it back up.

All the while I was passing through the room, play acting the part, "We have to get the whole school clean for the new year," "Oh, we have so much work to do to get ready," "This place is so dirty from the old year. We have to get it ready for the new one." That kind of thing. (I don't know if Chinese families are really like this, but nearly every book we own on the topic seems to convey this kind of feverish cleaning, and none of our several families of Chinese heritage have corrected me.)

At one point River and Luca were playing a game that involved carrying all of the toy food from our toy fridge and scattering it in the lower level of the loft. It's the kind of "big mess" game that preschoolers often play, one that is labor and time intensive during clean-up time. Just before that time rolled around, however, I began to hear a chant coming from that side of the room, "Clean up, clean up, clean up," and sure enough there were the two boys reversing their game from earlier, returning all the food back where it belonged. Naturally, I delayed our official clean up time until they were done. I also want to point out that there was no need to thank them or even "notice" what they'd done: it was simply what we do when we're together in preschool, especially during this week as we prepare for the new year.

And just as no one needed to tell the boys "Good job!" for putting away the toys, no one needed to tell the children, "Not like that!" when they experimented with the dust pans and brooms in ways other than for which they were intended.

Later, the thunder drum was upended and carried around the outdoor classroom as kids filled it with "garbage" (e.g., toys that appeared dirty). I'm starting to have confidence we'll be ready for the new year, but we still have soooo much to do!

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Lily's Courage Had Rubbed Off On Them

2012-01-24T06:03:00.000-08:00

Last week it snowed in Seattle, a fairly rare thing, but it was enough to close the schools. As wonderful as snow days are, arriving back to school on Chinese New Year without a week to prepare was kind of a bummer, so we've decided that this year, at Woodland Park, the new year begins next Monday.

I knew that this is the Year of the Dragon, but what I didn't know was that it's specifically the Year of the Water Dragon, a bit of information Violet shared with us as we took a look at Demi's magnificently illustrated book Dragons and Fantastic Creatures, one of my top 10 children's books of all time. I don't care how unruly the kids are, when this book comes out, a focused hush falls over them.

Unlike the tradition of western dragons with their fire breathing and gold hoarding, these are good, wise, powerful beings like the Creative Dragon, the Mountain Dragon, the Thunder Dragon, and, of course, the Heavenly Dragon, a dragon so large that the illustration must be folded out four pages wide.

We are a lucky school in that we also own a small parade dragon head. It's actually a lion's head, typically used for the famed lion dance, but it looks to us enough like the dragons we see in our books and parades that we've declared it a "dragon head."

For years I treasured it too much, keeping it out of reach, hanging it from the ceiling as a decoration, but for the last couple years, as I've turned more and more of the children's education over the to the children themselves, I've relaxed my control of the thing.

It takes a lot of courage for most of the kids to wear the dragon head. When we arrived at school yesterday, I danced around with it on for a bit, offering it to the kids, but only Rex took me up on it. As the day wore on, however, more and more of the children were willing to give it a try, although hardly most of them. The reluctance, I'm guessing, has to do with the perceived fierceness of the face. Putting it on is almost like being swallowed by this strange creature. The experience of being inside, on the other hand, with your hearing muffled and eyesight limited, is far different from what one might anticipate from its colorful outward appearance. Most of the children only let the thing sit on their heads for seconds before removing it.

In fact, Lily and Rex were the only two kids who spent any significant time playing inside the dragon yesterday, Lily in particular enjoying her time as the center of attention.

Some of the kids noticed, while Lily was inside, that the mask was dusty and went after it with our new classroom feather dusters. Others enjoyed peeking at their friend through the mouth, opening and closing it in a game of peek-a-boo. It interested me that while the mask had been in the classroom all morning, it was only when Lily animated it that the children really seemed interesting in exploring it, touching the eyes, the whiskers, the bouncing antenna, and the long fabric tail.

At one point two other children managed to get their heads inside the mask along with Lily, perhaps needing the comfort of others to be in there.

I'm pretty sure Lily would have spent more time as our classroom dragon, but before long there was a queue of children clamoring for their turn. Lily's courage had finally rubbed off on them.

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This Is The Critical Phase

2012-01-23T06:18:00.000-08:00

My wife and I have a joke we tell each other: "This is the critical phase." Voiced in moments of stress or anticipation, it never makes us laugh, it's not that kind of joke, but it always make us smile, reminding us that we've been here before and we'll be here again.

I have a picture in my head, maybe we all do, of what life will be like once we're past the current critical phase. It's a picture in which all the home repairs are handled, my loved ones are contentedly thriving in their own endeavors, and money is not an issue. It seems like so little to ask, sometimes it seems like it's right around the corner, but when I look up I see yet again that this is the critical phase.

That's what it's all about, after all, getting up each morning and wrestling life into shape. And when things do start to feel a little settled, when we do start feeling masterful, in control, that's when we're most likely to do something really "stupid" like take a risk. You know, something like agreeing to chair a local non-profit's annual fundraising auction, or taking piano lessons, or hosting a dinner party, or starting a new school. And there we are again: "This is the critical phase." People are counting on us, we are counting on ourselves, there are obstacles to overcome, ledges to walk, the prospect of failure in the offing.

I try to learn the lesson this time, don't bite off more than I can chew, don't worry about falling, but then I remember that I'm going to be getting out of bed each morning and wrestle with life anyway, even if it's just household chores. It might as well be with new challenges, ones with a bit of risk attached, because that's the only way I'm ever going to learn anything new. And after all, that's why we're here.

From critical phase to critical phase we go, step over step, hanging on, moving forward, perhaps wishing it could be different, but knowing all the while that we wouldn't have it any other way.

This is the critical phase.

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Banning Books

2012-01-22T10:33:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I updated and re-posted a piece on spanking. In it I made the statement that I hoped that if one continued to insist on engaging in this violent practice, at least, as reasonable people, we could agree that "if the child is too young to understand why he is being spanked, he is too young to be spanked."

In the comments a reader responded, in part:

"I've heard several times the argument that 4-5 is "too old" for spanking, that once they're old enough to reason and communicate with, spanking is no longer "necessary" . . . The idea of striking a baby (or baby that walks -- toddler) is abhorrent, but some people do believe they "know better" and that spanking is the best/only way to communicate with a non-verbal child."

Don't get me wrong, this reader is also morally against spanking, but was only trying to point out that I was incorrect in my assumption that "everyone agrees." What I actually wrote was that "I hope every reasonable person agrees." A person who buys this rationale for hitting babies is not a reasonable person. I've been a little sick since reading this: a mixture of deep pit-of-the-stomach sadness and impotent rage. Most sickening, I think, is that there is a kind of logic in this argument, one that a person unpracticed in the habits of critical thinking might very well accept, especially if it comes from a purported authority figure.

(I am, in fact, quite certain that there are some people out there propagating this heinousness by playing-acting in the role of "authority." I'm equally certain that someone who reads this will know from whence this is abusive idea comes. And I'm not at all certain that I want to know who it is because I just might not be able to handle having a face attached to this viciousness. But that's not what I want to write about today.)

We too often get lost in the letters and numbers of literacy and math when we discuss education, neglecting, I think, the far more, or at least equally, important aspects of what education ought to be. (I'll try this again) I hope every reasonable person agrees that the development of critical thinking skills stands at the top of the list of things we want from education, if only to make sure our children are competent to protect themselves from charlatans who would, for instance, try to convince them that hitting babies is a loving way to communicate with them. Of course, we want our children to grow into adults capable of thinking for themselves, clearly, skeptically, with an open mind, but backed up with the incisiveness of logic, the basic knowledge of history, literature and science, and compassion for those who are in some way weaker than ourselves.

I'm sure by now you've heard the story that the Tucson Unified Public School District has "banned" certain books, all of which were texts being used in their Mexican-American studies program. I just want to be clear that they were blackmailed into this by the Arizona Department of Education who threatened to withhold some $14 million in funds should they not comply. There are not many school districts in this day and age that can afford that kind of hole in their budget, so one can hardly blame them for giving in. The district has pointed out that the media reports are wrong, that the books in question have not been banned. They will still apparently be available to students through the library, just not as part of classroom curricula.

What's going on in Arizona is not so much an attack on books as an attack on critical thinking, an attack lead by a charlatan who is using the same kind of "logic" that leads to the argument that hitting is a form of loving communication. In this case, there is a face to this viciousness and it's Arizona Superintendent for Public Instruction John Huppenthal who has been for the past two years campaigning to stop the Mexican-American studies program essentially using the argument that teaching American history from the perspective of Hispanic and indigenous people, rather than from the point of view of the northern European colonizers, hampers critical thinking and, in fact, promotes racism.

There is, like with the baby spankers, a kind of perverse logic at play here, the kind that appeals to those who struggle with actual critical thinking. It goes something like this: the kids in the Mexican-American studies classes are only learning about American history from the perspective of those who were ultimately supplanted by the current dominant culture, a dominant culture that has not always treated them fairly, humanely, or even as full human beings, often enslaving and murdering them only on the basis of their ethnic or racial heritage. Huppenthal and his followers don't deny this history, but are wailing that teaching it, and teaching it in this way, will lead to resentment of white people, a division between the races; that it tells a story of oppressor-and-oppressed, one at odds with the mythologized traditional telling of our history as one long, triumphant march toward freedom and equality for all. They throw out the words "indoctrination," "racism," and "class war," by way to supporting their point of view.

In other words, what Huppenthal and his supporters are calling for is that these students, in a school district that is 60 percent Hispanic, continue to be taught the same version of history that they have been taught since they were in kindergarten. It's not a bad version of history, full of lots of great feats and edifying ideas, but history is always told with a perspective, usually from that of the "winners," and if anything it's this version of "history" that is the indoctrination. Huppenthal's version of history is one that primarily concerns itself with the perspective of the European conquerors. I'm sure, judging from his comments, that he wouldn't mind if other points-of-view were considered, say as sidebars to the main text, which is the way it's most often been done, but no, his objection is to a single class being given over to an alternative vision.

Of course, when considered in the context of a child's entire educational history, not to mention portrayals in popular media, the Mexican-American studies program is still little more than a sidebar, one that challenges students to consider, for once, history from the side of the "losers," to view history through the lens of Marxism, to consider current events for a few hours a week through a re-interpretation of the dominant paradigm. Alternative perspectives, such as that of a minority, and ideologies, such as Marxism, are the tools of critical thinking. Of course, Huppenthal would be correct if this Mexican-American studies viewpoint were the only one being taught to the children in Tucson's public schools; then it would be an indoctrination in the way that the "traditional" telling of American history has been a kind of indoctrination for the children up until they hit this curriculum in high school.

The inability to step outside of our own shoes and into those of another is exactly the kind of thing that misleads people into believing that a baby can somehow understand why it is being hit by the person who is supposed to love her the most. It doesn't take a lot of looking at the world from a baby's perspective to understand why hitting it is a bad, bad idea. It's understandable why people, stirred up by charlatans like Huppenthal and his narrow up-is-down logic might feel threatened by children being taught to look at the world from all sides, including those that might actually assert that up is indeed up, sideways or backwards. That's because when only one perspective is allowed, it becomes an article not of fact, but of faith, and it scares the daylights out of people to have their faith challenged.

At the core of this controversy is a new Arizona law, promoted by Huppenthal and his supporters, that makes illegal any class that "promote(s) resentment toward a race or class of people." That pretty much outlaws the teaching of history altogether, which has largely been, and continues to be, the struggle between races and classes.

As many of you know, Shakespeare is one of the centerpieces of our family life together. His genius is one of those intersections at which my wife, daughter, and I meet in agreement and common passion. So it has outraged us all that among the books reportedly "banned" in Tucson is The Tempest, a play that is near and dear of our hearts. I've been having a hard time comprehending that one. My daughter Josephine pointed out that Romeo and Juliet has often been banned by schools due to its themes of pre-marital sex and suicide, but we could not at first fathom why The Tempest could be found to "promote resentment toward a race or class of people."

It was Josephine who proposed that it must have something to do with Caliban, the only inhabitant of the island ruled by Prospero, who reviles him as some sort of less than human beast ("mooncalf") and forces him into a life of servitude. It took us awhile, but we finally figured out that the play must have been taught by some of the teachers as a kind of allegory of European conquest of the Americas, in which Prospero arrives on the island, supplants the witch Sycorax as ruler, then enslaves her son. That the play ends in contrition and forgiveness, a place to which we are still struggling to arrive as a nation, probably only makes it more threatening to those who hold firm to their faith in the always triumphant one-perspective version of history.

I am incredibly gratified that my 15-year-old daughter has the critical thinking skills, and the breadth of knowledge, to help me work this out. What a creative way for these teachers to use this great piece of literature as a new perspective, or rather a 400 year old perspective from within the European conqueror perspective, to look at our nation's history. So you see, The Tempest has not been banned, but rather only this interpretation of the play has been banned. The Tucson schools haven't been forced to ban books, but to, much worse, ban critical thinking, which I see is the real purpose of Huppenthal and his ilk. You see, critical thinkers aren't apt to just take things on faith and that, for unreasonable people, is a very frightening thing.

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Our New School!

2012-01-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a short and sweet post today. I'm heading out soon to a preschool fair hosted by the Moms Club of Seattle NW where the North Seattle Community College cooperative preschools will have a table. Ordinarily, I don't attend these events, but this year is different in that the Woodland Park community has decided to add a 5's program for the coming fall and I want to be there personally to talk with parents about it.

The idea of adding a 5's program to our community of schools has been percolating since we moved to the Center of the Universe last June. A group of us have decided to take the plunge and enroll a class of 17-20 for the 2012-13 school year. This will be a 4-day-a-week afternoon program for kids who turn 5 on or before December 31, 2012, and whose parents want to take a transitional year before kindergarten. We also know that there are some families whose children are enrolled in morning half-day public school kindergarten who want to supplement that with an afternoon play-based program. This also might be a good choice for those who have been home schooling through these preschool years and are now looking to explore school with their child in a community of like-minded parents.

The class will be taught by yours truly.

If you happen to be a reader in Seattle and think this sounds like it might be right for your child, click here for more information. If you're new to cooperatives, please make sure to take a good look at the section labeled "Parent Participation includes." We are a low tuition, high parent commitment kind of operation: it's the strength of our schools. If you want more detailed information about how our cooperatives work, you might want to click over to my "Cooperative Nuts and Bolts" series (read the articles from the bottom up).

I'm excited about this for all kinds of reasons, not the least being that for some kids at least, I will now be their teacher for 4 full years, meaning I also get to keep their families in my life for that extra year. I'm jazzed about the creative process of building a new school with these families and their kids, shaping a learning environment and curriculum perfectly tailored to who we are together. But mostly, I think, I look forward to introducing new families to our loving, dynamic, get-it-done community and the kind of progressive, play-based learning experience we offer at Woodland Park.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

I Will Not Teach Violence

2012-01-20T07:29:00.000-08:00

Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I would never spank a child, not as a teacher or parent. This is a vow I made long before having a child of my own, and it’s one I’ve never even been tempted to break.

And while I could link to dozens of studies that show that spanking doesn’t improve a child’s behavior, and in fact may lead to everything from poor peer relationships to hyperactivity to anti-social behavior, I’m not going to. I won’t because there are other scientific studies (fewer, but they exist) that show that spanking is an effective and acceptable parenting tool.

My objection to spanking is a moral one, anyway, and any research I cite would simply be backfill to support a position from which I will not budge. As I’ve written here before, I believe that once a moral argument is raised, the debate is over. No one is going to back down from an honestly held moral position: once that point is reached, further discussion is a waste of breath.

There are a few things about spanking, however, about which I hope every reasonable person agrees:

• Spanking must never be done in anger – that’s called beating.

• Spanking is the exclusive domain of parents; it’s never okay to spank someone else’s child.

• Spanking must be accompanied by a clear explanation to the child about why she is being punished and followed-up with clear demonstrations of love.

• If the child is too young to understand why he is being spanked, he is too young to be spanked.

As much as it goes against every fiber of my being, if these conditions are met, I guess a big, strong adult has the right to hit a smaller, weaker child. The whole idea makes me soul sick, but we live in a society in which the choice of parental corporal punishment is permitted.

That said spanking done in public becomes everybody’s business. We’ve all seen a frustrated parent whack a whining child. From where I stand, that’s hitting done in anger and I can’t help but wonder that if a parent does this in public, heaven only knows what she’ll do behind closed doors. That parent may have the right to spank her child, but I’ve just witnessed a child getting hit. As a teacher in Washington State, I’m required by law to report suspected child abusers. That parent's actions have caused a spark of suspicion, so I can’t just look the other way on both moral and legal grounds.

It’s hard to know what to do. I don’t want to make things worse by humiliating or further angering a person who has already demonstrated a willingness to hit a child. Sometimes I find a way to say something. I try to do it in a compassionate and reasonable tone. My primary goal is to stop the violence by distracting the parent. Other times, I simply make sure that the adult knows that I’ve been a witness by forcing eye contact. Either way, I’m always left angry, sad, and wondering what else I could have done.

I’ve had people shrug at my moral stance and insist that spanking “works,” and I’m sure it does. There are lots of things that work that I will never try. If I disagree with you, shouting you down works, but wouldn’t it be better if I engaged you in reasonable debate? If I need money, stealing works, but wouldn’t it be better if I worked to earn a higher income? If you’re standing in my way, pushing you works, but wouldn’t it be better to politely ask you to allow me to pass? Indeed, spanking may work, but there are better ways. They just take more effort.

As a boy, I was on the receiving end of a handful of spankings, always administered by my father, who is by every measure a loving, peaceful, compassionate man. I don’t believe that I am the worse for the experience.

Still, I have never spanked a child and I never will because I know in my heart that violence is wrong. And I will not teach violence.

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. ~MLK

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

A Moral Education

2012-01-19T10:57:00.000-08:00

I know Martin Luther King Day is in the rearview mirror, but we've been out of school all week due to snow, so I've not had the chance to shift my thinking over to our Chinese New Year celebrations, and besides, is there ever a bad time to be dwelling on MLK?

I've been reflecting particularly on a short piece of his on education that I'd never read before this week, one from which I quoted in Tuesday's post. Entitled "The Purpose of Education," it was an editorial King wrote in 1947 for the Morehouse College campus paper (and I urge you to click through and read it). In this piece he points out that education serves two primary functions: utilitarian and moral.

The function of education . . . is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

Ah, but morals, talk about touching the third rail. Of course, King is right. Reason without morality is how we create doomsday machines and sociopaths, but how can we ever begin to address morality outside the walls of religious schools, especially in our current political and social climate, one in which we call doctors "baby killers" and compare our ideological opponents to "Nazis?" Can you imagine the outcry if anyone suggested that our public schools turn even a small portion of their days over to any kind of moral instruction? I can already hear the howling and yowling from all corners of the ideological and political spectrum.

But that doesn't change the fact that King is right. That's what I keep coming back to as I've walked the dogs in the snow this week, asking myself if there are any moral values that we all share, or at least can agree that we all should share.

Looked at one way, I come to the answer of an absolute "no." One of the founding principles of our nation, the first to be founded upon an idea rather than an ethnicity or religion, are the co-joined twins of freedom of speech and freedom of religion: you can believe whatever you believe and say whatever you want to say. Inherent is the idea that given a population sufficiently well educated "for quick, resolute and effective thinking," it is from this democratic market-place of ideas that the bad ones fall while the good ones rise.

Of course, our system of laws is a kind of moral code, one in which are included such fundamental values as not murdering, stealing, or otherwise doing injury, physical and otherwise, to our fellow humans. We could make this the foundation of a curriculum of secular moral values we teach in schools. While I know that there are some who believe that others deserve to die, that private property itself is a crime, and that there are all kinds of loopholes in the doctrine of not hurting other people, I think we could safely assume that most of the people in our democracy would be okay with teaching these values, especially since they are also "the law." But simply obeying the law really isn't what King is talking about. In fact, he largely made a name for himself by disobeying laws that the felt were immoral.

In fact, the entirety of US history is the story of disobedience, from the American Revolution, through the abolition movement and The Civil War, to women's suffrage, the labor movement, and civil rights. We have always been a people who rise up against injustice. Perhaps that is the core of our moral curriculum: disobedience. Ha! Try to sell that one!

But then as the snow collects like dander in my dogs' fur, I can't help but feel that this gets closer to the truth of what a democratically moral education ought to be. The thing that our Founding Fathers had in common, the element of humanity that is most actively embraced by our founding idea, our Constitution, the force that has best defined the truly positive aspects of our history has been citizens who were able to "think incisively and to think for oneself." And more importantly to not "let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda."

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

King is right, but what are those morals? Ought we to simply leave it up to the church, to leave to religion the task of a moral education? Is it okay that in a democracy, a system of government that requires a well-educated population, we leave so much of it up to holy men and charlatans alike?

We do teach morals in our preschool, although that isn't necessarily what we call them. We are not a religious school, we follow no set doctrine or dogma other than what emerges year-after-year from the children. We always come to a collective agreement about non-violence, for instance, and equal opportunity and fairness, not as laws or principles that come from a higher power, but as morals that come directly from the necessities of living together. We discuss these morals every day, an ongoing conversation about "worthy objectives upon which to concentrate."

I suggest that non-violence, equal opportunity, and fairness are the moral values that we must teach in our public schools if our democracy is to thrive. Not taught as a lecture by a teacher in the front of the room, but as a conversation, an ongoing dialog that stems from these shared democratic values. This, coupled with an education that "enable(s) one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction" should form the core curriculum of a democratic education.

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Call Your Representatives

2012-01-18T08:13:00.000-08:00

Today is the day to call your senators and congressional representatives at tell them that you don't support the US government censoring the internet.

The goal of SOPA (in the Senate) and PIPA (in the House) is to fight copyright infringement, which is a good thing, but the way they seek to go about it is draconian and blatantly unconstitutional. As the bills are now written (and I'm no attorney, but I've heard this from attorney's who I trust) if you post a photo of your own child on your own blog wearing a Star Wars t-shirt or standing with Cinderella at Disneyland, you can be considered in violation of this law and search engines can be ordered to erase your site from search results. Period. You're done. If you accidentally link to a site that in turn links to copyright infringement, same thing.

This is what the Chinese government is currently doing to its people, except worse. In the US version private corporations can take action against you all on their own, without any kind of due process! Just think what it will do to your frame of mind as you set about entertaining or informing your readers, knowing that with one slip, one logo in the background of a photo that goes unnoticed, one disparaging word about one of the almighty internet companies (and believe me, they would use this law as a vengeance hammer), one link you don't investigate fully, and the lights go out.

This is craziness and should not be permitted in the US. You'll no doubt notice today that thousands of your favorite sites are in one way or another taking part in today's protest against these bills, including giants such as Google, Facebook, AOL, Ebay, and Twitter. Forty-one human rights organizations have signed a letter opposing this legislation. One hundred and ten prominent law professors have done the same. Small business owners and entrepreneurs say it will "hurt economic growth and kill innovation."

And most experts say that the bills won't even do much to stop piracy and counterfeiting.

For more information and for ways to take action: AmericanCensorship.org, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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I Don't Worry About Our World So Much

2012-01-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleagues will produce a group of closed-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, brethren! Be careful, teachers! ~MLK

It's a small wonder, a miracle indeed, when they discover an aspect of "we," often at first stumbling across it like over a super cool toy left in the middle of the living room floor.

Even if it's as simple as saying, "We are going up here now." Even that gives me confidence about our future.

The ones with siblings just a little bit older tend to learn it first, the joy of connecting with another child, and find their classmates a little slow sometimes. These are the ones who might take the lead, practicing the sentences that begin with the invitation of "Let's . . .," working their human power to bring themselves together with those other suns around whom the universe so recently revolved.

This is the work we're here to do: to make me into we, because otherwise it makes no sense.

There are things, so many things, over which to disagree. It's hard enough learning how to do that without having to also overcome closed minds that reject the universal language of objective "scientific" truth in favor of illogical propaganda. The same is to be said for that set of moral values we must share if we're to make this democracy work, let alone our day-to-day lives: non-violence, equal opportunity, fairness, the values without which the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness simply cannot be fulfilled.

It's true we attempt in school to transmit our "accumulated knowledge," but without also working diligently to transmit the "accumulated experience of social living," we risk creating sociopathic monsters, people rendered less than human by their inability to join us in our work of making me into we, instead seeking to exploit, to use up, to devour their fellow man in a dangerously misguided attempt to fill up that abyss that opens inside each of us when we stand all alone in the world. If we don't fill it with love, it becomes a vacuum for wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

When a boy and a girl and a tiger find themselves together and one of them says, "Let's go up there," and then they all pick up, still together, and go up there, sitting once more together I see the work of we being done and I don't worry about our world so much.

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Chaos Or Community?

2012-01-16T06:51:00.000-08:00

And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. ~MLK

What I'm saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated. ~MLK

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love. ~MLK

On this Martin Luther King Day many of us will listen to snippets, perhaps all, of his great "I Have A Dream" speech, and we should, but civil rights was not the only cause this great American championed, and it is not the only reason we celebrate his life today. He was also a great advocate for ending the war in Vietnam and on August 16, 1967 he gave what many consider his finest speech on poverty in America at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta.

Usually entitled "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?" this is long, powerful, and to this day controversial speech that reminds us that while we have, perhaps, made great strides in race relations, almost nothing has changed when it comes to poverty. Millions of our citizens of all races remain poor. And while the powerful in our nation are engaged in a misguided, punitive approach to reforming our educational system, they are turning a blind eye to the core issue with education in America: poverty. Let this speech be a reminder that whatever we do in the classroom, until we address the much more debilitating societal sickness of poverty, we will, as a nation, ultimately fail.

This is a magnificent, thoughtful and inspiring speech, one that taken in its entirety is guaranteed to make you think, make you sad, and may even make you angry. MLK calls here, for instance, for a "guaranteed national income." I know that's a non-starter for many people, but so was civil rights, so were at one time most of the great things we have done as a nation. One reason we celebrate this man today is that so much of what he stood for has proven to be prophetic. If nothing else, we must think about what he has to tell us.

If you'd like to read the entire speech, you'll find the text here.

If you're interested in listening to the entire 1 hour, 8 minute speech, here it is broken into 7 parts.

I've included here the concluding 16 minutes of the speech. It skips most of the edginess of MLK's "Where Do We Go From Here?" message, leaving the inspiration. I hope it inspires you to listen to the rest.

Martin Luther King - Where Do We Go From Here? (Conclusion) from MLK Speeches on Vimeo.

Here are some other things I've written about MLK: Love Is Winning and What MLK Said At Riverside Church.

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The Colors Of Us

2012-01-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

We were driving home after preschool, my daughter Josephine and I, talking about our day. Then quite decisively she said, "I don't like Citta." Citta was an au pair from Senegal who occasionally worked with us in our cooperative preschool classroom.

"Oh no, you don't like Citta," I replied hoping that it had something to do with her demeanor or behavior, but with a sudden lurch of the heart.

"I don't like her skin," she continued. "I don't like dark skinned people."

My 2-year-old had touched the third rail and while we lived in one of the most ethnically, racially, and economically diverse zip codes in the US, our school drew most of its students from the more homogeneous north end neighborhoods of Seattle, resulting in a less than representative assortment of skin colors at school. I can hardly describe the spike of shame and panic that shot through me when she said it, a new parent's fear that he had somehow made a racist of his child. It took me a couple minutes to fight that feeling down, knowing that she was, of course, not a racist.

From the time my child was born I committed myself to honesty. Even as we swaddled her in her crib, I told myself that when the time came, I would be prepared to have frank and open discussions about sex and drugs and all those other topics that parents so often sweep under the rug or, worse, about which they over-react, scaring their child into hiding their questions, thoughts, and feelings at the risk of upsetting mom or dad. For sex and drugs I was ready, but I hadn't prepared myself for this one. I did manage to remain calm. I told myself that this is one of those topics that we have to bring fully to the surface and discuss without judgement.

I tried to keep the conversation casual, "I like Citta. She has a pretty smile."

"I don't like her."

"Because of her skin color. Is there anything else you don't like about her?"

"No."

"Is she nice to you?"

"Yes."

"Well, then you like that about her, right?" She didn't reply and we drove in silence for a bit. Finally, I said, "I like people who are nice."

She answered, "Me too."

"Salvador's nice. I like him too. He has dark skin."

"I like Salvador."

"And Alnur has dark skin."

"I like Alnur."

We drove in silence again for a time before she said, "I like Citta, I just don't like her skin." That was the end of the conversation for then, but it provided a nice starting point for the rest of the conversations we've had about race over the years.

I don't believe it's possible to discuss Martin Luther King, Jr. without a conversation about the color of our skin.

I like to use The Color Of Us by Karen Katz as the starting point of our exploration of skin color. It's fun how Lena and her mom walk through their neighborhood describing the various shades of brown they find amongst their friends, family and neighbors. Most of the descriptions use food similes (e.g., cinnamon, chocolate, butterscotch, etc.) and we say, "Mmmm," after each one, savoring it together. We put our arms together to compare the colors of us (one of my great eye-openers came when, while doing this, I discovered that my own skin was several shades darker than that of an African American boy in our group). And we paint with a collection of "flesh toned" paints, mixing them together to discover the endless variety of hues.

Like I did with my daughter, I try to not be heavy-handed, although it's tempting each year as some kids always insist, despite the evidence in front of their faces, that their own skin is not at all brown, but rather white or red or yellow. I don't expect to solve the world's racial challenges in our little preschool classroom, but I do hope to surface the conversation and try to discuss it without judgement.

This year we tried a new skin color mixing project, one inspired by this make-up commercial:

We used sheets from a paper artist's palette for this because I wanted a surface that didn't absorb the paint. You could use plexiglas and wipe it off between kids or even wax paper. Each child started with 2-4 small puddles of skin colors, and the only tool the children had at their disposal were toothpicks.

When we do this again, I think I'll cut the paper in half and use a tool of somewhat larger gauge than toothpicks, but it turned out to be an interesting exploration, one that resulted in all the colors of us.

As Josephine grew older and more sophisticated our conversations about race have too. I don't worry about her any longer. In fact, she and her friends have it much more together when it comes to race than did my generation. I still remember my neighbors in South Carolina freely using the "N" word to describe those people who lived on the other side of town. Martin Luther King, Jr. was still alive, yet I don't have any memories of him or his struggle being discussed around the dinner table. Maybe the grown-ups thought it wasn't a proper topic for a 6-year-old when MLK was assassinated, but I didn't hear about it until much later, as a dull historical fact rather than something that had happened only a few short years ago.

Two years after my conversation with Josephine about Citta, as I picked her up from preschool, she asked, "Did you know that everyone is the same color?" The way she said it, I knew she had a joke to tell me.

"Really?"

"Inside everybody's pink! Even the boys!"

I was a stay at home dad, the sexism conversation was one for which I was prepared.

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Waterfall Painting

2012-01-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

It seems like so long ago, but the 2010-11 school year was when we launched Woodland Park's outdoor curriculum. It shocks me, so I know it will shock some of you, to know that up until last year, the time we spent outside during our school day could have been measured on a stop watch. I exaggerate, but there were days when we'd open the door for a mere 20 minutes or so to give the children a chance to run around on the slab of asphalt we called a playground. The kids had fun, of course, and we did what we could, tossing out a variety of toys, but it wasn't an important part of our school day.

I was just a few months into blogging then. As part of that experience, I came across Jenny over at Let the Children Play, who was also just getting going online. She was doing research on ways to enhance her own school's outdoor space, then sharing what inspired her on the blog. This opened a whole new world for me, one that started our community through a sometimes rocky transformation to where we are today, with a robust outdoor curriculum and an outdoor classroom of which to be proud.

So while I can say I'm a seasoned "classroom teacher," with 3 years of apprenticeship in my daughter's cooperative preschool, followed by 10 more as a teacher at Woodland Park, I'm still a relative newbie when it comes to an outdoor curriculum. Today our 3-5's class is spending close to half its day outside, even in the dead of winter, and our summer group doesn't use the indoor part of the school at all.

One of the aspects of this curriculum that has the steepest learning curve for me is doing outdoor art. So much of what we think of as art involves paper, and in a rain forest climate like ours, especially a maritime one with quite a bit of wind, paper is a frustrating medium: it gets soggy, tears, dissolves, gets blown away. Naturally, there are some ways to use paper that take advantage of the weather (like rain painting or painting with watercolors in the rain), but we're limited. We have similar frustrations with trying to use white glue for projects: colder temperatures seem to cause it to somehow separate, losing its adhesive and curing qualities. We use our glue guns out there quite a bit, but when the rain is torrential, I start to get nudgy about the combination of wet and electricity.

In other words, I'm still in the process of developing a core collection of outdoor art projects that I can rely on, meaning our "failure" rate is still quite high -- probably greater than 50 percent -- failure being defined as things not going the way I'd anticipated, which means that more often than not, our outdoor art projects wind up with the children simply making it their own.

Recently, on a non-rainy, non-windy day, we rolled out a sheet of butcher paper. I was thinking about how much fun I'd had as a boy using drinking straws to blow wine corks around the dining room table with my brother, and thought we could try something like that on our art table. The idea was to get the kids working on their blowing techniques first with corks, then introduce the idea of blowing paint around on the paper with their straws.

The corks held their interest for almost no time at all (there's a lot of other stuff going on outside competing for their interest), so we went to the paint fairly quickly. Tempera paint straight from the bottle is too thick for blowing with straws, so my plan had been for the kids to experiment with diluting it themselves, then test it with their straws. I do have enough experience to know that the mixing would be the biggest draw for many of the kids, so I'd sort of thought we'd have one mixing table and one table for experimenting with straws.

I was called away to other things, so I'm not exactly sure how we got from here to there, but by the time I returned, the kids had taken off from my original idea and figured out a very cool art project on their own, one that we could never have permitted inside. They were ignoring my two table idea. Instead, they were busy diluting paint, but instead of ladling it out on the paper as I'd thought they would, they had discovered that mixing, then dumping it out was far more fun, causing "rainbow waterfalls" to run off the table and onto the ground. Others still circled the table with their straws, blowing on the pools and puddles. At some point the paint brushes also came out.

We went through lots of paper and lots of paint and made a big, wonderful mess. I think we'll call this waterfall painting. I wonder if we'll ever do it again or will they discover something new next time.

With each of these experiences I become a little less of a newbie. This is the real story of a teacher's education.

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Today Is Your Lucky Day

2012-01-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes," ~Oscar Wilde

When our girl Josephine was a baby, we thought it was hilarious when she would miss wildly in her repeated attempts to get her thumb into her mouth, poking herself in the eye, or losing track of it as her hand passed out of her vision. She cried in frustration sometimes, and sometimes we helped her get her thumb where she wanted it. What made us laugh was that she just kept trying, day after day, often making the same mistakes over and over. It was so human.

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising every time we fail." ~Confucius

Failure is a universal experience. From the moment we're born we fail and fail and fail until we succeed. That is the calculus of learning:

f(ail)x + 1s(uccess) = s.

At first when Josephine succeeded in getting her thumb in her mouth, it was purely because the law of averages dictated she would, but with repetition she began to tilt the odds in her favor until after a few weeks, she'd mastered this self-soothing skill.

All real learning is built upon failure.

It's so tempting as teachers to save our students from failing. We see that adding that one last block will cause the tower to fall and surreptitiously reach out a hand to hold it up. Eventually he'll have to build that building that falls, why not let it be now? We fudge the die count in a board game so the child doesn't lose yet again. Eventually she will have to lose that game, why not let it be now? We try to catch them when they fall. Eventually she will take that fall, why not let it be now? We can't help ourselves as adults, sometimes we save them, but we also have to know that each time we do it, we're robbing them of experience, which as Wilde implies is another word for "mistake."

And Oscar Wilde knew about failure, having filed for bankruptcy, but he was in good company: Rembrandt, Mark Twain, Thomas Paine, Walt Disney (multiple times), Thomas Edison (multiple times), and even three of our presidents, Grant, Lincoln, and McKinley turned to the courts for bankruptcy protection. When a reporter asked Edison how it felt to have failed over a thousand times in his quest to invent the lightbulb, he famously answered, "I didn't fail a thousand times. The lightbulb was an invention with a thousand steps."

As human beings, we are not products of our successes any more that we are of our failures. I often tell the parents of my students that their job isn't to keep their kid from falling, but rather to to help them up when they do. Of course, we save them when we can, but each time we do we merely stave off the inevitable.

The tree of success grows in the soil of failure.

Everyone fails, and we might as well learn to laugh, not only because it's human, but because this time we might succeed.

"Today is your lucky day." ~Will Durant

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We've Invented A New Toy!

2012-01-12T06:20:00.000-08:00

We made a discovery down at the old cooperative preschool this week.

As part of last week's magnet play I'd turned a metal cabinet around so that the open side faces the wall, leaving us with a very impressive expanse of metal on which to play with magnets. We've let it run this week, equipping it with a few magnets each day.

If you look carefully near the boy's hand, you'll see a purple magnetic marble rolling down

the metal surface.

Among the magnets are several magnetic marbles. I don't know if everyone has these or not, but they're just as they sound, small plastic spheres with magnets inside. I think most of them were originally part of a building set, but have by now just become a part of our box of magnets.

In any event they're fairly old, old enough at least for many of them to have lost some of their magnetism. That doesn't happen to modern magnets unless they're subjected to fairly high heat or are exposed to a demagnetized magnetic field. Older magnets -- the kind I played with as a boy -- can lose some of their magnetic ability when shocked, say by getting dropped.

As we were putting them away earlier in the week one of the kids tried sticking one of these marble magnets to the back of the cabinet only to have it roll, slowly, right down the side to the floor. I'm sure I'm not doing it justice in the description, but it amazed us all.

So naturally, we tried it again. And sure enough the marble "rolled" down the wall in a controlled manner. Pretty cool! It was interesting enough that Fleur, a visitor from Australia on Monday, asked me, "What is this?" thinking, I suppose, that we owned some special apparatus for making marbles roll on vertical planes. And I guess we do!

We've now been horsing around with this for the past few days. We've noticed that some of them roll much faster than others. We've tried racing them down to the floor. We've set up other magnets thinking they'll create barriers and diversions, but they didn't work the way we'd anticipated, either serving to attract the marbles as they pass, not allowing them to continue, or by diverting them crazily in sudden, lurching arcs as the magnets repel one another.

We've discovered that if one marble gets stuck part way down due to the power of its own internal magnet, you can send another one after it. When they make contact they snap together then shoot to the bottom. In fact the more you stick together, the faster they go.

Here, he's trying to arrange other magnets to "capture" the rolling ones.

A little while back I read an article by a university professor who was arguing for the status quo and against play-based learning, at least as a curriculum for older students and adults, taking aim at Sir Ken Robinson's theories about learning and creativity, in which he defined creativity as discovering/inventing something that no one else has ever discovered/invented before. He also re-defined the term "tinkering," rejecting it as a creative activity, but rather seeing it as a mundane, almost mindless endeavor. By those definitions, he "proved" that almost no one is actually creative, that it is, in fact, a very rare thing, and that perhaps one of the key defining characteristics of older children and adults isn't curiosity, but rather laziness.

Success!

It wasn't such a bad argument if one is willing to accept his definitions, which I don't. Creativity isn't discovering or inventing something that no one has ever discovered or invented before; it's discovering or inventing something that you have never discovered or invented before. And tinkering is a curiosity driven process that may or may not lead to new discoveries or inventions, but it is essential to anyone's creative process.

I'm assuming that we are not the first ones to ever roll a magnetic marble down a metal wall, but the creative process of us doing it for the first time, accidentally, like the apple falling on Newton's head, then experimenting with it, has opened up new avenues in my mind. Even now, I'm imagining new things I want to try employing the phenomena we've discovered for ourselves, so I can only imagine what it will do for the kids as they continue to tinker around.

As far as I'm concerned, we've invented a new toy and we're only beginning to understand its potential.

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Listening

2012-01-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

I wish we could tell the truth about teaching, that it's really the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

I've had these large pieces of non-slip material you put under rugs to hold them in place

for quite some time. I was saving it mostly because I had a lot of it, which is one of

my primary criteria for saving anything. I've had a vague idea of using it at the art table,

but figured, as I often do, to see if the kids had any better ideas of how to use it.

I wish our profession wasn't in a fight for its life against deep pocket foes with a political or economic agenda, because this simplicity is really its beauty and joy.

Our main idea on the first day was to play under it together, making a kind of tent into which

to crowd ourselves.

We've learned to protect ourselves with an armor of jargon like every other profession as a way to sell ourselves in this sell-or-be-sold world.

Cooperating enough to fit all of our bodies under there isn't easy when

you're two.

But teaching is not every other profession. I'm not even sure it is a profession as much as a calling. Because when we strip all that "professionalism" away, we see that the core of teaching is to love the children: every one of us knows that. And when you love, you listen. That's what teachers do.

It's especially hard when one of those bodies is that of a grown man, taking

up far too much of the space, but we managed.

It's when we listen with our ears and eyes and hearts that we can access not only their genius, but our own.

Teaching greatness is not a rare thing, I don't think, but it's hard for others to see because it takes place in intimate moments when we're down on our knees, face to face with the children, ears, eyes, and heart wide open. And then to try to talk about it after the fact, to try to satisfy the demands to make learning "transparent," we wind up wraping the moments of genius in words that detail techniques and strategies that describe only the surface manifestation of what happened because to say, "We connected," sounds too hippy dippy and namby pamby.

Teaching is not a complicated thing, but it does take practice, lots of it, every day with lots of different kids, and even after ten or twenty years there's still a new thing to learn every day, its profundity often lost in its simplicity.

When we play with children, we engage them as they engage with their passions and curiosities, and when we listen with our whole selves, we notice instantly when that moment comes around, and then it's just a simple matter of making a statement of fact, or asking just the right question, or sitting quietly in the knowledge that that is what this child needs right now. How much better that is than to assume they are all ready for this particular knowledge at this particular time delivered in this particular manner by virtue of being more or less the same age -- what Ken Robinson calls their "manufacture date" -- then bang heads against the wall in frustration that many of them just don't get it.

To be a "gifted" teacher is really just possessing the knowledge that children are people and then proceeding to treat them like people, loving them, and listening.

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An Art Exploration

2012-01-10T06:11:00.000-08:00

If you're not planning on sending the kids home with something cute that they made themselves and you aren't working down a list of specific things that a legislative committee somewhere has decided that children this age ought to know, then this might be an art project for you too!

The first thing, of course, is to stop calling it an art project, I think, because words matter and the word "project" connotes ideas that get people focused on results or destinations. I suggested to the adults responsible for managing the art station to think of it as an art exploration.

It starts with these 2'x2' lucite squares: smooth, flat, non-porous surfaces. Paint just slides across them, never diminishing, flowing. You can use tools to swoop and swoosh it. If you use your hands, they glide through and across the paint.

And then there are these egg carton parts: rough, pointy, absorbent surfaces. When you apply paint to these it gets sucked right up, some of it always staying behind when you try to move it, leaving a permanent trace of pigment wherever it's been. It's more challenging to get paint in every nook and cranny so you have to adjust your brush to different angles and use different techniques like dabbing or twisting or wiggling.

Finally we explored using lots of tools, including brushes.

And like with any good exploration, we made some discoveries along the way about color . . .

. . . about texture . . .

. . . about print-making . . .

. . . about cleaning up and starting over . . .

. . . about exploring alone . . .

. . . and exploring together.

We took it where it needed to go, this exploration of smooth and rough, non-porous and absorbent, flat and pointy.

It was messy, sure, but it didn't have to be. That was up to how you wanted to explore.

And if you did, along the way, produce a masterpiece . . .

. . . and some of us did . . .

. . . then you can save it as a print.

There's no test that will ever tell us what the children learned from their exploration, and I know that for some that makes it suspect.

It's just play after all: how does anyone know what they know about paint and process and smooth and pointy? How can anyone express that to others other than to show them? I suspect, in fact, that these testers, these "accountability" thugs, aren't interested at all in learning, just in measuring. And this is all too hard to measure -- impossible to measure. So, they stick to math and reading comprehension, judging the whole of education by the narrow calculation of what can be calculated, casting the rest aside as mere play, a remainder that for the rest of us is everything.

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I Thought They Were Just Playing

2012-01-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

As hard as it might be to believe if you've been a reader of this blog for any length of time, but up until about 2 years ago, I'd never taken a photo in class. In fact, I rarely took photos in the rest of my life either: most of the photos I have of my daughter growing up came from grandparents.

"I don't want to experience life's peak moments through a viewfinder," is how I usually put it, whether standing in the shadow of Notre Dame or witnessing my girl's first swimming lesson. That had the virtue at least of being true, but it wasn't the whole truth. I also really disliked having to pack the camera around with me, a challenge that disappeared when I purchased my first iPhone and its quite satisfactory camera. I was going to be carrying my phone anyway, so that objection was handled.

Other teachers pushed me a bit on the topic, insisting that they would never teach without a camera at their side, selling it to me as an important tool for promoting reflection, not to mention its ability to document what was happening during the day.

As anyone can see, I've come around now. I've forgotten my phone occasionally and spend my day feeling half dressed, repeatedly dipping into pocket and coming up empty. I take a lot more pictures than I use here on the blog, of course, and one of the most important parts of my day comes when I set down to transfer the day's collection onto my computer, taking me through a slideshow of the day just completed, giving me a moment to think through what I did (both right and wrong), what we learned, and where we seem to be heading.

One of the best things I did was download a camera app for the phone that permits me to take photos by simply tapping anywhere on the screen. This gives me the chance to snap away, even if I'm not viewing life through a viewfinder. Sometimes I know what I'm shooting, but often I'm sort of absently recording moments while talking, observing, or otherwise handling teacher duties. I'm often amazed by what I find when I get home.

A case in point are the girls in the two photos illustrating this post. They're not particularly good photos because I was just tapping the screen while they played with magnets, but I was sort of stunned when I saw them. I've been told by people who should know what they're talking about that all of math, no matter how far you go, is just learning increasingly complex ways to sort and create patterns. Well, here you have it.

They found all the magnetic gowns and arranged them in a row, then demonstrated an interesting bit of cultural literacy by finding "word" magnets to arrange under each one like headlines in a graphic layout. They might not be able to read them, but they know they're words and know where they go. Down the left side, you'll notice a tidy row of circular boxes. And there on the floor I accidently photographed yet another girl who had gathered all the magnets of a certain type, then collected them in a box she had built from Magna Tiles. I thought they were just playing . . .

Just a couple the little things I would have missed without my camera.

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#reasonswhyIhateschool

2012-01-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday #reasonswhyIhateschool was a trending hashtag on Twitter. I know, me too: just a few months ago I barely knew what Twitter was and now I'm not just talking hashtags, but I clicked on one. It looked like it was mostly high schoolers and college students, lining up to get off their one-liner about what they hate about school, a global gripefest that goes back as far, I suppose, as there have been schools.

One of the first things I noticed, however, wasn't the specific complaints, but rather that almost every one of them had left the "bio" portion of their Twitter profile blank, which I find touching, frankly. Every adult person with whom I interact on Twitter has filled-in that bio section, a pithy sentence or two that we hope says it all, but these kids . . . Either not yet or too much to jam into that tiny space. Good on them for not feeling the need to be pigeon-holed.

What I found when I read the tweets was mostly the litany we would expect, and by far the number one complaint, easily outstripping all others, was some version of this:

I hate waking up early.

Of course, no one likes waking up early (aside from, perhaps, yours truly) but it's a fact of life for most high schoolers. Before jumping on them as a pack of whiners, please understand that sleep studies show that teenagers, in fact, are hormonally designed to stay up later and sleep in longer than the rest of us. That so many of them are crawling out of bed a 6 a.m. in order to make it to school on time is a kind of societal cruelty and one that takes an unnecessary mental and physical toll, proper sleep being at the heart of good health.

These studies showing the sleep needs of teenagers are by now decades old. If we had an educational system that was really up on the latest research, we would have long ago pushed back the start times of our high schools, but if anything the trend today is toward even earlier start times in the interest of more "instructional hours," creating an adversarial relationship where their need not be one.

Because I have to wake up early out of my comfortable bed just to go learn about things I won't need in life.

This tweet covers in less than 140 characters what I discovered through my decidedly unscientific research to be the two top reasons for high schoolers to hate school: getting up early and the irrelevancy of the subject matter.

Some of the stuff the teachers teach us is pointless. Like when are we ever gonna use this: 4xy+5x+-2b = b²-√5x?

because I have to take classes that don't teach me anything I'll ever have to know outside of it.

when you graduate all you get is another piece of paper

it's pointless, I've learned more from Google.

we won't use half of the things they teach us in real life.

I'm forced to learn sh*t I'll never even use & never remember in the future.

We r basically in there for 7 hours learning stuff we will NEVER need in life...

it teaches a lot of nothing.

We won't need half the stuff we learn when we leave school!

most of the work is pointless.

learning things that I will never need in my life.

pretty much everything you get taught, you'll never need to know in life

I thought the same thing when I was in high school and from where I sit now as a 50-year-old man I can honestly say I was right. These kids are right. Too much of what happens in school is an attempt to jam kids' brains full of trivia hoping they retain it long enough to "prove it" on a test. As one kid wrote:

it was a game in accurate vomiting ... it didn't matter if you understood or not, as long as you could reproduce it!

And I'm not surprised that someone feels she's learned more from Google -- it's because she was following her own interests, tracking down answers to her own questions, which is what education really ought to be. There were a lot of joke tweets like this one:

We're not learning about beyonce

. . . or Justin Bieber or the cast of Jersey Shore. People often argue against the "irrelevancy" charge by insisting that it isn't the specific information that's important, of course they'll forget it over time, but rather the habit or practice of filling their heads that matters.

If that's the case, why can't the topic be Beyonce? They're going to be learning this stuff anyway, really learning it -- I'm still master of details about The Who that I picked up in 6th grade -- because they're passionate about it. Instead of judging subject matter, wouldn't it be something if we could set teachers free to help the kids really pursue the things that motivate them, to ignite a flame in the Socratic tradition rather than simply fill an empty vessel? I know the kids would appreciate it and they'd be better educated for it. And when there comes a day when they need to know the exact date of the Battle of the Bulge, there will always be the search engine of their choice coupled with the habit or practice of filling their heads with what matters.

Is there any of what I've dismissively called "trivia" that we need every high schooler to know? I suppose so, especially when it comes to how our democracy works. And there are some fundamental scientific, historical, mathematical and other facts we should all share if we're ever going to get on the same page about anything, but wouldn't it be nice to figure out a way to do it without:

Long, boring classes

As one tweeter pointed out:

it wasn't like grease, hair spray, high school musical GLEE. it was all a lie. it was filed with boring CLASSES and TEXTBOOKS

Of course, life is not a TV program, but the point is well taken. Maybe we should be a bit more creative in how we go about it.

There are a lot of complaints about teachers, both specific and general, under this hashtag (far too many complaining about "coffee breath" for my comfort), most of which focused on the obvious:

teachers talk way too much! It's like give us the worksheet, sit down, & stfu

it's 7 hours of hunger and boredom.

Teachers go on and on about the same topic

teachers that think they know everything. Like you're a teacher not God.

the teachers are ignorant

The teachers think they know every single thing. When they don't.

I'm sometimes forced to sit in one spot for more than an hour

I suppose there may be some kids who thrive on the top down lecture model of education, with a teacher playing the role of "God" spreading neatly packaged wisdom to the masses, but it's hardly a one-size-fits-all way to teach and deeeeeeply boring to many. That's as far away from igniting a flame as you can get. At the preschool level, we're certainly more likely to acknowledge that education is a two-way street, or rather a network of two-way streets with lots of different ways to get to the same place. There's no reason other than inertia and "efficiency" for that to be any different because the students are older.

I love this one:

For some reason they kept telling me I wasn't the teacher and to sit down! WTF's up with that?

This sounds like a girl who knew what she wanted out of her education. Stand up, sister!

I've written before about Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College and specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology, who writes quite simply: "Children don't like school because they love freedom."

My school feels like a prison

they named the hallways and have street signs for them.

even if you're 5 seconds late they don't care. They still expect you to get a late slip

they treat us like we're in jail.

it's basically like prison. you have no rights, terrible food, and you can't fight.

directionators.

we have a dress code.

they throw a fit over self expression

They're too strict! So I can't wear a hat, but there are rebels walking around with their Rooster hair!?

it doesn't prepare you for life after high school they censor everything

Its Like Jail. Teacher=Police, Principles=Judge, Bus=Prison Bus, Students= Prisoners

I can't use the bathroom as often as I would like, but only when them stuck up teachers wanna let us.

because they won't let you be grown...

teachers alwayz staring at u and the gurl u kissing

talking to your friends is a crime at school

Becuz I can't get a drink or go to the bathroom at will and sometimes the teachers decide to not let you

that one annoying security guard that treats us like were actually in prison.

As a parent of a teenager, I'll just say that any moment now she'll be driving a car, voting, making all her own decisions. I want her to have plenty of experience with being treated as an adult, with having adult responsibilities and freedoms, before she's out there on her own.

And finally I wanted to share a few "special" tweets that, I think, show that these kids are critical thinkers who understand much more than they're given credit for:

The American Education system is a broken sham designed to enforce submissiveness and complacency

they never taught us meditation

I've to wake up early on weekdays, and I've to fret about it over my weekends.

same scenery every day of my life

bc I don't have enough time to live!

pressure to do well and meet expectations that others put onto you.

It perpetuates a no longer sustainable American ideal while secretly funding an already bloated credit market.

No Recess.

wake up early, go to bed late and do a bunch of work in the middle

8 hours being tortured in an isolated building. Then when it's over, another 6 hours of torturous work at home.

I am being prepared to be a factory worker, instead of the next innovator.

God I have so much work to do this weekend

I am being turned into a clone, instead of a creative, critical thinker.

It doesn't exist. Where I live, we just send our children in the wilderness to capture fire-breathing monsters.

I'm not pretending that any of these complaints are new. We had the same ones when I was a boy: too early, irrelevant, and boring. I also know that I'm looking under a hashtag called #reasonswhyIhateschool, a self-selected place to gripe. And in fairness, there was a companion hashtag running yesterday #reasonswhyIloveschool, under which kids expressed gratitude for their teachers, and the opportunities that education opens for them, but it was never trending and, honestly, most of the "reasons" were about the other kids:

School day is the only time I can be with you, see you and talk to you.

Righteous.

I'll finish with something I've written before:

Children don't like school because they love freedom. We are biologically driven to learn, but we are not biologically driven to learn on command. We are not biologically driven to stuff our brains with things about which we have no curiosity. Yet that's what school is for many children: going to a place in which they have few if any choices, where everything is done according to rules and schedules in which they have no say, and then being judged by a system of grades and tests that have no connection to the rest of their lives

It's easy to just dismiss all of this as a bunch of whiney kids. I think we ought to listen.

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The Story Of Education

2012-01-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

We've been trying a grand experiment this year involving long stick-like objects and 2-year-olds. I've mentioned many times before how it appears that the evolutionarily and developmentally proper thing to do with any object over about 8-inches long, especially if it's also a bit pointy at one end, is to pick it up, hold it at eye level and walk around swinging it. This appears to be particularly true when said object is discovered in a crowded space.

Our old outdoor classroom was the sort of place into which we needed to import things like sticks and rocks if we were going to play with them. When we moved into the new outdoor classroom this summer, Orlando, when asked by his mother what he thought of the new place, replied approvingly, "It has longer and sharper sticks."

We were horsing around with our collection of magnetic things last week and one of the activities we set up was the classic fishing hole. I cut out some fish shapes from tag board (okay, honestly, I just reused tag board fish that a teacher prior to me cut out over a decade ago and saved, one middle class bag lady inheriting from another), to which we attached paper clips. I then, via that same intergenerational bag lady hand-me-down underground, produced fishing poles made from lengths of dowel and string with magnet wands tied to the end. I turned one of our wooden boxes on end and dropped the fish inside.

In other words, not only were we handing long stick-like things to preschoolers indoors, but they were sticks from which heavy objects swung. These are kids who by now have a minimum of 4 month's experience with handling sticks around others in the outdoor classroom, including the real drum sticks we use with our scavenged drum set, so I was expecting that a combination of wisdom and adult vigilance would make this a safe, fun project.

I realize that we could have managed this project more strictly, doling out the fishing poles one at a time, creating a "safety zone" of some sort. Being a cooperative, we have the adult "man-power" to have made that work, and I was prepared to convert to that kind of system should the play became hazardous, but I never want to start from a place of expecting less from the kids. I always try to start from the assumption that the children are fully capable and they usually live up to it, even if it does involve sticks.

The stance of "vigilance" versus "control" is an important one in our classroom. The instruction I gave the parent-teachers responsible for the fishing hole play was simply, "I want you to keep an eye on things. I don't want anyone getting poked in the eye."

The fishing part was easy. The challenge, as is true of many things in life, is going about your business alongside other people going about theirs. For one thing, not only were our magnet wands attracted to the paperclips on the fish, but they were also attracted to the other magnet wands hanging down into the the old fishing hole, meaning that you were just as likely to catch one another as you were a fish. This was a frustration for some children and a delight for others. It took a cooperative effort to separate the fishing poles, especially when the lines got tangled as part of the bargain.

I was glad we left it up to the kids to more-or-less self manage. A nice ebb and flow developed, those who wanted to concentrate on catching fish, those who wanted to experiment with how magnetism works, discovering that those paperclips are the important target, waiting for opportunities when other children moved away, while those interested in the pure experiment of cooperative play had plenty of opportunity to tussle and tug, work together, laugh together, and make peace together. No one got poked in the eye as far as I know, nor whacked in the head.

When it was their turn, the older kids in our 3-5's class got over the whole fishing game fairly quickly, being already much more familiar, and thus less fascinated, with the magic of magnets. Several of them decided, in fact, that the tag board fish were much more interesting as elements in their dramatic play, first catching them, then absconding with many of them to use as food in their "house" at the top of the loft. As the level of interest didn't call for it, our parent-teacher put her efforts into other things, working with kids building with Magna Tiles and whatnot.

It was while everyone's backs were turned that the fishing pole sticks found their way through the classroom and to the top of the loft as well. I'll admit to being a little alarmed when I spotted them up there being dangled over sides, threatening the unsuspecting heads of their friends down below, being swung around in close quarters, and generally being used in ways that caused my inner 60's mom to say, "It won't be so funny when somebody's eye gets put out." As I arrived on the scene, probably jumping in too quickly with admonishments and warnings, the kids were thankfully far too engrossed in their play to heed me.

The focus was on the gap between the loft and the wall. Several of the tag board fish had "accidentally" fallen into the gap and the kids were busy trying to use their sticks with magnets to fish them out. They'd apparently learned what they needed to learn about these tools at my artificial fishing hole and were now attempting to use these skills to make a difference in the real world: the story of education.

I still don't know why stick-like things must be swung around at eye level in crowded places, but I do know that a childhood without them is impoverished. Sticks (along with rocks) are the stuff from which all other tools have evolved. As I've written before: "As humans we have being alone, we have talking face-to-face; for everything else we use tools." And so, yet again, there goes your proof.

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It's Up To Us To Do It Ourselves

2012-01-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

Unless you've been super busy living under your rock, I'm sure you've already heard that Finland has the best schools in the world, at least to the degree that their kids for the past decade have been earning top marks in something called the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which is, I guess, a kind of standardized test comparing all the nations on the earth (or something).

Even if you hadn't heard the news, serious people have, making Finland the hostess with the mostest when it comes to entertaining delegations of education "fact-finders" from the rest of the western world, including the US. Making it particularly intriguing is that unlike their main competitors like China, Singapore and South Korea, Finland is eschewing the long hours of high-stress rote learning and memorization favored in these Asian nations, opting instead for a system that involves less homework and more play.

Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility, has recently authored a book about what they've done and as part of his book promotion was interviewed by Anu Partanan for The Atlantic. The article includes all the usual cool stuff about how the Finn's have gone about building the world's best schools: no standardized tests until high school graduation and highly trained teachers who are permitted a great deal of autonomy in the classroom, along with the aforementioned lighter homework load and more play. But the focus of the article is on the part of Finland's success that seems to befuddle Americans: "the goal was never excellence. It was equity."

Since the 1980's, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality . . . this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

This is the real difference between Finish schools and the rest of us. Contrast this to the questions Sahlberg says he tends to be asked by Americans when they come, ostensibly, to "learn" about what makes the Finish system work:

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of student's performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice? . . . The answer Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

Of course, anyone who hasn't been living under that rock, won't be surprised that these are the questions he gets asked the most because, after all, these are the cookie-cutter solutions the corporate reformers have in their briefcases. This is the supply side merchandise they've already manufactured. Now they're busy trying to create a market for standardized tests, merit pay, and privatization. There is no natural demand for what they're selling, so it's all about ginning up hysteria about our failing systems and how they are the free market white knights riding in to save the day. (This is how supply-siders always work by the way: they create "products" for which there is no demand like, say, the Iraq War, then go about creating that demand by playing on people's fear, insecurities or patriotism. The pharmaceutical industry has become very, very good at this.)

Instead of standardized tests created, administered, graded, and "interpreted" by corporate education companies, the Finns rely on professional teachers who use independent tests they create themselves. And I love Sahberg's answer when asked about "accountability":

"There's no word for accountability in Finnish . . . Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

As far as "competition:"

The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

There is no effort made to "engage the private sector."

And there are no private schools: "In Finland parents can also choose, but the options are all the same."

In other words, the Finns have produced the world's top scores on the very standardized tests the corporate reformers are trying to use to scare us into buying their crappy merchandise. Not only that, but from the president on down they keep telling us we need to do what they say in the name of economic competitiveness, yet I don't see Finland, Singapore or even South Korea on anyone's lists of world economic juggernauts. Sure, test crazy China's an economic superpower, but they're a Johnny-come-lately to the testing game, only recently surging to the top of the list, long after they'd made their dramatic economic gains. In other words, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between high test scores and a nation's economic might (or anything else for that matter).

Honestly, from what I know about Finland's system, there are many points to quibble about. It hardly represents what I would consider the best-of-all-possible-worlds school system of my dreams, but it's a whole hell of a lot closer to the kind of rational, progressive approach I think children deserve.

And, oh, how I love the stick in the eye of the corporate reformers, who seem either unable or unwilling to hear it:

Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity . . . The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed.

I can hear them shouting, "socialism!" from here, but it just goes to show how much they've twisted that term through using it to fear-monger. It's about equal opportunity, which used to be the most American thing in the world. It seems to me the Finns have identified a basic demand within its citizenry, a demand for equality, then set about satisfying that demand like good capitalists should. Right now in America, we have corporations running amuck and an income gap between rich and poor that is ever-widening. Nearly one in four children live in poverty today. People are loudly demanding a more equitable society. The Finns have a product that seems to satisfy that demand, but it's clear that these so-called capitalists have no intention of bringing it to market.

I guess it's up to us to do it ourselves. Anyone want to start a cooperative?

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We Were Playing Yesterday

2012-01-05T06:21:00.000-08:00

Corporate education reform types advocate for standardized testing as a way to assess learning. They seem to like the way the "data" from these tests can be distilled down into raw numbers, then easily charted, graphed, compared, and otherwise manipulated. Of course, much of what we learn (in fact, I would say very little actual learning) can be so easily quantified, so they're forced to focus their tests primarily on reading comprehension and math because those things reduce themselves most easily into numbers, ignoring pretty much everything else a child might have learned, including learning how to learn which is the most important thing to know. Here are a few examples of discoveries made through the process of free play that I observed in our classroom yesterday over about a 30 minute period, none of which will ever be measured by a test.

*****

We were playing yesterday with colored magnetic "washers."

It's a set with vertical dowels and cards with patterns. The idea is to try to match the pattern on the cards by stacking the washers on the dowel. You're not just matching the colors, but also trying to match the spacing of the washers depending on whether or not you arrange them so as to attract or repel one another. Some kids take on the challenge of trying to match the patterns. Others prefer to experiment on their own.

Rex was doing it his own way, creating a tower with several gaps caused by the magnets repelling each other. He pressed down on the top of his stack of washers, compressing them, then letting them go, creating a kind of bouncy, spring-like effect. Finally, he released the compressed stack suddenly enough that the top few washers flew several inches into the air. He turned to look at me over his shoulder with a big grin, then went back to recreate the experiment several more times, proving it to himself.

*****

We were playing yesterday with a sensory table full of flax seeds, magnet wands, and lots of little metal bits and pieces.

At one point I captured the bottom half of a metal tin on my wand and began using it as a scoop. I said, "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump," as I worked with my accidentally created tool. There were only a couple of kids there and they were busy with their own experiments. I stopped talking and started watching them.

After a couple minutes George was standing beside me. I used my scoop. "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump."

George grabbed a handful of flax seed. I dumped my scoop, but before I could dig back into the seeds, he filled it for me. I continued my pattern, saying, "Dump," then turned the scoop over. George filled it again. We did this for several cycles, "Scoop, dump, scoop, dump," the teamwork getting smoother each time. In fact, with each repetition George filled the scoop faster and soon we were operating like a well-oiled machine.

George shouted, "Three!" I guessed what he meant, holding the scoop out as he quickly put three fists full of the seeds into it. I counted his handfuls, "One, two, three, dump. One, two, three, dump." We then repeated this for several cycles, gradually getting faster and faster.

George shouted, "Five!"

And I complied, "One, two, three, four, five, dump! One, two, three, four, five, dump!" It was an intense minute or so. He was laughing as he did it, apparently losing himself for a moment in our game.

We continued for a couple minutes before he suddenly grabbed his own magnet wand and used it to "steal" my tin bottom.

*****

We were playing yesterday with puzzles with metal bits on the pieces. The challenge is to use a magnet on a string to lift the pieces from their places. The kids didn't think this was enough of a challenge, so they started working on using the magnets on strings to return the pieces to their spots. It took a great deal of concentration and a steady hand. We started calling it "the hard way."

After having successfully restored the pieces to his puzzle Jody said, "I found an even harder way." He then got his magnet on a string swinging like a pendulum, carefully lowering it toward the puzzle until the the magnet was nearly touching the surface, when it got close enough, it suddenly leapt to attach itself to a puzzle piece. "That's the harder way."

*****

We were playing yesterday with small building sets that feature powerful magnets under the boards. The magnetism allows the tiny metal bits to be arranged into structures and shapes that gravity does not normally permit.

Most of the time we create our structures by adding one metal bit at a time, but Finn piled all his pieces into a mound on the magnetic base, then used both hands to sculpt it into a shape as if it was some sort of stiff, unruly metallic clay.

He pushed and shoved the bits, finger-wrestling them, squeezing them, but when he let go, each time the whole thing collapsed. Finally, he said, "I have to hold it to show it to you."

*****

We were playing yesterday with some magnetic letters on a sheet of metal. Or rather, I should say, no one was playing with them, but they were out and available. Nearby a group of kids were playing with the cardboard blocks, working together to build a house that wound up incorporating all of the blocks, leaving an empty cabinet.

At one point I cruised by where they played to find three kids sitting in the cabinet. They were giggling. They told me that this was the bathroom and they were all sitting on the toilet. Later I came by and found all the magnetic letters in the cabinet.

This time they explained, "This is our food." Calder objected, "No, they're letters." River replied, "They're letter food!" Luca picked up an E, saying, "I'm having an E for lunch." The others appreciated the joke and they each retold it, going through the alphabet one bite at a time.

*****

We were playing yesterday with cardboard boxes . . .

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Clutching

2012-01-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, we had to quadruple our Hot Wheels collection because we, in a quirk of demographics, enrolled an extra large class of 2-year-old boys. We were forced to make the investment because so many of those boys desired to have a car clutched in each fist.

I've been thinking about writing this post for a few days. I'd assumed

that I didn't need to take any extra photos of kids clutching things

because, well, it's so prevalent I was certain that I'd already have plenty

of photos of the phenomenon. But I was wrong. I take a lot of pictures

of hands (in fact I take mostly pictures of hands) but I'm so focused on

what the children are "doing" that I didn't have any of a child simply

clutching something. At best I have these pictures in which a child

is showing me something, often while I'm trying to get a snapshot

of something else entirely.

They all pick things up and carry them around, some more than others, but they all do it at some time or another. Sometimes it's a kind of treasured item, like with the Hot Wheels. In any given class there are always girls who have a stuffed animal or doll from the classroom collection that they clutch while moving from place to place, perhaps placing it carefully beside them while, say, making a painting, but picking it up again the moment their hands are free.

I'm not talking about those special comfort items from home, nor even about our classroom items being used as surrogate comfort items, although there is some of that. And I'm not even necessarily talking about special items, like cars or dolls. I'm thinking rather about a stage of play most 2-year-olds seem to go through in which clutching items is the main obvious feature of their play.

They arrive in class with this tendency, I see them in the world around me clutching mom's keys or a rock they've picked up off the ground, and now it's already starting to fade a bit as we're 4 months into our school year. But at any given moment there are still a half dozen children in the room, walking around with something clutched in their hands: a pizza wheel from the play dough table, a pawn from Candyland, the magnifying glass we keep near the tadpoles, a domino.

It's such a universal behavior that it must be an important thing. For the longest time I just thought it was mostly about not knowing or caring or remembering the convention of picking things up then putting them down, because so often they only put what they clutch down when they spot something else to clutch, usually dropping the first item where they stand, without looking back.

So how does that work? When I clutch an item, I immediately discover things about it's weight, it's texture, it's shape, it's temperature.

When I walk around the room with an item in my fist, adults remark on the item, saying things like, "You have a magnifying glass," or "That belongs on the red table," and when they do I begin to learn something about what I'm holding. After enough people say the words "magnifying glass," I know what it's called. After enough people tell me it belongs on the red table I know that's where it goes.

I try using the item I clutch instead of my hands, perhaps using it to splash water or to apply paint to my paper. Sometimes those results aren't a whole lot different than with my hands or the "approved" tools. Sometimes what happens is not pleasant at all, like when I get water in my eyes. Sometimes the results are worth repeating, like what happens when I drive a car through paint.

Sometimes when I clutch something it causes the other people to freak out. For instance, the other children might wail or try to grab it back or hit me. What an incredible thing that is! Sometimes the adults try to persuade me, or even compel me to stop clutching it, saying things like, "Johnny had it first," or "That's dangerous!" Who knew? Now I do. Or at least I will after clutching those items a few more times.

So why wouldn't I want to clutch items? Who knows what's going to happen simply by holding onto something and going about my life.

Clutching, I've come to understand, isn't a behavior so much as a series of very earnest questions.

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If You Really Want A Smart And Happy Kid

2012-01-03T05:58:00.000-08:00

If you really want a smart and happy kid, watch him. Just hang out while she's doing whatever it is she's doing.

Try to not ask questions unless you're genuinely curious. Try to not praise unless you're genuinely impressed. Try to not boss him around. When your agenda conflicts with hers, try to understand when she behaves as if there is a conflict.

Try to not even talk unless you have something urgent or informative or heartfelt or very funny to say.

If you don't know the answer, be brave enough to say, "I don't know." If you don't want to answer, say, "I need to think about that," because that's what you're going to be doing right up until you inevitably do answer.

Touch him a lot. Pick her up when she needs it, but otherwise let her stand on her own feet.

When he gets hurt, you'll know what to do; that's the easy part of parenting. The hardest part is letting her just be smart and happy.

This is all good practice for a lifetime as a parent, especially when they're all grown up. The best of it is to love them, to watch them, and to be there because they still need you even if you're not doing anything at all.

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!