Teacher Tom

The Fantastic Adventures We Shared

2013-05-17T05:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

We start our final parent meetings by going around the circle remembering, reflecting on the year, what our children learned and what we, the adults, learned as well. There were some tears, as there ought to be, and we laugh a lot too, especially when thinking back to who we all were back then and comparing that to who we are now.

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

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

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

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

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Working Puzzles

2013-05-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

I have a love-hate relationship with puzzles in our classroom. On the one hand I'm very pro-puzzle: I might not be the world's most avid puzzler, but I've always enjoyed the intellectual challenge. On the other hand, the way our classroom is set up, more often than not, when there are puzzles out, if I turn my back for a second, I return to find them dumped out on the floor or table top, pieces neglected and scattered, uninviting to even the children most apt to take them up.

Puzzles live in a kind of strange place at Woodland Park where we don't obsess over "the right way" and where making mistakes stands at the core of our curriculum. There is, after all, a right way to assemble a puzzle. Or rather, there is a correct answer that may be reached by many different paths, but ultimately everyone produces the same result. And I suppose that's why some kids find puzzles so frustrating. I reckon that's why, every time we're playing with the puzzles, there are some who can't bear to walk past without dumping or otherwise making a mess of them before walking way. Maybe it's like a sort of statement of, "Screw you" or a "You're not the boss of me!"

Another dynamic at work, I think, is that puzzles, at least for me, tend to be a kind of solitary activity and our school is essentially a social place. I've seen a lot of kids look longingly at a puzzle, apparently attracted to the picture and the challenge, kids whose parents report will work puzzles for hours at home, but who just walk on by in the classroom, drawn away by the more social prospects of dramatic play or a group art project.

So we have those things working against us every time puzzles make an appearance.

I go through flurries of trying to figure out how to make puzzles work in our classroom and every time my conclusion is that there needs to be an adult there, not to help the kids assemble the puzzles exactly, but to help make it a social, cooperative, goal-oriented activity. And maybe that's the nature of some goal-oriented activities, to need a kind of leader or guide willing and able to hold the big picture in mind as everyone else works on the details. One of Woodland Park's most glorious puzzling days was a few years back when master-puzzler Sasha took charge of a group of older boys, guiding them step-by-step through the assembly of a large, complicated floor puzzle, a project that engaged a half dozen kids for at least a half hour.

What Sasha did so brilliantly was to start by getting her team to buy into her strategy, which involved, first studying the picture on the box, then turning all the pieces face up so you could see them. She then had them start with the most prominent feature in the picture and work outward from there, the opposite of the usual adult strategy of looking for corners, then edges, in a process of building toward the center.

I'd noticed that with my own daughter, who was never a big time puzzler. If she was going to tackle a puzzle it was because there was something at the heart of the finished puzzle that attracted her -- a princess, a butterfly, something -- and that's where she always wanted to start. This is the approach I've been using with Woodland Park's puzzlers: doing my best Sasha impression.

I start by looking at the box or fully assembled puzzle and declaring something like, "I'm going to work on this T-Rex," to no one in particular. This will typically draw-in at least one kid, which is enough to get going. "First we need to find all the T-Rex pieces." Switching from "I" to "we" is my invitation for others to join me. I begin by turning all the pieces over so we can see them, while the kids help me hunt for pieces that seem to go with the T-Rex. I try to maintain a steady banter, keeping our immediate goal in front of us -- in this example the T-Rex.

We'll usually start attracting other children, some who just want to watch. Others join in. And some decide to go to work on their own part of the puzzle. "I'm going to make the triceratops." "I'm collecting sky pieces." As new children arrive on the scene, I give them an update on what we're doing: "Audrey's working on the T-Rex," "Luca's making the triceratops," "Mason's collecting sky pieces," each comment an invitation to drop to your knees and join us.

Some useful statements I learned from Sasha are: "If you sit on the puzzle you'll break it," and "Okay, everybody stand up. Somebody must be sitting on a piece."

Naturally, there are still many kids who continue to look upon our efforts with disdain. And there are some who are clearly itching to reduce our efforts to smithereens. That's another reason I stay nearby, to protect our efforts by serving as an reminder of self-control, and by assuring these kids that clean up time will come: if they just have a little patience, they will ultimately have their day.

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

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When Someone Needs A Rescue

2013-05-15T05:53:00.001-07:00

He was having a prickly day. Things were not going his way. He'd been in tears or enraged several times already, the toys with which he wanted to play were already being used, the other kids weren't doing what he wanted them to do, and the adults were failing in their attempts to make it all better.

He sulked up to the swings where he could be alone, hanging limply in one of them, using his feet to get a little momentum going, but without vigor.

I'd made various forays in pursuit of bucking him up: a hand on his back; chit-chat about the makes and models of cars, his hobby; an inside joke. I'd managed to get him to smile a couple times, to lean into me, to take me up on my offers of friendship, but we already like each other so it might have just been out of politeness. Right now, as he swung, I was keeping my distance, watching him deal with his prickly day in his own way.

After a few minutes of just hanging there, he tossed back his head and without volume or urgency, to no one at all, called, "Help."

I didn't move, nor did anyone else, and he didn't look around for a response either, lolling his head back to look up into the trees, tugging a little with his arms as if trying to get the swing going like that. Then louder, "Help!"

Still, I was the only one who heard him. The other adults were busy in other parts of the outdoor classroom. His closest friends were engaged in canal building in the lower half of our sand pit, an activity that for them usually involves lots of shouting out to one another, which makes it hard to hear cries of help from all the way at the top of the hill.

"Help! Help! Help!"

As his cry became more insistent I moved closer. I said, "You're calling for help."

"I want someone to push me." He wasn't asking me to do it. All the kids know I don't push kids in swings.

I nodded, "Like those kids over there?"

Sourly, "I don't care. I just want someone to push." Then, "Help!"

"I think you'll have to be louder."

"Help!"

That's when someone other than me finally heard him.

"Oh no, someone needs a rescue!"

"Who is it?"

"To the swings!"

Most of the kids dropped their shovels as they swarmed in pursuit of his cries, "Help!"

Once there, they didn't need to be told what he needed. They got to work, helpers in a crisis, pushing their classmate who was now grinning ear-to-ear, still saying "Help," but with a laugh, the first I'd heard from him all day.

After awhile of being twisted, turned, pushed and pulled, all of which delighted him, he said, "Okay, okay, that's enough." When the kids ran back to their canal digging project, he ran with them.

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

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Where We Actually Live Our Lives

2013-05-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

I was raised as a Lutheran, the original Protestants. When I came home from my public school talking about evolution, my devout mother said, "Isn't it incredible that this is how God chose to create the world?" In other words, I grew up in a family in which religion and science went hand-in-hand, one a living proof of the other. Facts, logic, and reason were the language of God, and each new revelation made by science was a new revelation about God's creation. This is how I've lived most of my life, blissfully unaware that there were cults taking the view that science was somehow in opposition to their Christian-ist beliefs.

These are fundamentalists. Every faith has fundamentalists, and in every case these are the dangerous believers. Fundamentalists commit acts of terrorism. Fundamentalists view non-believers as sub-human, heathen, infidel. Fundamentalists have no faith in a living god, but rather in a literal reading of dry ancient words interpreted for them by pastors, priests, and imams, which is how it comes about that they deny science: their version of god stopped speaking 2000 years ago.

Oh, I understand that I'm walking into a brier patch here, one in which I'm certain to be bloodied by the thorns of religion and politics, but damn it, every time I look for trouble in the world I seem to find a fundamentalist of some sort at the bottom of it. Every time. Jesus Christ was absolutely not a fundamentalist. Martin Luther was absolutely not a fundamentalist. They were both true, lower-case protestants: men who stood against the entrenched fundamentalism of their time.

So why write about this here? Why today?

I suppose it's because of this 4th grade "science" quiz that has gone viral:

And here's the second page:

When I first saw this, I thought it must be a hoax, but Snope.com has confirmed its authenticity. This is actually what children are being taught at the Blue Ridge Christian Academy in South Carolina. Apparently, according to Snopes, this quiz is based upon a curriculum developed by the same folks who brought us the anti-science "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. Now, this is a private school, of course, and people are entitled in a private school to teach their children anything they want, even if it's pure religious indoctrination, but increasingly these schools are receiving public money via charters and vouchers, making them part of our public educational system, and that makes it all of our business.

I don't know anything specifically about the Blue Ridge Christian Academy, but the state of Louisiana recently expanded the number of students attending these so-called Christian schools on the public dime. According to Reuters:

The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition . . . The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding . . . At Eternity Christian Academy first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution . . . "We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said . . . Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.

The courts have ruled the state's voucher funding mechanism to be illegal, but the state is moving forward with it anyway. And Louisiana isn't the only state actively seeking to inject religious training into public education. Public schools across the country, but mainly in the south, are actively teaching this kind of anti-science curriculum. If you want your children to learn this bunk, then Sunday school is the place for it. The purpose of public education in a democracy is so that we have a well-educated population, capable of self-governance. This type of fundamentalist theocratic education does the opposite.

I shake my head for these poor children who will grow up to be laughed at by the rest of the world, but also for our own children who will be forced to contend with an ever-expanding know-nothing electorate in the already challenging job of self-governance. Democracy requires a population of critical thinkers, people with the intellectual flexibility to come to agreements with those with whom one disagrees on public matters. Private morality is the business of the individual, but public morality belongs to all of us and must always emerge from compromise. Compromise is impossible with fundamentalists.

Fundamentalists will always be with us, of course, always out there as a threat to peace and prosperity, but our public schools cannot be in the business of intentionally creating them. That, at its core, is anti-democratic, anti-American, and frankly, anti-religion because it puts government directly in the church's business, the reason the devout James Madison gave for his own insistence on a separation of church and state.

The ultimate danger of a fundamentalist of any kind lies in his dogmatic inflexibility: what he believes yesterday is the same as what he believes tomorrow no matter what happens today. But what those of us who don't deny science know is that what happens today always matters: that's where we actually live our lives.

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

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Unnatural Consequences

2013-05-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

When our daughter Josephine was a young 3-year-old we purchased expensive front row seats to attend a classical music performance. It wasn't a special "family" performance, but she had become a fan of the late Vladimir Horowitz via video and this concert featured, not Horowitz of course, but an up-and-comer that many said had great potential. We were all excited for it, and in Josephine's case, probably too excited: she simply couldn't stop talking, even once the performance began.

When my whispered urges and cajoling didn't have the desired effect, my embarrassment mounting, I turned to threats: "If you don't stop talking, we'll have to leave." When that didn't work, I went the punitive route: "If you don't stop talking, we'll have to leave and you won't get to chew any gum for three days." She was very into chewing gum at the time.

As we eventually packed up and slinked out of the concert hall, I was fuming. In contrast, Josephine seemed, frankly, happy as a lark. I said, "We had to leave that expensive piano concert because you couldn't stop talking. It was ruining the show for everyone." I'd never resorted to punishment before, but in the moment, to this inexperienced and agitated parent, that seemed like the proper course. I wasn't even sure she knew what the word "punishment" meant. I said, "You are going to get a punishment. I told you if you kept talking you wouldn't get any gum for three days. We had to leave, so no gum for three days."

This got her attention, "Why?"

"Because you were talking in the concert."

"Three days is too long."

"I told you that if you didn't stop talking you would get a punishment of no gum for three days."

"Why?"

"Because you were ruining the concert for the other people."

"But I like chewing gum."

This conversation went on like this all the way home. Me trying to draw the connection between no gum and talking in the concert, while she just wanted to talk about no gum, completely unable, it seemed, to comprehend what one had to do with the other. Yes, she understood that you can't talk in a show and understood why we had left. That's what I wanted our conversation to be about. She, however, was only interested in talking about gum, why it had to be three days, and why her dad was taking it away, apparently completely baffled by this entirely unnatural consequence.

That was our family's first and last foray into the world of punishment. I think we got lucky. The lesson I learned was to not buy expensive concert tickets for a young 3-year-old: being able to sit quietly in the front row isn't necessarily in the skill set of young children.

We stuck with the three day gum punishment because we didn't know what else to do. Every conversation we had during that enforced hiatus would turn to the subject of gum. Not long ago, I reminded my now 16-year-old of this episode. She remembered the punishment, but nothing else, which didn't surprise me 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!

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An Imperative Force

2013-05-10T06:30:00.000-07:00

We build at least one new volcano every year at Woodland Park. Our current one is purple with sparkles. Periodically, to great fanfare, we fill it with baking soda, dish soap, liquid water color, and vinegar to create a sudsy eruption. The kids like it, but after a couple rounds the hew and cry goes up to "Put a cork in it!" By that they mean for me to empty the "lava chamber," pare the ingredients down to just baking soda and vinegar, then as quickly as I can, shove a cork into the top, sealing the chemical reaction inside.

We then move off to an exaggeratedly "safe" distance . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting. We try counting down from 20. We try chanting for it to blow. A few kids risk running right up to it, then racing away. We almost give up. Then suddenly, Boom! the cork blasts into the air. On good days we've had corks go a good 25 feet.

That's how things under pressure work: you stuff a cork in them and eventually the cork will be, sooner or later, ejected. If you jam the cork in too tightly then you get a blowout somewhere else. We once put a ghastly split the side of a 2-liter soda bottle that way.

My point is that an imperative force will always vent itself.

That's how play is: an imperative force. It will happen whether we damn well permit it or not, Boom! If I keep the kids sitting around at circle time too long, for instance, things first start to fizz with a little shifting about, then side conversations or accidentally-on-purpose tormenting the kid next to you with your restless foot, if I keep pushing forward without letting them vent their built up instinct to play it will lead to a full-on rebellion. The kids will play. I might be able to keep the cork in it for awhile, but the children will eventually erupt.

This is true of play on a day to day basis and it's true over the long haul, where, perhaps a better metaphor is the slow motion imperative force of, say, the dammed and levied water of the Mississippi River which will, no matter how clever our engineers, repeatedly, then eventually, wash away the place known as New Orleans because it's been built exactly where the water wants to go. It might not happen in our lifetime or even our children's lifetime, but one day the river will win.

Recently, a reader sent me a link to this Psychology Today article, which I'd read a few years ago, but re-read yesterday, noting that it had been reviewed and updated earlier this year. It's a good, long piece that quotes many child development experts on the pitfalls (depression, anxiety, stress, dependency) of what we've come to call "helicopter parenting." If you've not read it, I recommend taking a look: it's not good for kids to be over-managed and over-protected by mom and dad, mainly because it robs children of play, and specifically the part where they get hurt while taking the risks inherent in play (physical, emotional, and social), which is a natural part of the way we learn many of life's most important lessons about self-regulation, confidence, motivation, hard work, dealing with stress, and getting along with others.

The part that leapt out at me upon this read-through of the article, however, was this:

The end result of cheating childhood is to extend it forever. Despite all the parental pressure, and probably because of it, kids are pushing back -- in their own way. They're taking longer to grow up. Adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends, according to a recent report by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank F. Furstenberg and colleagues. There is, instead, a growing no-man's-land of postadolescence from 20 to 30, which they dub "early adulthood." Those in it look like adults but "haven't become fully adult yet -- traditionally defined as finishing school, landing a job with benefits, marrying and parenting -- because they are not ready or perhaps not permitted to do so" . . . Using the classic benchmarks of adulthood, 65 percent of males had reached adulthood by the age of 30 in 1960. By contrast, in 2000, only 31 percent had. Among women, 77 percent met the benchmarks of adulthood by age 30 in 1960. By 2000, the number had fallen to 46 percent . . . Take away play from the front end of development and it finds a way onto the back end. A steady march of success through regimented childhood arranged and monitored by parents creates young adults who need time to explore themselves. "They often need a period of college or afterward to legitimately experiment -- to be children."

The article doesn't say this, but I will: if you think the risk-taking involved in early childhood is harrowing, the "play" in which most post-adolescents tend to engage is often downright life-threatening, involving drinking, drugs, guns, sex, and, of course, cars. This is how play too often looks when it winds up on the "back end." I don't think it's unfair to assert that play -- real play -- in early childhood is a kind of vaccination against many of those dangers we have come to associate with the mutation of post-adolescence.

Play is an imperative force. It's not healthy to put a cork in it. It's not healthy to dam it up. In fact, it is ultimately impossible to do so. The volcano will erupt and the river will flow. It's up to those of us who work with young children to provide plenty of room to engage in freely-chosen, self-directed, open-ended play so that they can learn the important things they need and want to learn today when those lessons are more naturally, easily, and indeed, more safely learned.

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

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Who We Are Becoming

2013-05-09T05:56:00.000-07:00

Over the past several weeks, I've been meeting one-on-one with many of the parents preparing to send their kids off to kindergarten next year. One after another, they've been telling me how good they're feeling about their child, how the things that worried them nine months ago no longer seem to apply. What a wonderful thing to have so many parents feeling this way about their children. I've been tempted to warn them that it's just a lull, that there are new concerns right around the corner, but then I stop myself here on the cusp of summer, knowing that they, like everyone, will figure it out on their own. It got me thinking about this post from last May.

I try to be as Zen as the next guy, you know, setting aside those "wasted" emotions like guilt and worry, those ravenous obsessions that grow to eat up the present if you'll let them. They're horrible party guests, alright, with a tendency to hang around long after their value as goads to improvement or precaution has passed.

I find guilt an easier one to wrangle out of my day-to-day life. I've had lots of practice in my half century on the planet with apologizing, making amends, and committing myself to being a better me going forward, which is all anyone can ever do. I've been a parent long enough now to know that those things about which I feel the sharpest blade of guilt, will not only be forgiven, but forgotten in the long love story that is being a father.

Ah, but guilt comes out of the past, a place already behind us, viewable through that famous 20/20 hindsight and therefore, for me at least, easier to package up and put away. Worry is about the unknowable future, the place we prepare for with, at best, educated guesses. It's harder to keep worry in its place. And as a parent, the moment you put one set of worries behind you, there is another set to keep you up at night.

As a preschool teacher I talk with a lot of parents about their worries. Almost every time I'm pulled aside it's to discuss hitting or biting or shyness or fearfulness or aggressiveness or passiveness or whatever, present tense attitudes or behaviors about which that parent is concerned. Of course, they're always concerned about "right now," about teaching their child to not hurt another or to make more friends, but it doesn't take much digging to know that the real worry is of a future bully or moody loner. This is the bud we hope to nip.

I felt those same feelings too. I worried about those same things too. I still worry about them, although not as much these days as I'm really beginning to see the woman my teenaged child is becoming. No, now I worry about the well-known hazards of the age (drinking, sex, cars, guns) but I'm here to tell you that the person she is today could have easily been predicted a decade ago if my worries had only allowed me to see it.

Parents don't always find comfort in the assurance, "It's just a phase," I know. And perhaps that particular sentence ought to be retired, but for most of the kids, most of the time, it is just a phase, an important one from which your child is learning what he needs to learn to move beyond it or through it or to make peace with it. I know it's easy for me, not being a parent of these children, but rather just being an attentive guy who has stood in one place for a long time, touching and being touched by hundreds of families as they pass my way, to answer "I'm not worried," but it's also true.

The biting will stop. The hitting will fade away. The voiceless will find their voice. The rough will learn gentleness. The fearful will find courage. Your child will move on to the next developmental stage, be diagnosed, and learn to love and be loved. That is all, inevitably, in the future.

Who we are never matters nearly as much as who we are becoming. More often than not, that's how I have to answer parents when they come to me with their worries, "It's just a phase."

My wife and I have a joke we tell one another when the pressures of life are upon us: "This is the critical phase." It's always true; both in that it's critical and that it's a phase. It makes us grin because we know when we look back, we'll see that it really was a phase, while the critical part will remain immediately ahead of us, there just itching to be worried about.

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

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You Might Think I'm Joking

2013-05-08T05:41:00.000-07:00

People think I'm joking when I say this to kids, but I'm not, and the kids know I'm not:

"If you have no bloody owies, then you are being too careful. If you have three or more bloody owies then you're not being careful enough. The right number of bloody owies is one or two. That means you're not being too careful or too careless."

At least once a week I find myself in a group of kids comparing bloody owies. Sometimes we count bruises, but there's a general consensus that they don't count nearly as much as scabs.

Charlotte disagrees with my bloody owie-to-carefulness ratios. She claims to always have more than three bloody owies and feels that my standards are too low. She once complained, "It's impossible to not have at least three bloody owies. I have three just on this arm!"

Because of all this, I'm often very aware of the status of the scabs, cuts, and other assorted abrasions that have mangled the flesh of my charges (most of which, incidentally, don't occur on my watch). And what impresses me the most is how quickly they vanish. I mean, I might go two or three weeks showing off the same damn bloody owies on my own skin, while kids like Charlotte, it seems, can show me a fresh one every day without actually increasing the total number of bloody owies on her body. It's almost as if young children are designed for bloody owies.

And indeed they are. Otherwise healthy children heal remarkably fast. They have no knee caps so falling on them is rarely worse than a flesh wound. Their bones are flexible and everything about them is low to the ground. Their skulls aren't even fully fused, for crying out loud, which means they have a greatly reduced risk of concussions. In other words, young children are designed to fall down, hard, and often.

And likewise they are designed to learn from falling down.

This is why I'm so despondent about the changes currently taking place at my local playground. Up until a week ago, two of the main features of the place were four large rocks that kids used as "stepping" stones, that would more properly be called "leaping" stones, and a large, slippery steel dome that really could only be ascended by taking a pell mell running start, then hoping you could stop yourself right at the top or else it was down the other side with you, often on the seat of your pants. The city is replacing it all with, yes, yet another boring climber under which they are currently installing a good three feet of wood chips.

How do you learn about bloody owies from that? Nope, all those injuries, all that learning, will have to wait until they're older, out in the world with knee caps to break, greater heights from which to fall, brittler bones, and fully formed skulls so that their jostled brains have no space in which to swell.

No one wants children to get hurt, but at the same time every injury you prevent in childhood is just an injury pushed off into the future because as we say at Woodland Park, the only way to learn about asphalt is to fall on it.

You might think I'm joking about this, but I'm not.

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

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A Necessity For Thriving In The Contemporary World

2013-05-07T06:03:00.001-07:00

During my first year teaching 2-year-olds, I had a boy that probably had some sort of mild sensory integration issues. I was not experienced enough to recognize it, but it did result in him spending large chunks of his days hanging out under our loft, complaining to one of his parent-teacher buddies that he was planning to "break the whole school." I've written about Henry before and how we managed to calm him with caution cones, but there was a time, his mother later confessed to me, when she had considered switching schools, worried that Woodland Park was just a bit too rowdy for him. And we can be loud and rambunctious indoors and out.

When Henry headed off to kindergarten his mother told me about dropping him off, how she had anticipated at least a little first day jitters, but instead he just plunged right in to the big school with barely a wave goodbye. She said, "I'm so glad we stuck it out at Woodland Park. He was so ready for the craziness of 25 kids and one teacher."

And that's where most of the children are heading when they leave Woodland Park, into our terrific local public schools, some of which, however, have classes with as many as 30 students. Not ideal, of course, but that's today's reality. I'm glad we're sending kids like Henry off with the confidence and skills they need to handle it, if only because they have learned to thrive within a little cacophony.

Last week was one of our noisier indoor weeks. I'd set up our real traffic light, the one I borrowed from my father 10 years ago and never returned. We used our little push bikes as vehicles, created a tight road grid, and around and around and around we drove, complete with appropriate traffic sounds, including the occasional flare-up between drivers. It's really a big, ongoing negotiation, not entirely unlike regular urban driving.

When we have one of these kinds of set ups in the room, I like to pair it with other activities that lend themselves to concentration. One of our favorites is this Montessori-inspired art exploration in which we use liquid watercolor, pipettes, paper towels and some of those little suction-cup soap holders. Now, no one is telling the kids they must carefully direct one drop of paint into each of the suction cups, then place a paper towel on top to absorb a slow-motion tie-dye explosion, but most of them do, and some of them do it over and over, experimenting with their own coordination, the combinations of colors, and the characteristics of liquid.

It's not an easy thing, requiring a steady hand, focus, and patience, especially if you have a pattern in mind. It was impressive, I think, how capable the kids are by this time in the school year to block out the distractions and get to their self-selected work.

There were several kids who had been getting a little ramped up in traffic, even acting out upon their "road rage," who I saw remove themselves seamlessly from the fray, moving to the art table next door, where they self-calmed by going deeply into this tiny world of painting one drop at a time. I know many adults who do the same thing after a long, trying, end-of-the-day commute by pouring themselves a cocktail. This is healthier and much cheaper.

I wish I could keep them in our little progressive school bubble forever, but ultimately, sooner or later, what we're preparing them for is the real world with large classes and traffic jams. Being able to get about our work of living in spite of that is a necessity if we are going to thrive in the contemporary world.

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Jumping Through Hoops

2013-05-06T06:22:00.000-07:00

Whenever I write posts like the one from last Thursday, in which I rang an alarm bell about the trend of preschools to turn away from traditional play-based education and towards the flash card-worksheet-direct instruction model favored by the Tiger Mom set, I receive comments and emails pushing back, some blaming teachers, some asserting that a nice dose of stress is a good thing, and a small group of hand-wringers who worry that if we don't start early, those darn kids will never learn the importance of nose-to-the grindstone perseverance.

From where I sit, I find the assertion that teachers are somehow pushing for increasingly "academic" preschools both odd and a bit confounding. I suppose that there are some Teach For America types out there, those who were taught churn-and-burn ideology instead of age-appropriate pedagogy, who have found their way into preschools, but I have never met a professional early childhood educator who is doing anything other than fight tooth-and-nail to protect her students from the toxic stress and psychological damage done by this type of preschool curriculum. We're not all play-based, but anyone with any experience in working with young children knows that "focused, goal-directed behavior" is not developmentally appropriate for preschoolers. This anecdotal knowledge, gleaned from my own experience and the experience with every preschool teacher with whom I've ever spoken on the topic, is supported by the overwhelming majority of the research.

So where does this push come from? In Thursday's post, I blamed the corporate education reform movement lead by charlatans like US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee. And they are, at bottom, to blame, but the ones who are directly pushing for this type of toxic preschool curriculum are freaked-out parents.

Our play-based school is affiliated, along with some 40 other play-based schools, with North Seattle Community College here in Seattle. Each year we take part in "open registration" a sort of festival of cooperative preschools at which parents can talk to representatives (parent volunteers) from each of the schools to ask questions and, if they so choose, enroll in our classes. Generally speaking, Woodland Park's rosters are usually already full for the coming year (although we set aside some open registration spots in our Pre-3's class and our 5's classes), so we're there largely to compile a waiting list, but we still interact with a large number of parents each year. And even here, even in this progressive city, at this heartbeat of cooperative preschools, parents come to the table to ask about our early reading program, or math curriculum, or our homework load.

Many teachers (like the one's referred to by the Scientific American article upon which I was riffing last Thursday) against their better judgement, are being forced by marketplace demand to adopt curricula that requires young children to "handle material (for which) their brains are not yet equipped." Why are these parents pushing for this? Because they're scared. They've been scared intentionally by the likes of Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, with their over-hyped fear mongering that "our schools are failing!" It's true that some of our schools are failing, almost all of them as a direct result of the poverty. US schools that serve a population in which less than 10 percent come from families living below the poverty line are on par with the best public school systems in the world by any measure. It's simply not true that our schools are failing. (And even by writing that I have no doubt that there will be those who write to accuse me of classism or racism for implying that poor children are not capable of academic success. To them I simply say that poverty is already the hardest job in the world. Poverty in America is a cruel task master who relies heavily on a child labor force, many of whom are already working far too hard to give a rat's ass about school.)

Not every preschool teacher is in a position to fight back, and they have to give in or perish, hopefully continuing the good work subversively. But some of us are in a position to do something, although I don't know what to do about convincing parents other than to speak out about it, as a teacher, parent, and citizen, and hope I can convince the right people. I don't know if we'll be louder than the corporate education reform PR machine, but if we can get parents to listen, the best interests of children are on our side.

One thing I know we can't do is let them drive any more of a wedge than they already have between parents and teachers: we're the ones most closely allied in wanting what's best for our children. We might disagree with exactly what is best, but there is no doubt that flash cards and worksheets are a grimness.

Ah, but come now, people challenge, isn't some stress a good thing? Yes. This is how that works. From an article entitled The Powerful Impact of Stress from the Johns Hopkins University School of Education site:

Stress is neutral -- it is a person's perception of the event that determines their response . . . Stress is positive when the person feels stimulated and able to manage the situation. This positive response prepares the body to action and activates the higher thinking centers of the brain. A positive response to stress can provide the energy to handle emergencies, meet challenges, and excel . . . Stress is negative when a person feels threatened and not in control of the situation. These feelings instigate a powerful reaction -- affecting both the brain and body in ways that can be destructive to physical and mental health.

I can think of nothing that would make a person, a young child, feel more threatened and out of control than to be expected to "handle material for which their brains are not yet equipped." To be drilled on it with flash cards and worksheets, tested, to be found wanting, all delivered in a manner, and on material, that you are not capable of handling, according to an overwhelming majority of the research. We're talking about "toxic stress," to quote the Scientific American article again.

There are some have who written me, doubting that preschoolers are really suffering from that much stress that we need to worry about it. I hope that most of them are not, but the ones in these kinds of school are, and there seems to be a push to make more of them. So on that ground, I feel it's urgent. I don't believe there's any research out there specifically on preschool stress, but there is some on educational stress in general, especially among high schoolers, and at least some of that is attributable to the policies advocated by corporate reformers and the resulting parent pressure to "succeed." I can tell you that I've never met a preschool teacher who would claim that a stressful environment is appropriate for her students and I never expect to.

But how do young children begin to learn the important lessons about perseverance and hard work? That's where play and positive stress come in. Anyone who has worked with young children at all can tell you that despite the romantic notions, play is not all fun and games. At any given moment in our classroom, there is, of course, a lot of that, but you'll also see brows furrowed in concentration, cheeks wet with the tears of frustration, and faces red with the heat of anger. A proper definition of play doesn't even include the word "fun": it does, however, include the concept of being "freely chosen."

When a child, or any person for that matter, sets his own tasks, ones chosen by himself, for himself, ones that address his own questions and curiosities about the things and people in his world, and is then free to pursue those questions through his own methods: that's when deep learning takes place. And that is how the human animal is born to learn. Time and time again, researchers find that only a tiny fraction of information delivered through direct instruction, even among adults, is actually "learned" (in that it's remembered beyond the test) while nearly all of what is learned through the direct experience of play is retained.

No, learning to shut up and do the work imposed on us by others is not education that teaches the work ethic. That is how one teaches obedience. Flash cards, worksheets and other kinds of drilling cause negative stress not because they require hard work and perseverance, but because they embody mind-numbing rote, the opposite of a child's natural way to learn, which is through play. Hard work and perseverance are built into play, and study after study has found that when children are allowed to freely explore in an open-ended manner without fear of being labeled a "failure," they work longer and more diligently on their tasks than those simply following instructions.

When a child plays, it opens her mind fully, she is a scientist, an explorer, an inventor. This is where creativity and critical thinking come from. There are challenges, risk, and mistakes, all of which cause stress, but without the entirely unnecessary added toxic stress of compulsion, adult expectations, and judgement.

You see, whether we like it or not we all spend our lives jumping through hoops. That's the nature of life. That's the nature of education. Toxic stress comes from being compelled to jump through hoops held by a task master, or else: hoops in which we have no personal interest, or for which we are simply not yet ready, or through which we've already been too many times. Positive stress, the kind that makes our heartbeat with excitement and anticipation is a result of choosing our own hoops at our own time and through which we attempt to jump in our own manner.

It's the difference between jumping through other people's hoops or our own.

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"The Playground's Only Good When We're All Out There"

2013-05-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

"We must prepare our children for the jobs of tomorrow."

"The Chinese are beating us!"

"We need to out-educate the rest of the world."

These are the kinds of statements we most frequently hear from our elected representatives when they talk about education, framing their comments always in the context of economic competition. Competition is at the heart of the corporate education reform idea, the one adopted by both the Bush and the Obama administrations: pitting student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, district against district, state against state.

I wrote yesterday about one of the reasons I believe that corporate-types and other power freaks are so gung-ho on turning our schools into education factories. It's not because they have any actual data or research to support their plans (that is all on the side of those of us who advocate for progressive education reform) but rather because the factory is simply a model they understand from their day jobs of producing widgets, most of them having never spent a day in a classroom. Another bedrock of this businessman's ideology is this notion of competition: a faith that competition always leads to the best and the cheapest, and the more unbridled the competition, the better. This is also not supported by anything that has ever happened in the real world, but rather by theories that live beautifully on the pages of text books, but that when implemented in the real world always lead to the inevitable result of the rich getting richer and the ranks of the "lazy" poor expanding.

No, perhaps competition would be the best way to organize education if the goal was purely to prepare children to take their place in the economy, if we accept the idea that we are here to serve the economy rather than the other way around. But I even doubt that. The most successful companies rely at least as much on teamwork and collaboration to succeed as they do competition. At most, competition is a part of the puzzle of business success.

But that's all almost beside the point. The purpose of public education is so much broader than preparing the workers of tomorrow. That's certainly not what I want for my child's education. I want her, first and foremost, to acquire the skills of good citizenship. Good citizens, the kind with the critical thinking and interpersonal skills required to truly assume the rights and responsibilities of self-governance, must be prepared to contribute to society in ways far beyond the mere economic. We must be able to count on our fellow citizens to contribute socially, artistically, politically, culturally, spiritually, and in all the other ways that make life worth living. A well-rounded citizen is more than just a worker: our schools exist to prepare the well-rounded citizens required for democracy to flourish, people capable of doing more than just hold a job.

Education simply doesn't work as a competition. At it's best education it's a collaborative process with students and teachers and administrators and schools and districts and states working together, sharing, building upon the work and ideas of one another. This is how democracy is supposed to work as well: not as some competition between polarized political ideologies, but rather as the self-governed standing on the shoulders of one-another to build a better, more fair, more responsive, more beautiful, more enlightened, and yes, even a more prosperous society. Competition is all about "me." Democracy is about "we."

And likewise, education is about "we." Or as my friend Jaan, then a 4-year-old, said as his classmates were pushing and shoving to get through a narrow doorway, "Hey, it's not a race. The playground's only good when we're all out there."

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No Risk Of Brain Damage

2013-05-02T05:50:00.000-07:00

A drinking glass holds water, but only if you hold it the right way. Tip it too much one way or another and you lose control of it as it spills onto the floor. A bucket also holds water in much the same way, but if I take it by the handle and swing it with enough velocity, the centrifugal force created will hold the water in place. I know that a sponge can hold water too, at least until I squeeze it. Same goes for paper towels. If I put water in a bottle and screw the lid on tightly I can make the water swirl and wave without losing a drop. I can direct the flow of water, at least for a time, by building channels and understanding that it moves according to gravity. I don't even try any more to make it flow up hill. I can't hold water in my hand for long unless I freeze it, and even then it eventually leaks through my fingers. I can turn it into steam with heat and use its energy to drive machinery. I can add salt to it so that things float more buoyantly on its surface.

Every adult human knows these things about controlling water. It's the stuff of universal knowledge. Water behaves the same everywhere, throughout history, without variance. We can make reliable predictions about water, including that water will always ultimately defy our efforts to control it, leaking out, evaporating, or changing course as it follows the much larger arc of mother nature's purposes. But as far as human time is concerned, we can "own" water and make it do our bidding.

From the wider perspective, of course, it's water that controls us. We've evolved as animals, at least in part, according to its demands. It does this by being utterly unchangeable; a condition of life that we must accept. Water has nothing more to learn. Water has always existed in its final, perfected state.

We living beings, however, have always been and always will be in progress, our perfected state anticipated by religion perhaps, but it always takes death to achieve it. Philosophers and poets often compare this progressive feature of humanity to the flow of a river, and while that metaphor may reveal important things about ourselves, we are really nothing at all like water. For one thing we're nearly impossible to predict and control. That's because it's in our nature to learn, and to do that we must play, a process that is defined in part by its unpredictability.

Not long ago Scientific American discussed the phenomenon of how, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, preschools are increasingly trying to control children's learning through more lectures, flash cards, and tests, teaching them tricks to impress their parents, and putting these same children at much higher risk for long-term mental health problems:

Perhaps most disturbing is the potential for the early exposure to academics to physiologically damage developing brains. Although the brain continues to change throughout life in response to learning, young children undergo a number of sensitive periods critical to healthy development; learning to speak a language and responding to social cues are two such domains. Appropriate experiences can hone neural pathways that will help the child during life; by the same token, stressful experiences can change the brain's architecture to make children significantly more susceptible to problems later in life, including depression, anxiety disorders -- even cardiovascular disease and diabetes . . . asking children to handle material that their brain is not yet equipped for can cause frustration. Perceiving a lack of control is a major trigger of toxic stress, which can damage the hippocampus, a brain area crucial to learning and memory.

Despite this, preschools are increasingly ditching their play-based curriculums in favor of this kind of toxic direct instruction.

"Scientists are baffled," says Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. "The more serious science we do, the more it comes out that very young children are not designed to do focused, goal-directed behavior . . . but are to a phenomenal degree very sophisticated about learning from the things and the people around them."

I'm not particularly baffled. The more I read about these corporate education "reform" efforts, the more I come to understand that this is about inexperienced people and their craving for control. Lurking in there is the crazy idea that if we treat education like a predicable, mechanistic system of some sort, we'll be able to manufacture brilliant little minds, all filled up with the names of the countries in Asia or the various species of whales. That if we just put them in the right containers, direct them into the proper channels, or boil them at just the right temperature, we'll have a generation of little knowledge machines ready to set loose on the world. In this vision, teachers need only be technicians, or perhaps mere factory workers, trained to adjust the dials and read the gauges.

This, of course, is like trying to make water flow uphill, with the added sickening bonus that you risk damaging their brains. I think it's because these otherwise intelligent people have so little experience with the process of education that they don't understand the basic principles of how young children actually learn. They don't have the experience to know that the method and the order in which children learn things, the process of learning, is far more important than any trivia you try to cram into their heads. They are trying to push this water up hill because they've not played with it enough to understand that it's simply not in water's nature to flow up hill. In this way, they are showing themselves to be very poorly educated, at least on the topic of education.

It's as if these people are working from the perfected template of a theoretical child, one that they can predict and control the way they might water, a concept they've developed after spending a few hours observing children through one-way glass. Classroom teachers, those of us who have spent years and decades immersed in children's learning, know that they come to us ready to learn everything they need to know, in fact learning it already, usually in spite of us. Experienced teachers know that they spend most of their days racing to just keep up with their charge's natural inclinations and curiosities that carry them in directions often entirely unpredictable and uncontrollable. Much of what I do after making sure they don't kill themselves or one another is to get out of the way. That's much of what teaching is.

Earlier this week we broke out a set of puzzles that we've owned for awhile. They've always been moderately popular with our 4-5 year olds. I'd had these puzzles out earlier in the year and they kids had been frustrated with them, many being reduced to tears, despite the fact the the official label on the box said they were for "3 and up." Many of the kids had needed a lot of adult coaching to get through them, which is a sure sign that they're not ready for them. I predicted, however, that while many of them still aren't natural puzzlers, enough of them had advanced enough in their puzzling skills by now that at least if help was needed they could help one another. And sure enough, that's how it went. Instead of struggling with the puzzles one-on-one, the children, with no adult instruction, paired up to coach one another.

So there you have it, education "reformers," free of charge, a genuine predictable outcome that took me ten years to finally learn to anticipate. It didn't teach them anything about the nations of Asia or the species of whales in the ocean, but the children did spend a lot of time talking, sharing space, strategizing, taking turns, and generally "just playing," learning from the things and people around them as they are "designed" to do.

These results are valid until the next time we get out these puzzles with an entirely different set of children, who may or may not take it where this group did. And guess what? No risk of brain damage.

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"You Did Your Best"

2013-05-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

By the time I realized I was just a prop in her play, I was already helping by adding yet one more piece to her very tall tower. I don't do this kind of thing, help kids do things beyond their capabilities. I don't push them on swings or lift them onto high places or even help them out of a physical jam unless it's moral support or if I see panic starting to set in.

But there I was, holding her tower, mostly because she just assumed I would.

"I can't reach any more. Here," handing me yet another piece to fit on the top. "Now, I'll turn it back down to the ground."

She fit together several small curved pieces, shaping a U-turn, which she handed to me. "This connects to the top."

I tried to get out of my predicament, "I can't do it while holding the tower with my other hand. I think you'll need to get a chair to stand on."

"No, that won't work. I'll hold it for you." Okay, okay. I tried to fit the U-turn onto the tower, but it was all too flimsy and the entire top broke into pieces.

"Hey, that almost hit me, Teacher Tom!"

"Sorry. I don't think this will work."

She gathered up the pieces that had fallen. "It will work. But you put these pieces back on."

I tried to claim that I couldn't do it, but she assured me that it would work if I just tried it, so I did. It fell apart again.

She calmly picked up the pieces that had formed the U-turn, reassembled it, then said, "I guess I'll just have to build from the bottom."

"From the bottom?"

"Yes, you hold your part, and this part," handing me the U-turn, "then when I build my part tall enough, we'll connect the two towers with the curvy piece." When she got to the point that the second tower was too tall for her reach, she began handing me pieces again.

I said, "My hands are already full."

"You'll have to put down the curvy piece." I placed the U-turn carefully on its side, then, no longer seeing anyway out of my role in this project, began taking the pieces she handed me, and, according to instruction, clicking them atop the second tower. When they were the same height, she said, "Now it's time for the curvy part."

She waited for me to pick it up. I said, "I'm already holding two towers. I can't reach the curvy part."

"That's okay, Teacher Tom, I can help you." She handed me the U-turn. This tubular building set is actually pretty crappy. It doesn't click together solidly enough. Any structure of size, which this was, is going to be flimsy.

When the whole thing came crashing down, she reassured me, "That's okay, Teacher Tom, you did your best," then walked away.

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Understanding Every Word

2013-04-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

The most challenging part of my recent trip to Greece was visiting the Dorothy Snot Preschool and not sharing a language with the kids. It wasn't the children's challenge, they couldn't have cared less, but mine. If there's any single thing I'm certain of, it's my ability to engage children, but until I dropped to my knees in the school's courtyard to bring myself face-to-face with the kids, I'd not been aware of how reliant I'd become on doing that through chattering.

Robbed of my go-to move, I was thrown back upon non-verbal communication. With the youngest kids, of course, this wasn't so hard. They're still working on the rudiments of language themselves, and much of my communication, even with English-speaking toddlers is non-verbal, so it didn't take me long to figure out a few simple, repetitive games we could do together, like passing a ball back and forth through a hanging tire, to get things going, to develop some trust. No, my real challenge was with the oldest kids, the 5-year-olds, the ones who chatter as much as I do.

The kids had been anticipating my visit, and none more so than the kindergarten class, crowding around me, full of questions and comments that were all, literally, Greek to me. It feels awful, frankly, to leave children hanging like that, not knowing how or even whether to respond. I got on my knees with them as well, smiling, responding to their physical touch with touch of my own, turning to one of the teachers for help translating when a child was particularly insistent that she or he be heard.

I'd been a child in Greece some 40 years before, arriving with limited Greek language skills, much like this return visit. Back then I'd managed communication, cobbling together a common language of words and gestures with the children I met there, but I felt out of practice there in the midst of these kids who were excited to engage with me. I didn't want to let them down. I'd worn my cape for that first visit, the one you see me wearing at the top of this blog, so I started by offering it to the kids, asking through pantomime who wanted a turn to wear it. The bolder children took me up on it, taking turns racing around the space with the red cape trailing behind them, growing a bit wild in their play, tugging at the cape, wrestling one another in their excitement. I was winding them up, which is not in and of itself a horrible thing, but it's not really communication.

As we played this game, my ear began to pick out familiar Greek words like, "yes," "no," "tomorrow," "go," "strawberry," words I'd not needed in four decades. At one point I began to just shout them out randomly as they came to me and the kids shouted them back, language without communication, a step in the right direction perhaps, but one that didn't really lead us anywhere, other than to perhaps cement the growing opinion among the kids that Teacher Tom was, at least, silly.

At one point, a teacher brought out a large sheet of paper and some markers. I don't know if she meant it for me or not, but I saw my opportunity. Soon we were gathered around the paper, drawing. This is a universal language. It no longer mattered what we were saying as we pushed up against one another, huddling up, sharing a blank space, filling it up with our lines and figures and colors. It was through drawing with the children like this that I began to become something more than a silly man in a red cape. It was in this process that we first began to become friends.

Over the course of the next few days we found other ways to communicate. We ate together several times. I learned to say, "I don't like that," which is an important phrase for every adult to have when working with young children. The highlight for me, then, was telling a story, in English, to the kindergarteners. It was a plan the teachers and I had cooked up, a sort of challenge. I would tell the story, then the kids would tell us what they thought the story was about. It was a test of the new language we'd developed together over the preceding three days. I used lots of hand, body, and voice gestures. I was thrilled that they laughed at all the same places the kids do back home. Occasionally, one of them would shout out an English word to me that they recognized: "Butterfly!" "Bear!" At the end of the story, they wanted to hear it again, which was an incredible honor.

Upon the second telling, then, the kids discussed what they thought the story was all about, and sure enough, they nailed it. That evening, I met the parents of one of the boys. They told me he'd come home enthused, boasting to them that Teacher Tom had told them a story in English and that he'd understood every word.

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Our Magnificent Boredom

2013-04-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Last week was a gift here in the Pacific Northwest. Warm, bright blue skies, lilacs in fragrant bloom, a light breeze: an early week of summer, one the likes of which we didn't experience until mid-August last year.

Our 5's class normally spends a little over half its days outdoors. Last week we elected to spend our entire days out there. No one appreciates a sunny day like us mildewy Northwesterners. When I worked at the chamber of commerce, the offices would more or less clear out around lunchtime and stay that way on days like these, most of us claiming an afternoon meeting out of the office that would run late enough that it didn't make sense to return to the office. Of course, we all knew where everyone was, out there in a patch of sun, and we all let one another off with their little lies without even a wink.

Lazy joy! The running around was half-hearted. None of us wanted to let one moment of our day go by unappreciated, so we slowed way down, all of us. We were together in shorts and sun dresses for the first time in months, feeling almost scanty with our bare arms, legs and toes, Huckleberry runaways, with dirt under out nails, a bit of something in our hair, and the often clearer perspective of youth.

Oh, we're the ones who know how to play in the damp, windy cold: that we do with aplomb for most of the year. But days like these: they play with us. There was Cooper over there, in a chair, his journal on a knee as he drew a detailed illustration with ballpoint pen, feet rested on an edge of the table, his head in the sun, while his body rustled with dappled shade.

There were none of those wild good guy-bad guy games we've had so much of this year, while around the workbench was a casual congress of chatty machine dismantlers, taking their time removing parts that we would later use to repair our robot. Another group gathered in the shade with large paint brushes and rollers -- house painting tools -- methodically making a pastel masterpiece of the door that most recently hung on our new play house. There was much discussion, but no resolution, about whether or not it would go back on its hinges or just serve as a piece of art. The day gave us permission to leave the question hanging, showing us the folly of our usual rah-rah urgency to resolve things.

People who live in places where almost every day is like this simply cannot fathom the giddy happiness we people of the dark and damp experience when we get even one day like this, let alone a run of them in mid-April. We got sunburned. We purchased new sunglasses and promptly lost them. We continued to wear our shorts and sandals even when temperatures dropped down into the low 50's at night.

The nation of Bhutan uses a measurement it calls Gross National Happiness (GNH) to assess it's national well-being. I love this idea, even while recognizing the challenge of really measuring what we call happiness. But I sure love that Bhutan seriously tries, basing its government's 5-year planning upon certain psychological and social indicators to try to get at the overall "satisfaction" of the people. Critics complain that it's an inexact, subjective kind of measure, too reliant upon the vagaries of self-reported happiness, and the fact that it can never be used to accurately compare nation-with-nation given cultural differences, expectations, and definitions of happiness. If Seattle were surveyed last week, our self-reported happiness would indeed be through the roof.

Of course, who cares, right? If I'm self-reporting as "happy," does it matter if my happiness can be judged against the happiness of another, be they my countryman or not? If I'm not so happy, I'm not so happy. If I'm happy, I'm happy. It's not a comparative statement, but always a purely subjective one. GNP will always be an averaging of subjective reporting, data created by unique individuals, each of whom has her own criteria, some of whom are happier on a sunny day than those who live in places where it's commonplace.

It's not that the clouds and rain depress us, I don't think, at least those of us who've been here for a long time, but rather that when sky opens, clean, so blue it hurts your eyes to look at it, inviting us to expose our pasty skin, we're all simultaneously filled with an appreciation, a gratitude, and even a love. And that's what lies at the bottom of all happiness. When the sun shines in Seattle, we don't have to count our blessings, they count us. There is no better place to be than amongst these truly happy people, moving slowly, appreciating every blessed moment.

Up under the cedars, we wove a plank between our two swings, inventing a kind of front porch swing upon which we idled for awhile side-by-side. We hung there, barely swinging, chanting together, "Blah, blah, blah, blah. This is boring. Blah, blah, blah, blah. This is boring . . ." loving ourselves and one another and our magnificent boredom.

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The Critical Phase

2013-04-26T05:11:00.001-07:00

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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"I'm Not Leaving My Profession . . . It Has Left Me"

2013-04-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

Veteran teachers are becoming fed up with the direction of our public schools, with an ever-increasing emphasis on unproven and disproven "educational" methods like high stakes standardized testing, standardized curricula, the de-professionalization of teaching, privatization, larger class sizes, and longer school days, all being driven by dilettantes, charlatans, ideologues, and for-profit companies that prioritize profit over education.

This incredibly well-written and well-reasoned resignation letter has been making the rounds. I wanted to share it with you. This is exactly the kind of teacher we need in our classrooms, this is exactly the kind of person that will not choose teaching in the future unless we push back. It is a national tragedy that so many teachers are finding they have no other option that to shut up or resign. This is why the rest of us must continue to fight the good fight.

Our children deserve better than schools that run like factories.

Dear Mr. Barduhn and Board of Education Members:

It is with the deepest regret that I must retire at the close of this school year, ending my more than twenty-seven years of service at Westhill on June 30, under the provisions of the 2012-15 contract. I assume that I will be eligible for any local or state incentives that may be offered prior to my date of actual retirement and I trust that I may return to the high school at some point as a substitute teacher.

As with Lincoln and Springfield, I have grown from a young to an old man here; my brother died while we were both employed here; my daughter was educated here, and I have been touched by and hope that I have touched hundreds of lives in my time here. I know that I have been fortunate to work with a small core of some of the finest students and educators on the planet.

I came to teaching forty years ago this month and have been lucky enough to work at a small liberal arts college, a major university and this superior secondary school. To me, history has been so very much more than a mere job, it has truly been my life, always driving my travel, guiding all of my reading and even dictating my television and movie viewing. Rarely have I engaged in any of these activities without an eye to my classroom and what I might employ in a lesson, a lecture or a presentation. With regard to my profession, I have truly attempted to live John Dewey’s famous quotation (now likely cliché with me, I’ve used it so very often) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself.” This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education and particularly not at Westhill.

A long train of failures has brought us to this unfortunate pass. In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place. This lack of leadership at every level has only served to produce confusion, a loss of confidence and a dramatic and rapid decaying of morale. The repercussions of these ill-conceived policies will be telling and shall resound to the detriment of education for years to come. The analogy that this process is like building the airplane while we are flying would strike terror in the heart of anyone should it be applied to an actual airplane flight, a medical procedure, or even a home repair. Why should it be acceptable in our careers and in the education of our children?

My profession is being demeaned by a pervasive atmosphere of distrust, dictating that teachers cannot be permitted to develop and administer their own quizzes and tests (now titled as generic “assessments”) or grade their own students’ examinations. The development of plans, choice of lessons and the materials to be employed are increasingly expected to be common to all teachers in a given subject. This approach not only strangles creativity, it smothers the development of critical thinking in our students and assumes a one-size-fits-all mentality more appropriate to the assembly line than to the classroom. Teacher planning time has also now been so greatly eroded by a constant need to “prove up” our worth to the tyranny of APPR (through the submission of plans, materials and “artifacts” from our teaching) that there is little time for us to carefully critique student work, engage in informal intellectual discussions with our students and colleagues, or conduct research and seek personal improvement through independent study. We have become increasingly evaluation and not knowledge driven. Process has become our most important product, to twist a phrase from corporate America, which seems doubly appropriate to this case.

After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, “Words Matter” and “Ideas Matter”. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean.

Sincerely and with regret,

Gerald J. Conti

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The Only Religion

2013-04-24T05:49:00.001-07:00

One word that sums up the basis of all good conduct . . . loving kindness. Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. ~Confucius

Rex was insistent we read his book at circle time. It was entitled "The Golden Rule." It probably had a subtitle and an author, although I took no notice. What compelled me was his insistence. There was something here that he really wanted to share with all of us.

We've all been there, of course, full of epiphany, overfull, giddy to share something that has moved us mind, heart, and soul.

The Golden Rule is really the only religion. This is the great truth found at the heart of all spiritual life when it comes to our relationships with the other people. And as far as I can tell, relationships are the only reason we're here.

Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. ~The Buddah

I asked, "Rex, is this your show-and-tell item?"

"No, it's a book. Read it."

In his class we usually vote on which book we're going to read each day. Sometimes you don't get to read the book you want. I said, "I have some other books too. We can vote on it."

"No, we have to read it."

In everything do to others as you would have them do to you. ~Jesus

We have a list of rules on our wall at school, dozens of them, all of which we, as a democracy of children, have agreed to by affirming that none of us want these things done to us. "Does anyone want to be hit?" I ask. When no one speaks up in favor of being hit, I say, "Then we agree. That's a rule."

"I can tell you really want to share this book with everyone, Rex. We'll read it at circle time."

Rex was satisfied with that.

What is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. ~Hillel

Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baha'i Faith, Zoroastrianism, and every other religion you can name: the simple message of the Golden Rule stands at its core.

When children break one of our rules, after reminding them of the agreement they've made with their friends, once some of the emotion of the moment has faded and we've found a better solution, I more often than not calmly ask, usually smiling with an acknowledgement that I'm asking a question to which we all know the answer, "Is it okay for people to hit you?" "Do you like it when people take your things?" And when they reply "No," usually smiling themselves at the ridiculousness one finds in answering such obvious questions, I state the simple fact, "No body does." Then we sit there nodding for a moment, silently understanding that we're all in this together.

Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. ~The Prophet Mohammed

Rex was an evangelist for a day, a proper prophet, bringing us the good word. We read his book together and discussed what it meant. He kept watching the faces of his classmates as I read, watching, I suppose for them to show signs of their own enlightenment. What a gift he brought to us.

Then, when the book was done, we sat there nodding silently in the ancient wisdom: the simple, sweet, perfect heart of humanity.

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The Skills Most Necessary For The Life To Come

2013-04-23T06:41:00.000-07:00

When we arrived at the front gate, I was sure it wasn't the same place. I even said, "I don't think this is it." If I'd just peeked in at the gate as I'd originally intended, I'd likely have shrugged and walked away, but we had an appointment so we gave the guard our identification in exchange for visitors' passes and passed inside.

I attended the American Community School (ACS) in the Chilandri neighborhood of Athens during the early 1970's when I was in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. Once we got through the security gate (which is new since my time) things began to look familiar. Although it seemed smaller now, I recognized the facade of the 3-story elementary school building with its exterior stairways that invited us to race down at breakneck speeds. I taught myself to really barrel down the stairs, having, as a 4th grader new to the school, identified speed on the stairs as a "status" thing.

All I'd really wanted to do on my first return to Athens in 40 years was "look" at the old school. Really. That's all I'd intended, but John, my thoughtful host, had organized things, and as Principal Cathy Makropoulos showed us around the place, it all came flooding back: so many things I'd forgotten.

We had played a lot of what we called "German Dodgeball" (prison dodge ball) on those playgrounds, huge games involving dozens of boys, hurling those rubber balls at one another, dodging, catching. This was not PE class dodgeball -- the only people playing were the kids who chose to play. You could throw the ball as hard as you wanted and no one complained. We took it seriously. In fact, as a 10-year-old, I don't think I'd up to that point in my life ever competed at such a high level athletically as I did in those entirely child-created, child-managed games. I remember being counseled by an older boy to "keep the ball low: it's harder to catch." Excellent advice, but my greatest strength was being able to actually catch another guy's best throw, sending him to "prison." There was another older boy who had taken it upon himself to attempt to be my tormentor, he came after me with a hard, low throw and I was able to cradle it just off the ground. He looked at me in shock for a second, then shook his head in disgust before jogging off to prison. I didn't have problems with him after that.

Of course, it was on these playgrounds that I also learned to play soccer, or more properly, football. I was never one of the best players (those guys were mostly the Greek-American kids), but when I returned to the States where the sport was just catching on, it was as a skilled player: skilled enough to be captain on an Oregon state championship team. That was a big deal in my life -- still is!

I learned to play the clarinet while there. Our music teacher was very temperamental, although no one really took him seriously. For a time, I was "first chair," but one week I simply didn't practice at all, and as he dramatically pointed me to "last chair" he hit an actual chair so hard with his baton that a piece of dried chewing gum fell to the floor. We all laughed while he fumed. I continued as last chair for the rest of the year, experimenting with the role of class clown, then gave up on the instrument altogether.

More intimidating was when Telly Savalas' brother Teddy, a 5th grade teacher, called a student meeting to discuss the 50 drachmas that had gone missing from his wallet. He didn't yell, but was nevertheless quelling in his firm, earnestness: "It's not the amount of money. It doesn't hurt me to lose it. What hurts is the idea that someone from this school would steal it." It almost made me wish I'd been the one who had taken it so I could, as he offered, return it anonymously to his desk. Later, after I'd played the character John in a Thanksgiving Day production, it was Mr. Savlas' complements that meant the most.

When I'd been a student, there had been a public street that ran right in front of the elementary school, dividing it from the rest of the campus. Shepards regularly walked their sheep along it. On the opposite side of the fence where we played soccer on a gravelly pitch, there had been some run-down houses where gypsies lived. We called them gypsies, at least, and Principal Makropoulos, an ACS graduate, remembered them that way as well. We were told to leave them alone, to not interact with them through the fence, and for the most part we didn't, but it was hard to ignore what looked to us like extremely disadvantaged lives. Now there are apartments where the gypsies used to live, but I still think of them when I think of poverty.

As we took in the rest of the campus, meeting the teachers, many of whom said they planned to attend my Friday night presentation, people kept asking if I remembered this teacher or that teacher. Some of the names sounded familiar, but I couldn't put faces with them. The faces of my classmates, however, and their names flooded over me as I rounded corners and ascended stairways. It was my classmates that came back to me the most.

The library had been remodeled, but the shelves looked the same, and as I began to remember, I saw a row of study carols from the past where we had taken turns putting on those giant headphones that plugged into a turntable, and where we listened to the very first Cheech & Chong comedy album as 6th graders. Even after only a couple hearings, we all had it memorized ("Dave? Dave's not here," and "Class . . . Class . . . Class . . . SHUT UP!"). The pothead aspect of the humor went right over our heads, but we knew it was hilarious because all the high schoolers were talking about it, and all we needed to do is evoke Sister Mary Elephant or Fifi the sexy poodle to elicit laughter.

I don't suppose anyone is surprised that I wasn't likewise flooded with memories about the worksheets I'd completed, the chapters I read, or the tests I took. I know my education was a good one, because ACS was and still is an outstanding school, full of dedicated teachers, but curriculum isn't the kind of stuff that sticks with a person, although that's not entirely true in the case of my time at ACS.

There were no walls between the classrooms on the 5th grade floor back then. It was called the "open classroom" concept, something that struck our whole family as experimental and radical at the time. Our literacy and math curriculum was branded Independently Prescribed Instruction (IPI). I've never been so aware of a curriculum as we all were then. We all talked about IPI. "It's time for IPI," the teachers would say. The basic idea was that you were handed a package of lessons as a 4th grader that represented the entirety of what you were expected to get through during the next 3 years, with the idea being that everyone worked at his or her own pace. You read the materials, did the exercises, then, when you thought you were ready, you took the test.

I don't recall any of the specifics of what we were learning, but what I do clearly recall is this process: if you passed the test you moved on to the next lesson. If you didn't, you reviewed the material until you felt you were again ready for the test. When I realized how this worked, I simply plowed through the entire "English" part of the IPI program so that within the first few months of my 5th grade year I was done, completely, meaning that I had "free time" instead of IPI; time I mostly used to play marbles with a kid named Aki Baez while the others worked on their lessons. As the year wore on, more and more boys began to complete their English work, motivated I think by the prospect of joining Aki and me playing marbles on the blue-grey carpeting. It was high stakes gaming in that we played for "keeps." As the year wore on, we developed a kind of "marble boy" culture, one with its own unwritten social rules and expectations: we were building a democratic, or perhaps meritocratic, community together, down on our knees amidst the table and chair legs, off the radar of the teachers, our own independently prescribed instruction in what is, frankly, the most important thing of all: getting along with the others.

This is why we have class reunions, of course, not to reflect on the formal parts of our education, the school work, but rather the extra-curricular parts of our time together. No one gets together with high school chums to reminisce over a test score or a text book. Sometimes we may celebrate a teacher, but only if she was a person who was warm, funny, inspiring; someone who rose above the academics.

As I enjoyed my reunion of one, touring the campus that was so warmly opened to me, I was overwhelmed with the realization that this, after all, these memories of people, of the things we did together, of the community we made together, this is what school really is always all about. The academics, frankly, are the excuse, but it's through learning how to live together that we develop the skills most necessary for the life to come.

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Let Me Tell You The Story

2013-04-22T05:48:00.001-07:00

You may or may not be aware that I was posting all of last week while eating breakfast on the rooftop of my hotel in Athens, Greece. I don't know if that impresses you or not, but it does me. The last time I was in Greece, as a boy in the early 1970's, if we wanted to write something to someone back home, it was via letters written on tissue thin paper so that it wouldn't cost too much, employing the technology of air mail that sometimes took up to 5 weeks to complete the delivery.

People try to tell me it's not true, but the fact that I can even write paragraphs like the one above is evidence that I'm getting to be an old man. And please don't think I'm pitying myself, because I'm not. I've long looked forward to being a guy with some experience under his belt; with memories to comb through for anecdotes and stories and life lessons and all that other stuff that can only come from having already lived for decades. In college I once went into a drug store looking to buy the gray hair dye that I hoped would lend me some gravitas, only to be told by the sweet woman behind the counter, "Oh honey, they don't make gray hair dye. Who would buy it?" No, indeed, I've earned every gray hair in my beard and I'm now living in the time of life most suited to me.

I was in Greece to give a speech at the invitation of my friend John who is the founder of the Dorothy Snot Preschool in the heart of downtown Athens, a place where I met dozens of kindred spirits, teachers, parents, and others who share my love and respect for young children, and who want nothing more than to see them have the opportunity to play, to learn, to begin to collect the stories they will tell when their hair starts to go gray. Maybe some of them will remember the time a strange man in a red cape came to play with them in school, and whom they sent away to his distant home bearing gifts they'd made for him.

As I spent my week amidst both ancient and living history, I was aware of myself as a character in not just my own story, but all the stories; not just from my own half century, but of all the eons that people have walked the earth. I would come around one corner and see the ancient Parthenon above me, representative of the enduring greatness of Athens, only to round the next to find graffiti-art, speaking of its painful present. And around the next I might then be face-to-face with one of the promotional posters of myself in full Captain Superhugger regalia.

I re-visited my old neighborhood, Kifissia, a place that as a boy I'd known as a simple village of bakeries, kiosks, butchers, and groceries, now replaced by Ralph Lauren, Sephora, and Louis Vuitton, our age's universal markers of the prosperity of a certain social class. The next day I was caught up in a march of thousands of men and women, all even older than myself, and certainly with more stories to tell, protesting the austerity measures that have impoverished their sunset years. I ate traditional kid and lamb as well as hot dogs wrapped in pita and stuffed with french fries.

I told my stories to the children at Dorothy Snot, in English, then they tried to figure them out. In turn, I tried to figure out the stories they were telling me in Greek. I told my stories in meetings, in interviews, at gatherings, and over meals, and listened to the stories others told me. And even as we told our stories and collected new ones, I was always aware of being a part of the larger never-ending story of children and mommies and daddies: stories of life and death and play and love.

Officially, I was there in Athens to tell my stories in an auditorium that was once a part of a now defunct gas plant, in a neighborhood that is in the process of being transformed from an industrial area into a district of trendy nightlife. Three hundred people came out to listen, on a Friday night no less, and then turn the tables and talk back to me, asking questions, challenging me, and sharing parts of their own stories.

We are born, we live the stories, we tell the stories, and we listen to the stories, then we find eternity as characters in the stories that those we have touched tell about us. That's how forever works: let me tell you the story.

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Some Notes On Personality

2013-04-18T21:04:00.001-07:00

Back in the 80's, during my years working for The Man, the entire office had an afternoon off for a kind of personal development seminar at which we all took the well-known Meyers-Briggs personality test. Afterwards, we discussed the results in small groups. I was the only one in my group not surprised that I fell into the classification of introvert. I remember my assistant manager saying, "This test is crap. You're the most extroverted person I know."

The pioneering psychologist Carl Jung was the first to popularize the concept of extroversion-introversion during the early 1900's, a notion that has become a centerpiece of just about every personality theory out there. The terms are commonly used as synonyms for "outgoing" and "shy," but that's a misunderstanding of the concept. The basic idea, as I've taught myself to understand it, is that those with the personality trait of extroversion tend to get energy from being with the other people, while introverts tend to get their energy from being alone or with only a few intimates.

I live with a pair of women who are classic extroverts. They come home from parties, temple, work, and school with bright eyes, chattering, enthusiastic, and in general seeming "all filled up," ready to make phone calls or turn around a do something else. I come home from those same places, places where I talked and laughed and engaged at least as much as they did, but I'm all emptied out: I crave the quiet time to sort through what just happened, to muse, to fantasize, to veg out, to tank up. In other words, I love all of you, but you take it out of me.

This blog has become one of the places I get filled up. I can't exactly say I enjoy the process of reflection, but I do crave it, nevertheless. I've always done it, of course, even before I became a teacher, going over my day, reveling in things that went well, trying to figure out what I could have done differently when they don't. My extrovert wife, who is quite often my sounding board, used to say, "Stop obsessing," and it would draw me up. Am I obsessive? I don't think so. I think of obsessiveness as a largely destructive trait, one I associate with perfectionism, or a mind that just won't shut off. It's never felt that way to me. I might not always like it, but I really need to mentally process my day. That's what gives me energy.

Some people think of extroversion-introversion as a continuum with the majority of people falling somewhere near the middle (ambiverts). Others, Jung among them, believe that we all possess both traits, with one being dominant, but that there are times when the less dominant side is expressed.

I'm in the second camp, judging from my own experiences. It's become clear to me, that one of the reasons I am a teacher is that I'm a true extrovert when it comes to spending time with young children. They fill me with energy. I often drag through my early mornings, preparing for the advent of the kids, but once they start arriving it's like a switch is thrown and when our days together come to an end, I find myself wanting them to go on. I often stay too long afterwards, chatting with parents, horsing around with kids, not wanting it to end. And once they're all gone I pass through a period of loneliness which explains why I so often leave the classroom a mess until the following morning -- I just don't want to be there in the quiet building without the children, while in the rest of my life, alone does not equate at all to loneliness.

I've found a few other places in my life where my extrovert side expresses itself, but none so much as my time with the kids.

We all live with these two sides of ourselves, as do our children. It's important, I think, as adults in the lives of children to make an honest study of them, to understand when and where their introversion and extroversion are expressed. And perhaps more importantly, to recognize that they are not us. The excitement you feel about the lights of the carnival may strike your child as a chore, one that requires summoning up the enthusiasm that comes naturally to you. The peaceful evening at home toward which you looked forward, may loom in your child's mind as grim loneliness, especially after a day of tanking up with the other people.

I often say that school is the place where we practice being together, which is why I don't particularly value having a lot of nooks and crannies where kids can be on their own, at least for extended periods of time. Whether we are gaining energy or spending energy in social circumstances, it's only through experience that we can come to better understand ourselves. While this time might be harder work for the introverted child, the aftermath is often harder work for the extrovert.

Of course, personality is far more involved than this, and although I've not seen any data, I suspect that our fundamental personality type can actual grow and change as we gain experience in life. I know I'm a far different person today than I was 30 years ago when I last took the Meyers-Briggs test and I've seen young children over the course of their 3 years at Woodland Park transform themselves, while others are just more sophisticated versions of who they were at 2.

Personality is not a fixed thing. And all the tests that purport to measure it really are crap because each one of us defies categorization throughout our lives. There is always a danger that terms like "introvert" and "extrovert" become labels to conveniently and inappropriately slap on other people. Still, if we understand that the concepts describe nothing more than a point in time for an individual, they can give us a framework for thinking about personality, especially the personalities of the other people with whom we spend our time each day, including the children in our care. And every tool that helps us reflect on our relationships with others is a good one.

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

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The Magnificence Of Play

2013-04-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

I can't imagine anyone thinks more or more deeply about sensory tables than Tom Bedard over at Sand and Water Tables. I especially love the right hand column of his blog where he lists his eight "Axioms of Sensorimotor Play." Not only do these axioms have the virtue of making me chuckle because they verify my own experience, but taken in aggregate they stipulate that if allowed to play freely and given enough time, children will explore every possible nook, cranny, up, down, laugh, and tear. This is the magnificence of play: no stone is ever left unturned.

Recently, Tom posted about creating levels within his sand table using peg board, and since among the many things I'm curating in the storage room is a large sheet of peg board left over from another project, I thought we should give it a go. For better or worse, our peg board had become a bit warped from being leaned against a wall for a couple years, so I wasn't able to exactly re-create Tom's set up, so I just winged it, duct taping one larger sheet to one side of our magnificent sensory table, then creating lots of smaller mobile platforms from scraps and wooden chopsticks.

We have a massive amount of sand, but it was all the way outside in our sand pit and I had a couple large bins of flax seed within arm's reach, so I went with that. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but a storage room full of oddball loose parts coupled with a bit of laziness is certainly its father.

As the children across all three of our classes, aged 2-6 played with this set up over the week, I saw each of Tom's axioms in action as the children fully explored every level, both over and under, including the floor. They filled and emptied every scoop and container, repeatedly. They discovered that the chopstick supported platforms could be moved around. They discovered they could be taken apart. They discovered they could be put back together. They discovered that the peg board scraps themselves could be used to move the flax seed around.

I've been having a number of incredible discussions about play while here in Athens for my talk on Friday. In one of them we discussed a study in which researchers had invented a toy that had a number of features, both obvious and hidden. With one group of children, the adults demonstrated a handful of the features (e.g., push this button, turn this dial), then handed it over to the children. The children quickly explored each of those features, then were finished. The key element of this toy, however, was that there another dozen features to be discovered that had not been demonstrated. The second group of children were simply given the toy with no demonstration. This group of children played with the toy until they had discovered all of the features. (UPDATE: Thanks to readers, I've learned that the toy I'm writing about here only had 4 functions and one was demonstrated, but the results were as I've described -- the children who received no demonstration of the toy were far more likely to discover the other three functions, and played longer, than those who received a demonstration. Here's a link. Another link is provided by Alec of Child's Play Music in the comments.)

As I watched the children play with the flax seed and pegboard levels, I was in awe of their inventiveness, curiosity and motivation. Some of them spent hours there during the week, asking and answering their own questions, working at their own pace, figuring out this small corner of the world, which is really just a model of the larger world in which we all live.

This is the magnificence of play.

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Get This App Today!

2013-04-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

Let me state right up front, it wasn't my idea to download this latest app for the preschool. It was Luca's mom Megan who thought the school just had to have it. Her own kids had really enjoyed it, it was sooo educational, you know, the usual blah, blah, blah.

I guess I should quit fighting it. After all our kids are growing up in this world, and huge sheets of cardboard are going to be part of it, but I worry about what it's doing to their brains. Still, for better or worse, there we were, taking part in this grand social and developmental experiment.

It didn't surprise me, of course, that the kids took to it right away. I mean, it's cardboard, right? They all seem to be drawn to it.

Honestly, it's amazing how they somehow intuitively knew how to turn it on and start using it.

It only took a few seconds for them to figure out how to get to the napping function where they all cozied in together and made me turn off the lights. I have to say, that doesn't happen often without the app!

But what really impressed was when they discovered the fort building function. How they did it, I'll never know, but, I mean, there they were, 3, 4, and 5-year-olds already learning their forts! And I don't think they even knew they were learning anything. I mean the cardboard app can't be all bad if they're doing forts as young as three years old -- that's a lifelong skill there, people!

They started with the upright, roofless kind of fort. Like I said -- three years old. If you could see my face right now, I'd be raising my eyebrows at you in a knowing way.

Then, get this, they figured out another kind of fort that involved getting low and adding roofs! I mean, I'm an educated guy, but these preschoolers took to the technology as if they were born with it in their genes.

And I have to say, they didn't seem to be turning into cardboard zombies the way I'd feared. Only time will tell, of course, but for now they seemed quite actively engaged: not only with the cardboard, but with each other, and it really looked like it was involving their whole minds and bodies.

I asked Megan if she'd found any need to set limits or anything, but other than "not in the living room," she hadn't so far. And she guiltily mentioned another feature that I'd secretly been enjoying myself: it really kept the kids occupied when she needed to get something done. I mean, let's be honest, that isn't always a bad thing.

Then they figured out the slide, human sandwich, pig-pile function, which made them squeal. Anything that can make children laugh like that can't be all bad. Still, I had some questions.

I decided to ask a few experts about their thoughts on young children and cardboard, starting with a psychologist who sighed, and said, "Well, it's cardboard. What can you do? You can't ban it. That will only turn it into forbidden fruit." The neuro-scientist perked up when I asked him for his thoughts, saying, "There's actually some very compelling evidence that early exposure to large sheets of cardboard stimulates not only the part of the brain that makes you feel good to be alive, but also seems to have some effect on the every other region of the brain worth developing."

This information in my pocket, but still not entirely convinced, I returned to school determined to try my own experiments. Of course I didn't tell any of my fellow teachers about this in advance for fear of being ostracized, but I took the cardboard outside.

That's right. I was nervous about it, but the kids knew just what to do, discovering the paints and painter's tools function and transforming the cardboard into everything from a bus stop to a castle to a maze to a work of art.

They engaged as if they were born to do it, creatively, scientifically, and socially.

It's a brave new world folks. I'm a convert. Download this app today! You won't regret it.

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Good Teachers Are A Flaw In The System

2013-04-15T21:34:00.000-07:00

I've written about Michelle Rhee before, one of the faces of the corporate education "reform" movement. For the uninitiated, this is the woman who was chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools when they saw dramatic increases in standardized test scores, became the toast of the factory-style reform movement, hanging with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan and landing on the cover of Time Magazine, only to have it then revealed that those vaunted scores were based upon widespread cheating, not by students but by teachers and administrators.

When I wrote about her, I kind of let her off the hook for the cheating, assuming she didn't know, even though her draconian policies made it all but inevitable, but memos have now been released and sources have come forward that demonstrate that she was fully aware of the problems, discussed them with her staff, and decided to try to sweep it all under the rug. The truth is that she has lied and cheated, her actions have prevented children who needed remedial help from getting that help, she has destroyed the careers dozen of dedicated teachers and principals, and she has used her falsified track record as a way to persuade 25 states to adopt her high-stakes, produce-or-else approach to education. Michelle Rhee is a fraud and possibly a criminal. The Washington, DC school district, already one of the nation's most challenged, was left the worse by almost every measure for her self-serving efforts.

If you're wondering, I've illustrated this distasteful post with photos of children watering the garden simply because I can think of nothing more hopeful than children in the springtime. And despite all of this, I remain hopeful -- and I hope you do too!

If you're after the details on these latest revelations, and the full Michelle Rhee story, I urge you to have a look John Merrow's excellent piece, Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error, on his Taking Note blog. John is a veteran education reporter for PBS, NPR, and dozens of other publications and a leading proponent of quality public education.

What follows is what I wrote about a year ago, and which is still relevant. I included lots of links, which I hope you will use to educate yourself on the dangers and mistakes of the corporate education reform movement. These new revelations about Rhee, what she knew, and when she knew it, are an opportunity for those of us in opposition to push back. I hate that this is how it must be, but this is politics and the emperor is without clothes.

*****

Her school's assistant principal wrote of her:

"It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined."

The head of the school's PTA (and a parent with a child in her class) said of her:

"One of the best teachers I've ever come in contact with. Every time I saw her, she was attentive to the children, went over their schoolwork . . . she took time with them and made sure."

Naturally, this second year 5th grade teacher with glowing classroom evaluations was fired. Not "let go" as part of a last-in, first-out cost cutting measure, but fired for incompetence based exclusively on standardized test scores. That would be outrageous enough all by itself, but it appears that a large percentage of her students had come from another school in the district that is suspected of cheating on the prior year's tests. She had even expressed concern earlier in the year that many of her students who had arrived with high reading scores where, in her opinion, barely able to read. So when these students who had been passed along to her with artificially inflated scores were tested in her class, "the machine" found that they had regressed and she was gone. Appeal denied. They even claim they "treated her fairly." It's the Blueberry Story writ large.

How does anyone expect teachers to work under these conditions?

This happened in the District of Columbia Public Schools, one of many districts scandalized by what appears to be widespread cheating on these unproven, mathematically invalid high stakes standardized tests. What makes this particularly infuriating is that much of the cheating in this case happened between 2007-2010 under the watch of union-busting, corporate education reform poster child Michelle Rhee, who has risen to prominence based on her supposed turn-around of the DC public schools, when it appears she did it all based on lies and cheating. No, I don't think she personally engaged in the cheating, but as chancellor she certainly jumped at the chance to claim credit for those ill-gotten test scores and did everything she could to slow-walk any investigations on her watch. And she's still doing it.

Despite this, Rhee continues to hang out with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, receive $50,000 a pop speaking fees, and generally enjoy being feted as a leading light in American education.

You would think that, at a minimum, everyone with any kind of sense of responsibility about public education in our country would be keeping their distance from this deeply flawed champion of high-stakes testing, charter schools, and the de-professionalization of teaching, but no, they seem to be doubling down.

What's wrong with these people? I'm serious. Everyone from Bill Gates to President Obama to Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee seem to be victims of some sort of brainwashing. No matter the actual evidence in front of them, they stay the course. No matter how many mathematicians and professional educators demonstrate that their tests are bunk, they stay the course. No matter how many studies show that charters and vouchers, on average, produce worse results that regular public schools, they stay the course. No matter how much their own "research" proves to be simply data that has been "fixed" around a pre-determined result (e.g., We prove that high stakes test scores help children learn by using high stakes test scores to show that children are learning), they stay the course. No matter what, they seem simply incapable of seeing or hearing anything beyond their dogma of corporate education reform, a project that seems specifically designed to enrich corporations, while totally ignoring the educational requirements of children and our democracy.

I used to think we were just dealing with misguided crusaders and dilettantes, well-intended folks striving to give back, but no longer. There are powerful, wealthy people who want our children to be less well-educated, more obedient, and less likely to question; they are looking to our schools to create a citizenry that is so hard at work keeping their heads above water that they don't have the time, let alone the ability or knowledge, to speak for themselves. And they seem to have managed to create these legions of brainwashed followers, who can see nothing but what they've been fed by lobbyists in smokey back rooms. It's hard to know which ones are the zombies and which their cynical masters.

Good teachers stand in the way of this agenda; teachers who think for themselves, who have a genuine interest in education, who understand that the corporate reform movement is not about education at all, but rather manufacturing methods designed to produce unquestioning worker bees.

How does anyone expect teachers to work under this system? They don't. No, good teachers are actually a flaw in the system. They must be fired because the machine says so.

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

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"Sharing" The Right Way

2013-04-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

Scarcity is always a problem, not just in preschools, but everywhere. The big difference is that in our preschool, thankfully, scarcity isn't an issue when it comes to necessities, only with those like-to-have-but-can-live-without items like old rowing machines and giant plastic insects.

When I first started teaching we spent a lot of time trying to help children hammer out sharing and turn-taking agreements, often involving me or another adult serving as the time-keeper, or otherwise managing things, and still, when the time was up, there remained many kids tearily reluctant to stick with the bargain, taking us back to square one in which an adult more or less has to force matters. And honestly, it always stuck in my craw that even these dodgy solutions took so much adult intervention.

I like the books of Robert Munsch, mainly because he is a storyteller first, and they are structured so that it's easy to borrow his stories like Stephanie's Ponytail, Murmel, Murmel, Murmel, and The Paper Bag Princess, and make them into my own oral stories. One story, however, that I could never make my own was the book We Share Everything, in which the kids wind up making a mockery of the adult mantra that was the book's title. I mean, that's kind of how we were doing things at Woodland Park and I couldn't bring myself to reveal the flaws in our system.

It was the advent of the 2-seat swing set, I think, a couple years ago that lead me to rethinking the whole idea. At the time, there always in seemed a kerfuffle over the swings. Children would whine, "She's not giving me a turn!" One day, probably because I was distracted with something else, I responded, "She's using the swing now. When she's done, it will be your turn." I then said to the girl swinging, "When you're finished swinging Sophia wants a turn." Minutes later, when I looked up, there was Sophia getting her turn. There are still individual parent-teachers who manufacture sharing solutions for the kids, especially around the swings, and when something new is introduced (like our slot-car track with only two-tracks) the adults still need to manage a system, but when it comes to day-to-day sharing and turn-taking, I've more or less stopped trying to help.

When a child complains to me about "turns" or "sharing," I now generally just point out the facts: "Johnny is using it now, when he's done it will be your turn," making sure that Johnny hears me say it, sometimes, even confirming with him, "When you're done, Johnny, Suzy wants a turn." It doesn't always result in Johnny doing the right thing, but most of the time it does. In fact, very often Johnny voluntarily ends his turn far sooner than he would have had I been there compelling it.

But, as is true with anything we adults turn over to the kids, they are often far more inventive when it comes to solving their problems if we give them that space, even when scarcity is involved.

For instance, my parents are moving into a smaller place, and they had a rowing machine that was too old to even sell, so I decided to try plopping it down in the outdoor classroom, with the idea being that if the kids don't play with it, we can at least dismantle it bolt by bolt at the workbench. It's not been as popular as the swings, but on any given day, children will play with it, often using it as a space ship. A few days ago, I noticed Lily standing on a log, her harms wrapped around one of the uprights of the swing set. She looked either bored or melancholy, so I thought I'd check in.

I said, "I looks like you're just hanging around."

"I'm having my turn standing on the log."

I was confused, especially since there was an empty swing seat. "Are you waiting for a swing? I see an empty one right there."

"No, it's my turn to be on the log."

Still confused, I asked, "Do I get a turn next?"

"No, it's Hazel's turn next."

I spotted Hazel several steps away, struggling with the rowing machine. "Is Hazel waiting for her turn to stand on the log?"

"No, she's having her turn on the machine." With that, Lily stepped off the log and went over to Hazel. Without a word between them, Hazel stopped rowing and gave up her place. As Lily began to row, Hazel stepped up on the log and wrapped her arms around the pole. They continued this sort of wordless trading of places for several rounds as I watched.

Or how about our giant plastic insect solution? We have a collection of these large insects. There are a couple dozen of them. They're all popular playthings, but there are some that are more sought after than others. Typically, when we have them out, we have to deal with the problem of hoarding, a word that I've introduced to the children to describe the phenomenon of a child collecting the bugs (or whatever) and not playing with them, but rather just preventing others from playing with them.

When I arrived on the scene, Marit was the only child playing with the bugs. She had lined them up along the top of a block, side-by-side. Thinking I detected the beginnings of a hoarding situation, I said, "You have all the bugs."

"No I don't," she answered, "There are some over there," pointing to a collection of smaller, less desirable insects. "This is my store. I'm selling bugs."

"Can I buy one?"

"You can buy anyone you want except the bee. That's my pet."

"I'd like the scorpion." I picked up my merchandise and pretended to hand her money.

"No, you have to use the money over there," again pointing to the other insects. "I'm pretending that the other bugs are the money."

I handed her a small rubber spider, a clearly less attractive bug, and she gladly turned over the scorpion no questions asked. Before long, other kids joined us and Marit had a booming barter business going. She made no distinction between larger bugs and smaller, desirable and undesirable: everything was a one-for-one transaction. Soon Rex had joined her as a shop keeper.

For the rest of the week, we played with those bugs, always with someone or a group of kids operating a "bug store," and not once did we have to deal with hoarding. Not once did scarcity cause us to whine. It was the kind of beautiful we're-all-in-this-together solution that only a child could contrive.

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

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