Teacher Tom

Inventing Us

2026-11-06T05:43:40.593-08:00

The opposite of play isn't work, it's rote. ~Edward Hallowell

This might sound like an odd thing for a teacher to write, but I sometimes get the idea that knowing stuff is the enemy of education. There is little gratification in it for me when I've envisioned how children will do something, then they proceed to do it in just the way I've imagined. Certainly, I could claim it as some evidence of experience on my side, but it also makes me worry that it's also evidence of rote on the children's side.

I'll leave it to future teachers to worry about teaching the kids to follow instructions if that's what they feel they need them to do. Much better things are happening in our school, it seems, when instructions are minimal and I'm constantly proven wrong in my expectations. Fortunately, when working with young children in a play-based environment, that's more the norm than the exception.

Our classroom, every day, should be one big experiment, a place where things are not known by either the kids or the teachers, a place where we fiddle and argue and poke and prod our way toward knowledge, and where everything we come to understand is only a part of all the other things we're striving to know. It should be a place with lots of room for failure, frustration, and conflict. It should be a place with lots of room for wonder, epiphany, and friendship.

When a colleague complained to Thomas Edison about his lack of results in one of his experiments, he replied, "I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won't work." Except we're not even trying to invent anything here, but simply discover, in the spirit of pure science, conducted for the purpose of getting closer to our own truth and nothing more.

Or maybe we are trying to invent something, after all, and if we are, it's not the sort of thing that can be put into words, but rather felt or intuited. I suppose it has something to do with inventing ourselves both as individuals and as a community. It's something that can only be invented by conducting thousands and thousands of experiments; by taking thousands and thousands of steps.

And even though billions of humans have come before us, if we are playing together, we are discovering and inventing a thing that has never been discovered or invented before: us.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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The Magic Circle of Us

2026-11-05T06:45:10.597-08:00

"You have to go around that tree."

The boy was telling a friend how to run the obstacle course he and the other kids had created. After running around the tree, there were some stairs to climb, a clamber through the sand pit row boat, a scamper up and a slide down the concrete slide, a stop in the garden to pick a ripe berry ("or something else to eat"), a jump off of something, a balance across something else, and so on until you arrived back at the starting point.

It was even more elaborate than my explanation and the boy being instructed listened with an intensity, asking for clarifications, obviously wanting to get it right. Then he was off as the others cheered him on. "You forgot to ring the bell!" "It's okay, I couldn't find any berries either!" "Hurry!"

He was flushed and panting by the time he'd completed the circuit. Now it was time for someone else: "Go!"

As the next child rounded the tree, the others cheered. The boy who had just joined the game, likewise joined in the cheering, naturally, because that too was part of the game, an unspoken but nevertheless vital rule of this game of obstacle course running.

This was a game that emerged entirely from the children themselves. It was not urged upon them by an adult, although the physical space of our junkyard playground may have suggested it to them.

Ethologists tend to distinguish between "exploration" and "play," although I've always considered the two behaviors part and parcel because one so often leads to the other. Exploration is the evolutionarily functional process of answering the question of "What is this?" while play asks the open-ended question, "What can I/we do with this?" On this day, the thing they found to do, their play, was this game of taking turns running a course.

In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga theorized that play is the primary and necessary condition for the creation of culture. He argued that while play is a self-selected activity, one that is entered into via an exercise of free will, the space in which it takes place (in this case, our playground) becomes circumscribed by a "magic circle." Inside this circle, there are rules that exist by agreement of the players as long as the game continues. Those who violate those rules and refuse to mend their ways, are either expelled from the game or, if they persist, the game comes to an end. Everything that is outside this magic circle becomes irrelevant for the time.

There were no rule breakers in this game on this day, but had there been a conflict over the rules of this game, for instance, I might have felt compelled to step inside the circle which would have, in an instant, destroyed the magic. If the conflict turned violent, if someone was excluded, for arbitrary reasons, I would have had no choice but to intervene. But short of that, I try to allow conflict to play itself out. Often, beautifully, it results in some sort of compromise. Sometimes it leads to the formation of a second magic circle in which the rules are completely different. And sometimes it leads to, as Huizinga suggests, the exclusion of someone from the game.

This is the hard one for early childhood educators because, in the backs of our minds we have the idea that no one be excluded. "You can't say you can't play." But what of the player who, say, refuses to start by going around the tree? What of the player who decides to spontaneously add tackling to the game? Certainly, they can suggest these changes, discuss them, negotiate, but if the rest of the kids are against it, it would be grossly unfair of me, the adult, to insist that the newcomer and their unilateral changes be included within the magic circle. In fact, to do so would, again, destroy the magic. I can suggest to the child who has been excluded that they create their own game, to attempt to circumscribe a new magic circle with its own rules, but if the goal is to be part of the culture that has sprung up around the obstacle course game, then joining that culture means finding a way to live within its agreements.

I like this idea that play is the source of culture, but it does require adults who see and understand the magic circle, who are able to treasure it from the outside, because like a soap bubble, the act of crossing the barrier usually makes it disappear. We can't, of course, always stay on the outside. And sometimes, on the best days, we're invited in.

"Teacher Tom, do you want to try it?"

As I ran around the tree, I heard the children cheering, but I knew it wasn't for me. It was for all of us. That's the magic conjured inside these circles -- the magic of us.

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The Ice Cream Was Always Just Out of Reach

2026-11-04T06:54:36.529-08:00

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

I said, "What is it?"

"It's healthy food."

"What kind of healthy food?"

"You just have to eat it."

"I'll need a fork."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll need a wash cloth."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maybe . . .

2026-11-03T07:37:32.763-08:00

As a boy, we heard a lot about the so-called "population bomb," a term used to describe apocalyptic predictions that without drastic action to curtail birthrates around the world, we would face mass starvation by the mid-80s.

It was a bomb that didn't explode according to predictions as birthrates then declined in what some identify as one of the most significant demographic developments in human history. From the perspective of today, we can see that global population growth peaked at about 2.1 percent annually in the late 60s, then began a rapid decline, falling to 1.08 percent by 2019.

There are many reasons that this happened, including the empowerment of girls and women, better access to contraception, declining infant mortality rates, urbanization, rising prosperity, changing cultural expectations, government policies, and, probably, to a certain degree, the apocalyptic predictions themselves, which likely caused at least some people to not want to bring children into a world of starvation. We see a similar response to apocalyptic predictions about climate change today as some young people are opting out of parenthood explicitly because they see a grim future for humanity.

The philosopher Alan Watts popularized a version of an ancient Chinese parable that seems particularly apt:

A farmer's horse ran away. His neighbors came to console him. "What terrible luck!" they said.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

The next day, the horse returned, bringing several wild horses with it. "What wonderful luck!" exclaimed the neighbors.

"Maybe," said the farmer.

The following day, the farmer's son was thrown while trying to ride one of the wild horses, breaking his leg. "What terrible luck!" the neighbors said.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

Soon afterward, war broke out and the army came to conscript the village's young men. Because of his broken leg, the farmer's son was spared. "What wonderful luck!" said the neighbors.

"Maybe," replied the farmer.

In his book How the World Really Works, scientist and author Vaclav Smil discusses the challenge of making predictions about any complex system, offering dozens of examples of how even seemingly well-supported predictive models typically miss the mark, often dramatically.

"(E)ven short-term projections involving complex systems . . . remain highly uncertain, and even near-term outlooks result in a broad range of possible outcomes." He even shows how today's sophisticated computer models are built on assumptions which can, and do, lead our predictions about the future astray, perhaps even more so than "pen-and-paper" calculations.

As it happens, I'm posting this on the morning of Election Day, when we will discover how closely the results align with the predictions of pollsters and pundits. Whatever happens, the story will continue, and tomorrow we'll all be making new predictions.

Of course, we all would like to know the future, and we can't help but anticipate and plan for it, but when the rubber meets the road, the most intellectually defensible response to confident predictions about our collective future, no matter how apocalyptic or Pollyannaish, is "Maybe."

The story continues and we, ourselves, stand within the complex system of life.

In his masterpiece War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy takes a similar view of how we view the past. So often, our history books focus on stories of individuals exerting their will, making it happen. As Tolstoy tells it, Napoleon imagines that he is directing events, but he is caught up in a complex system of circumstances, individual decisions, accidents, misunderstandings, and forces beyond anyone's comprehension. His generals issue orders, but by the time these orders reach the battlefield, the circumstances have changed. Soldiers must respond to what is immediately in front of them. Battles unfold through countless interactions, none of which can be understood in isolation. History doesn't go according to anyone's plan; it is simply what happens . . . Maybe.

Smil shows us the limits of our ability to predict the future, while Tolstoy is concerned with the limits of our ability to explain the past. We naively assert that hindsight gives us 20/20 vision, but the narratives we create after the fact, inevitably lead us to favor one set of individuals and events over others, while overlooking the countless other "reasons."

Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of boys who were disrupting the classroom with their game of "bad guys." These two "sweet" boys had created a relationship that produced a behavior that no one could have predicted by observing either child individually. Indeed, it confounded their parents who insisted that the "fault" must lie with the other boy. But their relationship wasn't something that just happened between the two of them. It included their parents, the rest of the children, me, a wider world in which "bad guys" were a thing, and countless other factors. As an active part of this system, I managed to bring their relationship into conversation with the larger community, and in doing so, new possibilities emerged that no one could have predicted.

The solution was not to correct their collective mind, but to expand it.

This is, I think, what the Chinese farmer does. Each new development expands the story, making moot the previous judgments of "good luck" or "bad luck." What seemed certain becomes uncertain.

At the end of the day, perhaps we are no better at being able to explain why the past happened than we are at knowing what the future holds.

As adults who work with young children, we concern ourselves with their futures. Our schools strive to make children "school ready" or "college ready" or "career ready." Our policymakers are forever talking about those mythological "jobs of tomorrow." We worry what this or that behavior portends for their future prospects, worrying that their "bad guy" games will lead them to some sort of apocalyptic future; or that learning to read earlier than their peers portends glory.

"Maybe." It is neither a statement of pessimism nor optimism, but rather an acknowledgment that the only thing we can ever really know is right now. Of course, we still try to learn from the past and prepare for the future, but at the end of the day, we can only act according to the moment that is emerging in front of us.

This is the great opportunity of the early years. Young children are neither cornucopians nor catastrophists. They are more firmly fixed in the present than we adults with our vast experience with pasts and futures that preoccupy us as life itself emerges before us. They are less committed than we are to the stories they've constructed about the past and future. A block becomes a telephone, then a jet, then a slice of cake. The meaning of an object remains open. The next moment can change everything.

Young children are especially adept at keeping possibilities open, which is precisely what the Chinese farmer does.

Folk singer and storyteller Utah Phillips quoted Mark Twain as saying, "Those of you who are inclined to worry have the widest selection in history."

It's one of those lines that remains evergreen as our predictions and interpretations come and go. The opportunity, however, is for us to strive to approach our work with children, recognizing that they offer us a perspective of the emerging present that we struggle to grasp. It's a perspective in which there is no "ahead" or "behind," in which the past is never fully explainable and the future is unpredictable, so why not live right now and remain open to what happens next?

Our word apocalypse, which has come to signify the end of the world, comes from the Ancient Greek word apokálypsis, which originally meant "unveiling" or "revelation." That is the ultimate power of "Maybe."

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Not to Correct, But to Expand

2026-11-02T06:39:21.495-08:00

Separately, individually, the two boys were sweet, but together they took joy in tormenting their classmates. They called themselves "bad guys." They knocked over block constructions. They gleefully upset games of domesticity. They called names, snatched objects from hands, and roared, all the while giggling together, then running off whenever an adult approached.

They never physically harmed anyone. They definitely frighten some, but mostly. They left a trail of frustration and anger behind them. When one of the boys was not at school, the "bad guys" were likewise absent. It was a behavior that emerged only as a collaboration. Every now and then, I'd find myself alone with one of the boys. When I broached the subject of "bad guys," they would both insist that it was "fun." They also acknowledged that they frightened and frustrated the other kids and knew that their game was "just pretend." Neither felt they were really bad guys. Based on my separate conversations with them, I knew that they recognized that some of their classmates might not know it was pretend, and they even seemed to regret that the "bad guys" made other people afraid or angry.

Together, however, this recognition either disappeared or was ignored as they giddily returned to their challenging behaviors.

I didn't see it as bullying behavior. They didn't target the weak the way bullies do. Indeed, they generally preferred being "bad guys" to the children who responded with most fervor, the ones who fought back, who yelled, who matched, or even fed, their energy.

Then, irritatingly, they giggled together and ran off to scheme their next act of bad guy-ism.

There's a concept in psychology called distributed cognition, which studies how thinking can extend beyond an individual into interactions with other people, objects, and environments. A related idea called participatory sense-making explores how meaning can emerge through interaction rather than simply being exchanged between separate minds.

We see examples of both of these things in preschool all the time. Most often we celebrate the idea that together we're smarter, more capable, more creative. We imagine collective cognition like this as an improvement on individual cognition. I often express this concept as together we're a genius.

This is often one of the most exciting discoveries of early childhood.

And it's not wrong to see it this way. After all, as historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses in his book Sapiens, much of the success of our species is our ability to cooperate and work together. Alone we are rather frail, naked apes, easy prey for apex predators like tigers, sharks, and bears, but together we build cities, dominate continents, and make the world new through our collective imaginations.

But this capacity for creating meaning through interaction can also, obviously, take a more ominous turn. We can, in fact, behave collectively as "bad guys." Distributed cognition and participatory sense-making can create something like a single mind that carries us into the kind of morally ambiguous territory that we would avoid as individuals. It can cause us to be less capable of recognizing certain truths that are obvious when we're on our own.

I spent a lot of time talking with these boys, both separately and together. Individually, they committed themselves to taking more care of their classmates, but the mind that emerged when they were together continued to cause problems. It wasn't until we began to discuss the "bad guy" situation at circle time that things began to change.

It started with one girl proposing we make a classroom rule: "No bad guys." The children make their own rules (or agreements). I often discuss this process in terms of self-governance and democracy, but I've also come to understand it in terms of psychology as well.

The boys, of course, immediately objected to a rule against their favorite game, and it was clear from the start that they would never agree to it, but that doesn't mean that a circle time conversation about "bad guys" wouldn't be productive. I asked the girl to explain why she thought we needed that rule, to which she replied, "They scare me." This confession caused the boys to giggle, but as classmate after classmate shared their anger, frustration, and fear, that disappeared. The bad guys had some defenders, as well, but there was the overriding sentiment was against them.

By the end of that day's discussion, you could feel the collective mind had grown, which is what happens as we add perspectives.

This wasn't the end of the "bad guys." Nor was it the end of our collective mind-expanding circle time discussions. The concept of "good guys" emerged as a natural counterbalance. Likewise the notion that this was all "just pretend" began to be included. Pretend fear and pretend anger began to replace some of what had been real. "Powers" were created, like invisible shields or magic wands that could stop "bad guys." But more importantly, the antagonists found their own perceptions expanded in ways that allowed them to include the impact their behaviors had on others.

And slowly, over weeks, the bad guy mind evolved into something bigger, even if it never lost the high energy, connection, and giggling.

A common approach to "bad guy" play is for the adults to quash it one way or another. We start with an attempt to show the baddies how their behavior negatively impacts others and when that doesn't work, we tend to ban or constrain the game, often under threat of punishment. It's a short cut that relies on teaching the lesson that those with power get to tell others what to do, a fundamentally anti-democratic concept, and often just succeeds in pushing the behaviors underground.

The alternative is to trust that the same collective intelligence that creates the problem can also be part of the solution. The two boys had discovered something powerful in their relationship, something that neither could have created alone. My job wasn't to break the relationship or extinguish their joy, but to help bring it into conversation with the larger community. The solution was not to correct their collective mind, but to expand it. And as more perspectives became part of it, new possibilities emerged, possibilities that none of us, certainly not me, could have imagined on our own.

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The Ability to Forget and Be Forgotten

2026-10-30T02:38:39.224-07:00

In her book Monsters Claire Dederer considers the question of what to do about artists who have created beloved works of art, but who have also been revealed to be, well, monsters. Woody Allen is one of her prime examples. At one point she uses the metaphor of a beautiful piece of lace that has been stained. It still might be a beautiful piece of lace, but it’s nearly impossible to not notice the stain.

Dederer points out that many, too many, of our artistic icons have turned out to be monsters. We all know about Allen, Roman Polanski, and Bill Cosby because their transgressions are relatively recent. Maybe we’ve even taken part in “canceling” them. But even if we don’t approve of so-called “cancel culture” I doubt that any of us can fully enjoy their work the way we once did – the stain is always right there. But many of us are unaware, or have forgotten, that Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and even William Shaespeare have left stains on their masterpieces. Do we forgive them because it happened so long ago? Or did we, collectively, just forget? And is forgetting okay? And if so, how long ago does it have to be for that forgetting to be okay?

As people who work with and care for young children, we are in the business of forgiving and forgetting. Of course, we don’t let a preschooler's missteps stain them. Even our teenagers get to leave most of their transgressions in the past, or at least they did until the advent of the internet where nothing is forgotten.

Reflecting on my own teenage years, I'm happy that the internet didn't exist in those days. I don't know if I would be the man I am today if I wasn't free to leave my mistakes behind. Much of therapy involves dredging up those old memories and that will always be a part of social-emotional healing and growth, but there is a growing body of psychological research that finds that forgetting negative experiences is perhaps just as important to our social identity development because to remember every shameful or humiliating experience would be immobilizing.

In her book The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn writes, "I understand that forgetting can . . . be incredibly dangerous but there are times when the ability to forget and be forgotten is integral to social transformation."

I worry about our young people who are, increasingly, living in a world that never forgets. Growing up, we were often warned about how our behaviors would wind up on our "permanent record," but that was a boogyman compared to today. I can't imagine the pressure young people must feel to manage their reputations because a single slip-up can genuinely have lifelong ramifications. Risk taking is essential to cognitive and social development, but today, the stakes of failure are so much higher than for past generations that it's no wonder we are seeing what Jonathan Haight calls "the anxious generation." He lays the blame largely on a loss of childhood autonomy and smart phones, and I don't think he's wrong, but the prospect of a permanent record on steroids certainly plays a part in the rise in anxiety in our youngest citizens. The impact of "celebrity" on young people is well documented. Today, we have an entire generation that is faced with life "in the public eye."

One of the benefits of being allowed to forget our shameful and humiliating moments is that it creates the freedom necessary to transform ourselves into new and better people. That's nearly impossible if there are those out there who continually remind us about that one time we behaved like a "monster."

It’s been decades since Woody Allen was accused of his crimes. Has the stain faded? Should it? If we still enjoy his movies, are we condoning his past behavior? Are we forgetting about his victims and justice?

It’s easier to forgive preschoolers, of course, because they’re so young. Their brains aren’t fully developed. Even if they hit or bite or abuse a classmate, we don’t let that stain them. They’re not monsters; they just made a bad choice. They didn’t know any better. But when should they know better? There are teens who are tried in court as adults. I guess we assume that they should have known better. On the other hand, we commonly expunge crimes from the records of teens under the assumption that they have learned their lesson and they don’t deserve to start life with a stain. But today, courts may forgive and forget, but there is no undo button for the internet.

I don't think I'll ever forgive Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, or Bill Cosby. I remember what they did. Youthful indiscretions are a far cry from using one's position of power prey on the weak and vulnerable. That's a stain I can't not see. Perhaps future generations will be able to enjoy their art without condoning their monstrous behaviors the way I do with Picasso, Hemingway, and Shakespeare. Maybe I'll feel differently when they are in their graves. In the end, perhaps it's only then, when they can do no more harm, that we are able to start separating monsters from their art.

But no child is a monster. As preschool teachers and parents of young children we forgive and forget every day. Indeed, it's our responsibility to help young children move beyond their impulses, their mistakes, and their "monstrous" behaviors. From day-to-day we forget and forgive, setting our children free to live today anew as better people.

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Humans Are Ultra Social Learning Machines

2026-10-29T07:45:31.536-07:00

Most of us take it for granted that human beings are smarter than other animals. After all, we have exceptionally large brains for our body size, comprising, on average, about two percent of our body weight. But when scientists in Germany used a series of thirty-eight tests designed to compare our innate intelligence with animals we assume are pretty smart, such as orangutans and chimpanzees, on things like spatial awareness, calculation, and causality, we performed about the same. This doesn't surprise me, actually. Having lived with a series of dogs over the course of the past three decades, I'm convinced there are times that they've pitied me as a sweet little puddin' head, lovable, but not that bright, especially when it comes to things like being aware of a rabbit hiding in the shrubbery or understanding what they want or need when they could not be communicating more clearly.

The only area of intelligence in which the researchers found that humans surpass our ape cousins is when it comes to social learning: the ability to learn from others. As Rutger Bregman writes in his book Humankind:

Human beings, it turns out, are ultra social learning machines. We're born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it's not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that's uniquely human. blushing, after all, is quintessentially social -- it's people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.

That we need one another in order to take advantage of our great big brains shouldn't surprise any early childhood educators.

Other research, and most significantly, the Perry School Project, the longest running study of the impact of high quality preschool on the lives of children, finds that far more important than anything that can be measured by standardized testing, the traits most linked to children going on to live "successful" lives are the development of traits like "self-motivation, the ability to work well with others, and sociability." And the key thing that makes a preschool "high quality" is programs that foster trust and enable cooperation.

Too much of what passes for education today is about the individual, about shoehorning various kinds of trivia into their brains, then patting ourselves on the back when they can regurgitate it on a test. During the pandemic, when schools were closed and children were forced to learn remotely, we got a glimpse of what happens when we strip education of its social dimension. There were those who insisted that this was an opportunity to really figure out what kinds of shoehorning worked "best" without the data being "tainted" by the distractions of social interactions.

But without one another, without being able to see other people blush, without the ability to look into one another's eyes, without the information embedded in our subtle smiles, flared nostrils, or tensed muscles, we learn no better than apes. Screens are very limited in what they can convey. They make trust and cooperation far more difficult. The same for physical distancing. No wonder we were all so tired. We were working overtime to gather the social information we need in order to learn at full capacity.

Whether we know it or not, this is why "school" isn't working very well right now. We tend to think of our schools as places for shoehorning the old reading, writing, and 'rithmatic into their little heads, but its real value (beyond the economic value of child care) has always been the opportunity for children simply be together, to learn from one another, to practice being sociable, to cooperate, to develop the habits of working with others, to play, and to grow the trust necessary for their brains to develop to their highest potential. This is where or focus ought to be..

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It's a Pretty Good Joke

2026-10-28T06:34:19.884-07:00

There is no evidence that Albert Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," although he often gets credit for it. Novelist Rita Mae Brown was the first to use it in print, although she probably learned it from Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool is housed in the lower level of the Fremont Baptist Church, a congregation that serves its community by providing space for several 12-step programs. There was one very early morning group that met in a room adjacent to the school rooms and shared our kitchen space. As I prepared for the children, I tried to honor their privacy, but I couldn't help but overhear much of what was said. Over the years, I got to know several of the regulars quite well and, to some extent, I was considered an "honorary" member of the group.

That quote about insanity punctuated many of the stories people told of their struggles, usually expressed as an if-I-didn't-laugh-I'd-cry-all-day joke. It never failed to raise a chuckle of recognition.

I'm grateful for that unique experience of preparing for the children against the background of these stories of former children. I couldn't help but think of it that way. Obviously, I strive to "teach" or help raise the kids in my care to avoid the trap of addiction, to protect them, to equip them with the coping skills and self-esteem that I hoped would allow them to not fall into this particular brand of "insanity." At the same time, I found myself chuckling along as well. This isn't just a caution for addicts . . . Or maybe we just need to expand our definition of what addiction means because I don't know any adult who can't identify with the sentiment, who hasn't found themselves once more digging themselves out of a familiar deep hole.

Recently, my wife and I went to an open mic event to support a friend. There were a couple dozen performers, one of whom recited a poem by Portia Nelson called "There's a Hole in My Sidewalk." It made us laugh. It sounded familiar and not just because its message was universal. This morning I awoke knowing where I'd heard it before. Years ago, one of the AA regulars read it to the group. It made me chuckle back then as well.

Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost . . . I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in . . . it's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault . . . I get out immediately.

Chapter Four
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter Five
I walk down another street.

When we see this story playing out in the lives of others, as we so often do as adults who work with young children, it's so painfully easy to see it coming. We might even shout, "Watch out for that hole!" but they fall in anyway. We're frustrated. It would save them so much pain if they would've just listened to us. We're the adults and they're the children so we, of course, pull them out of that hole, dust them off, bandage their wounds, and hope that they now know what they need to know about that hole in the sidewalk. But more often than not, there are more chapters to come.

This is one of the most difficult parts of working with young children. On the one hand, we know that experience is our best teacher. As Oscar Wilde wrote: "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." At the same time, we're there to help and most of us can't bear sitting by as a child suffers and struggles, so of course we help them. We dust them off and bandage their wounds as best we can, then worry if we've somehow, in our solicitude, prevented them from learning what they needed to learn.

One of the things I know from my years of being AA adjacent is that none of us can do it alone. Indeed, that's what 12-step programs are all about. Of course, I want the children in my care to grow into adults who can "stand on their own two feet," but at the same time none of us are capable of doing that. Not all the time. We all have our sidewalks. We all have our holes. We all live our chapters. If we always steer them around the holes in their sidewalk, how will they ever learn to recognize the holes for themselves? But at the same time, who's going to let a child fall into a hole? It's tempting to want to help by skipping ahead to Chapter Five, but that isn't the way stories or learning works. Without those middle chapters the ending is meaningless.

It's a tricky balance that we walk as important adults in the lives of children. Most of the time, I find it in viewing my role as a colleague or fellow traveller: two people learning together. I share my own experience as we go along by pointing out the holes that I can see, but I'm aware that there are an infinite number of holes that I can't see. Life is about falling into them and climbing back out: that's where the learning is. It's hard, sure, and painful, but it's rendered a little less so if we don't have to do it alone. If nothing else, that gives us someone with whom to chuckle as we start digging ourselves out, because, you know, it's a pretty good joke.

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Cobbling Together a Perfectly Age-Appropriate Curriculum

2026-10-27T06:02:34.564-07:00

Rog was in love with Marian, who loved him back. It was one of those cute preschool romances where children were exploring the loving adult relationships they see in their lives by acting out one of their own. But one day, Rog arrived to find that Marian had changed her mind. She was, she informed him, going to marry Titus instead.

Rog was frantic. He spent his morning gamely drawing pictures for Marian, offering her snack foods, and otherwise striving to convince her to change her mind. By midday, however, the reality had set in. In despair he threw himself onto the floor amidst the costumes, his head pressed into a corner. I went to console him, but he sent me away. When his friends then tried, he ran from the classroom and down the hallway. I found him in tears behind a door.

It wasn't so cute any more. The emotions he was feeling were real. I sat near him until he had calmed himself enough to say, "I want to marry her, but she only wants to marry Titus!" which cast him back into despair.

As he finally emerged into the initial pain of acceptance, I listened to him. At one point he had the idea of talking about it with the whole group at circle time.

This immediately struck me as a bad idea. Certainly, no one wants to share their broken heart with the world, but he was insistent so I told him that if he still wanted to talk about it when we gathered together on the checkerboard rug, he should raise his hand and I'd call on him. I assumed that after some time to reflect he would think better of it. After all, these aren't the sorts of things one wants discussed in public.

His hand, however, was up before we had even all assembled. When I called on him, he declared, "I love Marian but she doesn't love me any more. She loves Titus." I realized even as he said it that he wasn't telling anyone anything they didn't already know. Everything about their preschool relationship had been public knowledge from the start.

Marian confirmed Rog's assessment matter-of-factly from where she sat beside Titus.

One of Rog's buddies said, "That's okay, you can just marry somebody else!"

"Yeah," said another, "Marian gets to marry whoever she wants and you get to marry somebody else."

Rog made some comment about how he didn't want to marry any of the other girls in the class and his friend responded, "Well then just marry one of the boys. I'll marry you if you want."

Someone else chimed in that they were going to wait until they were a grown-up to get married and the conversation took off from there. We discussed love and divorce and how babies are made. We shared what we knew about body parts and their functions. Before long I realized that these children, in many ways, understood more than I had at 18.

You see, I grew up in places and in an era in which talking about relationships and particularly sexual ones was taboo. It wasn't a topic of conversation in my home, my church, or my school. Or rather, it wasn't discussed when adults were present, because we kids tended to share what we knew in whispers, which wasn't a lot, and even that was largely, and often profoundly, inaccurate. Pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and toxic relationships were hidden away in the dark corners where we discussed them, in our ignorance, not knowing what to believe. So we were left alone in the dark with one another.

There are still large swaths of the US where we leave our children to learn about sex and relationships in this way, but for the past couple decades, I've been a part of a community in which most of the preschool-aged children in my life come from families who are striving to normalize these conversations.

These children consoled their friend through frank, honest, philosophical talk, cobbling together a perfectly age-appropriate curriculum, supported by adults who corrected misinformation and refrained from judgment. Children don't need us to make their lives into lessons. Their lives already contain the lessons. I saw clearly that not talking about sex certainly stands among the worst ideas humans have ever had.

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Countering Alienation With Connection: Play Can Save Humanity

2026-10-26T07:18:52.470-07:00

Yesterday, I listened to Pink Floyd's masterpiece The Wall. The album came out in 1979. I was a high school senior and on my way to university the following year. For those unfamiliar with it, the album was conceived as a rock opera and is the story of an alienated young man who responds to the slings and arrows of his life by building a metaphorical wall around himself ("All in all it's just another brick in the wall").

At the time, I appreciated it as a work of art that showed me a person struggling with mental health, who had suffered at the hands of society, and who was undergoing a kind of ongoing existential crisis. Although I didn't necessarily identify with it, I knew that there were many kids around me who did, who had not had the kind of privilege that I had lucked into. I was a relatively well-adjusted youth with decent grades, plenty of friends and lots to look forward to in life. That doesn't mean I wasn't inspired to "try on" the affectations of youthful alienation and angst, but it was never really me, even as I found myself romanticizing the moodiness.

The record came back into my life when our daughter Josephine was 12. The entire sixth grade was given the assignment to create some sort of artistic response to The Wall. It was a project that took weeks, so once more the album regularly played in our home. By now, I was an educator and the story seemed more tragic than it had when I was younger. I didn't think that I was one of the adults who contributed bricks to the wall. I certainly didn't want to be that adult. I wanted to be a person who tore walls down, both for my child as well as the children I taught.

Perhaps the best known song from the album is the anthemic "Another Brick in the Wall," with its unforgettable lines:

We don't need no education

We don't need no thought control

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Teacher! leave them kids alone

Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone.

At one point, a chorus of children take over singing it. Yesterday, as those young voices shouted, "Hey, teacher! Leave us kids alone," I choked up.

I've been involved with education for a long time now. I've always strived to do it the right way by placing children at the center, by not commanding or controlling or shaming them. I've tried, to the best of my ability at any given moment, to allow children to be free to do and be what they want to do and be. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've even made some children cry. But, all in all, I've tried my best not to be a brick in anyone's wall.

That said, there are still too many children for whom school does not work, who do not have the advantages that I had. Over the years, I've come to understand that for many kids, school is and was a kind of hell. We don't do anyone a favor when we ignore this fact. And we are especially irresponsible when we try to blame the kids themselves, or their parents, who are, in most cases, products of this very same school system that manufactures at least as much alienation as it does education.

Part of what made me cry yesterday was when those children shouted, "Teachers!" I imagined them pointing their little fingers, their faces stony with anger. I'm aware that there are some awful human beings in our profession, as in any profession, but all in all most of the teachers I've known are likewise not to blame for the alienation. Indeed, teachers are the heroes of our schools because we are the ones who inject humanity into what would otherwise be a hollow behavioristic system of carrots and sticks. From where I sit, any successes our school system can point to are the direct results of teachers who find it in their hearts to mitigate the harm.

Teacher-activist and author Jesse Hagopian once told me that school taught him that he wasn't smart. He had been labeled by standardized tests as being "below" some arbitrary standard and it wasn't until "years later" that he came to understand his own intelligence. Likewise, Kisha Reid, one of the world's leading experts on play-based learning (and emerging painter), told me, "Play taught me I was smart . . . It wasn't until I went to school that I started to doubt myself."

We tell ourselves that education is our society's great equalizer, that education will allow us to rise above and grow beyond, but for far too many of us, that is a myth. The world is full of people like Jesse and Kisha who have risen above the harmful tendencies of our system of mandatory schooling, with its relentless focus on deficits, but for every Jesse or Kisha, there are countless others who experience "education" as a wall to overcome or escape or, tragically, behind which to remain forever entrapped.

I cried yesterday, because I've been trying for decades, like Jesse and Kisha, to do my part to be the change I want to see in the world, but the central facts behind those lyrics remain. It wasn't that long ago that my friend and colleague John Yiannoudis blared that song into the streets of Athens, Greece to attract a crowd of hundreds to listen to me and others as we discussed our dreams for what education could be. More than 45 years later, those lyrics, those angry children, remain relevant.

But I remain unalienated, as does Jesse, as does Kisha, both of whom have countered alienation with connection. Jesse has built an inspiring career from "struggle" against the injustices of school and society, sprinkling his stories with the words "joyous" and "beautiful." Kisha has created a "circle of love" in which robust, authentic play teaches generations of children and their parents that not only are they smart, but that they can do and achieve anything their hearts desire. "Play," she says, "can save humanity."

The last thing our world needs is more schooling, more curriculum, more testing, and more homework. What we need are more educators like Jesse and Kisha, who stand up boldly and who, as Kisha puts it, "Step into our positions as professionals." It means educators who know what is right for children, who love children, and who are committed to tearing down the walls.

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She Was Meant for Life

2026-10-23T04:48:50.025-07:00

Many young children arrive on our doorsteps ready to attend to us, to what we point out to them, to sing our songs, to play our games, and to follow our lead. In standard preschool classrooms, these are our teacher's pets.

But then there are those other kids. These are the ones with their own agendas.

Miranda had no interest in toys. Dolls, blocks, and puzzles were in her way. Other children were interesting unless they wanted to "pretend." She had little patience for pretending. She preferred real things.

As a two-year-old, she hunted out light switches, then pulled furniture over so she could climb up to reach them, flashing the lights off and on until someone helped her find something else to do.

Our vacuum cleaner was aces.

She was so fascinated with our pencil sharpener that I wound up purchasing a whole collection of different types of sharpeners for her to explore.

She liked tools of all sorts and would make a beeline for the workbench whenever we were outdoors -- she was particularly fond of screwdrivers and pliers.

Indoors, she would sometimes engage with art-making tools like brushes, brayers, and scissors, but she was most often found in the kitchen where she insisted on helping with snack prep.

She would not sit for circle time. She played with the other children when they played with real things, but otherwise she was content to play on her own.

Our junkyard playground was her favorite place because, well, that's where we kept most of our junk.

The naturalist and author Joseph Wood Krutch was writing about the Sonoran Desert, but I believe his words apply likewise to every "natural" place, including those places like our preschool where humans provide the habitat:

"Perhaps the mind is not merely a blank slate upon which anything may be written. Perhaps it reaches out spontaneously toward what can nourish either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of nature and, without being taught, shares nature’s intentions."

Miranda could be a handful, but she was not necessarily meant for standard school. She was meant for life.

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The Poopie Head Faction

2026-10-22T10:00:37.287-07:00

I've always trusted preschoolers to make their own rules, or rather agreements, for the classroom. If you're interested in how this happens, here's a link.

I like this ongoing process of making agreements through consensus for many reasons, but not because it necessarily 'works' better than the typical method of adults imposing and enforcing rules. Just as our adult rules and laws are no guarantee that everyone obeys them all the time, our agreements are likewise no guarantee that everyone will abide by them all the time.

These agreements are, as I see it, a kind of statement of intent: this is how we want to live together.

Agreements as we do it don't include the cudgel of punishment. The consequence of not abiding by an agreement is that someone -- usually an adult, but often another child -- will remind you. "I want to remind you, we all agreed, 'No hitting.'" Or maybe, "I want to remind you that you agreed, 'No hitting.'" Sometimes a child will need to be reminded more than once, and sometimes, maybe once or twice a year, I will say to a child, "You keep forgetting your agreement. I'm going to ask you to play somewhere else until you're ready to come back."

Most children step outside the play for a few minutes, then decide to return. Every now and then, however, a child will walk away and not return to the game that caused them to forget their agreement. These children are, in many ways, my heroes. These are the children who recognize that there is something about the circumstances that cause them to "break the rules" and choose to walk away rather than stay and continue to cause problems.

And sometimes, they are more creative.

Almost every year, at some point, the children agree to some version of the agreement, "No name calling," which we generally understand to mean that we don't want to be insulted. One time, several months into the school year, a boy I'll call Mike decided he didn't like that agreement. Specifically, he wanted to call other children Poopie Head. I told him, "If you want to change the agreement, we can talk about it at circle time. If everyone agrees, then we can change it."

I was still a fairly new teacher, but I knew that it was very unlikely that any, let alone all, of the children would agree to this. I like to let children learn things for themselves. And sure enough, the next time we gathered, he raised his hand and proposed, "I want to change the rule, 'No name calling'. I think we should be able to call people Poopie Head because some people are Poopie Heads, and I think it would be funny to call them Poopie Head. But I can't call them Poopie Head because we have a rule that I can't call people Poopie Head."

You get the idea. He was using this moment to say the words as often as possible and he was getting laughs, but when I asked the group, "Does anyone want to be called Poopie Head?" the response was a unanimous "no." Mike tried again the next day and the next with the same results.

Then one day, he spent the morning lobbying his buddies and by the time we sat down for circle time, he had formed a pro-Poopie Head faction. This time he got a handful of "ayes," but still far from consensus. After that he let it die down.

A couple months passed.

One day, he handed me a piece of construction paper on which he had made marks that looked like letters. He was almost five-years-old, an age when some children begin to explore letter writing, so I said, "Wow, Mike! You wrote letters!"

He replied, "Read it."

I was expecting nonsense, but approached it phonetically, sounding out, "Erin . . . picks . . . her . . . boogers."

Mike roared.

I said, "Mike, you broke the rule," to which he replied, "I didn't break the rule. I wrote it . . . You said it!"

I had to hand it to him. He had found a way to insult his classmates while abiding by his agreement, but also, importantly, without hurting anyone's feelings. So we agreed that he could write whatever he wanted, but he was only going to show it to me.

At the end of the day, his mother arrived to pick him up, and, of course, I told her what her brilliant son had done.

She shook her head, "That damn kid. He's been going into his room after dinner every night to teach himself how to read and write. Now I know why!"

Neither the children nor I see our list of agreements as final. Indeed, additions and improvements are made throughout the year. We often discuss challenges without coming to consensus. These are often our most important conversations because, after all, if we all agree, perhaps we don't need a rule at all. When we can't agree, we learn about the world from the perspective of others, allowing us to at least consider their point of view in everything we do.

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The Natural State of a Hoarder is Misery

2026-10-21T05:56:40.731-07:00

Preschool is a time for children to experiment with community and their place in it. One of the things they experiment with is hoarding. What happens when I manage to control all, or most, of a valuable resource?

Of course, they probably don't frame the question so clearly. More often than not, a child who likes, say, Hot Wheels, will keep adding to their collection until they have all of them. A boy once took a fancy to our giant plastic insects, put them in a pile and sat on them. It happens because it seems like more or all might be better, but it doesn't usually play out that way.

In many classrooms, the adult steps in, first cajoling, and then commanding the child to "share." This, in my view, is not sharing, but rather compliance to authority, which is not something I'm interested in teaching. Experienced children may give in, sullenly, but those who have not yet resigned themselves to being bossed around will fight back. They refuse, they resist, and they shout, "That's not fair!" contrary to the adult's intent, which is, after all, fairness. The lessons learned in this scenario aren't about hoarding, but rather about the ability of the powerful to use force to get their way.

I want children to learn from their experiments. One of the words that I teach the children in my care to understand is "hoard" (another is "exclude") because I want to be able to point it out when it's happening. I don't do it to shame anyone. In fact, I try to state it as a simple fact.

Someone will complain, "Mary has all the dolls!"

And I'll respond matter-of-factly, "Yeah, she's hoarding them."

If someone complains, "That's not fair!" I'll respond with something like, "You can use them when Mary's done hoarding them." I'll even smile at Mary to assure her that I will not interfere with her experiment. And I genuinely don't because I recognize that she is about to start learning the great lesson about hoarding: the natural state of a hoarder is misery.

The boy who sat on all the giant insects was at first nagged by his classmates to let them have some, or even "just one," but he held firm. After a while, the kids gave up, opting to play with something else, and more importantly, someone else. Slowly, you could watch the boy begin to sulk until before long he was a picture of misery. As he sat there, this previously valuable resource became less and less valuable until it was so worthless that he abandoned it.

One time I was sitting around a table with four 4-5-year-olds. One of them, Phillip, had collected most of the play dough and was sitting with his arms around it possessively. He seemed to enjoy rejecting the other children as they begged him for a chunk. As they bickered, I began to gather up the tiny bits of play dough that remained on the table, eventually gathering a small ball of the stuff about an inch in diameter.

I said, "He doesn't have all the play dough. See? I have some too." I then began pinching off portions of it, saying, "I'm going to give a piece to you . . . And you . . . And you." As the rest of us began making tiny balls and cookies and swords with our bits of play dough we were chatting, laughing, and showing off. Meanwhile, Phillip was looking on with a grim expression, probably beginning to feel miserable in his isolation.

I looked around at everyone's faces. The children with the least were clearly enjoying themselves. I said, "Alex is smiling. Sonya is smiling. Salvador is smiling . . . Phillip is not smiling." We all sat there for a second, just looking at each other's expressions. Then Phillip broke into a huge smile before breaking off large chucks of his hoard to share with the rest of us. I said, "And now everybody is smiling!"

Both Phillip and the boy on the bugs experienced something the central to hoarding which is that though they may have had a monopoly in terms of possessions, the rest of us had something far more valuable: the happiness that can only come from participation, connection, and friendship.

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Agreements We Make With One Another

2026-10-20T06:58:19.570-07:00

There was no reason for me to be close, so I kept my distance. There was no reason for me to be a part of their game, so I remained invisible.

It probably began days, if not weeks, before I understood it was a game, but it came to my attention in the form of a girl filling a plastic witch's cauldron with things she had scavenged from around the playground.

A friend said some words to her. Maybe he asked, "Can I play with you?" but it was more likely something along the lines of "What are you doing?" which is typically a better playground question if the goal is to be invited in. So then they were filling the cauldron together, discussing each item, coming to agreements over what went into the mix and what was cast aside.

A decision was made to add water to the cauldron. By now it was heavy with the debris they had purposely, even meticulously collected. But it wasn't too heavy so it only took one of them to carry it over to the cast iron hand pump. While the girl held the cauldron, her friend began filling a smaller bucket, which they then poured over their collection. As they worked together, another child joined them. After a discussion that may or may not have included the phrase, "I've got an idea," they agreed they would forego the unnecessary step of the bucket and slide the cauldron itself under the flow of water.

Agreement, however it is arrived at, stands at the center of our preschool, as it does in life itself. Conflict, all conflict, emerges from the inability to agree. These children were not playing a game; they were living.

The children took turns pumping until the cauldron was full, or at least as full as they collectively agreed it needed to be. Now it was too heavy for a single carrier, so they circled around the cauldron and lifted it together. Walking with it was a complicated matter: they had to agree about where they were going, at what speed, and who would have to walk backwards or sideways. Maybe it was still too heavy. They staggered a bit under its weight before another friend joined them, dashing in to slide his arms under the cauldron. It was still too heavy, but when another playmate tried to squeeze her body in amongst them, it became clear that they could lift it, but not effectively carry the heavy thing, even when they all worked together.

They agreed they would need to put it down, which they did, carefully, not spilling more than a drop or two.

As they discussed their next steps, someone said, clearly enough for me to hear it, "I've got an idea! Let's use the wagon!" This was met with approval, with the exception of one girl, the girl who had tried to squeeze in. She objected. "I'm using it." I had previously noted her idly pulling the wagon, alone, watching the cauldron situation from afar. She had abandoned it briefly to help.

"Please!" the other children begged. "We just need it for a second." The girl stood with her back to the group, apparently considering what to do. It wasn't long before she relented, "Okay, but I want it back when you're done." Another agreement.

Now the challenge was how to get the wagon to where the cauldron sat on the ground. It sat on the other side of the row of tree stumps that line the upper level of the sand pit. One child attempted to lift it, but when the others didn't join his effort, he gave it up in favor of what the group decided was a better idea, which was to pull it around to the side with the slope. It appeared to be the work of a single child, so the others stood around watching as he wheeled the wagon the long way around. He struggled, however, when it came to the steep part of the slope, so other children, spontaneously, pushed from behind.

Then, the wagon in place, a small miracle happened. The girl who had started it all, easily lifted the heavy cauldron all on her own, placing it into the bed of the wagon. As it turns out, it could have been carried by a single child, but they had collectively agreed that together was better, even if that made things more complicated, perhaps even more difficult. The agreements were the important things.

The project, this project of life itself, continued to play out for some time as the wagon, propelled over difficult terrain made its way in stops and starts around the space, eventually winding up back where the whole thing had started. The cauldron hadn't, after all, mattered. The debris and water it held didn't matter. Whether it was a witch's brew or a soup didn't matter. Indeed, even where they were going with it didn't matter. All that mattered, it seemed, were those agreements and this project.

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Because We Live in a Society

2026-10-19T06:23:36.643-07:00

My wife and I have lived with dogs for most of our 40 years of marriage.

Our first dog came before our daughter was born. He was our gateway "child." One of the responsibilities of a dog owner in an urban or suburban place is to pick up after it. The concept disgusted me: turning a plastic bag inside out, grabbing it with my hand, and carrying it until I came across a trash can. Honestly, I often skipped it when I didn't think anyone was watching.

That said, it irritated me when I came across unpicked poo. What slobs, I would think. Don't they realize they live in a society? Then one day, my hypocrisy hit me. How can I expect other people to pick up after their dog if I myself sometimes let it lie?

Today, I always pick up after my dog, not because I've come to enjoy it -- it's still an annoying, unpleasant task. And not because I'm worried about any kind of punishment or public shame, but because, well, we live in a society.

At preschool, one of our health and safety requirements is that every person who comes into the school starts by washing their hands. This goes for both children and adults. Indeed, we enter our school through a room with a sink. At the beginning of the school year, we remind the children, "Don't forget to wash your hands," but typically, by about this point in the school year, reminders are no longer necessary: they enter, stash their stuff, then hop up on the stool to wash their hands. Often, you hear them reminding their parents.

They do it because it's what we do; because they are part of a society. They are not doing it to avoid punishment. They are not doing it because they are concerned about being shamed. It's a responsibility that each of them has assumed. I suppose you could say it's part of the price of entry into our little community. Or perhaps more accurately, hand washing could be understood as one of the small daily rituals that hold us together.

Parents and educators often want their children to be responsible. We assign them tasks or chores and tell them that they are "responsible" for getting them done. We scold them for being "irresponsible" when they fail or neglect them. But I don't think this is how responsibility works. We assume responsibilities, not because others are dictating to us, not because we will otherwise be punished or shamed, but because, quite simply, we live in a society, and this is what we do.

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"To Daily Converse About Virtue"

2026-10-16T08:20:12.298-07:00

"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," said Socrates, according to his student Plato, "I am better off than he is -- for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know."

This is one of his most famous assertions. Whether it's true or not, can be debated. Self-evidently, he knew more than nothing. My mother used to say, whenever I thought I'd caught her in an inconsistency, "All wise people change their minds." It was a frustrating parry in the same way I imagine Socrates' claim was frustrating to those who sought to debate the famed orator.

And he was quite famous in his lifetime, at least in Athens where he spent most of his life. When he was still a relatively young man, Aristophanes' play The Clouds was first performed, portraying Socrates as a ridiculous intellectual clown teaching young people to undermine traditional beliefs. He was sufficiently famous even then that audiences were expected to recognize him.

It's hard not to compare him to, say, The Beatles, who were initially laughed at, then criticized as corruptors of youth. Or maybe he was more like a modern influencer, who many of us old people view as lightweights, at least until one of them pops through our bubble and we find ourselves outraged at the things they are saying. I'm not saying that any of them are Socrates, but then again, the Beatles were a bunch of silly mop tops before they became icons.

The Beatles, of course, didn't have the internet, but they did have radio and television, which allowed them to "converse" directly with their young audience. Today, most of us know about Socrates through Plato's writing, but Socrates himself wasn't a fan of the phonetic alphabet and its ability to lock things down. As he complained, if you want to question the written word, it cannot reply. Things that are written are fixed, whereas direct discourse between people allows for the kind of public square give-and-take he was, and still is, famous for.

Another of Socrates' most well-known assertions is that "the life which is unexamined is not worth living." But what he actually said (again, according to Plato who was writing it down) was, to me, far more interesting. The fuller quote from his Apology, in which he was defending his life against accusations goes, ". . . the greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that life which is unexamined is not worth living."

"The greatest good of man is to daily converse about virtue."

The Greek word that gets translated as "virtue" is aretē, which carries a broader meaning of excellence and fulfilling one's potential. He's not advocating for endless conversations about being morally upright, but rather asking what it means to live well, to be a good human. In other words, what he is advocating is something far beyond mere introspection. He is calling for conversations, daily, in which we engage our fellow human beings about what it means to be fully human.

I doubt anyone would have cared about Socrates had he been content to sit in his ivory tower examining his life and writing books about virtue. What outraged the establishment to the point that they condemned him to death was his insistence on conversing about it in the public square.

He was condemned by a jury of what was, by tradition, comprised of 501 fellow citizens (all free men). Apparently, his death sentence was decided by a slim majority, illustrating one of Socrates' objections to the kind of direct democracy practiced in Athens at the time: the tyranny of the majority. Without protections like "freedom of speech" and "freedom of assembly" his ideal of "daily converse" was a dangerous thing.

It doesn't seem that Socrates thought of "free speech" in the way we do today, as a legal protection for everyone. He was more focused on the moral obligation to speak one's truth and ask challenging questions, even if it did lead to ridicule and even death.

Although Socrates is recognized as one of the foundational figures of our Western traditions of thought and philosophy, his notions of democracy were different from how we understand it today. Indeed, he wasn't a fan, even though, in the end, he accepted his democratically decided fate.

Our current experiments in democracy are attempts to fix the flaws of ancient democracy. The written US Constitution along with The Bill of Rights and the mechanisms of amendment were an attempt to balance majority rule with individual rights. It was intended as a living document, one that could be changed, just not in a willy-nilly-wims-of-the-moment fashion. It was, one might say, intended to be an ongoing, daily, conversation among we the people; a dialog about excellence, fulfilling potential, living a good life, and, yes, virtue. The fact that it has evolved beyond the framer's original ideas about gender, race, and other matters is evidence of this.

The fact that so many of us avoid politics is evidence that we are failing. I've long believed that "voting" is the bare minimum of democratic participation. The real work and promise of democracy is the conversations we have with our fellow humans. That includes through the media, social and otherwise, but perhaps even more central are those conversations we have with the actual humans in our lives -- our neighbors, those with whom we do business, in our churches, our workplaces, and above all, in our schools.

Preschoolers engage in daily converse about virtue. It happens every day, all day long as they express their opinions and show their emotions. It happens in each negotiation, in each agreement, in each decision about with whom and what we play. In my role as an adult who works with young children, my responsibilities are clearly defined as keeping the children safe and doing what I can to ensure their physical and psychological needs are met. And as a member of the community (one who perhaps knows "nothing") my role is not to direct, but to interact as much as possible as an equal. The rest, then, is up to all of us, and that is to engage in daily converse about excellence, living well, being righteous, and to discover, together, what means to be fully human.

This is a life worth living.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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Brains Do Not Grow in Captivity

2026-10-15T07:01:34.328-07:00

We now know enough about the brain to realize that its mystery will always remain. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. ~Johan Lehrer

When our daughter was a preschooler, authority figures informed parents that the human brain was fully formed by around five-years-old. After that, there would be no new brain cells, which was why, they told us, the early years were so important. These were the scientific facts. Just a few days ago, a parent of a preschooler told me that the director of her child’s school told the assembled parents that the human brain was “90 percent developed” by five, information which she conveyed to me in a kind of jittery breathiness that betrayed both awe and panic. I recall feeling similarly about these scientific facts.

The problem with these facts is that they were not facts 20 years ago and they are not facts today. They are the product of a debunked theory about human brain development. Sadly, these non-facts were, and still are, being used to support the toxic academic pressures being applied to our youngest citizens.

It seems that the earlier “facts” were based largely upon studies done on monkey brains in a laboratory. When skeptical scientists more recently tested the theory on monkeys living in their natural habitat they found that not only do their brains continue to produce new brain cells throughout their lives, but they produce a lot of them. It was being held in captivity that caused their brains to stop producing new cells. This has now been confirmed in birds, rats, and other animals, including humans: when animals are free, their brains grow, when they are not free they don’t.

Play is the “natural habitat” of young humans. Traditional schools are, at their core, a form of captivity. Longer school days, more academic instruction, developmentally inappropriate expectations, less time outdoors, standardization, and high stakes testing are causing children’s brains to stop growing. The cure, according to science, is to set our children free, to let them play: that is how brains grow.

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I Fought the Temptation to "Correct" Them

2026-10-14T07:39:45.480-07:00

When my grandmother-in-law died, she left us with a set of The Great Books, a 54 volume set of renowned works by European men, from Homer to Freud. Published in 1954 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was meant as a comprehensive study guide for adults interested in learning about intellectual underpinnings of the Western world. The idea was that students would encounter the original works, rather than textbook summaries, and, more importantly, the curriculum was built around conversation, debate, and inquiry rather than to simply deliver direct instruction.

The Great Books approach to higher education had been underway decades before this set was published, versions of it having been adopted by several respected universities, including Columbia, University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and St. John's College, which to this day organizes its entire undergraduate program around it.

Over the years, I've cherry picked volumes to browse, reading, say a bit of Plato here or a passage from Goethe there, but largely they've lived with us ornamentally, or, as I often say about books on the shelf, aspirationally.

My attention was drawn to these books recently when I read that schools in South Korea have begun adopting the Great Books seminar approach by partnering with St. John's. Hwacheon High School began offering the program as a two-credit course in 2025. Five other schools in Chuncheon offer seminars using readings from Plato and Thomas More, and the Incheon National University has adapted it for Korean students and is currently extending it into local schools.

At first, this confounded me. Why would Korean schools be embracing a deep dive into this curriculum of "dead white guys." I mean, certainly Korea has its own rich intellectual and literary tradition to draw from, and apparently they have included Asian thinkers, but the point isn't the specific content. The stated goal, according to educators, is for Korean students to discover a new way to learn. They want their students to learn by speaking as equals, questioning one another, and exploring ideas without being expected to reach a single correct answer. This, of course, is a reaction against school cultures that have traditionally been more hierarchical and lecture-based.

Equally important, I think, is that they are consciously seeking to move away from vocational training and toward supporting students to become facile, confident critical thinkers.

This is happening in Korea as US universities and high schools are moving away from reading entire books altogether.

Of course, as a preschool teacher, I've always worked in schools in which the students don't read any books at all. Or rather, books are read to the children. And then, invariably, they are discussed, not as lessons to be learned, but very much with the goal of becoming facile, confident critical thinkers.

One of the greatest reading episodes of my life involved a reading of The Little Red Hen. This classic morality story involves a hen who finds some grains of wheat and decides to do the work of planting, tending, harvesting, grinding, and ultimately baking it into a loaf of bread. At every step of the way, she asks the others, "Who will help me?" to which they reply, "Not I." As an adult, I know the intended moral of the story, but when we got to the end where the hen, justifiably, refuses to share the bread, the children were confused and outraged.

"Why didn't she share?"

"They're hungry and she's eating all the bread!"

"That's not fair!"

I fought the temptation to "correct" them, but rather allowed the discussion to unfold as the children, together, determined that the little red hen was a jerk.

Another time we were collecting books for a fundraiser. The intent had been picture books, but one of our families donated a bunch of paperback novels, among them William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. People my age know that this book is difficult and dense, made particularly confusing by the fact that the narrator of the first quarter of the book is a grown man, Benjy, with a severe intellectual disability. A five-year-old brought it to me. I told him, "That's a grown-up book. You'll probably have to read it when you're in high school."

"Let's read it now."

It was a sunny day, so we took the book outside and I began reading it to a small assembly of preschoolers. I figured they would wander off before I'd reached the bottom of the first page, but I was wrong. For the next week, we read and discussed this book on the playground, as a group. Not only that, but the children, together, were able to discern exactly what was going on ("They're playing baseball." "No, they're playing golf." "He's hiding from them." "He's trying to get their golf balls."), something I'd struggled with as a teenager. They made me stop to define words, and they were particularly interested when I skipped over the N-word. "What's so bad about it?"

Our policymakers are forever talking about the "jobs of tomorrow" and how our schools must "prepare" our children for them. What BS. No one can possibly predict what jobs our preschoolers will be applying for 20 years from now. They're just blowing smoke. They're, at best, talking about the jobs of today, but more often than not, they're talking about the jobs of yesterday. It will be today's preschoolers who will be inventing those jobs of tomorrow.

What we do know, however, is that whatever the future holds, we will need those critical thinkers.

That's what educators in South Korea are thinking about. Maybe we should too.

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The Examined Life

2026-10-13T06:26:39.612-07:00

Most young children go through a stage in which they ask, "Why?" No matter what you answer, be it thoughtfully, jokingly, or through clenched teeth, they reply, once more, with "Why?" When our daughter Josephine was in this phase, she encountered another girl who was likewise in it. After going down the "Why?" rabbit whole for several rounds, Josephine finally, in exasperation, said, "Stop asking that question!"

"Why?" is endless. Even when we attempt to shut things down by finally replying, "That's just the way it is," "Why?" is legitimate. It's among the many questions that philosophers have been asking since before there were philosophers. And at the bottom of it all, we know that the truth, the one that every free person must ultimately confront is, "I don't know." And that leaves us with no choice but to turn it around, What do you think?"

I don't know if every teacher must be a philosopher, but as early childhood educators who value inquiry, philosophy is part of the job description.

A person working with young children must constantly confront questions that philosophy has wrestled with for millennia. What is a good life? What is justice? What do we owe one another? What is freedom? What constitutes knowledge? Who has authority, and why? What does it mean to be a person?

Working with young children is necessarily a philosophical undertaking, whether or not the adult recognizes it.

These aren't abstract questions in a preschool. They come up when two children want the same shovel, when a child refuses to join the group, when someone gets hurt, or when an adult decides that a child's behavior needs correcting.

And the adult must respond philosophically. Even the choice to not intervene is a philosophical choice.

Both the beauty and bane of working with young children is that these newly minted human beings have not yet fully internalized the assumptions that the rest of us take for granted. They question things that we've stopped questioning, not necessarily because they're consciously pursuing truth, but rather because the world's conventions are not yet self-evident to them.

They have not yet discovered the frustrations or fear that some of us feel when confronted with yet another "Why?" They haven't yet become so worried about making mistakes or of offending others to know that they are poking around at the unexamined certainty that so many of us cling to in order to survive another day.

"Why?"

It's a profoundly Socratic question, one that pushes the boundaries of knowledge just a little bit further, then a little bit further, and so on. It will always, at some point become uncomfortable which is why we so often attempt to wrap it up with a joke or, like Josephine did, a command to knock it off. But the only valid response, I think is the turn-around, "I don't know. What do you think?" because, with free people, that's where the answer ultimately lies.

And naturally, young children crave certainty. They want to know they are loved unconditionally, for instance. They need to know they are safe and that their basic physiological and psychological needs will be met. They are very young and providing this foundation is the first responsibility of the adults in their lives. And this is what leaves children free to ask "Why?"

Every teacher operates from assumptions about human nature, learning, obedience, freedom, and the purpose of education. A teacher who believes children must be controlled is operating from a philosophy just as surely as one who believes children are competent and deserving of autonomy.

The difference is that the second teacher might have examined those assumptions, while the first might simply have inherited them. Of course, the reverse is also possible.

Socrates, perhaps the best-known teacher in Western history, didn't advocate for a particular philosophy. He simply insisted that we examine the beliefs by which we live.

When children ask "Why?" that is what they are doing.

And as educators, we owe to both the children in our care, and to ourselves, to examine who we are with children, moment-by-moment, and likewise ask ourselves "Why?"

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Your Children Already Know How to Be Successful

2026-10-12T06:50:10.177-07:00

I think most of us, if asked to define "success," would think deeply enough to consider more than the capacity to acquire great wealth. Certainly, we would cite things like having "enough" money and a holding personally satisfying job, but we would also include things like mental and physical health, good personal relationships with friends and family, and a general sense of well-being about how life is going.

There has never been a study that links early literacy or early numeracy to any of these aspects of "success," even the superficial one of wealth. None. Never.

The research that's been done on successful people tends to find, rather, that their success comes from being self-motivated, sociable, and having the ability to work well with others. These are the skills and attributes children work on when they have ample opportunity to play, especially outdoors, with other children, with few toys and lots of time, and with a minimum of adult intervention. Our job as adults to prepare an environment in which free play is possible, to keep an eye out for hazards (as opposed to risks children choose to take on their own), and where children have the opportunity to do things for themselves, even if it means failing, and failing often.

As a teacher in a cooperative and a parent myself, I understand the pressures parents are under. On the one hand there are those who insist we must drill and grill our youngest citizens lest they "fall behind," while on the other, there are those who are in the business of selling us on the idea that children are constantly at risk of abduction or injury or other dangers. These twin manufactured fears, and they are largely manufactured, have caused a generation of parents to behave as what is popularly called "helicopter parents," always hovering nearby, always ready to step in, always urging and cajoling and warning, teaching helplessness instead of independence. All this leaves precious little time for the children to actually play in the way that will allow them to grow into successful adults.

I reckon by writing this, I'm now, at one level, joining the fear-mongers, providing parents who are already pulled this way and that by fear, one more thing about which to worry: is my child getting enough free play? For that I'm sorry, but the answer is, if you're a typical American parent, probably not.

I've spent my career at a cooperative preschool, which means that I worked more closely with parents than most teachers. I write here often about teaching children, but one of the most important things I did was to also teach their parents, which was done formally through our parent educators, and informally by our larger community of families who were, collectively, striving to offer children the opportunity to acquire the skills and attributes of success through play. It's a learning process I've witnessed time and again, one that I experienced myself as a parent. I know that for some it is a painful one of "letting go," of coming to trust the world enough to know that those inevitable bumps and bruises our children experience, both physical and emotional, those "failures," are the true building blocks of success. It's hard because we live in a culture that tells us our job as parents is to fix things for our kids, to make things easy, to soften the blows. We have to consciously push back against the culture of fear that has come to surround parenting if we are to raise truly successful adults.

Most of our three-year-olds were out of diapers. When they told me they need to go to the potty, I pointed to the bathroom and said, "The toilet is in there." If you asked their parents, many would insist their child still needed their presence, if not assistance, in the bathroom, but it was really no longer true. Sure, children may want mommy with them, after all it can be an intimate, private moment, but when mommy isn't at school, they've shown they are more than capable. Yes, some struggle to get their pants back up, others miss the toilet, and I'm sure few do as thorough a job of wiping as mom, but they all come out of there, mission accomplished, then hop up on the stool near the sink to wash their hands.

It's likewise difficult for parents to step back and allow their children to engage in, say, conflict or risk, but it must be done if our goal is successful children. Yes, they will fail, and those failures form the foundation of success. Indeed, when looked at from the wider perspective they aren't failures at all, but rather steps along a pathway. As Thomas Edison famously said about the invention of the light bulb when asked by a journalist how it felt to have failed a thousand times: "I did not fail a thousand times. Inventing the light bulb was a process of one thousand steps."

A pastor friend of mine once said that our main purpose in life is to assure the other people, "Don't be afraid," and that is what I'm saying to parents. Your children already know how to be successful, and that may require a lot of failure. What they need from you is to love them, to trust them, and to keep them safe. Otherwise, relax and get out of their way. It's through freedom that their own unique success will be found.

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"That's What's Cool, Teacher Tom . . . Look!"

2026-10-09T07:06:08.319-07:00

The biggest social event of our preschool year was always our annual all-school Halloween party, a typically raucous affair attended by most of our 65 or so students, their parents, siblings, and often grandparents. All three classes "practice" our Halloween songs at circle time, which are mostly variations on songs we've been singing together for as long as I've been at Woodland Park.

Easily the most popular, for all ages, are a pair of ditties that involve holding up jack-o-lantern faces to our own, then removing them as a surprise ending.

The first we talk about as a song for the "babies," one we sing gently and sweetly while thinking of the "little kids" who will laugh and laugh when we sing it for them:

Someone is hiding, hiding, hiding

Someone is hiding

Who could it be?

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

The second, however, is for the grown-ups and "big kids" who we intend to scare:

Halloween is coming

And this is what I'll do

I'll hide behind this pumpkin face

And then I'll say, "BOO!"

We practice this over and over in all the classes, getting louder and louder (which we equate with scarier and scarier) with each successive iteration, until we're frightening the aliens in outer space.

I have a small set of 25 practice pumpkin faces that were created years ago, but for the big event, what with all the siblings, we're going to need at least 125, which requires a manufacturing process. We use paper plates for our pumpkin faces, with eyes, noses and mouths precut, and each class takes a turn cranking out as many as they can.

Teachers often complain about the challenge of getting older boys to the "art table." Well let me tell you, I've found that manufacturing processes are a great lure, especially if they involve glue guns, although in this case we were just using tempera paint in the colors we all agreed are "Halloween colors": orange, black and yellow. I've found that one of the key parts of making an art project into a manufacturing project is to say, "We won't have time to put your name on any of them. You're making them for everyone." There's something about speed, efficiency, and teamwork that hooks them.

As a swarm of boys descended on the table, I had to wait awhile for a chair to open up for me. When I finally took a seat, the first thing I commented upon were the stenciled pumpkin faces the kids were leaving behind on the table top.

"Hey, there are pumpkin faces on the table."

Wyatt said, "Yeah, you make them like this, Teacher Tom," and he showed me by quickly painting a plate solid black, then lifting it up for the big reveal.

"Thanks for showing me," I said, then got to work painting orange outlines around some triangle eyes.

"No, Teacher Tom," said Yuri, "You have to paint right across the eyes . . . Like this," and he showed me on his own pumpkin face.

I said, "But I just want paint around the eyes."

"That's what's cool, Teacher Tom . . . Look!" He picked up his plate and held it into my face, "The paint that's in the eyes stays on the table. Only the paint that's around the eyes stays on the plate."

I thanked the boys for their help, then got to work manufacturing my pumpkin face, employing the scientific magic of the simple stencil, chatting with the guys about making babies laugh and grown-ups quiver.

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We Have Always Lived in an Age of Distraction

2026-10-08T06:03:30.679-07:00

I recently took a book outside, setting up in a shaded chaise lounger with a cup of coffee. The sun was out. It was going to get hot, but would be pleasant for a couple hours yet, especially with the gentle breeze. The mocking birds were talking, creatively mixing their trills and titters. My wife would be with her girlfriend for the next few hours and no other person was in sight. It was, in short, a perfect set up for a morning with a novel. And this was one I was particularly eager to read, the fifth book in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence pentalogy.

As I settled in, before I could even open the book, a dragon fly buzzed me. It hovered before my eyes, its teal and pearly flanks iridescent, set off by veins of pure black, veins that became thin and intricate as they continued into otherwise transparent wings. I noticed that out over the lawn there were dozens more of the species patrolling the area. My insect friend had not come alone. The typical dragon fly only lives for a couple weeks, a bit to trivia I'd kept stored away for just this moment. Later I would look it up, to be certain. (As it turns out the life of an individual dragon fly can range from one to eight weeks.) Such a short life, yet long enough to be born, to feast, to procreate, and to die.

With a start, I realized that my book was on my lap, unopened. Okay, now for reading. I was a couple paragraphs in, when a squabble erupted in the tree overhead. The mocking birds' song was now a kind of shriek, an alarm, as a pair of them shot from the branches to intercept a raven that was flying past, an innocent passerby mistaken for a nest raider. The raven, much bigger than its attackers, nevertheless took evasive action, diving, circling, flipping onto its back to show sharp talons, while the smaller birds drove it onward and away, chasing it to anywhere but this place. It was a kind of epic battle, fought out against the background of our local mountain, now orange and purple in the rising sun.

The mountains here are protectors. At least that's how they struck me as my attention shifted to their flanks. I was reminded of an idiom I learned from the writer Rebecca Solnit, "(T)he mountain is beautiful in the distance, but steep when you're on it." I was reminded of the idea that if a mountain peak represents human goals, the slopes represent life itself. The life-and-death dance of the birds had, in the meantime ended, as I refocused on the pages of my book, 600 to go, a steep climb before I reached the peak, which would be the end of a reading experience of several months. I flipped to the end of the book to see that my goal was page 612. And then I'd be no where.

Okay, now I read, I told myself, but not before taking a sip of coffee. As I did, a rough gray-brown rabbit emerged from a hedge across the way, followed by a baby, then another. I let the coffee, which was no longer quite hot enough, rest on my tongue, robust, nutty, bitter, before swallowing. The baby bunnies made me scan the sky for birds of prey. Only a few days ago, I'd seen a hawk carry off a ground squirrel. There are so many rabbits around here, of course, almost too many. Bobcats, coyotes, and owls have all been seen hunting in the area, doing what comes naturally to them, while incidentally preventing the rabbit population from overwhelming us. Although it's impossible to not feel sympathy for individual bunnies, like the ones who live in the hedge across the way, it's likewise impossible to not find a kind of peace, which is to say acceptance, in the way nature tends toward balance.

My book rested heavily on my lap. I took it in two hands and began to read, telling myself that now I would concentrate, focus, put my nose to the grindstone. Martha, the protagonist, was making a study of an ancient hunk of wood that had been fished from the muck at the bottom of the Thames River in London, probably a vestige of some long lost ship, that had for a time been part of a stairway prior to the second World War, but was now, more stone that wood, being used as a gate post for protective fencing bearing skull-and-crossbones signs, encircling a bombed out building. Meanwhile she was thinking about the places she needed to be, the things she needed to do, the people with whom she needed to consult. I continued reading the words, but my mind was busy considering a teak sculpture that I once saw daily, and that I thought was stone for the longest time. I caught myself reading without comprehension, backtracked, and re-read. There are curricula that purport to teach children how to read like this, without requiring comprehension, but rather drilling kids on phonics, on sounding out random words as they stand alone; they read sections of books, but not the whole thing; I once heard about a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird, but not all the way to the end. To do it this way is to strip writing of meaning, which is to strip it of interest, as if the mountain peak can exist without its flanks, making reading into a rote task and no one likes rote tasks. What a cold, harsh lesson about reading.

It would be a miracle if any child, taught to read this way, would choose, on a sunny morning to carry a book outside . . . But then again, I myself had not read more than a couple pages.

A "V" of Canada geese flew overhead, squawking. The smell of a neighbor's bacon and egg breakfast curled under my nose. Some doves had joined the mocking birds in song. Yellow butterflies had supplanted the dragon flies over the lawn. And the mountain, beautiful and steep, was now bright in the full sun. The book felt good in my hands, solid, the words on the page taking me from this century back into the last one, into the mind of a young woman from South Africa, a post-war woman on the streets of London being distracted by a hunk of old wood that appeared like even older stone.

In the previous book in the series, Lessing wrote, "The big city's not been with us long enough to be important, we are already beyond it. Because now we think: that star over there, that star's got a different time scale from us. We are born under that star and make love under it and put our children to sleep under it and are buried under it. The elm tree is out of date, it's had its day. Now we try all the time, day and night to understand: that star has a different time scale, we are like midges compared to the star."

Far overhead, a jet was painting a trail of frozen water vapor in the brilliant blue sky from west to east, carrying passengers back because east is the direction of back in this country, just as west is out, south is down, and north is up, points on the map and in the story we tell of how the world goes together.

I'd not given up on reading, but the distractions of the morning were doing their jobs. We say that we live in the age of distraction, but we have always lived in an age of distraction. Seneca the Younger, the ancient Roman philosopher complained, "A multitude of books distracts the mind." Descarte, Mark Twain, John Locke, Tesla, all of them complained of distractions. The challenge of self-important educators throughout history has been how to compel the attention of their students. These teachers are forever trying to force children to focus, to concentrate, which is to say, block out the here and now in order to one day be able to do or know or believe . . . something. They take away their smartphones, they hush the room, they close the doors, they make rules about when the children may talk or eat or urinate or sing or ruminate on the connections between themselves and the world around them. Sometimes this is even enforced with shame and punishment.

Yet, the children, in being distracted, are only doing what nature has designed them to do. This is how the human brain has evolved: for a world of distraction. That distraction is a bane, is a product of the myth of the mountain peak, the fairy tale of goals and destinations. Reality tells us over and over again to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, to pause on the steep slopes, to experience what is real and who we are in that reality. It's not an accident that what neuroscientists call our "window of consciousness" can only remain open, on average, for about seven seconds. We are not meant to shut out the world in order to learn about the world. We are not evolved to think in straight lines, and we are especially not evolved for spending our youth attending to the trivia that bossy adults set before us as summits we must attain lest we be labeled failures.

By the time the day grew too hot to continue sitting outside I had managed to read most of a chapter. That was enough. There is no hurry to finish a book, any book, especially when there is so much else to feed the mind, heart, and soul. The only insects out now where pesky flies. The birds had fallen silent. The rabbits were hidden in the shade. My coffee was the temperature of the air. And the mountain still embraced all of us, beautiful and steep.

And far above everything was that star, invisible now behind the brightness of the star we call our own, somewhere along its dragonfly journey of birth, feast, procreation, and death: beautiful, steep, present, not a distraction at all, but rather the only thing there is, life itself.

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All Artists are Scientists

2026-10-07T06:02:04.689-07:00

I was chatting with an artist, a painter, at her studio and gallery, discussing her process. I always ask artists about their process because I'm forever trying to steal their ideas and figure out how to convert them into preschool art explorations.

When I told her I'm a preschool teacher, I added, "All our art is process art. It's really just science." And she replied, 'That's how every artist approaches their work. We're all scientists."

Whether an educator, parent, or just, you know, a human being, it pays to be curious about process.

For instance, some time ago, I came across this video:

My initial thoughts were, "Way cool" and "There is no way to make this into a manageable, affordable class room project." It was at about this time, however, that I received some shelving I'd ordered that came with far too much packaging. In fact I wound up with something like 60 pieces of perfectly good corrugated cardboard cut into nice 12" X 10" pieces that had been stuffed into the boxes to fill up the empty space. That's when it began to occur to me that if the "tall" part were short enough, the paint thick enough, and the pouring containers small enough, it just might work.

So I got to work with our "third teacher," the environment, in this case the storage room and the junk we'd been collecting.

I had several pieces of scrap 2"x2" cedar that a parent had dropped off after a home improvement project, which I cut into 2" to 3" lengths. I then hot glued them to the center of the cardboard. I wanted to thicken up the tempera paint so it wouldn't run all over the place, plus reduce the cost, and white glue seemed like the perfect answer, so I pre-mixed roughly 3 parts glue to 1 part paint. And finally, to increase the odds that the "paint" wouldn't just run right off the cardboard and onto the floor as it dried, we used small specimen cups (also donated) to control the quantity the children had for each pour.

Then, "Go!"

The kids didn't always stick to pouring on top of the wood and, naturally, there was other kinds of experimenting, like mixing our own custom colors (primarily "preschool gray," which is what you get when you try to mix a "rainbow").

I'd removed all the chairs, thinking the kids would have better "aim" on their feet, but several chose to work sitting anyway.

We were so engaged that we took the project outdoors and kept going.

I'd call this a success, even though the dried pieces, which we scattered around the classroom on every available horizontal surface, adhered themselves to the table tops in such a way there were only a few left to take home on the following day. But that's hardly the point. The kids were entranced by watching how their paint flowed, oozed, and mixed, and that's the point. They got to tinker with the idea which is where the learning takes place.

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We Had Built a School and We Were Our Own Teachers

2026-10-06T07:41:47.431-07:00

When I was a college sophomore, I had four roommates. We'd all been randomly assigned to the same dormitory floor as freshmen and liked each other enough to give it a go in a large two-bedroom house just off campus.

Many of our other friends from the dorms had joined fraternities, but none of us saw ourselves as the frat boy type. Our house was located to the west of the majority of the frat houses, so we mockingly called ourselves Frat West. Our joke caught on. One evening, while I was there alone, an entire sorority stopped by to serenade me: just me alone hanging out a window with 30 young women singing to me.

My roommates and I made an agreement to start the year: we would create a schedule that required one of us to be responsible for a dinner for all five of us each evening, Monday-Thursday. That left us with a schedule that meant we each got an occasional week off kitchen duty. Our other rule was that you were allowed one "cheat meal" per quarter. A cheat meal was anything that we collectively agreed was not "real cooking" (like frozen pizza), but even then it had to be balanced according to government guidelines (e.g., dairy, meat, vegetable, fruit, grains). None of us were seasoned cooks, although my mother had taught me a few of her recipes, which gave me the reputation as the "gourmet" of the bunch.

Our friends predicted the schedule would fall apart within weeks. Even my own mother later told me that she doubted we'd be able to stick with it. And I don't blame them. Here we were, five young men, responsible for preparing our own food for the first time in our lives. No one expected young men to manage a household. Certainly studying and social life would come first.

That doubt unified us. By the end of the school year, we could tell the story of each of our collective meals together.

There was the night that Mike made "rhino burgers": burnt on the outside and raw on the inside.

Kevin tried his hand at Chicago style pizza. It's still the standard by which I judge deep dish.

Dan disliked salad dressing, so one night I served him an unaltered head of iceberg lettuce in his salad bowl, which he gamely consumed in its entirety.

Brian got us to agree that he could be replaced one evening by guest chef Father Patrick from the Catholic House. Father P complained about our dull knives.

Friends often asked to join us as a sixth or seventh, which we typically accommodated.

Between defying doubt and our friendly competitiveness, we stuck with the program from September through June. And even when one of us failed, we praised or panned accordingly, but we always ate the food.

Looking back, I can see that the year was the product of accidental genius. We placed constraints on ourselves through agreement -- dinner for five, balanced, Monday through Thursday, only one cheat per quarter -- but within those constraints we'd given ourselves enormous freedom. And we had the most useful, and brutally honest, feedback mechanism imaginable: people who knew us well actually eating the entire meal.

I didn't see it at the time, but I now recognize that we had created a functioning anarchistic community, in the original sense of the word. Or in less controversial language, we created a pretty sophisticated cooperative labor system.

Those balanced dinners became more than mere healthy eating. They were community meetings. They were events in the shared history of five people. Remember the turkey-extra-crappy? The meals became landmarks.

Nobody taught a course called Cooking 101. Together, we constructed an environment with real responsibility, meaningful constraints, repeated opportunities, natural consequences, and a community that depended on us. We all learned because learning was a necessary part of living together. In fact, I know that I learned at least as much from this experiment in community as I did in any of my classes.

This is where I first really learned to cook, but it was much more than that. We had a communal need. Rather than each of us solving it individually, we created a cooperative system into which everyone contributed, and from which everyone benefited. Responsibility rotated.

This isn't far off the kind of cooperative preschool community in which I spent my teaching career. It's where I got first-hand experience with rules designed not to enforce obedience, but as agreements that allowed our community to function. We didn't do any of it to avoid punishment or earn praise, but rather because the other four guys were counting on us. The original goal might have been to eat decently and save money, but the real outcome was learning about one another, developing traditions and stories, and creating community.

Every Sunday at midnight we would do our grocery shopping. We chose that exact time because we agreed that none of us would have other plans. There was a big, no-frills grocery store called Waremart, known for its low prices. We each contributed $20.

We took a single cart through that virtually empty store and together shopped for the ingredients we needed for our meals, but also what we individually wanted to have around for breakfasts, lunches, and weekends, not to mention household necessities like toilet paper. We were in a constant state of negotiation as we jockeyed to stay within our collective $100 budget. One thing we all agreed upon was that we each got our own loaf of sliced bread, white or wheat, for the week. Another was that the common budget could not be spent on dessert . . . Unless it was ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, which would be made, and consumed on an evening when we were all at home.

I'll never forget the cashier, a middle-aged woman, checking us out after our first group shopping expedition. When the final bill came due, we were within pennies of $100. She said, "You boys made good choices."

The best part is that even at the time, we all approached it as a kind of lark, a challenge, an adventure in which failure was always a possibility. Even our midnight shopping felt like a night on the town with friends.

In other words, we were playing.

It was just a bunch of young men experimenting with life, creating it together to suit ourselves and one another. It's kind of stunning to think about how much learning was embedded in our play: budgeting, meal planning, nutrition, compromise, division of labor, accountability, generosity, cooking, economics, shopping, conflict. We needed no other curriculum because we had something to accomplish together. That's what we play-based educators call project-based learning.

In Frat West we had built a school and we were our own teachers.

But most importantly, I think, is that we were learning that autonomy isn't the opposite of community. Indeed, we were learning that a healthy community is what makes autonomy possible.

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Learning a New Game

2026-10-05T05:46:56.352-07:00

Among the first games we play with our babies is some version of give-and-take.

We show an object to them and they take it from us wth their little fingers. As they get a little older, they often enjoy a more advanced version of the game in which they hand the item back to us, then take it again, then give, then take, delighting in the pattern, the cooperation, the interaction.

Over time, we stop recognizing it as a game, it's just part of how we interact as we play with our kids. If they snatch a block from our hand as we're building them a tower together, we hardly notice it. If they commandeer the book we are reading to them to turn their own pages, we find it cute. If we're rocking a doll in our arms and our child wants to imitate us, no words are spoken as they take that doll as their own.

This is all as it should be at home, but as any parent with older children will attest, it's not a game that always goes over well with other kids. As adults we don't attach any particular value to playthings, indeed we tend to think of them as rightfully belonging to the children, but other kids, be they older siblings or preschool classmates, tend to be far from sanguine about having valued things snatched from their grasp. At any given moment in a preschool classroom, especially at this time in the school year, there is likely to be a child who is upset about it and a child who is equally confused about the fuss. After all, this is how they've learned the world of play works: I want something, I take it.

As a preschool teacher, I don't allow children to snatch things from my hands. Whenever I see a tiny fist reaching for the object I'm holding I tighten my grip and say, matter-of-factly, "I'm using this." I then follow that up with something like, "If you want it, you can ask me for it," or "You can play with it when I'm done." If the child is very young, I then relinquish it almost instantly. With older children, I might play with it for a few seconds, or even minutes, before saying, "I'm done with it. Now it's your turn." My objective is to simply role model a pattern of interaction that I hope becomes, so to speak, a new "game" for the children to play.

One day, we were playing with our Fisher-Price toys, a significant collection amassed over the decades as families have donated their old toys to the school. The big plastic tub contains dozens, if not hundreds of those squat figurines representing both people and animals. A group of children were struggling with snatching and emotions were on edge, so I sat beside the tub, picked out a polar bear, saying as I held it up, "I found a polar bear." As I expected, one of the children immediately reached out to make a grab. I pulled it back, "Hey, I'm using this!" She looked stunned. I then said, "If you want it, you can ask me." She said, "Please?" and I handed it to her, saying, "Sure, I'm done with it now."

I then proceeded to remove other animals from the tub, "I have a tiger," "I have a parrot," "I have a bear," and so on. Children gathered around. At first many hands grabbed for the toys and I went through the process again and again. Soon, as you would expect, the children began to catch on, many of them clearly delighted with the game we were playing. Occasionally, I would answer them with, "In a minute, I'm still using it," or "I'll give it to you when I'm finished," an addition that the children accepted with apparent patience. Before long they were playing it with one another, practicing both sides of the equation.

I'm under no illusion that this alone will make for a snatch-free classroom going forward. Old habits die hard, and there are levels of empathy, fairness, perspective, and simple courtesy to be learned, but we have weeks, months, and years to learn new ones.

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