Teacher Tom

The "Curiosity Chemical"

2026-08-14T07:34:35.579-07:00

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly misunderstood as the "pleasure chemical." In modern slang, we talk of "dopamine hits" to describe what people are doing when they, say, spend hours scrolling their social media feeds or waste a day playing video games.

Dopamine is involved in those activities, of course, but not the way many people think. It doesn't serve as a reward, but rather as a signal that something is worth pursuing or important.

In other words, dopamine is intimately connected with curiosity, not pleasure.

When we perceive a gap in our knowledge our brain predicts that there's something here worth learning and dopamine motivates us to act to close that gap by asking questions, experimenting, and exploring. It causes our bodies to join our brain in "wanting." The reward is that we get to update our mental model of the world especially if there is an intrinsic "pay off" and it's this, not the dopamine itself, that reinforces the behaviors that led to it.

In other words, dopmine is not about the satisfaction of anything: it's about the desire to know, or in more common terms, curiosity.

This is how self-motivated learners, like children at play, operate. Dopamine is the mechanism that drives intrinsic motivation. And external motivators, like grades, are known for interfering with that by reducing our interest in doing a task or following an interest.

This is how our schools get it so wrong and what social media and gaming get right: they provide novelty, cliff-hangers, wild improbable assertions, and questions. The problem isn't the dopamine or curiosity, the problem is that they have then made closing that gap in our knowledge instantaneous. More often than not, satisfaction requires nothing more than the click of a button or swipe of a finger. It's too easy and therefore disrupts the important part of learning, which is the questions, the experimenting, and the exploring.

Questions are far more motivating than answers. The pursuit of information, the effort required to satisfy our curiosity, often has a much bigger effect on memory than knowing the answers themselves. When we've worked for it because we were curious, we are far more likely to remember it, which is to say learn it by updating our mental model of the world.

In contrast, when we've mainly worked for it in order to get a reward (an A) or avoid a punishment (an F), we may well arrive at the right answer, but we are far less likely to use that information to update our mental model, although we may well remember what grade we got in the class. Educators in standard schools are often urged to "make it interesting," but that's a tall task, especially in a world full of "distraction," which is just a negative world for "interesting."

What play-based learning gets right, what self-directed learning gets right, is that we place the process of learning ahead of the right and wrong answers.

It wasn't that long ago that even the scientists were calling dopamine the "pleasure chemical." That was the "correct" answer, but in the meantime, researchers have learned that the correct answer is closer to the "curiosity chemical," although since dopamine it's also related to movement, attention, cognition, mood, and so much more, we can be confident that we still don't have our answer. "The science" is what we think we know right now. Scientific progress is about questions, the unknown, and where our curiosity takes us.

When we allow children to play we don't need to "make it interesting," we don't need to create the illusion of learning through a system of external motivators like grades. Learning is both natural and inevitable. What worries so many adults is that learning through play, learning driven by self-motivation, means we must allow the children themselves to decide what is worth pursuing.

Without dopamine, our species would likely have died out long ago. It's our curiosity that drives us to learn what we need to know to adapt to an ever changing world. Modern schooling stupidly pretends that it can somehow one-up Mother Nature.

Letting children play, means that we need to become curious ourselves and let go of outmoded ideas and notions. As play-based educators we know that our job is to question, experiment, and explore right alongside the children.

*****

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.

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

Action is Character

2026-08-13T07:18:16.459-07:00

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "Action is character."

As has often been the case, this artists was just asserting something that modern scientists are now confirming: not only do our actions reveal who we are, they also become who we are. In other words, neuroscience and sociological research are finding that when we act kindly (even if we don't feel kind), when we act courageously (even if we don't feel courageous), when we act generously (even if we don't feel generous), the more habitual and natural those behaviors become until, before we know it, we are the kind, courageous, generous person we aspire to be.

Of course, we don't need scientists to tell us that this is true when it comes to negative habits, so why wouldn't it work with virtuous ones?

Young children don't worry about what kind of person they are, let alone what kind of person they will become, even as we adults worry about it on their behalf. Indeed, much of what passes for parenting or teaching falls into this category. We worry that the child who hits another child will grow up to be violent. We worry that a child who snatches toys from another child will grow up to be selfish. We worry that a child who climbs too high, runs too fast, or hurls their body into the fray willy nilly, will grow up to be foolhardy. We scold or punish or forbid or otherwise seek to teach them the right habits. By the same token, when a child is gentle with their friends or thoughtful or generous, we reward or praise them all the while crossing our fingers that the cruel world doesn't victimize them.

When a child puts on a cape and says they are Batman, they are not aspiring: they are Batman. They stand in their power pose, strong, brave, heroic and a champion of those in need. In the very next moment they may crumple to the ground in tears, a baby who needs its mommy. We're all this way throughout our lives. The idea that character is fixed is a myth. Oh sure, we may have been shy or anxious or melancholy for a long time, we may need a therapist or even medications to help us, but in the end, the way to something better will not begin with feeling or thinking differently, but rather with acting like Batman. Of course, as adults, we may not be able to become Batman all at once. But if we can, each day, starting small, engage in a small act of heroism (or whatever), then do it again and again, the more natural it becomes. We will slowly become capable of bigger and bigger acts of heroism, until . . . Well, no one is Batman all day long, not even Batman, but the more we will feel and think like Batman. We do this through action.

I'm not saying this is an easy thing to do, but becoming the person we want to be will never happen if we wait until we feel like that person. Action is character. The rest will follow.

We worry too much about the children, I think, and not enough about ourselves. There is a tendency to see ourselves, both individually and as a society, as too far gone to be saved, our character is already set, but maybe this child or this generation will be the one that finally gets it right. Too many of us seem to think that if we do our parenting and teaching jobs just so, according to this method, or with this or that attitude, then we will be able to produce future humans who are kind, courageous, and generous. We see it all the time in public policy when we turn to schools to fix the poverty, bigotry, ignorance, and violence that pervade our society, when the problem isn't with the kids, it's with us. It's us that have to change. It's us that have to act even if we don't feel like it.

As Gandhi said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." It's a truth that is being confirmed by science. It applies to individuals as well as the world at large. We can't do it for other people because no one can self-actualize for anyone other than themself. We can provide for basic needs and safety, we can love them and let them know they belong, we can even support them in feeling good about themselves. And a just society would provide all those things for all people. But when it comes to character, when it comes to becoming, that is the part that each of us must do for ourselves. That's what a child is doing when they declare, "I'm Batman!" We can all do it and it starts today, right now, with one small act of heroism, even if we don't feel like it.

******

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

We are Plural

2026-08-12T06:59:23.496-07:00

Cry contagion, or contagious crying, amongst human infants is a well documented phenomenon, one that anyone who has worked with groups of young people has learned about first hand. One infant's crying triggers nearby infants, especially during their first year of life.

This response tends to be much weaker when babies hear recordings of their own crying or other loud sounds. It seems to be specific to the cries of other human babies. Researchers don't think this response is mere imitation, but rather a display of emotional resonance, a manifestation of the fact that our nervous systems are inherently interconnected at a level beyond any previous relationship or even awareness of the other individuals. As humans mature, this connection transforms into the empathy and compassion that drives us to help one another, which is how our species has always moved forward.

In other words, we are born aware at a basic level that we're part of something greater than what is typically thought of as our individual selves.

At the same time, it's estimated that only about half the cells in our body actually contain human DNA. The rest "our" body is made up of the bacteria and other microbes that are essential to digestion, immune health, and other functions. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, this means we aren't "singular, each of us, but plural, a cooperative community."

Of course, we have been taught to perceive ourselves as individuals, but in everything we do, there is an entire civilization, both within our "selves" and without, with which we are inextricably intertwined

We are born enmeshed in our world, yet it seems we go out of our way to deny this. Our schools, for instance, tend to be set up as competitive arenas in which children are ranked, divided, and scolded to keep their eyes on their own work. Even "cooperative" activities result in individual grades.

The "genius" of play-based learning is that it's part and parcel of a cooperative community, one in which "success" isn't judged by an authoritative adult, but rather by how well the play sustains itself. In other words, the reward is that the game continues, moving from one thing to another as individuals adjust, adapt, compromise and negotiate. Too often adults show up in the context of play as the killjoys, as the ones who scuttle the ebb and flow of the games, often intervening just when it was "getting good."

When we allow ourselves to step back, to observe, and to intervene only when necessary, we find ourselves in a natural world in which cooperation and connection, not competition, stands at the center. A place where "we" is greater than "me"; where we are plural. That is, and always has been, the glory of our species.

******

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

Playing at the End of Summer

2026-08-11T05:00:32.563-07:00

For a time, the children gathered together around the workbench where they made things with junk using glue guns. Others chose to create using construction paper, tape, and staplers. They talked quietly amongst themselves as they worked, sharing tools and ideas as they went.

After a while, in ones and twos, they declared their projects complete and began to move away into the rest of the playground. Someone began to work the handle on the cast iron pump and the flow of water attracted the children, who took up shovels to direct the flow of the water. There was talk of creating a lake that was deep enough to float the old row boat that has rested in the sandpit for over a decade. They organized themselves.

It was a warm, breezy end of summer day. I tried not to think of all those poor children who were already back school. It's impossible not to think of it as an outright robbery. For me, summer belongs to children. Only a self-important killjoy would take that away. I was grateful to live in a place that at least respects childhood enough to give them a proper summer.

I was sitting with a mother whose oldest daughter just completed her first year of public school kindergarten. As we watched the children from afar she sighed. Her children had been part of Woodland Park for the past five years, a place where the seasons change, but the spirit of summer feeds the entire year. She said, "Kindergarten was great, but it made me doubt myself. When we're here I know my kids are doing the right thing."

No one ever needs "desk time" more than they need this.

Earlier in the week, I performed a little slight-of-hand for the kids. Some of them figured out how I did it, which lead to a conversation about magic that has stretched out over hours and days. Some of them believe in magic, others think it's all slight-of-hand. We've wondered about unicorns and tooth fairies. We had a long conversation about dragons. We discussed the fire-breathing kind, but also the metaphorical ones that exist in Chinese mythology: the creative dragon that flows through our minds as we make art, or the water dragon that exists in the flow of water coming from the pump, or the fire dragon that makes the sun so hot. One group of siblings told us they were taking a weekend drive up onto the mountain dragon's back where there would still be snow even in the summer. And then there was the heavenly dragon, who is so large and powerful that its entire body is made of pearls of wisdom and other dragons.

Some of us danced together. Some of us danced while hanging upside down by our knees.

Summer, childhood, where there is no such thing as falling behind. The dragon myths are uplifting, but the one about falling behind is crushing our children and crushing our families. Indeed, it's not even a myth, but rather one of those dark fairytales designed to frighten us into "proper" behavior. I've heard of teachers being celebrated for giving children short breaks to dance at their desks, a crowd control technique that empties dance of its joy and freedom. Indeed, it's not even dance.

I recently had lunch with a friend who teaches in the public schools. She's always been a ball-of-fire, aware of the flaws in our educational system, but convinced that she, at least for the children in her life, could overcome them. This time she told me, "I no longer think I can change the world. I'm not even sure I can change the world for a single child." She had hoped that the pandemic would have opened people's eyes to what we are doing to children in the name of "desk time" and the fear of falling behind, but, as she said, "Everyone is just rushed to get right back to the crap."

Against this background, I watched these children play in their natural habitat. I took several deep breaths, allowing myself to join them in this genuine moment of summer, of childhood, without adults breathing down their necks, without having to get career and college ready, without worry over the myth of falling behind. This is what young children should be doing: creating, digging, splashing, talking about dragons, and dancing, not in a rush, but in the warmth of a lazy mid-summer day.

******

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

"In This Light and Shadow, Monsters Arise

2026-08-10T07:29:19.307-07:00

The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise. ~Fiamma Montezemolo

May you live in interesting times. It's an Ancient Chinese curse. Likewise it's a blessing, in the same sense that "May all your dreams come true" can go either way. As adults, we look around and see monsters: bigotry, technology, billionaires, corruption, war, alienation, mental illness. If you're inclined to see monsters, there has never been more light and shadow from which they can arise.

The fact that they are the same monsters, albeit in different clothing, that humans throughout history have always perceived is cold comfort, although it does provide perspective.

I've often bemoaned the loss of my own childhood, not for myself, of course. I already have a good on under my belt, one anchored by lots of unsupervised play, outdoors, with other children, full of wonder, conflict, risk, and triumph. No, I find myself worried that it's the "kids these days" who are really getting ripped off. Recently, however, my own daughter, a child of the 90's, expressed her concern for the younger people she's encountering, largely because they didn't have the childhood opportunities she did . . . and it shows.

And so it goes.

The old world is always dying and the new one is always struggling to be born. As adults we have the perspective to see it happening even if we don't fully understand it. We know of the "before times", when we were . . . happier?

Aristotle argued that "happiness" is an emotion that we can really only fully experience upon reflection, when we cast our minds back over the past and see that, yes, then I was happy. He pointed out that the moment we name our happiness in the present it tends to disappear. I'm sure my own mother worried about the world in which I was growing up, a world that was dying while the new one was struggling to be born. Yet, I was happy.

It's tempting, in our dark moments, to give in to the monsters, to convince ourselves that we are, this time, really in the end times. But this, I think, is the only real monster: despair.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary about the rise of funk music -- James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, George Clinton. The world in which these Black artists produced this joyful music was chaotic, politically, socially, and culturally. Monsters were everywhere. MLK was assassinated, the Civil Rights Movement was in full voice, the Vietnam War and the specter of nuclear war hung over everything. This was the time of my own childhood as well. The old world was dying and a new one was slow in appearing. The filmmaker interviewed old men (and it was mostly old men) who clearly remembered those times has happy, like I do, despite growing up in that time when monsters lurked.

From the perspective of childhood, there is only the world of now. The children in our classrooms will one day, as we all do, see their moment, this moment, as an old world that is dying while they glimpse monsters in the light and shadow. But for today, there is only today, the only world they have.

The gift of working with young children is that they, if we allow them, can share their perspective with us. It's a place in which the old world isn't dying: it simply doesn't exist. They are living in a place of happiness, even if it won't be fully recognized for decades. Of course, there is pain, grief, and failure, but a life without these monsters is no life at all. Perhaps wishing someone a life without pain, grief, and failure is another curse disguised as a blessing.

And one day, as adults, these children will worry about the monsters in the light and shadow, monsters that you and I will never perceive. And I am motivated to ensure that they will at least recall their time with me as happy.

The old world is dying. The new one is struggling to be born. When we drop to our knees amongst young children, humbly, entering their world, we find ourselves amidst the midwives charged with bringing the new world to life.

******

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

What is This System Trying to Do?

2026-08-07T07:30:06.689-07:00

When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home. I'd anticipated it. We live within the jurisdiction of a home owners association and periodically, when ant populations begin to surge, they lay down insecticide. Whenever they do this, within 30 minutes, the ants come inside.

Of course, they're escaping the tragedy and my home, being relatively poison free, is a sanctuary. Usually, they just mill around on the floor, but this time, one the scout ants, the ones whose role in ant society is to randomly search for sustenance, discovered the panty, and specifically the dog treats and a package of shelled pistachios that had not been fully resealed.

I'm not a fan of swarms of ants inside my home, and especially in the pantry. Over my adult life, I've had to deal with ant invasions at least once a year and, to be honest, I've come to relish the challenge. It's always an opportunity to learn something new.

I've tried all kinds of things over the decades, but my current approach is to start with Windex. I emptied the pantry shelves, tossed the fully infested food, then took the rest outdoors where I would later wipe off any remaining ants. I then gave the swam, their trails, and their entry points a good dose of Windex. I wiped the slowed ants up with paper towels. This does a few things: the liquid slows them down, the surfactants in the product interferes with their respiration, and the cleaning product dissolves the all important pheromone trail.

Ants are what biologists call "superorganisms" in that they are both individual animals and parts of a larger organism. The "queen" is comparable to the reproductive organs, the workers function like the body's cells or tissue, and their pheromone communication system operates like a nervous system.

When I awoke yesterday, there were still a few lingering ants, but they seemed to be aimless -- just a few scouts randomly hunting. Often, if I'm diligent for an hour or so, I can finish the project one ant at a time until they've "forgotten" about the inside of my house entirely. But first I fed the dog, who then came over to see what I was doing and coughed up a "little something." I saw it, but I was busy with other things for about 30 minutes. When I returned, the ant swarm had also returned to this meaty mucus on the floor.

What had happened was that one of those scout ants had stumbled upon our dog's wee gift, found it interesting, tasted it, then returned to the rest of the ant-body all the while leaving a pheromone trail by way of remaining connected to this delicious morsel. Back in the colony, it regurgitated its bite so the others could confirm for themselves that, indeed, this just what they needed. Then it was "C'mon everybody!"

I often feel like the preschoolers I work with operate very much like a superorgansim. A child will come across something on the playground, like an ant trail. They'll stop to study it, to wonder about it, to experiment with it. Then they tell someone else about it. Before long you have a swarm of children. I've often referred to the "hive mind" of preschoolers who have been together for a while.

Some ant species focus on sugars, some on protein/grease, and some on both depending on what the colony needs at the moment. I've often had good luck with maple syrup and borax traps (the workers carry sticky sweet grains of borax -- an ant toxin -- back to the colony), but I knew that wasn't going to do the trick this time, at least not all on its own. I'd already destroyed the pheromone connection to my pantry, but the ants were clearly trapped between the outdoor insecticides and me. And they needed another find a source of protein. I would need to consider other measures.

My approach to ant invasions is to observe, try to understand, then adjust the environment in order to make it possible to live as much as I can in harmony with them. In fact, I usually don't even use borax in my "traps." Often I just put a pool of syrup on a piece of aluminum foil and place it along their trail between the entry point and the food they're after. When the ants are seeking sugar, they very quickly abandon the more distant food for the more readily available syrup. I then, day-by-day, sometimes even hour-by-hour, shift the foil in order to redirect the flow of ants until I get them outdoors. I will then move them away from the house and leave the foil in the middle of the lawn for them to gorge upon. I can then clean up the pheromone trail and that's that.

I gave this new swarm the Windex treatment, but knew that I needed to get them going somewhere else. Among the foodstuffs I'd tossed out was an almost empty box of Milk Bones. I dug it out of the trash. They were still swarming it, even though I know that these individual ants, despite plenty of food, were destined to die. Ants cannot survive for long without a connection to their colony, any more that a human cell can exist once disconnected from the whole. They can't start new colonies anymore than we can regenerate our arms and legs. They cannot join a different colony because their chemistry identifies them as part of a rival and marks them for death. They may have survived on those Milk Bones and other garbage for while, but left where they were, they were doomed.

I put the box of Milk Bones against a wall outside my home, closest to their main entry point. The ideas was to lure them to a new, perfectly acceptable food source outside my home. I dusted the crevices with a food-grade "soil" comprised of fossilized algae (diatomaceous earth, available at my local Ace Hardware). This isn't a poison, but rather a naturally occurring product that can remove the waxy protective coating on the exoskeletons of ants. It can kill them if it remains on their bodies for a few days, but they are actually amazing at cleaning it off themselves and one another (grooming). The main function of the soil is to make things uncomfortable which discourages all but the most determined scout ants.

This morning, knock on wood, I see no ants indoors. Surprisingly, a check of the outdoor Milk Bones that had once been swarming with ants, was today completely ant free, so much so that I'm going to let the dog decide if they're still edible . . . I think I know the answer to that one! But I don't know the answer to my most pressing question: Where did the ants go?

I mean, they must have found a better/closer food source that does not involve my pantry and avoids the poison.

I regret that my process killed some ants. I am more upset, however, with the HOA and its insecticide program. Ants are not my enemy. They were simply escaping a habitat that was rendered suddenly, and ham-fistedly, inhospitable. That said, I didn't want them in my food or my house.

This week I've written a couple of posts about earth systems (here and here) and how we're part of those systems. What I see when I slow down and study these ants, is a system, or a part of a system, revealing itself. I tried to approach this "problem" the way I approach my work with young children, which is to say, when things aren't going as expected, it's my opportunity to learn. These ants have given me a live demonstration of emergence, adaptation, and collective intelligence, which is what happens whenever we slow down and consider that we exist as systems within systems. The whole of evolution is systems adapting to one another as part of greater systems.

When we see the world this way, we learn to approach challenges with the question: What is this system trying to do? We can only answer this question through close observation, experiment, and patience. Then once we understand, our interventions can become specific, smaller, more elegant, and usually far more effective than if we, you know, just lay down a bunch of poison.

******

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

Is Play the Creative Process of Our Universe?

2026-08-06T06:10:55.240-07:00

"Love isn't a state of perfect caring," wrote Mister Rogers. "It is an active noun like struggle."

I hate to quibble with the great man, but love and struggle are also verbs. The English language is already largely comprised of nouns, which is, as Robin Wall-Kimmerer commented in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, "appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tells us that the theory of quantum mechanics, the core theory of modern physics, "does not describe things as they 'are': it describes how things 'occur,' and how they 'interact with each other'." In other words, our entire physical universe is not comprised of things at all, but rather interactions, processes, and systems, which is to say verbs. We don't live in a world of objects, but rather "a world of events."

The language of the Potawatomi people of what is today the Great Lakes region of North America, is a language of verbs. It's estimated that 70 percent of their words are action words. "When bay is a noun," writes Wall-Kimmerer, "it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegadmaa -- to be a bay -- releases the water from bondage and lets it live."

The people who brought English to the Americas didn't just colonize land. The Potawatomi weren't the only Indigenous people whose language and traditions reveal an understanding of the universe that Western science is only now coming around to embracing. Western culture still has a long way to go. Around the world, we find Indigenous cultures understand that humans cannot be separated from the rest of nature, that nothing exists without relationship and connection, that nothing can be thrown away because there is no such place as "away."

Our young children, if we avoid colonizing them with our thing-based way of viewing the world, seek to understand their world through relationships. Most conventional schooling expects children to categorize things like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and facts that can be tested. Play-based learning is much more about verbs than nouns: exploring, negotiating, building, pretending, wondering, arguing, balancing, inventing, and connecting. Learning in this context isn't something they acquire, but rather something they do.

This is purely anecdotal, but I've noticed lately that many of my former preschool students have chosen educational and career paths that study the earth itself, like environmental science, climate science, Earth systems science, sustainability, and interdisciplinary environmental programs. These are all disciplines that ask about relationships: how to the atmosphere, oceans, soil, plants, animals, microbes, and humans interact? I like to think that their play-based foundation played a part in this.

Play is how we learn about how the world works, how the different parts, the loose parts, play with one another, and we too are a part of it.

In her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, she writes of a "world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events."

It strikes me that this would make for a good definition of play.

She points out that Indigenous creation myths tend to be about "trickster creators" who argue and improvise a world that is "never perfect, never finished," and, most telling, "never fell from grace." This is how I view the young children with whom I work, these natural humans, these creators, who evoke the entire universe as they play.

Maybe what we see is that play is the creative process of our universe. I don't think it's a stretch to at least wonder about it.

******

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

If We Want Children to Think, We Must Let Them Move

2026-08-05T06:40:58.048-07:00

As you step onto a preschool playground or a play-based classroom, the first thing visitors are struck by is the never-ending swirl of bodies in motion. Adult visitors to Woodland Park have always stopped at the gate or doorway seemingly afraid to get in the way as children move from one thing to the next, leaping, skipping, swinging, crawling, jumping, jiggling, bending, and reaching. Even when children stop to greet the newcomers, they are in motion: kicking a leg for no apparent reason, clapping their hands, bouncing up and down. Sure, some of the children might remain relatively still for a few minutes at a time, but even the ones curled up with a book are bouncing a foot. Even the ones pretending to be a baby under a blanket are wiggling.

"Sit as little as possible," wrote the influential philosopher and notorious nature trail hiker Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."

A mountain of studies back up Nietzsche's assertion. When we move our bodies our visual sense is sharpened, our ability to concentrate is enhanced, comprehension is boosted, information retention is increased, and self-regulation improves. Cognitive scientist Sain Beilock even asserts that "(m)oving the body can alter the mind by unconsciously putting ideas in our heads before we are able to consciously contemplate them on our own time." (Italics are mine.) In other words, our bodies can know stuff through movement for which our brains aren't yet ready. And it doesn't necessarily have to be robust movement either: one study found that when people doodle while listening to a lecture they retain nearly 30 percent more of the information. By now, most of us know that our brains alone don't do our thinking, but rather our whole bodies, other people, and even things are involved, not just intellectually, but emotionally as well.

Another great 20th century philosopher and psychologist, William James once observed that one of the best ways to overcome mild depression or ennui is to stand up straight, pull our shoulders back, hold our head high, and move confidently. More contemporarily, Katherine Isbister, a professor and researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, talks of what she calls embodied self-regulation. "Changing what the body does," she writes, "can change our feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.

One of the foundational myths of schooling is that we must somehow get the kids to stop moving around in order to focus, but the exact opposite is true. Some schools have even gone so far as to cut back on recess in elementary school in favor of more "seat time." The evidence, however, tells us that the more children move, the more clearly they think. This evidence is so clear and so compelling (and by now, so widely known) that the fact that our schools persist in forcing even preschoolers to spend large chunks of their days sitting quietly is outright malpractice.

What visitors see as they stand in the doorway of standard classrooms are humans whose minds are torn between obeying the adults by sitting still and their natural urge to actually think and learn through movement.

What visitors to a play-based classroom are witnessing are humans in motion, thinking, and learning at full capacity.

******

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

We are Systems, Not Categories

2026-08-04T06:41:35.123-07:00

I recently learned a new word: holobiont. A holobiant is an animal or plant and all the symbiotic microorganisms living on or inside it, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. I'm one, you're one.

"We ourselves are not singular," writes Rebecca Solnit in her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, "each of us, but plural, a cooperative community. About half the cells in our body do not have human DNA, and your gut, skin, mouth, and many other parts of you are populated places. These are the strains of bacteria and other microbes crucial to your digestion, immune health, and other functions, and they make you a plural being, a lurching collective of mutual beneficial entities."

In other words, we are no the individual, independent entities our culture tells us we are, but rather a system of cooperation and agreement, that is likewise a part of wider systems. Even our minds, this seemingly central thing that we often identify as our self, is created by this interconnected system of mutual benefit, a cooperative community. It would be more accurate to say, "We're hungry" than "I'm hungry." "We're tired." "We're stressed." "We're happy."

We've been taught by our culture to bifurcate ourselves from the rest of nature, to somehow see ourselves as separate, not just from the rest of nature, but from one another. It's a philosophy in which everything is categorized. "Categories," writes Solnit, "are the antithesis of systems, at least when the categories are deployed in service of an anti systemic worldview and of containment by conceptual and literal boundaries. A system is by definition in motion, connecting and circulating, made up of the flow of interactions and exchanges; it is a process of change."

And change is learning.

I can't help but see a play-based preschool classroom in this description, the ebb and flow of children moving, connecting, circulating, weaving a web of interactions and exchanges. There are conflicts, of course, but there are also agreements. There are times when the system seems to become chaotic, but also times when it settles into the perfection of a bee hive, a place where we understand the true nature of nature, and that we, not me, is the central, ever evolving, unit of life.

******

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

The Real Rigor of Play

2026-08-03T07:06:51.022-07:00

The opposite of play is not work, it's rote. ~Dr. Edward Hallowell

Our outdoor classroom is one big slope and within that slope there are many ups and downs, reflecting our city which is built on hills. We're forever experimenting with gravity out there, rolling and flowing things downhill or dragging and pushing things up. There are parts of the space that are so steep one needs a running start to get to the top and there is very little flat upon which to rest one's legs.

We have a pair of wagons, which are regularly used on the hills. One day, one of those wagons became an airplane.

From my photos, it's easy to see the physics and engineering learning, but those were minor aspects, almost side-effects, of the bigger, more important project, which was figuring out how to get along with the other people.

People sometimes question the "rigor" of a play-based curriculum when, in fact, we're engaged in the most rigorous curriculum known to mankind. There is simply no greater or more important challenge than the one of balancing our own individual desires and needs with those of the other humans with whom we find ourselves.

A play-based curriculum is rigorous because of it's subject matter, which is the all-important one of getting along with the one another, something children are passionate about. Traditional schools, on the other hand, are rigorous simply because they attempt to teach less interesting things by rote, lecture, and text book, the most difficult way to learn new things because most children find them tedious and frustrating. It's an artificial rigor designed, I guess, to make the adults feel important.

Many people confuse hating school with rigor, saying things like, "It prepares them for life," but those of us who work in a play-based environment spend our days amongst children who love school, who arrive each day eager to tackle the challenges of community, and I would assert that there is no better preparation for life. Make no mistake, it's not pure joy, it's not all laughter. There are tears. There is conflict. There is negotiating and compromise. Children might complain, but they return each day eager to engage, to figure out the things they are most driven to figure out: the most important things of all.

There was so much to learn about flying our airplane together. Would it be safe? Where would everyone sit? How many of us can go at a time? Who gets to steer? Who rides and who "launches?" How do we get it back to the top of the hill? How do we make sure everyone gets a turn?

For the most part, we adults stood back, taking a few pictures, letting the kids work it out. Sure, the first few times they launched themselves down the hill, I jogged just ahead of them, prepared to intervene in the name of safety, but as it turned out on this day, I was unnecessary, even when the airplane crashed and burned.

I'll take the real rigor of play over the artificial rigor of rote any day. And so would the kids.

******

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

Play is a Perfection That is Not Improved by Gilding

2026-07-31T05:42:10.138-07:00

In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, the man sometimes credited as the father of modern wildlife ecology, wrote, "It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it."

He was writing specifically about natural places, but he could have been talking about just about any perfect thing with which we humans come into contract. In our efforts to improve upon Mother Nature, Leopold bemoaned our urge to build roads into perfect places in order to make them more accessible; to manage the plants and animals in order to create a more desirable "balance"; to construct facilities to make the experience of wilderness more convenient. We gild natural places with fences and signs and bear-proof trash cans only to find that our love is suffocating. We can't seem to resist the urge, as Shakespeare put it, "(t)o gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw a perfume on the violet, to smooth the rice, or add another hue unto the rainbow . . ."

Even the lilies we purchase to decorate our homes have been gilded in their way, cultivated to produce over-sized blooms that come in a gaudy rainbow of colors never seen in nature. Not long ago, I found myself among wild growing lilies, pure white with yellow-tipped stamen and instantly felt the difference. These were the flowers that have inspired culture, art, and literature before they were made tawdry in our efforts to one-up Mother Nature.

We've done the same with children's play, which is to say the natural urge to educate ourselves. For some 300,000 years, our species, Homo sapiens, has evolved an extraordinary intelligence through the processes of curiosity-driven exploration, discovery, experiment, cooperation, and invention. Play stands among the perfect things, yet alongside that has emerged this human urge to gild the lily.

We see this gilding in the advent of modern playgrounds and the proliferation of manufactured toys. We see it whenever someone touts an innovation by labelling it "play with a purpose" (which renders it not-play) or by asserting, "They won't even know they are learning" (as if children must be tricked into it). We see it in our classroom management methods which seek to replace the sacred urge to play with rules and curricula that require the application of external motivations like grades, punishments, and rewards.

Play is enough, especially in the early years. Everyone knows that this is when we are at our most capable as learners, when our brains and bodies are as facile as they will ever be. "They are like sponges" we enthuse and we are right, but it only works properly when self-motivation is the engine, which is to say, when we are playing. Play has evolved as a perfect mechanism for learning, yet sadly, too many of us cannot leave it alone: it's a lily we are too ready to gild.

When we build roads into a wilderness, we begin the process of rendering it less wild and therefore less perfect. Our intentions may be good, but a gilded lily will never live up to the ones that grow in natural places. Play is another perfection that is not improved by gilding.

When we resist the urge to gild and instead stand aside as our children play, we see a perfection in our imperfect world, and if we would keep it, we must resist the urge to gild it.

******

Starting tomorrow! If you want to learn how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, the this summer camp is the place for you! The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think is a one-week exploration of how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes soon. Click here for more information and to register.

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

"He Has an Irrational Fear of Pinecones"

2026-07-30T07:28:17.031-07:00

Before I'd even met the two-year-old boy, his mother told me, "He has an irrational fear of pinecones."

This was important for me to know because there was a pine tree on the playground. And she knew it. I quickly considered how I should respond if she asked me to remove pinecones from the playground. Thankfully, that's not where she was going. Instead, she said, "I wonder how he's going to react when he notices."

In recent years, we've seen an uptick in mental health diagnoses in young children, especially anxiety disorders. The jury is still out on why this is happening. It may well be that society, the environment in which our children are growing up, is causing it (e.g., early academic pressure, technology, decreasing opportunities for outdoor play, and so on). But it's almost certain that at least some of the increase is simply a statistical phenomenon based on improved diagnostic methods and earlier intervention, rather than an actual increase in anxiety disorders.

I've known many families who are grateful for their preschooler's anxiety disorder diagnosis. It gives them access to language, services, and interventions that genuinely reduce suffering. This is a good thing.

In our role as preschool educators, however, we've all worked with parents who mistake normal childhood anxieties for anxiety disorders, or at least the worry about it an awful lot. Most of us aren't qualified to diagnose a disorder, but if we've been at this for any length of time we are experts on normal childhood anxiety.

Helping children through separation anxiety, for instance, is a beginning-of-the-school-year tradition as young people experience their fear of being without mommy, and then learn, through experience, that they can not only handle it, but emerge on the other side feeling more independent and capable. These sorts of normal childhood experiences in resilience, in turn, give them the confidence the next time they are faced with an unknowable and uncertain future. This is an enduring finding in both psychological research and practical down-on-our-knees experience.

Anxiety disorders are one thing and should not be dismissed, but typical emotional development is a process of repeatedly experiencing manageable amounts of fear, frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty -- and there's my point -- while supported by caring adults. We don't leave a child to simply "cry it out." We don't toss them in the water to let them sink or swim. We're there to comfort them and let them know that they're safe, to let them know their fears are valid, but ultimately allow them to discover that they can manage their own fears.

There is a difference, however, between support and "rescue." When adults see fear as the enemy and all anxiety as a "disorder," they can often rob their children of the necessary opportunities to exercise autonomy, taking risks, solving social problems, and recovering from setbacks. At best, this sort of bulldozer parenting, in which natural opportunities to learn about anxiety are cleared away by well-intended adults, just pushes the learning off into the future. At worst it can lead to an actual disorder, which we all want to avoid.

It took the pinecone averse boy several weeks to peer up into that pine tree and, to his horror, spy those dreaded pinecones. I happened to be watching him as his eyes grew wide and his jaw clenched. He pointed into the tree and said, "Teacher Tom."

His mother had prepared me. I said, "You've noticed the pinecones." I didn't tell him that he had nothing to fear, because quite obviously he felt he did.

He pulled his arms into his chest and moved slowly away. Over the next several days, we talked about those pinecones. He showed me how malevolent they were with his hands. He described their fearsomeness with his words. He imagined that they were a kind of monster that was going to do something scary to him. The future is always uncertain and unknowable and this is what he was dealing with, what we all deal with, as we confront the world beyond the safety of what we already know. Trepidation, fear, and anxiety are all valid responses. It's what we do in spite of those feelings that matters.

By the end of the week, he was still worried, but seemed to forget about the pinecones for longer and longer stretches of time. Every now and then, especially when he was playing under the pine tree, I'd see him cast a wary eye their way, but then go back to his game.

Then one morning, after a wind storm, there were pinecones on the ground. He noticed them as he entered the building. "Teacher Tom," he pointed out the window, "pinecones." We stood looking at them through the window for some time before he got on with his play. When we later went outdoors he mostly ignored them. I even saw him kick one out of his way.

A few minutes later he was tugging on my shirt tail, "Look!" He was showing me the pinecone he was holding in his hand, his face a portrait in pride.

******

The way I spoke with the boy in this post is an example of The Technology of Speaking With Children at work. In summer camp we'll explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. It's not too late to grab your seat around the camp fire. Click here to learn more and register.

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

Clean Up Time Without Bossing the Kids Around

2026-07-29T07:22:49.615-07:00

In the sitcom Seinfeld, the character Elaine Benes is annoyed that a friend doesn't think she's up to being a babysitter: "I couldn't raise a kid? C'mon, I love bossing people around."

She, of course, finds out that bossing kids around is a sucker's game. No body likes to be bossed around. The mentally healthy response is to resist. The adult ratchets it up. The resistance grows stronger or goes underground, leaving the adult with no choice but to take it up yet another notch, and so on until we have grown-ups threatening and yelling. It's ugly and unnecessary.

All this to say, I strive to avoid bossing kids around. And I would assert that in most preschool classrooms, the time we tend to boss the kids around the most is when it comes time to tidying up.

When my wife Jennifer and I bought our first house, I spent the first weeks wandering from room-to-room, into the yard, and out to the garage thinking, This is our room. This is our yard. This is our garage. I even once lay on my back in the lawn and told myself, "This is our piece of the sky." I was telling myself those things, because it didn't yet seem real. It wasn't until after I'd mowed that lawn a few times that I began to believe it. It wasn't until I changed the furnace filter, pruned the forsythia, and repaired a cabinet hinge that it was really felt like ours. It was only then that I could get down to the business of living in that house, and caring for it, instead of just wandering its rooms like a guest.

The children often call our school, "Teacher Tom's school." I remind them, "It's not my school, it's your school," but it's more a statement of aspiration than reality until they've started taking care of it themselves, and the place most of the children start is clean-up time.

As a cooperative preschool with all those extra adults in the room, it would be easy to just leave it to them and it would get done, and done well, in about 5 minutes. Instead, however, I instruct the parents to leave as much to the children as they possibly can, even if it takes a half hour and even if the results leave a lot to be desired. Rather than being an annoying, yet necessary part of our day to hurry through, this act of coming together to care for our school is the single most important community building activity on our daily schedule.

Here's how it works in my 3-5's class . . .

The song

I announce clean-up time by beating my drum and singing, to the tune of the Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs song Heigh Ho:

Hey hey
Hey hey
Put everything away
Into the place
In which it stays
Hey hey
Hey hey hey hey hey hey

It typically takes a few weeks, but before long, most of the kids, most of the time, go into action with the first beat of the drum. The rest might need a couple minutes to finish what they're doing, and that's understandable.

Speaking informatively

I expect the adults to avoid bossing the children around with directional statements like, "Pick up the blocks," or "Put the dolls in the crib," but instead strive to make simple informational statements like, "There's a block on the floor," or "The dolls go in the crib." This might sound like a distinction without a difference, but it's important. Humans instinctively resist being told what to do, even preschoolers, and this is especially true when it comes to an activity like clean up. When we command children, we give them two options: obey or disobey. But when we provide information, we open up a space in which they can think for themselves. It's clean up time. I could help clean up. There's a block on the floor. I could put it on the shelf.

I'd rather focus our energies on coming together to take care of the school than in power struggles between adults and 3-year-olds. Informational statements are the only way I know how to do that. When we respond to a child's complaint of, "I don't wanna clean up," with an informational statement like, "It's clean-up time," we are avoiding a time sucking battle of the wills by not giving them anything to fight against.

I cruise the room, making informational statements like, "We need lots of help in the drama area," "The stuffed animals go in the basket," and "There are counting bears under the table." The trick is to be patient. The kids aren't always going to respond right away. You need to give them a chance to process your statements and make decisions for themselves, because that's the kind of space informational statements leave for the children -- a decision-making space. This isn't about obedience, it's about allowing children to make their own choices, then verbally noticing when they take action to care for their own school: "Max is helping clean-up the drama area," "Alex is putting the stuffed animals in the basket," "Sophia is picking up the counting bears from under the table."

I'm not praising them. I'm not saying, "Thank you." It's their school, of course they're taking care of it. I'm merely making a point of noticing the children who are participating in clean-up time, just as I would notice the children who were participating in circle time by raising their hands.

When children continue to play during clean-up, I give them informational statements like, "This is not playing time, it's clean-up time," or "That's closed. We're cleaning up now." I then follow it up with a directly applicable informational statement like, "The playdough goes in the playdough container."

When a child wants to talk to me during clean-up time, I ask, "Is it about clean-up?" If they say, "No," I answer, "You'll have to save it until circle time because it's clean-up time now. I only want to talk about clean-up." My own desires and opinions are informational statements and during clean-up time I'm a single purpose clean-up machine.

When a child simply retires to a corner with a book, or sits quietly, I let it go. That child will eventually join us, if not today, then in the future.

And finally, when all else fails, in those rare instances when a child steadfastly continues to play in a way the disrupts or impedes the group activity of clean-up, they are given the choice to either join clean-up or "stay out of the way." A few children make this choice, but most give it up after a few seconds, opting instead for the action taking place in the room.

"Big projects": planning ahead

Two years ago, a parent remodeled her kids' bed room and donated a nice set of shelves and cabinets that gave us a lot more "in classroom" storage space, so much so that we even had room to store our large wooden blocks near our block play area rather than out in the hallway. As we were setting up to start the school year I instructed a couple parents to move the blocks. Malcomb's mom Carol said, "Aw, really? It won't be the same place without the kids taking the blocks to you in the hallway."

She was right and I relented on the spot. Taking the big blocks into the hallway is a "big project" and it generally involves well over half of the kids. As I wait to receive the blocks, I sing my observational statements to the children, usually forcing it into the tune of our clean-up song:

I see
Sarah
Bringing a medium block
And here comes Marcus
With a big one.
Hey hey
Hey hey hey hey hey hey

Hey hey
And Peter is pushing his
Across the floor
While Alex
And Orlando
Are working together
Hey hey
Hey hey hey hey . . .

They have to carry those heavy blocks, some larger than they are, from the classroom, up two steps, and around a corner to were I'm waiting. The doorway causes a bottleneck where they are forced to negotiate that small two-way space while managing heavy, bulky blocks, and the stairs are a real hazard for some of them. It takes a real team effort to make this work and it's wonderful to see all the different ways they do it. Some try to carry 3 blocks at once, while other single blocks are ushered into the hallway by 5 sets of hands. Some push blocks across the floor, while others carry them on their heads. And all the while I'm singing to them, informationally, "Hey, hey, hey hey . . ."

It's useful to plan at least one "big project" clean-up activity every day. Removing wet things from the water table to drip dry on towels can be one of those projects. Moving large objects like our boxes from one place to another will do. Turning over a table that's been tipped on its side can be made into a group effort ("I need lots of strong people to turn this table over!"). So can bringing chairs back into the room from the hallway ("We need 6 chairs at the green table and 4 at the blue table.")

The "big project" is one of the best ways to get everyone involved and there is no better way to build community than engaging in a big project together, shoulder-to-shoulder.

The story of us

When the school year starts, participation on some days might only be around 50 percent, but I have faith that if we (meaning the adults) remain consistent in our commitment to speaking informatively and not worrying about incidental things like how long it's taking or how well it's done, most of the children, most of the time will get involved.

I approach clean-up time with the steadfast expectation that every child will pitch in and that every parent will join me in speaking informatively about what needs to be done. Realistically, an adult needs to step in and handle anything that require sanitizing or to put the finishing touches on the sweeping, but most of the time, the kids do most of the work.

That said, like with any preschool activity, there are always a few kids who opt out, but by mid-year it's rarely more than 1-2 kids each day, and they quickly see that they're missing out. It's hard to resist carrying a block or two out into the hallway where Teacher Tom is singing a silly song, or joining your friends in the effort to right-side-up a heavy table.

I spend most of my time on most day simply narrating what I see happening, naming names. "I see Marissa hanging up costumes." "Jody and Marcus are working together on the Legos." As I do, I feel as if I'm telling the story of us. And most children, most of the time, when left to make their own decisions, opt to be part of that story.

It's not my school, after all, it's the kid's school. And the only way to make that true is to take care of it together.

******

Clean up time like this is an example of The Technology of Speaking With Children at work. In summer camp we'll explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. It's not too late to grab your seat around the camp fire. Click here to learn more and register.

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

Transforming How We Speak With Children

2026-07-28T06:32:21.070-07:00

"No climbing to the top!"

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high.

One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the way. No one plays on it." When I asked her why, she just shrugged, "It's just not fun."

Awhile back, I posted some thoughts on The Theory of Loose Parts. Appropriately, it is an idea that has emerged from the field of architecture about how the best learning environments are those in which we have permission to shape and manipulate our surroundings, and the things found within our surroundings, to suit our needs, ideas and curiosity.

It's a theory that's generally thought of in terms of the physical environment, but no matter how loose the parts, no matter how flexible the space, if the environment does not grant permission to engage freely, then the children, as loose parts theorist Simon Nicholson puts it, will still be cheated.

That's what happened at our daughter's school. The adults, in their concern about safety (or perhaps liability), had sucked the joy out of it. They would have been better off not installing the thing at all. Or installing a shorter one. Or, the way we did it at Woodland Park, not have a climbing structure at all, but rather provide the materials -- scraps of wood, shipping pallets, car tires, ropes -- from which the children could build their own "climbers."

And at our preschool, that's what the children did. None so high as the one on our daughter's kindergarten playground, of course, but always just the right height for the children creating it. Not only that, these impromptu structures were never in the way because the moment the kids were done with it, the parts were on the move, being put to other uses.

But this didn't happen just because we provided the parts. It wasn't even just because they were "loose." This kind of self-motivated play can only happen when children know they have permission to follow their curiosity.

At our daughter's school, the adults specifically forbid a certain type of exploration, but much of the time we let children know they don't have permission in more subtle ways.

For instance, if you listen to the things adults are saying to children at play -- "Come here!" "Slow down!" "Be careful!" -- we hear mostly commands. Research finds that 80 percent of the sentences adults speak to young children are commands. And an environment full of commands is not an environment of permission.

We also hear a lot of school-ish questions, "What color is that?" "How many marbles do I have in my hand?" "Do you know what letter that is?" Implied in these types of questions is the idea that the adults know better than the children what to think about. But even more open-ended questions like, "What do you think will happen if you put one more block on your tower?" tend to steer children into adult approved "places" in which the parts are no longer loose. When we ask questions, we compel children to divert from their own course and onto the one we've chosen for them.

There are times for commands and questions, but if our goal is to create the kind of loose parts environments that allow children to learn at full-capacity, then we are well served to consider even our words as loose parts. When we strive to replace our commands and questions with informational statements -- "That color is red," "I have marbles in my hand," "This is the letter R" -- we are offering children information, facts, that they, like with any loose part, can use or not use.

Instead of the command "Get in the car," we might state the fact, "It's time to go" and let them do their own thinking. Instead of the command "Be careful!" we might say, "The ground below you is concrete and it will hurt if you fall on it." Instead of school-ish questions to which we already know the answers we might instead simply speculate aloud, "I wonder why the sky is blue," leaving it there for the children to consider . . . or not.

Of course, we might also choose to just not say anything at all which is when our "third teacher," the environment, often does her best work.

We will be discussing this and much more around the virtual campfire at our upcoming one week summer camp (see below). It will be a deep dive for educators, parents, and other caregivers who want to transform their relationship with young children by transforming how we speak with them . . . Or sometimes by not speaking at all!

******

If you want to learn how to transform your own words into the kind of loose parts that allow children to think for themselves, the this summer camp is the place for you! The Technology of Speaking With Children So They Can Think is a one-week exploration of how the language we use with children creates reality . . . for better or worse! We will explore how the way we speak with children creates an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. Group discounts are available, but hurry because registration closes soon. Click here for more information and to register.

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

In Endless Dialog With An Interconnected World

2026-07-27T06:45:50.435-07:00

Yoan Capote (detail from Isla, oil, nails, fish hooks, artist's blood)

I often talk about my blogging habit as the core of my reflective practice as an educator. I generally don't sit down and write because I have answers, but rather because something has happened that intrigues me, or challenges me, and I want to understand it better.

Maybe it's a child doing something. Maybe it's something I've read. Maybe it's something someone has said. Maybe it's the state of the world. It starts with an anecdote or quote or phenomenon and this part, the writing, is my best effort at making sense of it. I like writing for publication because knowing that someone might read it, gives me an imagined thinking partner or interlocutor. I write a sentence and wonder how someone might respond. Will they, with reason, scoff, will they doubt, will they be confused, will they be angry or depressed or inspired. They say we shouldn't worry what the other people think, and sometimes that's probably good advice, but I find that if I'm not considering how others will respond, then it's often difficult to think of anything at all.

One of the things I think I've learned from working with young children is that they seem to think best while engaged in play. As developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky put it, "In play a child is always above their average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than themself."

In this way, my blogging, I think, is a form of play, a way to sustain a thread of thought, not with a specific goal in mind, but rather because I've learned if I'm not rushing toward a conclusion, I'm much more likely to discover connections I could not have otherwise anticipated.

In their book, The Dawn of Everything, David Greaber and David Wengrow, write:

“When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds . . . the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on tend. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem.”

Play is likewise a kind of sustaining dialog, a thread that keeps children engaged without forcing a predetermined destination. This is why it stands in such sharp contrast to normal schooling, which is all about predetermined destinations in the form of "correct answers." Play, like dialogue, is inherently about taking the time to explore questions without the pressure of being judged right or wrong.

In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari argues that Neanderthals, our species' chief hominoid rivals, were individually much more intelligent than individual Homo sapiens. If Neandrathals were like mainframe computers, we are much more like PCs, individually less powerful, but far better connected. This is what our species has evolved to do: to think through, with, and alongside people, places, and things. Our minds are not confined to our brains, but rather come into being through the connections we make.

In other words, thinking is at least as much a social activity as it is a cognitive process. Together we're a genius.

We've evolved in conversation, in argument, storytelling, joking, teaching, debating, writing, and playing. And it seems to me that play is the seed from which it all grows. Play is how we evolved to sustain inquiry. It's how we come to stand a head taller than ourselves. Children do it with blocks, mud, and pretending. Adults do it with ideas, stories, and conversations. In both cases, the activity provides enough structure to keep the thread from dissolving, to keep our minds from distraction, while remaining open enough to be surprised and delighted by what we find; not because it's the right answer, but rather, as Eleanor Duckworth puts it, because it's a "wonderful idea."

When we are free to play, this is what we're doing, moving from one wonderful idea to the next, in endless dialog with an interconnected world.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? If you want to learn more about how the language we use with children impacts not just our relationships with them, but also their entire learning environment, join us for summer camp. This is my popular 6-week course, The Technology of Speaking With Children So The Can Think, condensed into a single week. Join colleges from around the world as we examine how the language we use with children creates reality. We will explore how the way we speak with children becomes an environment in which cooperation and peacefulness are the norm, where children take the initiative, solve their own problems, and, most importantly, think for themselves. This is great summer PD for the whole team. There is nothing like getting everyone on the same page to start the new school year! Clink here for more information and to register.

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

Stupid Questions

2026-07-24T06:09:18.875-07:00

They say there are no stupid questions, but I beg to differ. We hear stupid questions almost every time adults and young children are together.

For instance, a child is painting at an easel, exploring color, shape, and motion, experimenting with brushes, paper, and paint. There is an adult watching over her shoulder who points and asks, "What color is that?"

This is a stupid question.

Here's another example: a child is playing with marbles, exploring gravity, motion and momentum. An adult picks up a handful of marbles and asks, "How many marbles do I have?"

The adult already knows the answer. The child probably does as well, in which case, the adult is distracting her from her deep and meaningful studies in order to reply to a banality. Or she doesn't know the answer, in which case the adult is distracting her from her deep and meaningful studies to play a guessing game.

In a moment, these stupid questions take a child who is engaged in testing her world, which is her proper role, and turns her into a test taker, forced to answer other people's questions rather than pursue the answers to her own.

If it's important that the child know these specific colors and numbers at this specific moment, and it probably isn't, then we should do the reasonable thing and simply tell her,"That's red," or "I have three marbles." If it's not new information, and it probably isn't, she's free to ignore you as she goes about her business of learning. If she didn't know, now she does, in context, as she goes about her business of learning.

This is one of the greatest offenses we commit against children in our current educational climate of testing, testing, and more testing. We yank children away from their proper role as self-motivated scientists, testing their world by asking and answering their own questions, and instead force them to become test takers, occupying their brains with our stupid questions.

In my rapidly approaching summer camp for early childhood educators, we will explore alternatives to our stupid questions as well as the other ways that well-intended adults, through the words we habitually choose, create a reality for young children in which they are discouraged from, and sometimes even "punished" for, thinking for themselves. In so many ways, both overt and subtle, adults unwittingly shut down critical thinking, replacing it with a reality in which mere reaction and obedience is rewarded. The good news is that when we learn this "technology" we can, through our language, create a reality for young children (and anyone else for that matter!) into one of self-motivation, cooperation, respect, and peacefulness.

******

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

The Language We Use Creates Reality

2026-07-23T05:32:16.651-07:00

We start speaking with our babies from the moment they're born. We know they don't understand what we're saying, of course, but that's beside the point. If we ask them questions, we don't expect answers. If we give them instructions, we don't expect them to follow them. If we tell them the name of something, we know there is no way it means anything to them.

We speak with them because human language is more than just communication: it's one of the primary ways we connect with one another. As a new parent in 1996, I'd not spent time with babies since my own sister was one, but my instinct was to babble and sing whenever I was with her. I knew it didn't matter what I said (or sang), only that I did.

I couldn't wait until she could talk back. I wanted to know what she had to say even though her eyes, her hands, her feet, her wiggles and kicks and stretches, and especially her cries, told me everything she needed me to know.

She was an early talker. At three months she began regularly saying, "Papa" to me, probably because I'd developed the habit of saying "Papapapapapapapa . . ." whenever I entered to room. By five months, she was starting to form sentences.

Back then, like most new parents, I was focused on every word that passed between us. It was like a miracle, almost as if the world was being created anew with each sentence that passed between and around us. And in a very real sense it was. The language we use creates reality.

I don't mean this as a metaphor, but as a fact. We speak the world into existence, for ourselves and those around us. A thing said one way, creates one reality; said another, it creates something altogether different. Our sentences, our questions, our tone, and our mindfulness (or lack thereof) shape the world for both ourselves and the young children with whom we spend our days.

It's too easy in the rush and crush of life to go into a kind of remote control, speaking with our fellow humans as if on automatic pilot, and, all too often, this results in creating realities we would rather not, if we were aware, be creating.

In our upcoming "summer camp" this is what we'll be talking about. It's amazing how many of our challenges as educators can be minimized and even eliminated when we turn our focus to the words we use, the sentences we say, and the questions we ask. So many of our adult habits tend to shut children down rather than open up a space in which they can think for themselves.

Language is a miracle: it is the miracle of creation. And sometimes it's the smallest of shifts in how we speak with children that make the biggest difference.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp is on. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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

"Look What We Did"

2026-07-22T07:14:09.064-07:00

As a play-based preschool teacher, I make sure, every day, to have at least two opportunities for making art available to the kids, one indoors and one outdoors. Typically, the outdoor provocation offers the opportunity to get good and messy, although it can get messy indoors as well. Sometimes I go to great effort in preparing things, such as when we do pendulum painting or are melting crayons to pour into play dough molds, but most of the time, I keep it simple.

For instance, I'll roll out a sheet of butcher paper on a table and provide something with which to apply pigment -- crayons, tempera, pastels, water color, makers, pencils, bingo dotters, powdered paint, and so on. And, when appropriate, tools for applying and manipulating the pigment -- brushes of various types and sizes, kitchen tools, stampers, sponges, pipettes, stencils, brayers, cutlery, and so on.

These are group projects, something to gather around and discuss as you work in creative collaboration. When the paper is full, we take a moment to admire it, then shift it out of the way to make room for another sheet of butcher paper, or cardboard, or a bed sheet, or other communal canvas. These finished products are not signed by any individual. They are not taken home to display on the refrigerator door. No one says, "I made that," but they often say, "Look what we did."

I've recently been revisiting the theories and predictions of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, he of "The medium is the message" fame. In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan points out that the concept of copyright, the idea that an individual could "own" the work they had produced, emerged alongside the transformative technology of the printing press. Looking at the arc of history from the perspective of 1962, the year of my birth, he felt that our emerging electronic media (radio and television specifically) marked the beginning of the end of the reign of print media.

Print media had made ours into a predominately visual culture, one that both read, and therefore tended to think, in a linear manner. Electronic media was to return us to a kind of "global village" in which oral storytelling came to dominate once more, freeing us of the linearity and shaping us into a people with more in common with pre-printing press cultures and their oral traditions.

And with the death of print culture would come the death of the concept of copyright, which is to say individual ownership of a creative work.

Up through medieval times, great works of "literature" were certainly created. The Odyssey is showing in theaters right now. Someone named Homer is credited with it, but it's far more likely that "Homer" is a name given to a collective effort over generations. Perhaps it originated with an individual bard who was particularly gifted in retelling these evergreen tales, but the stories themselves are the product of an oral tradition going back over centuries, making it a collective work.

"Look what we did."

Our concept of copyright, or individual ownership of stories, has extended well into our electronic age. Until the internet arrived, this concept continued to be tenable, but now in the era of AI, it's becoming increasingly clear that the age of copyright, along with the age of print, is coming to an end. It won't happen all at once, there will be plenty of death throes, but pride of authorship is already dissolving. Much of the music we listen to is cobbled together from samples of other people's music. Social media is fueled by re-mixes of memes and clips and reimaginings. And our movies and programs are increasingly erasing the lines between what it proprietary and what is available for common usage.

I have no doubt that we'll create a leaky dyke of laws to protect copyright for a time, but the writing is on the wall, pun intended. Anonymous graffiti, I believe, has more of a future -- in the long run -- than, say, the collected works of Marshall McLuhan.

And what will we be left with? Something like these children crowding around a table, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating collective works of culture, rather than proprietary works of individual genius.

As Albert Einstein, one of the most iconic individual geniuses of modern times, once complained, "(T)he cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate."

As historian Darrin McMahon wonders in his book on the history of genius, The Divine Fury, in a world in which Supermen are not needed, in which genius is becoming a group activity, "are we returning to the era in which we are closer to god?"

As I watch these young children crowd around, shoulder-to-shoulder, creating together, I see a through-line hearkening back to pre-printing press times when community meant creating together and remembering together; when a rambling troubadour might come through to sing songs and spin yarns, leaving them behind, not as works of proprietary genius, but as commonly held material to be used by the people, just as the children use crayons and paper to make their own stories.

"Look what we did." Our culture may be generations away from McLuhan's predicted transformation, but preschool classrooms, as pre-literate cultures, are already there. Just look at that crowd around the art table practicing the literacy of the future.

******

Who do you want to be when the children arrive? The countdown for Teacher Tom's Summer Camp has begun. In this course you will learn how even seemingly small changes in how you speak with children can transform even the most challenging behaviors without the need for rewards and punishments. This is especially effective when the whole team is on board. And there's nothing like coming together with like-minded educators to get you ready for when the children arrive. To learn more and to register, click here. I hope to see you around the campfire!

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

The Practical Wisdom of Living Virtuously

2026-07-21T07:10:36.466-07:00

I recently ran outside in the middle of the night with a baseball bat to chase away an intruder who was obviously trying to do mischief.

My neighbors are torn over whether I was courageous or foolhardy.

Several have expressed the feeling that I was "lucky." The man might have been armed. He might have overwhelmed me with superior quickness and strength. I might have actually hit him with the bat, then faced legal liability for using "excessive force."

On the other hand, one older neighbor insisted that if anything like that happened again, I was to call him and he'd join me with a "steel bar." He insisted that he would be "fierce." A woman, inspired, immediately ordered her own baseball bat. Many have thanked me for protecting "our community."

As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the Ancient Greek concept of "virtue," and specifically about Aristotle's idea that all virtues exist on a continuum, one that is different for each individual.

Courage, for instance, lies on a continuum between cowardice and rashness (or foolhardiness). Generosity lies between stinginess and being a spendthrift. Truthfulness between self-deprecation and boastfulness. Friendliness between servility and sycophancy. We live in a psychological age, one in which we tend to view our behaviors, as a default, through the lens of our emotions. But I find a great deal of value in the continued practice of philosophy. Even as I wielded my bat, I was fully aware of my emotion (fear), but I was equally aware that hiding safely behind my locked door waiting for the police to arrive was, for me, the coward's option.

You can call it foolhardy machismo, and people have. I don't expect anyone else to behave the way I did. Indeed, I've talked the woman who ordered the bat into returning it. But there is always a price to pay for safety, or the perception of safety.

Yesterday, I discussed bell hooks talking about our culture of fear and what it does to us both as individuals and as a culture. She writes, "Learning to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way." To love in the face of fear takes courage. Being free takes courage. The courage comes first. As Doris Lessing asks, "What else is there for any of us but courage?"

I worry that our obsession with safety is crippling us, and particularly this generation of young people. These children in our care are going to live their entire childhoods under adult supervision, forever being told to "be careful" lest they do something foolhardy. But courage, like every virtue, resides in each individual and the only way to learn what it means, for you, is through practice. And yes, this means, sometimes, perhaps often, erring on the side of rashness. Without courage, without knowing what it takes to be courageous in this world, one is left at the mercy of fear. And fear is the great destroyer of life.

Aristotle's assertion is that each of us must find, for ourselves, the mean between extremes. Living virtuously, he says, is an act of what he called "practical wisdom," the kind of thing that can't be taught, only acquired through the day-to-day practice of living. A life under constant adult supervisions, a life behind locked doors waiting for the police to arrive, never allows us to acquire this practical wisdom and to discover ourselves virtuous.

As Lessing goes on to wonder, "And perhaps (courage) is only a world for being prepared to go on living at all."

******

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

The Choice to Love

2026-07-20T06:11:00.027-07:00

We were all afraid of Mr. Turner. He was the principal at Meadowfield Elementary in Columbia, SC, and, it was rumored, he had a wooden paddle in his office with "holes drilled in it" so he could swing it faster. Even as an eight-year-old, I thought the physics of that sounded off, but I sure didn't want to test it. The most sure-fire way for a teacher to shut down disruptive behavior was to threaten to send the offender to the principal's office.

"Cultures of domination," writes bell hooks, "rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience."

As a boy, I valued my reputation as a "good boy." I valued the good opinion of my teachers and strived to shine in their eyes. I didn't always like or even understand what I was being taught, but I knew that learning was largely immaterial. The important thing was to convince the adults that the lessons were learned, which meant doing well on the quizzes and tests, yes, but more vital was to cheerfully abide by the rules. So that's where I focused my efforts, even as I risked being labeled a "teacher's pet."

I never came close to being sent to the principal's office. Avoiding sticks was easy for me. I was after those carrots. In other words, I fully accepted the notion that those with power could tell me what to do because, after all, they could mete out punishments. I wanted nothing to do with those, so I set my sights on the reward side of the equation.

As a child, I struggled to understand kids who flirted with the punishment side, even as a part of me admired their courage, but I now know that my choice to be a "good boy" wasn't one that every child was capable of making.

In all honesty, I doubt that paddle ever existed. I remember Mr. Turner as a large, chuckling, slightly fuddley man in the mold of Mr. Whetherbee from the Archie comic books. There were never any credible sightings of his paddle, let alone, actual evidence of its use. I suspect that the paddle rumor wasn't intentionally planted, but rather was the product of children who were regularly spanked sharing their fears with the rest of us: they knew that even loved ones had the potential to hit them. So even if the paddle was a fiction, the fear was real. I was a "good boy," but that doesn't mean that the threat of Mr. Turner's paddle wasn't a baseline consideration in every choice I made while at school.

Advocates for punishments value them as "motivation." And they are, I suppose, in that children learn to be motivated by fear. And fear is a powerful, yet deadly, motivator.

"In our society," writes hooks, "we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known . . . Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair."

This is the real challenge of our age: isolation, loneliness, and disconnection, the natural consequence of a culture of fear. And that fear is used to "motivate" us. There doesn't even have to be a paddle. The rumors are enough.

Today, most children go to elementary schools where corporal punishment is off the table. You would think that this would contribute to lowered anxiety, but according to the American Psychological Association, rates of anxiety in children have been on the rise since well before Covid.

Our obsession with safety is a product of our culture of fear. This has led us to greatly limit, in the name of safety, our children's access to independent play, which in turn contributes greatly to increased mental health challenges, and specifically anxiety and depression. According to researcher Peter Gray, rates of mental health issues among children, even very young ones, have been rising dramatically over the past many decades and are now at the highest rates ever recorded.

"We would like to think of history as progress," Gray writes, "but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950's."

"When we choose to love," writes hooks, "we choose to move against fear -- against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect -- to find ourselves in the other."

If being educated is defined as being equipped to deal with the world in which we find ourselves, it seems that this, the choice to love, is the most necessary thing in the world, more important that literacy, more important than math. And love is impossible as long as the paddle remains in the backs of our minds.

I like that hooks refers to love as a choice -- "The choice to love." As an early childhood educator, this is a choice that I strive to make every day. Fear is a powerful motivator, but connection is infinitely more powerful. Only when a child feels connected, can they be truly motivated from within. An obedient child is motivated by fear and sycophancy. A connected child is one who seeks even deeper connection through cooperation, agreement, and kindness. And that, ultimately, is what is most needed if our children, and our world, are to thrive.

******

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

This is Why We Never Assigned Chores to Our Child

2026-07-17T06:21:33.268-07:00

We never gave our daughter chores to do around the house when she still lived with us.

This runs against the current of most of the parenting counsel out there. Her school officially recommended it for all families. Even our pediatrician suggested, when she was still a baby, that we would want her to do chores. "It's good for them." "It teaches them about responsibility." "It's how they pull their weight in the family."

But I couldn't assign her tasks any more than I can assign tasks to my wife. Our family is not a business, nor a system of government. It is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous people.

Our culture grants parents the right to command particular children based upon the accident of their birth. We have the right to yoke them to work that they didn't choose and to saddle them with rules in which they had no voice in making. We can, if we are cruel or angry enough, beat them with our hands, imprison them, and rob them of every freedom. Stripped down like this, exposing the raw authoritarian power of it, isn't something we often do, and I've learned that when I do it makes many people quite angry.

Please know that I'm not writing to tell you what to do. I'm sharing what we've done.

In refusing to exercise these parental "rights," I understand that I am, in this, outside the mainstream. People assure me that they can exercise their parental rights with love, and I'm sure they do, but we must have very different ideas about love. Love, for me, cannot exist within structures of hierarchy and control. As groundbreaking psychologist Carl Jung wrote, "Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking." Love, if it is to mean anything, is a relationship between fully-formed, autonomous humans. It is a relationship of choice, one that we must continually reaffirm or it stops being love and becomes something else.

Our child did not ask to be born. That decision was made on her behalf, one that places all the weight of responsibility on me, not her. It's a responsibility I assumed. I do not own my child, but I am responsible for her. She was born not owing me anything, not even gratitude. Indeed, I don't own anyone, nor does anyone owe me anything except when it is an obligation or relationship we've both entered into willingly.

I don't buy this idea that children can be taught to be responsible through the coercive assignment of tasks, although many, many people seem to believe this. Indeed, for the better part of the first two decades of their lives, we assign children responsibilities "for their own good," at home and throughout their schooling. But that is simply not how responsibility works. Responsibility is always something we assume of our own accord. In the workplace we agree to assume certain responsibilities in exchange for money. In our relationships we make agreements about who is to do what. We might, at times feel as if we have no choice in the matter, but as autonomous humans we always have a choice. And if we truly don't, then we are not autonomous, which means we come to resent it, to rebel against it, to stew and anguish and despair. Is that what we feel we must teach children? To simply do what others tell them to do and call it being responsible?

Our child is an adult now. She is a valued employee. She cooks and shops and tidies up. She pays her bills. If being assigned chores is the path to these little virtues, then she managed to get there by other means. And whenever there was real work to be done, as opposed to the "make work" that comprises most chores we assign to children, she always pitched in because that's what fully-formed, autonomous humans usually do when they see the opportunity to help others.

Utah Philips sang, "I will not obey, but I'm always ready to agree." That is the larger virtue that I choose for myself, even when it comes to the fully-formed, autonomous humans we call children.

******

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

Family Dinners and Becoming the Authors of Our Own Lives

2026-07-16T06:57:02.957-07:00

Growing up, family dinners weren't exactly sacred, but they were our default mode. Most evenings during my first 18 years of life involved the five of us sitting down around the dining room table and talking.

Much of what we talked about were our collective memories, especially as we got older. And when we get together, that's what we still tend to do. My wife of 40 years has heard our stories countless times by now. She's been a part of the family so long that she's part of many of them, even as she teases me that we hash and re-hash the same stories over and over again, year after year.

If my family is typical, about 40 percent of our conversational time is spent doing this. Some scientists are attempting to make the case that the primary reason our species developed language at all is so that we could communicate our memories with one another.

At one level, why that would be the case is obvious. If our prehistoric ancestors could accurately and efficiently share their memories of, say, where they found food or where they encountered danger, it increases the overall odds of collective survival.

The fascinating thing is that, as Charan Ranganath writes, "Our personal memories do not exist in a vacuum -- they are constantly being influenced and reconfigured as we interact with family, loved ones, friends, and our larger communities. The science of collective memory . . . is still nascent, but we have discovered that the very act of sharing our past experiences can significantly change what we remember and the meaning we derive from it."

I recently wrote a post here about an accident I had while riding my bike. In a nutshell, a man had been flying a kite in a field adjacent to the bike track when a gust of wind knocked his kite to the ground, causing the string to stretch tightly across my path, something I didn't see until it was already cutting deeply and painful into my arms, ultimately sending me to urgent care.

At the time, I was in the midst of reading Ranganath's book (Why We Remember) and decided that I was going to experiment with taking charge, or at least being as aware as possible, of my memories from this traumatic experience. One of the ways I did this was by telling the story to everyone I knew, focusing on the bizarre and even humorous aspects, showing off my scars, and generally turning it into a kind of heroic yarn. Writing about it here on the blog was, in fact, one of my first attempts to shape the memory. When people asked, I told the truth about the pain, the anger, and the gore, but most of my attention has been on turning it into a story of bouncing back from a strange accident. I know that some will say that I'm consciously practicing "denial" by repressing memories, but it feels more like I'm taking charge of the narrative memory.

The fascinating thing is that from the moment I arrived home after the accident, my wife began to share the memory with me. Then as I showed the fresh wounds to friends and neighbors, they became part of it. The story of the accident itself is one about which I've maintained awareness and some control, even if I'm fully aware that I tend to leave out certain parts and focus on others. But the memory of how my friends and family got me to finally take the injuries seriously and seek medical attention, is one that has entered the realm of collective memory. In this collective memory I come off as somewhat naive and foolhardy; a man who's putting on a brave face or even indulging in a show of machismo. A man, in fact, who is consciously practicing at least a little bit of denial.

It's now been around six weeks since the accident occurred and my experiment began. When I re-read that post, I'm reminded of details I've already dropped from the memory while there are new aspects that have "emerged" in the meantime. For instance, I'm now convinced that I subconsciously leaned into the string with my biceps out of concern that it would slip up to my neck, causing more grievous injury. Is it true? In my memory it is. I mean it makes sense.

And that's exactly the point of memory. It's not there to accurately record events, but rather to help us orient toward the future. That's why our memories are typically more about what must have happened than what actually happened. And a big part of how we cobble our memories together is in dialog with others which is why I see some of my behaviors, in hindsight, in memory, as something I'd do differently in the future.

That is the great power of family dinners when it comes to our memories.

According to Ranganath, psychologist Robyn Fivush "found that children whose mothers asked open-ended questions . . . and elaborated on their children's answers . . . tend to remember more of their life experiences and put them together in a more coherent narrative than those whose mothers ask their children to recall specific information. These kinds of interactions can significantly impact a child's self-concept. Children who are encouraged to have a voice develop more ownership over their sense of self . . . because they are allowed to be authors of their personal narratives."

When I read that, I realized that this is what I'm attempting to do with my own memory experiments: become the author of my own personal narrative so that I can use it to inform my future behaviors. For instance, in the future, I won't wait 24-hours to go to the doctor.

"Conversely," writes Ranganath, "disallowing certain stories to be told or . . . disputing a child's perspective can undermine their sense of the experience and be detrimental to the development of self." Fivush has found that when families make a habit of discussing shared memories collectively, their children tend to have higher self-esteem and are less likely to be anxious, depressed, or to have behavioral issues.

Collective memory may be a relatively new area of study, but its practice is at least as old as language itself. When we talk about our shared memories, be it around a modern dinner table or hunter-gatherer campfire, we are in a very real sense preparing ourselves for an unknowable future, coming to a kind of collective agreement, not about what happened, but about what must have happened, connecting the past to the present in a story of which we are the authors.

Advocating for family dinner time, one without screens or other distractions, seems so cliche as to be fuddy-duddy, but these moments of talking about our memories are more important than we realize. When we share our memories with our loved ones, we are allowed to become the authors of the narrative of our own lives.

******

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

Living a Meaningful Life is the Only Real Success

2026-07-15T06:42:39.345-07:00

More often than not in our culture, when someone is talking about "success" we assume they are referring to either material wealth or the result of someone having achieved some sort of victory or prize. And often they are. Most of us are less superficial in how we define our own successes. Oh, we'll take the cash and the laurels, but our drive to success tends to be motivated by more personally meaningful measures like a sense of satisfaction about a job well-done or having good relationships with family and friends or an overall feeling of contentment.

As educators, we're widely viewed as agents for the success of the children in our care. A parent of one of my former preschool students wrote to me about how her daughter, now a second grader, had boldly stood up to a child who had been excluding her from a game. "She told her how it made her feel and said, 'I don't like that.' And the other girl apologized and started including her. That's all because of you Teacher Tom." Success!

Parents want their children to be successful and most want to see us as allies in making their children successful. Taking a step back, we see that our policymakers have similar ideas about our role in society in that most of them cast us in the role of getting children "college and career ready," which is widely viewed as the surest pathway to worldly success.

The problem is that our obsession with success too often clashes with the far more important goal of education, which is to support children in creating a meaningful life.

In her book The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith proposes four pillars of meaning: belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. The more connected we feel to our family, friends, and community (belonging), the more we are motivated by positive long-term goals (purpose), the more adeptly we can make a narrative from the threads of our life (storytelling) and the more we concentrate our energies on something larger than ourselves (transcendent), the more meaningful our lives are.

It all begins with belonging, which is the only curriculum with which I've ever really concerned myself. It's within the context of community that we flourish. Community is an active living thing, something that requires the contributions of everyone. Success is inclusion. When that girl stood up for herself, she was asserting her place in her community. When the other girl listened, apologized, then included her, she was likewise doing the work of belonging. In many ways, this is the only work there is. It's not easy. And it's almost impossible in an educational system that focuses on individual achievement and competition, which is to say, division. The world doesn't need more division.

Living a meaningful life is the only real success. The only way to get there is through belonging.

******

Today is the final day of the Preschool Autism Summit! There are still many more free sessions to make it worth your while . . . Including a live discussion panel with me at 2 p.m. PST. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I've learned a lot the past two days. Looking forward for more of the same today. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for some outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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

Playing With Social Arrangements

2026-07-14T07:29:18.874-07:00

When the two boys played alone, they tended toward the art table where they would chatter their way through works of art that involved action -- superheroes mostly. Or maybe they would claim a corner of the rug where they built a fort or parking garage together. When they played this way, it was as equals, almost in the spirit of improvisational comedy, building their play one "Yes, and . . ." at a time.

They were also part of a larger group of boys that often played together. You would find four of them forming a team of some sort, usually involving costumes or carrying "blasters" they had made from Legos. These games were full of "C'mon everybody!" and "Let's go over there." Although at times they had to pause things in order to negotiate the exact nature of what they were doing, usually culminating a Eureka! moment of democratic synthesis with someone saying, "I've got an idea!"

And sometimes they played in even larger groups, with up to a dozen kids, boys and girls, engaged in, say, digging ditches and holes in the sand, then flooding the area from the uphill side with water to see where it would flow. These games could involve a great deal of bickering, sometimes breaking up into factions, but usually coalescing around one or two children who directed while the rest set their own agendas aside, at least temporarily, for the greater good.

You could find these boys engaged in each kind of social arrangement over the course of any given week -- sometimes even over the course of a day. In fact, most of the children ebbed and flowed in this way, sometimes playing alone, sometimes in small groups, sometimes massing together.

Of course, it was rarely quite this clear-cut. At any given moment, someone was getting frustrated that their ideas aren't being considered. Or there was someone on the outside biding their time for their bestie to break away and join them in something more intimate. There might be someone trying to figure out how they could fit in with the glamorous team that was swooping about the classroom, or someone else who had broken away for solo play that was destined to become the next great fad.

In many ways, this sort of experimentation with social arrangements, the question of what is the "best" way for humans to live together, stands at the heart of what makes our species unlike any other. In their book The Dawn of Everything, the Davids Graeber and Wengrow, an anthropologist and archeologist respectively, point out that a fish or a hedgehog exist in a "state beyond good and evil" and therefore have no need to ask such questions. They organize themselves as their instincts guide them. But humans have evolved the capacity to be moral and social beings, which makes us unique in the animal kingdom. We can choose how we are going to organize ourselves.

Not everyone believes this, of course, there are many who insist that we are evolutionarily hierarchical and that civilizations always progress from the "primitive" to "civilized" in a predictable way. But Graeber and Wengrow beg to differ:

"(A)rcheological evidence is piling up to suggest that . . . our remote ancestors . . . shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of the year then dismantling them -- all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states . . . our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next."

Graeber and Wengrow have re-interpreted the anthropological and archeological record of our species, finding this phenomenon on every continent (with the obvious exception of Antarctica) across millennia. They show that many Indigenous societies deliberately shifted social forms, often on a seasonal basis. A community might be relatively egalitarian during one season and highly hierarchical during another, depending on what they were trying to accomplish. Hierarchy was never an inevitable or permanent state, but rather a tool, adopted for a time, to get certain things done.

Our habit of considering our ancestors to be "primitive" in comparison to us tends to blind us to the fact that they were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. "Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them -- at least the most reflexive among them -- just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others . . . equally perceptive, equally confused."

In a similar way, I sometimes think, our habit of considering young children as less cognitively capable, likewise blinds us. When they engage in these kinds of social experiments, these ebbs and flows, they are following in these same footsteps, grappling with the paradoxes of social order, creativity, and what it means to be both free and connected. The Davids argue that our present social order where we see nation-states and hierarchy as inevitable, is unnatural, that we have become "stuck," and that this is the source of many of the world's most pressing challenges. There is no room for the natural ebb, flow, and experiment.

In her Canopus in Argos pentology (five book series), Doris Lessing explores a similar theme, but at the level of consciousness rather than political organization. She creates a mythology based on Sufi philosophy, in which there are six zones, each representing a specific level of consciousness. As moderns, our habit is to rank these zones, ranging from the most earthy to the most Devine, but she shows us that healthy development requires movement and exchange, like the circulation of blood, between the zones, or levels, or ways of being with regard to the other people.

Otherwise we stagnate. Otherwise the blood clots.

As moderns, we've come to understand freedom as freedom from the control of others, but maybe, as our Indigenous ancestors seemed to understand, freedom is the ability to move between social arrangements, not the obligation to live perpetually under one "ideal" system or another.

When children are moving like this, between self-created social arrangements, I see a healthy classroom. I see children moving fluidly between moments of complete autonomy, collaborative negotiation, and, hopefully rarely, situations in which an adult must temporarily take charge because the moment calls for it (like when safety is at stake). This may be one of the biggest challenges for us adults: remembering that our moments of authority must be temporary.

The health of any community lies not in its commitment to one governing principle or other, but rather in its flexibility. That is what the children are playing with as they circulate and move, enjoying the fruits of one way of being together, bumping up against the paradoxes, and then trying something else again and again and again. Perhaps it's only when we become stuck that we have a problem.

******

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

"There is No Evidence That Children Learn Through Play"

2026-07-13T06:25:55.389-07:00

An early childhood educator recently told me that if "playwork" was a viable career option in the US, she would have pursued that rather than "play-based preschool teacher."

I get it. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to work with and alongside several highly regarded playworkers in the US, Europe, and Australia. I've always felt a strong affinity for their way of working with children, far more so, in fact, than I do with most "preschool teachers."

If you're not familiar -- and if you're in the US, you might not be -- playwork emerged from the adventure playground movement, beginning with Denmark's Emdrup "junk playground" in 1943. It spread to postwar Britain, most notably through the work of Lady Marjory Allen. Playwork is explicitly not about educating children. It is about respecting children enough to create and protect spaces for freely chosen, child-directed play with as little adult intervention as possible. Today, especially in Britain, it has evolved into a distinct profession and philosophy.

Play-based learning has a longer pedigree, with its roots in the work of Friedrick Fröbel, who created kindergarten in the 19th century around the idea that play is central to children's development and learning. This concept was later picked up by such thinkers as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky who connected children's active exploration and play with intellectual and social development.

Obviously, there is a great deal of cross-over, but there is one significant difference. As one crotchety play worker once said to me after listening to a talk I gave at a conference: "There is no evidence that children learn through play." Not only are those fightin' words, but it's empirically not true. There is plenty of evidence that children learn through play.

At the same time, I feel like I know what he means, even if I object to the specific thing he said. He was raising a philosophical objection disguised as an empirical one. Playwork Principles say that the play process is paramount and that the role of a playworker is to guard against adult agendas that disrupt the process. I don't think this playworker doubts that children learn through their play, but rather he sees an adult agenda in the word "learning" and, in my experience, he's not wrong about that.

Throughout my decades working with young children, I've experienced, time and again, adult agendas disrupting play. I've seen well-intended adults unilaterally solve "problems," not allow children to struggle, pepper them with questions, and simply take-over the play. The adult agendas of efficiency, conflict resolution, schedules, learning, and adult-direction, are all play disruptors. I felt like my main job as the "teacher" of our cooperative preschool was teaching the adults how to get out of the way and simply be amazed by what they witness.

I suspect that the main thing about play-based learning that rubs playworkers the wrong way is that instead of approaching childhood play as a "pure good," they see us as subordinating play to the adult agenda of "learning."

And that definitely happens in many, maybe even most, play-based environments. There's a lot of talk, for instance, about "making the learning visible," and "scaffolding" the play, and (the phrase that really gets my goat) "guided play." Some of us do it because, frankly, we don't, deep down, trust play, and by extension, we don't trust young children. Some of us do it because we have an agenda (self-imposed or imposed from above) of what the children are supposed to learn and by when. Some of us do it because we see ourselves as "teachers" and that's what teachers do. Others do it because parents are watching and when we "loiter with intent" we worry it looks like we're not doing anything at all.

When children play, really play, learning has nothing to do with it. Not from their perspective. They are learning, of course, but the process of play is the only thing that matters to the people who matter. When adult's enact their agendas they are making it about themselves, their needs, wants, and fears.

I call what I do play-based learning for one reason: marketing. It's strategic language. I find myself "selling" play into a culture that believes, cruelly, that children, even very young ones, must always be producing something that can be measured. "Just let them play" doesn't sell because it sounds too much like nothing is happening. When I say "they're leaning through play" it reassures adults enough to, I hope, leave the children alone.

The playworker critique applies far more devastatingly to academic-style schooling. We know children are learning something in those schools, but we have no idea what any given child will learn. Ever. We can know what being is taught. We know what they can reproduce on demand (testing). We might even know what they can recall a week later. But learning itself is always largely invisible and wildly idiosyncratic. School children can sit through the same lesson and learn entirely different things. One learns long division. Another learns that they're bad at math. Another learns that adults become irritated by certain questions. Another learns how to cheat without being caught. Another that they must sit still and quiet. Yet the test only asks about long division.

So perhaps the intellectually honest claim isn't "Children learn through play," but rather, "Children are always learning. Play simply gives adults less control over what." And maybe that's what bothers everyone.

Play is what children do when left to their own devices. It's how humans have evolved to spend large swathes of their early years. Adult agendas tend to rob children of their right, their need, to explore, manipulate, and live in the world. All mammals, birds, and even reptiles play when they are young. Some have even found evidence of what could be called play in invertebrates and even, stretching things, plants. The leading theory for play's existence is that it is how young animals practice for the future, which is to say learn in order to survive and thrive.

We are at our best as play-based "educators" when we create beautiful spaces in which children know they have permission to play. The learning, whatever that entails, is none of our business.

******

The Preschool Autism Summit is already underway, but it's not too late. Our understanding of autism and educating autistic children is changing almost daily. I can't wait to dig into all 30 of these sessions. I know I'm going to learn a lot . . . And I know I'm going to be a better teacher for it. And it's FREE . . . So why not join us for 3 days of outstanding summer PD? Get your free pass right here.

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