Teacher Tom

Because We Live in a Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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"To Daily Converse About Virtue"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a life worth living.

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

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Brains Do Not Grow in Captivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I Fought the Temptation to "Correct" Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why didn't she share?"

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

"That's not fair!"

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

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

"Let's read it now."

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

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

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

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

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The Examined Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Children Already Know How to Be Successful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone is hiding, hiding, hiding

Someone is hiding

Who could it be?

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

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

Halloween is coming

And this is what I'll do

I'll hide behind this pumpkin face

And then I'll say, "BOO!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We Have Always Lived in an Age of Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All Artists are Scientists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, "Go!"

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

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

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

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

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We Had Built a School and We Were Our Own Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, we were playing.

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

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

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

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Learning a New Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"Not Just Allies, But Accomplices"

2026-10-01T09:57:10.125-07:00

Fin whales, the second largest animals on earth after blue whales, can communicate across entire oceans. They are capable of producing extremely low-pitched calls that travel up to 13,000 miles under water. They are also capable of hearing those sounds which means that a fin whale off the shores of Bermuda can "talk" to whales hanging out near Ireland.

Mice and other rodents carry on like birds, twittering, chirping, and singing, yet they do so at such high-pitched frequencies that they're undetectable to the human ear.

Many fish interact with the world through electrical fields, turning their bodies into batteries, essentially extending their sense of touch beyond their physical bodies. Migratory birds, sharks, and a host of other animals orient according to the earth's magnetic fields. We know they do these things even though, as humans, we have no way to imagine what it might be like to "see" through electricity or "hear" through magnetism. Indeed, we are even limited to the metaphors of sight and sound which probably have little in common with the actual experience.

There is so much going on in the world about which we are totally unaware. This is true of all species. We are trapped in the bubble of our senses, or what scientists call our umwelt. The entire umwelt of some spiders is the vibrations of their webs. The umwelt of bats consists largely of echoes. Even the umwelt of the dogs who sleep in our beds is largely incomprehensible to us.

We struggle to understand what it might be like to experience the world as another species, just as we often struggle to understand the different experiences and perspectives of our fellow humans. A while back, I was talking with Nick Terrones, who was then the director of the all-tribes Daybreak Star preschool in Seattle. He told me that many Indigenous people conceive of other species, including plants, as relatives, an idea that might be alien to someone, say, from a European background which has long viewed Mother Nature as a collection of resources to exploit.

While it may be impossible to fully understand the experience of other species, all we have to do to better understand other humans, including children, is to be curious and to listen with the intention of understanding. When we do this we come to see the world through their eyes, through their traditions and cultures, through their respective umwelts. They are showing us truths about which we were totally unaware, helping us overcome the hubris and arrogance of believing that our own perspective is all there is. When we do this, we expand our understanding of who we are.

They have also, just as importantly, shown us where our umwelts overlap, creating connection and relationship, showing us that we are all relatives, and making it possible for us to go through the world, as Nick says, "Not just as allies, but as accomplices."

This is how we expand beyond our bubbles to become the curious and connected adult accomplices our children need us to be.

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

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Our Worst Days Become Our Best Stories

2026-10-01T07:06:53.520-07:00

A couple months back, within the span of a few weeks, two bad things happened to me: I rode my bike into a nearly invisible, taut, kite string that lay across my path, lacerating both of my forearms. Not long after, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a nefarious knucklehead trying to steal things from my patio who I chased off by wielding a baseball bat.

I had just read Charan Ranganath's book Why We Remember, and it inspired me to be as conscious as possible about how I stored those traumatic memories. And specifically, I tried to store them as stories that made me feel good about myself, while also entertaining others.

Comedian Jimmy Carr asserts that our worst days become our best stories. My goal was to be aware of how these stories lived within me.

I live in a very tight-knit neighborhood, and both stories have spread amongst my neighbors, told second and third hand at this point, circling back to me in fascinating and inaccurate ways.

The way I tell my kite string story, it's as the purest of accidents. I'm proud of the fact that although I yelled at the guy whose downed kite caused my pain, I forgave him on the spot. Every time I notice my rather ghastly scars, I'm reminded of that man, Tony, who I pity more than myself. Even as I was still bleeding, I urged him to not stop flying his kites, although the last I communicated with him, he'd taken a break from his wholesome hobby.

When the story comes back to me through the grapevine, however, it appears there are some who aren't ready to forgive him on my behalf. If it had happened to them, I'm told, they would have sued, or at least threatened to sue. They find my story incomplete. When I correct their version with my own, they shake their heads in disagreement. They want, by proxy, their pound of flesh.

But the stories that have round-robined back to me about the baseball bat incident are even more fascinating. In some versions I'm portrayed as a kind of everyman hero. One of my neighbors even immediately purchased her own baseball bat. Another close neighbor demanded, almost gleefully, that if it happens again, I should phone him before confronting the "baddie." He promised to arrive with a "steel bar" and that he would be "fierce."

My wife Jennifer likes to take the lead in telling the baseball bat story. In her version, I "leapt" onto the patio, indeed, she says I cleared it entirely, landing with both feet on the lawn. She says I shouted ferociously, like a character in a Tarantino movie. She never fails to mention that I was shirtless. As you can imagine, I love that this is the way she's stored the memory/story, even if it's not quite how I remember it. It makes me sound like a superhero.

On the other hand, many versions of the story have come back with me as a chest-thumping idiot who could have been badly hurt or even killed.

As a friend said to me, "Both things can be true." Although, to be honest, I really can't embrace the second version. I never really felt endangered, even in hindsight.

Looking back, I've had quite a bit of experience with people who others view as nefarious. I've rousted unhoused sleepers from the school playground on more than one occasion. I've even had to coax them from inside the building.

A man who I know to struggle with addiction and mental illness was lurking about in the darkened room across the hall. When I confronted him, he insisted that no one could see him. When I said that I could see him, he replied, "Except you."

Another time, I chased down a guy who had tried to steal my bike in order to say, "You tried to steal my bike. Come on, man, get with the times!"

I've also spent weeks hunting in the various local encampments for one of these fellows whose family (we sometimes forget they have families) said he had a public episode shortly after I hustled him off, then disappeared. I knew that the man I'd caught in the shadows had a family who sent him his medications every month in care of our landlord Pastor Gay; the same pastor who considered it part of her job to care for the people sleeping rough in our neighborhood, who we all knew engaged in petty crimes and other anti-social activities to get by.

I knew they weren't so much dangerous villains as they were knuckleheads. Forgive me the name calling, but it's a label that allows me to understand them best; to pity them. I've been a knucklehead more often than I care to admit.

In other words, maybe I wasn't brave when I confronted our intruder, despite my wife's story, so much as experienced. Experience has taught me that the scruffy man in the shadows is not necessarily the villain my frightened imagination can so easily create. He might be dangerous. I can't know. But he is also a human being. And, quite possibly, a knucklehead.

I've not yet succeeded in storing the bat story in the way I'd hoped, at least not entirely. While I love hearing Jennifer's version and I like knowing that I am still capable of protecting myself if necessary, I'm far more proud of the times that I disarmed myself and faced the person in front of me as another human being — fallible and, quite possibly, a knucklehead.

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What We Lose When We Can't Get Lost

2026-09-30T07:00:27.486-07:00

There are a couple of inventions that have made my lived experience less pleasant, and I'm not talking about smartphones or AI.

The first is the telephone answering machine. Prior to the answering machine, if you wanted to talk to me, you had to keep calling until I answered. The moment I got my first answering machine, people started asking, "Why didn't you return my call?" Suddenly, the onus of making contact could be placed on me by anyone at anytime, even by people I had no desire to speak with. The answering machine is long gone, but its legacy -- email, text messages, direct messages -- just put the whole thing on steroids. Now, I even receive email from advertisers that scold, "I've written to you several times about this"

I don't want to be rude, but the modern world has become one big answering machine of flashing lights telling me that someone, everyone, is attempting to place the obligation of communication on me. Well, I left you a message . . .

The second invention is GPS. I know, it's an amazing thing to not get lost in the world. As long as we have service, it's almost impossible to get lost, even in strange or foreign places.

People my age know what it's like to be lost, to have to rely on your wits and the kindness of strangers to get back on track. Some of my favorite travel memories involve times when I didn't know where I was. I was once lost in Paris, having gone out on a ramble, only to find that I'd taken too many turns to recall the way back to my hotel. I stopped at a street cafe to collect myself over a cup of coffee. I looked up to find a most magnificent cathedral across the way. It turned out it was Notre Dame. I felt almost as if I'd discovered this famed tourist attraction because I'd not sought it, I'd not planned for it, but rather came across it in my travels.

Another time, while lost, I found myself in light industrial area. I stepped into an open garage door to find it was an artist's studio. Specifically, he was blowing glass, a process I'd never seen so close-up. He sent me on my way with a bespoke piece of glass that he blew for me on the spot.

In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes, "Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind."

And implied in the act of exploration, at least for me, is this idea of not really knowing where you are or where you are going. Exploring the world or the mind suggests that we are fully alert, using all of our senses, taking in the strangeness and foreignness as an outsider, an innocent, curious, wondering.

Solnit refers to "the mind at three miles per hour," a pace of body and thought that allows for exploration rather than mere sightseeing.

I share Solnit's fondness for long walks. When I travel as Teacher Tom, I'm generally hired for a specific purpose, but there are always hours during which I'm free to roam. I rarely consult the "What's Happening" or "Must See" listings, and instead simply wander. In this way, I got to watch dog sled races through the streets of Fairbanks, Alaska. I once found myself in Sydney's magnificent botanical gardens. I've re-discovered one of my childhood homes in the suburbs of Athens, Greece.

I've also found myself walking along motorways without sidewalks, trapped in a maze of dead ends, and chased by aggressive (seeming) off-leash dogs. That's the other side of exploring, of course. It's not all Notre Dame.

Just as the answering machine became its own kind of slippery slope, the advent of GPS has virtually eliminated the necessity of surrendering to being lost, and reduced the opportunity to experience the unexpected. We get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. We plan our itineraries, take our photos, then get back on track. I recently spoke with a 17-year-old who told me of his panic over finding himself in a rural part of Oregon where there was "no connectivity." That was my entire life until relatively recently, but today connectivity is part of our baseline reality. Being lost today isn't a normal aspect of freedom, but rather an emergency.

And I miss it.

I still go out on those long walks. And yes, I do carry my phone. I turn it off because I crave being "out of touch" for a few hours, but it's impossible to forget that should I "get lost" I can be immediately found, complete with step by step directions to food, water, and transportation. No need to stick my head into an artist's studio. No way to find myself amidst huskies pulling sleds. No exploration of either the world or my mind.

The mind at three miles per hour, however, seems like the perfect thing. It seems like how we are meant to think, while moving, outdoors, communing with unfamiliarity, exploring, learning about the world and ourselves.

Today's children may well go their entire lives without the experience of being lost. They may never know what it means to temporarily disappear from the known world. And that, I think, is a loss.

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Childhood is the Time for Falling in Love

2026-09-29T07:04:07.296-07:00

I'm currently planning an exciting DIY project.

The wicker armrests and backs of our patio furniture are coming apart. It's nice, well-made furniture, and the sides are still looking nice, so I've had the idea to add teak planks to cover the broken wicker. In my mind, it looks good. In my mind, I can envision exactly how I'm going to do it. I even think I already have all the tools I'm going to need, other than perhaps a little sandpaper. I calculate that it will cost around $200 to do the job, which is a lot less expensive than new furniture.

I actually think it will make the furniture look even better than it did when it was new; more solid, more substantial, and I like the way teak tends to weather into a soft grey. My friends have different opinions. My wife Jennifer, despite knowing that I have a history of successful home improvement projects (one of the main reasons, I joke, that we've remained married for 40 years), is doubtful so I've just ordered the minimal amount of material to finish one chair as a proof of concept.

I don't fault anyone for doubting me. After all, I'm an amateur.

An amateur, by definition, is someone who does something for pleasure or as a hobby instead of for money, but the word also often connotes someone who simply isn't very good at something. We often dismiss things as "amateurish." But then there are, say, amateur athletes or amateur artists who we admire, in part, because they are amateurs. They are doing something for the love of doing it. Indeed the word amateur comes from the Latin amator, "lover," from amare, "to love."

In his iconic book The Medium is the Massage, philosopher Marshall McLuhan writes: "Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the ground rules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment . . . the “expert” is the man who stays put."

Part of becoming a professional is that we must learn to function successfully within an existing "professional" environment. The professional must master its assumptions, conventions, categories, standards, vocabulary, and measures of success. When McLuhan uses the word "environmental" he's talking about the "ground rules" that become so habitual that they cease to even be noticed.

A professional is a person who has become adapted. They have learned what it means to be, say, a "good" lawyer, a "good" teacher, or a "good" carpenter. The professional knows what is "legitimate," "acceptable," and, perhaps most importantly, what success is meant to look like.

In contrast, the amateur hasn't internalized those rules. Indeed, the amateur may not even know they exist and therefore has the freedom to ask questions the professional would not even think to ask, such as "Why must it be done in this way?"

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics," wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer, "because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." That loss is one of the risks of becoming a professional.

I'm not saying that professionalism is necessarily a bad thing, but rather to suggest that perhaps it's best not to rush ourselves towards professionalism, especially since it can tend to turn something one loves into a mere "job."

I'm an amateur bread baker -- sour dough baguettes are my speciality. When I deliver fresh bread to my neighbors, they often say something like, "You should sell these at the farmer's market" or "You should start a bakery!" It's a nice compliment, but I know that the moment I start doing it for anything other than pleasure, it will become, well, less pleasurable and that's something I don't want to lose.

The professional has something at stake: reputation, status, livelihood, credentials, measurable outcomes. The professional therefore has reasons to stay inside the established rules.

The amateur—at least McLuhan's ideal amateur—can screw around.

They can try something that probably won't work. They can abandon it halfway through. They can pursue something merely because it's interesting. They can combine things that aren't “supposed” to go together. They can ask questions whose answers have no practical value. They can fail without having failed at being an amateur.

In other words, amateurs can play.

A four-year-old building a block tower isn't a junior architect. She's an amateur builder in the deepest sense. She doesn't need the tower to stand. She doesn't need to optimize materials. She doesn't have a client or deadline. She doesn't need to demonstrate mastery against a rubric. She can build it badly, knock it over, turn the blocks into sandwiches, discover something about balance, forget about balance entirely, and wander off to dig a hole.

And importantly, the freedom to lose, or to fail, is what makes discovery possible.

Play-based education protects amateurism. Standard schooling prematurely professionalizes childhood.

Consider how much of conventional schooling resembles professionalization: specialized subjects, schedules, externally defined objectives, standards, performance measurement, comparison with peers, deadlines, evaluation by experts, and increasingly narrow definitions of competence.

We say, in effect: Here are the ground rules. Learn to succeed within them.

Whereas play, amateurism, permits children to discover the ground rules themselves and, crucially, to discover that the ground rules can be changed. And that's why children playing in the street may have an advantage over a professional.

This rush to professionalize childhood is a misguided effort to dismiss a necessary and beautiful mode of learning: amateurism. We want children to get good at things, to master the ground rules, to produce measurable outcomes, often before they've had enough time to screw around with the world.

The amateur, remember, is the lover. Children at play are amateurs in this oldest and best sense of the word. They pursue things because they are interesting. They do things badly. They fail without being failures. They change the rules. They abandon one thing for another. They follow questions that lead nowhere, then suddenly somewhere.

There will be plenty of time for professionalism. Childhood is the time for falling in love.

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Extending Themselves Into the World

2026-09-28T06:56:12.495-07:00

Karntakuringu Jakurrpa

I've been driving cars for 45 years. It's been decades since I spent time and energy thinking about driving. I just do it. When I was first behind the wheel, when I was learning about driving, I had to think about every aspect of what I was doing, but today it is second nature.

As Tyson Yunkaporta explains it in his book Sand Talk: "At the simplest level, when we hold a tool, our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn't really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes."

This ability to make and use tools, like hammers or cars, is one of the things that makes Homo sapiens the species we are. Of course, other species, like apes, otters, and crows, use tools, but none to the extent that we do.

I recently observed a toddler stop to consider a stick on the ground. On wobbly legs, she stood over that stick for a moment, before carefully, awkwardly, bending at the waist and knees to get closer to it. Again, she paused to catch her balance before reaching out her hand, fingers splayed. It took her a couple attempts to grasp hold of it. She fell on her bottom in the effort to stand upright again, but then, without dropping the stick, she pushed herself back onto her feet. She then began testing the world with that stick, tapping it on the ground, poking tree trunks, sticking it into holes. It had become "an embodied extension of (her) neural processes."

We've all observed young humans doing these kinds of things. This urge to extend our bodies and minds out into our environment is, in many ways, what learning is all about. Reggio Emilia educators consider "the environment" to be a teacher, equal in significance to human teachers. Indigenous wisdom, no matter where we find it in the world, has more often than not acknowledged the interconnectedness between us humans and the rest of creation.

"At more complex levels," Yunkaporta writes, "the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making, we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places, and relationships with others." (Italics are mine)

A while back, I went golfing for the first time in 30 years. I was concerned I would make a fool of myself, and I did, but not nearly to the degree I'd feared. Indeed, the moment I picked up a club, I was reconnected to the golf clubs of my youth. I thought of my father's persimmon wood drivers, then my father, then of taking those clubs to our local municipal course and the pride of having the pro there enthuse over their rarity and beauty. I thought I'd forgotten everything about golf, but the moment I took my first swing, my body and mind embodied much of the knowledge I had stored away in those clubs from long ago. As I went around the course, I was in the past as much as the present, as the course itself -- the grass, the sand traps, the greens, the balls, the tees -- taught and re-taught knowledge, even wisdom, that I'd left stored there long ago.

Many of us will gather with our extended families over the upcoming holidays where we will reconnect with knowledge that we keep stored in our relationships with others. Perhaps we will spend time in our childhood homes or engaging in rituals and traditions that reconnect us to things we thought we'd forgotten. If the lessons we learned were of kindness and love, those will surround us. If they were harsh or sad, we will resist or avoid the people, places, or things that store our pain, which is probably why so many of us find the holidays challenging.

Young children are just beginning this process of extending themselves into the world, of connecting their neural processes with their environment. They are just beginning to store their knowledge and wisdom outside of their brains. They will learn things in school, although most of it will remain in school, stored there in the classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Their important connections will be made with the people, places, and things from life itself.

"If you use a familiar object to help you encode new knowledge that you are learning," write Yunkaporta, "then when you pick up that object or even just visualize it, you instantly remember what you learned. It has become a tangible metaphor, an overlap between the two worlds." This goes for people and places as well as things. Writes Yunkaporta, "This is how spirit works."

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Our North Star

2026-09-25T07:01:53.578-07:00

The profit motive is good, I suppose, for some things, like televisions. If the demand for TVs goes up, then the big manufacturers can make more by doing business things like expanding capacity or becoming more productive through creating efficiencies. If demand falls, they can protect their profits by cutting back or lowering prices. The bottom line is that at the end of the day no one really needs a TV and there is still enough competition in the consumer electronics market that the promise of capitalism's supply-and-demand dynamics actually serves consumers who are always, at least theoretically, looking for the "best quality" at the "lowest price."

Some of you may have heard about the collapse of the Guidepost Montessori chain of preschools. The founder had raised $335 million from venture capitalists and private equity firms with the promise of doing "what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved." At its peak, Guidepost had opened 150 preschools serving tens of thousands of families, only to have the whole thing come tumbling down after accumulating $440 million in losses. But only after degrading their "product" (i.e., caring for young children) to the point that they were, from the sound of it, essentially warehousing kids under the care of unqualified teachers working for, you guessed it, low wages. It's been called a "Ponzi scheme" by some former employees.

Some things, and early childhood education is one of them, cannot practically or ethically, be provided as the kind of fast-growth, high-profit "product" that most investors are looking for. I know something about this because I've watched, from the inside, as smart, well-funded people tried to thread that needle.

Several years ago, I got involved with an effort to do something similar to what Guidepost Montessori was trying to do. We even compared ourselves to Uber. I was recruited, the CEO told me, to protect the company's "North Star," which was to provide affordable, high-quality preschool in every neighborhood in the US, and, we dared to dream, ultimately the world. We had seed money from a well-regarded venture capital firm and I was well-compensated, but it didn't take long for me to realize that they really didn't want my input. I was there to provide credibility. The company had other problems, but it quickly became clear to me that the kind of business approach favored by Silicon Valley would never work for our sector. The Guidepost collapse just further confirms my decision to run like the wind.

On the surface our model sounded ingenious. Instead of building expensive centers, we would unlock the underused capacity of educators' homes, the way Uber does with their drivers' own cars, to create a network of in-home care. Instead of employing all teachers at a central location, we would create a platform to connect families directly with educators in their neighborhoods. We would create efficiency by centralizing marketing and admin, while letting individual educators provide the actual service.

But there's a fundamental difference: Uber can scale without producing more drivers. It recruits people who already possess cars and driving skills, and each additional driver expands capacity. A preschool platform, however, has to somehow produce and sustain high-quality educators, and that quality resides overwhelmingly in those human beings and their relationships with children. That's a much bigger challenge than simply providing a relatively clean vehicle with a full gas tank.

I would say it's an impossible challenge.

I'm not saying that business is bad for childcare. Indeed, our profession is full of scrappy, creative entrepreneurs, people who are providing outstanding education and care that is both affordable and at least modestly profitable. These people aren't likely to get rich. They might open a second, third, or even fourth location, but at some point they stop themselves because they know that anything more would mean losing sight of their North Star: the high-quality that made them successful in the first place.

No, the conflict isn't between business and education, but rather between the economics of high-quality care and an investment model that requires rapid, scalable growth and attractive financial returns. You can't have both.

From the perspective of economics, our profession is a mess, which is why so many business people are trying to fix it. Families are stretching themselves thin to afford child care and preschool. Early childhood education is among the lowest paid professions with many of us leaving because of it. Yet, as we discovered during the pandemic, the service we provide is an essential aspect of the overall economy. In the world that capitalism envisions, this should mean that we all get a substantial pay raise, but that ain't in the offing. The economics of what we do is broken.

At the same time, I've long said that I would love to see us make more money, but not so much more that we start attracting people only for the money. Money is important, but it's an inadequate organizing principle when it comes to caring for children.

Money is what motivates a television manufacturer to respond to growing demand through productivity improvements: automation, cheaper components, improved manufacturing, larger factories, global supply chains. Each worker can, as a result, effectively produce vastly more TVs to satisfy demand.

An early childhood educator can't become vastly more "productive" in that sense without degrading the "product" itself. If one excellent teacher caring for eight children becomes one excellent teacher caring for 16, we haven't discovered an efficiency -- we've simply changed (degraded) what we're "selling."

This is an aspect of what economists call Baumol's Cost Disease. Labor-intensive activities like education, childcare, and live performance can't achieve the same productivity gains as manufacturing, but their workers still exist in an economy where wages and costs are influenced by sectors that can. That's one reason these services become increasingly expensive relative to manufactured goods.

Capitalism knows what to do when we want more televisions. Why doesn't it know what to do when we want more preschool teachers? Maybe it's because the "productivity" of an early childhood educator isn't measured in the number of children she can process. The relationship is the product. And that's why so many of us know that we are rich even when our paychecks are modest.

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Without Emotion Reasonable Decisions are Impossible

2026-09-24T05:50:16.250-07:00

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The stereotypical argument used to exclude women from business, science, politics, the military, or indeed just about any category of public life is that they are "too emotional." Emotions, the theory goes, renders them incapable of making rational decisions. Most of us, of course, instinctively recognize this as a baseless patriarchal assertion, one that is disproven every day as we find women succeeding in every area of society.

Chihuly glass

As a preschool teacher, I've learned that emotions have no gender. Every child cries. Every child has tantrums. Every child experiences fear, frustration, envy, joy, disappointment, and melancholy, and gender has nothing to do with how and how often. As children grow older, however, society tends to be somewhat more accepting of girls' expressions of a fuller range of emotions, but there is still a lot of pressure to hide "bad" feelings, especially anger, behind a smile.

Boys, in turn, quickly learn to hide their "negative" feelings behind stoicism and anger, the only public emotion "allowed" to them. A boy who cries or is afraid is often mocked. A boy who smiles too much is often considered flighty or unserious.

We are all emotional, but that begs the question: is it possible to be too emotional? I suppose the answer is yes, to the degree that our emotions become incapacitating or destructive. We all have those moments when we flip our lids, curl up in a ball of anxiety, or trudge through days as if under a dark cloud. When it becomes chronic we call it mental illness. So yes, I suppose it is possible to be too emotional, but it is equally possible, and perhaps even common, to not be emotional enough. It's only through our emotions, not our intellects, that we fully connect with one another, understand, empathize, and communicate. Without emotion, we are but automatons, doomed to stand outside of humanity either as outcast or villain. We all have our times when we become emotionally exhausted, when we detach for a time. When our emotional detachment becomes chronic we call it sociopathy.

It's tempting to conclude that it's all about finding a balance, but there's no fulcrum here upon which to rest an easy center. Our emotions are too important for that. They are to be felt fully and honestly, not balanced out with cool rationalism. Indeed, rationality cannot exist without emotion.

For much of the 20th century scientists were convinced that emotions played no role, and were perhaps even an impediment to rational thought, which provided much of the "scientific" underpinning for denying women (and children for that matter) rights and opportunities. But more recent research has found that emotions play a critical role in our ability to make decisions.

Rather than clouding our judgement, the neural systems that underlie emotions are essential to high-level cognition, which is to say decision-making.

One of the pioneers in this research is prominent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Much of his work has been done on patients whose brains have been injured and who, as a result, are missing the connection between their sensory input and emotions. The rapid beating of their heart at the prospect of crossing a narrow bridge, for instance, doesn't provoke fear. Based on traditional views, one would conclude that this fearless person would be more clear-headed and, therefore, be more inclined to making rational decisions. But Damasio has found the opposite to be true: his emotionless patients proved incapable of making reasonable decisions. This is a conclusion that has now been replicated numerous times by other scientists.

We need our emotions in order to make sound judgements and our greater doubt should be saved for those who do not credit their emotions because they are more likely, according to science, to be the irrational ones. But like much of what scientists are "learning" about humans, this is actually ancient knowledge, long understood by artists and mystics alike. As Lao Tzu wrote in the 6th century BC, "Let your feelings flourish and get on with you life of doing." That is, and always will be, the path of wisdom.

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It's hard sometimes to stay-the-course these days, but every child thrives in a self-directed environment because every child deserves the right to pursue their own special genius in the company of others who likewise are pursuing their special genius. It's not just a foundation for life, but a way of life. If you want to provide this kind of playful childhood for the children in your life, then join us for a 2-week pop-up version of Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning starting September 24. It's designed for early childhood educators, childcare providers, parents, and grandparents who know that there is so much more than mere academics. This is a great way to make sure the whole team is on the same page to begin to coming school year. To learn more and to register, click here. But hurry, we start today!

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The Story of Your Life

2026-09-23T06:47:50.163-07:00

In his novella The Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang imagines a woman who learns to comprehend the language of an alien species that perceives the universe through a teleological lens, meaning that instead of seeing cause-and-effect as we do, they live their entire lives always knowing the past, present, and future. Physicists like Stephen Hawking have pointed out that the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish past from future in the way our experience does. The fact that we perceive time's passage, that there is a past and future, these scientists tell us, may largely be a function of our perspective.

Of course, knowing something is true does not mean it's necessarily useful. We would be fools to attempt to live as if time does not pass.

But it's something to wonder about.

The book's protagonist learns the alien language, and as she does, her own mind is rewired to see things as the aliens do. She comes to know the fullness of her life: that she will marry, have a daughter, suffer through a painful divorce, and lose her child to an early death. Yet, despite all this inevitable heartbreak, she chooses to embrace the journey of her life.

And isn't that what we all do anyway? As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote:

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.

We know the rain and dark are coming even if we don't know the specific nature of them. We always try, and always fail, to shelter our children from this knowledge -- or at least try to soften it. We also know, in our good moments, that the sun is still shining.

As a mental experiment, it's fascinating to consider how one would live without either the fear of or hope for what is to come. Since the future is fully known in all its details, there is no place for either anxiety or its flip-side, anticipation. Would we still lie awake at night? Would our hearts still flutter? Would we better appreciate the emerging moment in which we find ourselves?

Or, perhaps, what we learn is that we aren't so different from those aliens and their alien language.

In his notes for the novella, Chiang writes, "Stephen Hawking . . . found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now." He then quotes Kurt Vonnegut, "Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are."

When I think of that first moment alone with our newborn daughter, just the two of us face-to-face as the midwives tended to my wife, the story of our life together unfolded before me. There was joy, pain, learning.

I saw it all and embraced it.

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Use It Or Lose It

2026-09-22T06:52:45.909-07:00

I've come to realize that many people I know can barely tell one plant from another. Yes, they may know a tree from a weed, or maybe a shrub from a cactus.

According to science journalist Zöe Schlanger, "'plant blindness' is the tendency to view plant life as an indistinguishable mass, a green smudge, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals, as distinct from one another as a lion is from a trout."

To one degree or another, most of us suffer from plant blindness, at least compared to our ancestors. For much of human history, knowing the subtle differences between plants was much more a matter of life and death than it is today. When we lived closer to nature, it was important to know, say, which red berries were delicious and which might kill you; which leaves could alleviate your headache and which could cause seizures; which you could wear and which could cause a rash.

But today, we tend to come across "plants" as products in the form of berry baskets, medicines, and clothing. The necessity to know the properties of this plant or that plant isn't as vital as it once was, so our ability to do so has atrophied. In our fantasies, we often imagine that if a caveman was transported through time to our modern world, they would be in awe. And I'm sure they would be, although much of that awe would be over how stupid and oblivious we've become.

As the saying goes, "use it or lose it." We've outsourced plant knowledge to farmers, chemists, and the entire supply chain that manufactures and brings things to market, specialists who supposedly free us up to specialize in our own right.

Today's children spend significantly less time outdoors than previous generations, part of a decades-long shift of childhood from outdoor environments to indoor ones. Indeed, Americans of all ages now spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. So, of course, this ability is atrophying.

The modern world is built on specialization, on individuals picking what they will use and what they will lose. Unfortunately, that also means we lose our connection to things that may well be important to us. I mean, the smartphone or AI may represent grand, perhaps misguided, definitely uncontrolled "experiments" that may wind up killing us all, but this experiment in disconnecting from nature is, from where I sit, a far more dangerous experiment.

This is part of the reason I feel so strongly that every preschool playground should include plants. A garden is a good place to start, but also trees, grasses, vines, shrubbery, and whatever else will grow in and around the place. Even better, of course, is an adjacent forest or pond or beach or bush or vacant lot where the weeds run wild. Sadly, most playgrounds are soft fall zones and out-of-the-box equipment, with, perhaps a patch of well-mown grass. We think that represents "safety" when, in fact, it represents the adult's ignorance of nature, the full needs of children, and the only real safety that has ever existed: the experience to keep oneself safe. Use it or lose it.

We'll never be as plant savvy as our hunter-forager ancestors, nor do we need to be, but what else do we miss in our near complete inability to recognize these living things that were here for millennia before us and will likely be here for millennia after we Homo sapiens have either died off or evolved into whatever is next?

What else are we blind to? The evidence is that we, as individuals, are blind to most of reality, even if we, as a species, have specialists who know a lot about a lot.

I often see our youngest children as the last of the generalists, which is why I want them to play. If nothing else, when we let them choose what to explore, what to think about, what to experiment with, we allow them to discover connections with the world to which the rest of us have become ignorant through disuse. We often talk about the early years as a time for building foundations, but maybe a better metaphor is to think of it as discovering how to connect with the world in all its wonder.

In our species' "progress," we've lost at least as much as we've gained as we've leaned into our capacity for specialization. But of all the things we've lost, I wonder if the one indispensable thing is the capacity to connect directly to the rest of the world, freely, without the perpetual guiding hand of for-their-own-good specialists. And that capacity is built through play.

Use it or lose it.

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How Much Evidence Do They Need?

2026-09-21T06:55:00.499-07:00

Swedish cognitive neuroscientist and researcher John Axelsson says that our brain seeks to become expert in the environment in which it finds itself.

The brain is, in effect, a "simulation machine," according to Axelsson, designed to learn about the world, then automate the relevant survival behaviors.

The example he gives is learning to drive. At first we must be conscious of every aspect of operating our vehicle (i.e., learning), but with practice the relevant behaviors become more and more automatic until we can free our brains up to do more "important" things, like simulating what we are going to say to our boss about being late yet again.

The brain learns and automates: learning takes a lot of energy, automation less. This means that we are in a continual process of converting behaviors that take more energy into behaviors that take less energy. This can also be called the process of becoming expert which is, to close the circle, what our brains are designed to do.

We see this process in action, quite clearly, when we observe children at play. Each is drawn toward becoming expert in their environment, starting with what is most "important," which is to say that thing about which they have the most curiosity. I recently watched an 18 month old with a stick. His learning took the form of poking various things in his environment with it, trying the dirt, then the pavement, then a manhole cover, then a wall, then a tree trunk. I can certainly speculate about what he was learning, although I can never know for sure. What I do know is that he was seeking to become expert in the environment in which he found himself because that's what humans do. Not far away, another child, in more or less the same environment, was sitting with her family at a lunch table repeatedly scraping a fork across a plate, then putting it into her mouth. She was also in the process of becoming expert in her environment.

Standard schools are based upon hubris and habit, rather than the science of how learning happens. When committees of adults pre-determine what is important in a child's environment, when they likewise predetermine how and on what schedule they are going to learn it, we cheat the children. Instead of creating environments of autonomy, we create ones of reliance upon others (i.e., adults). What children learn in these environments is that they must strive to ignore their curiosity and become expert instead at compliance, placing their learning in the hands of "teachers" who will then attempt to measure it. This is an artificially stressful environment and, as Axelsson told us, stress is one of the conditions under which learning slows down, or even ceases altogether in extreme cases.

In contrast, we learn best in relatively stress free environments. Axelsson points out that children escaping extremely stressful environments like war zones will stop playing until they find themselves in environments that are relatively stress free, like refugee camps. Indeed, they need to play in order to start becoming expert in the new environment in which they find themselves. Our schools are not, of course, war zones, but by seeking to control the bodies and minds of children, we are asking them to replace their curiosity with obedience. And that is unnecessarily stressful.

Some children learn those lessons in compliance quite well. We call them good students. Many more learn to hide or squelch their curiosity, doing their real learning by pursuing passions outside of school. Those we call "indifferent students" even if some of them learn to pass all the tests. Still others are driven to rebel, which is how their brains seek to become expert in an environment that tries to control them, a perfectly valid, even commendable response. These children know that, for them, escape is the only relevant behavior.

If we were to rely on science instead of habit and hubris, our school environments would look much different than they do right now. Instead of being places of top down curricula and compliance, they would be environments full of stuff and ideas. They would be environments in which children were free to pursue their curiosity, to become expert in the aspects of the environment that they deem most important, to do it in the manner they choose, and according to the timetable they set for themselves. Schools would be environments in which the adults themselves are part of the stuff and ideas, there not to instruct or control, but rather to answer questions, provide materials, and support each individual child to the degree and in the way the child determines.

Those who support standard schools are never asked to defend their methods, whereas those of us who advocate for play-based or self-directed learning are forever being challenged to defend our approach. Again and again, the science, the evidence, tells us that if a generation of critical, creative thinkers is our goal, an environment of play is how our brains work best. Yet again and again we are called on to provide more evidence. How much evidence do they need?

It seems the only conclusion is that those who support standard school methods have different ideas of education than I do. And, of course, if compliance is the goal, carry on. You'll just be doing it without me.

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We Are the Gossiping Animal

2026-09-18T06:03:37.091-07:00

What other people say about me is none of my business.

It's a rationale that pops up for me when I feel judged by others, when I suspect or know that someone is talking about me behind my back, or, and this is probably the most frequent circumstance, when I feel insecure about the opinions of others.

The truth is that for those of us who are not Taylor Swift, our fellow humans probably spend insultingly little time thinking about us, let alone judging or gossiping about us. Still, try as we might, it's almost impossible to not, at least at times, fret or wonder about the things being said about us when we're not present. And I suspect that's because, we ourselves, judge others, and at least sometimes, we express those judgments to others.

Judging and gossiping are part of being human. In his book Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari relies on anthropological research to assert that not only is gossiping part of human nature, but that it is one of the key traits that allowed Homo sapiens to evolve from a middle-of-the-food-chain mammal to an apex predator. Gossip, it seems, is at least in part how we create social bonds, friendships, and community.

"Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction," writes Harari. "It's not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat."

Given the centrality of gossip to our evolution, it might be surprising to consider that most of us, most of the time, are vehement in our disapproval of gossip. Indeed, one of the worst reputations one can have is of being an inveterate gossip. So most of us strive to keep our harshest judgements to ourselves or only express them in the strictest confidence to our best friends, managing our own behavior lest we become, in turn, the subject of judgmental gossip.

My mother used to scold us, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," a worthy aspiration, but hardly possible when gossip is such a central part of what our species is all about.

In a study out of Japan, researchers found that even children as young as four will adjust their behaviors when presented with the possibility that an observer, even someone they don't know, might gossip about them. Children in the study shared their treats with peers, not just when others were watching, but even when they thought their behavior would be conveyed to a stranger who was not even in the room. However, when the children were assured that there would be no gossiping, they were less likely to share their treats. "These findings," the researchers write, "suggest that 4- and 8-year-old children attempt to manage their reputation when they could be a target of gossip."

Of course, what we mostly despise is malicious gossip. We tend to not object to gossip about, say, the anonymous charitable giving of a neighbor or the romantic birthday gifts exchanged between spouses. Indeed, we might not even label those things as gossip because we tend to narrow our definition of gossip to the spreading of negative or harmful stories, true or not, about others. The habitual spreading this kind of gossip, if left unchecked, has historically lead individuals to be ostracized or worse.

Gossip stands as one of the most powerful mechanisms by which human communities manage themselves. We may bridle at the idea of being controlled in this way. Likewise, most of us are likely uncomfortable with the notion that we control others, not necessarily because we gossip, but because of the possibility that we will gossip. Even very young children seem to understand this: it is part of what makes us human.

I wonder, however, if this social function of gossip is starting to wane in this era of pervasive social media (which in many ways is just a gossip column on steroids) and political leaders who seem to be immune to the feelings of shame that gossip relies upon. In fact, it seems that malicious gossip is too often rewarded. It seems that there are some who have found that gossip benefits them no matter how heinous their behavior; who thrive, indeed, on infamy. I don't know if this is a modern thing or not. I suppose there have always been those who rise to positions of power and prestige due to their reputations for cruelty and debauchery. At the same time, I wonder how much evil we've managed to avert because of the power of gossip.

When our daughter was born, I was instantly aware that I cared deeply about how she would see me. I wanted her to know me as loving, reliable, competent, and kind, even though I often hadn't behaved in those ways. This is what I mean when I say that our children make us better people. At least in my case, I managed my reputation to the point that I am, today, a much more loving, reliable, competent and kind person than I was on the day our daughter was born. I did it for her, but also for myself.

The American culture is one in which individualism is set on a pedestal. We respect the people who don't seem to give a damn what other people think . . . At least until they do or say things that make us wish they would be ore considerate of others. We admire those who blaze their own trails . . . At least until their blaze begins to scorch the earth for others.

We want our children to grow up to be compassionate, to care for others, and a big part of that is caring about what others think and say about us. By the same token, we don't want our children to be driven by shame or to sacrifice good and unique aspects of who they are in the name of fitting in or getting along.

This, I think, is the great dance of being human amongst humans. We are the gossiping animal. What others say about me may still be none of my business and that is often exactly the stance to take in the name of mental health, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

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A Stone Like All the Others

2026-09-17T06:03:40.564-07:00

I picked up a small stone and performed some sleight of hand for the children. I then handed the stone to a girl, saying, "I'm giving this to you." Our playground is bestrewn with stones and pebbles. Any one of them would have served my purposes, but I'd selected this one. Now this girl had it. The other children gathered around her, requesting a turn with this "special" stone.

"It's funny how the nature of an object . . . is so changed by the way it has come into your hands, as a gift or a commodity," writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. This stone was just a stone until I picked it up, then gave it to someone else. Now it's a treasure.

After trying to make it "disappear" several times, in imitation of me, she passed it along to a playmate, who squealed. The first girl had not squealed when I gave it to her. It had become even more valuable as children jockeyed to be next.

"The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes," writes Kimmerer.

The stone passed from hand-to-hand over the course of the next half hour or so. Some held it for a few seconds before passing it along. Others took time to cherish it. But they all paid it forward. There was no adult coaxing them or praising them. They knew exactly what to do.

"Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again."

Eventually, the last child took his turn with the stone. He had waited a long time. Only he could say if it was worth it, but he seemed as pleased as the others.

"From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the "gift" is deemed to be "free" because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships." And the obligation to give it away again.

I figured the game was now done, but I was wrong. After several minutes the boy began to look around until he spied me. It had started as a stone like all the others, but as it passed from person-to-person as a gift, it had become a talisman, a symbol, and a ceremony. He completed the circle by handing the stone to me. And I returned it to the Earth, who had given it to me.

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Life at the Cutting Edge of Reality

2026-09-16T07:09:35.685-07:00

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ~Albert Camus

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the king of Corinth, a clever trickster who offended the gods and was condemned to spend eternity rolling a large stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down before he reached the summit.

As a metaphor for life itself, it works, which is why the myth continues to resonate today. Camus' interpretation of the story as related in his 1942 philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, was a response to the absurdity of our human cravings for meaning in a universe that seems indifferent. He rejects religion and suicide as responses to the absurdity, ultimately concluding that one can live fully without expecting the universe to provide purpose. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," is a conclusion that leaves many of us cold, but as early childhood educators, we see it in action every day.

As adults, we've learned to strive for summits. To achieve our purpose, we push the stones in our lives, large and small, toward our goals, only to find that even when we achieve our wildest dreams, there are more hills and more stones. Young children have not yet learned the lesson of summits. They see only the rocks and slopes and the adventure of life.

"No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too," writes Annie Dillard in her book The Living. They go through their days unaware of the absurdity, because, when one embraces the present, not as something to improve upon, but rather as something with which to play, the absurdity vanishes. They know the stone will always roll back to the bottom, and it fills them with wonder when it does.

It's learning that reveals the absurdity. "(A)nd they wear out their brains learning what folks expect," writes Dillard, "and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks."

As early childhood educators, we get to live with them during that magnificent time of life. We call it naiveté or innocence or ignorance, but it's the paradise, the happiness to which we all hope to someday return. The absurdity is that we've been taught by expectations and competition to think that it's a shining city atop that mythical hill, that's where happiness lies, if only we can get this damn stone to stay up there.

But it always rolls back down.

I'm 64 years old. The children with whom I grew up are now retiring, the summit. But I can tell you it's a false summit. There are still plenty of stones to push. My peers are battling cancer, arthritis, insufficient funds, family traumas, and an ever-changing world from which they, in their retirement, feel increasingly alienated. Kids these days!

This isn't a promise, but I can't imagine joining them if only because the children have shown me that you simply can't retire from life. Yes, you can stop pushing that one particular stone, but there will always be other stones to push. It's not the stone that matters. It's how you approach the struggle.

Immediately before the famous ending, Camus describes Sisyphus as conscious of his fate and embracing it. "His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing." Early in the same concluding passage, he contrasts sorrow and joy, and insists that Sisyphus's conscious return to the rock can take place in joy. This isn't about tolerating or enduring or accepting one's fate, but rather the stronger and stranger claim that happiness is possible. It's how you approach the struggle.

"Each atom," Camus writes, "of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man."

We are meant to conclude that Sisyphus is damned by the gods precisely because his process produces no lasting product. The stone always rolls back down the hill. The gods assume that this makes the punishment unbearable, but the children in our lives find a workaround in the recognition that there are no "products," only "processes," and so too are we.

Children don't stop building block towers just because they know they will always fall down. Indeed, they understand that building is a process that must include the blocks falling down. Sometimes they build the tower for the purpose of knocking it down. They come to us to paint and pretend and bicker and climb and dance and cry and laugh, often all at once. And they come back tomorrow and do it again, not chasing products, but rather immersing themselves as a part of processes that flow and change and come to include everything there is, including themselves as both subjects and agents. And in that, they find joy.

So what if the stone rolls back down? C'mon everybody, let's roll it back up again!

This is life at the cutting edge of reality.

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Mysteries Make Us Curious

2026-09-15T05:51:40.534-07:00

Anthony White (detail)

Tim Berners-Lee wrote, “In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected."

Berners-Lee would know a thing or two about connections: he's the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1990. His invention embodies the idea that information becomes meaningful through connection, one page linked to another.

As an educator, however, I'm far more interested in how he applies his insight to human cognition. Neural connections clearly matter, but brains are more than wiring diagrams. Connections come and go. Synaptic strengths change over time, use, and circumstances. Neurons and neural populations have dynamic electrical and chemical activity. Neuromodulators (like dopamine) and hormones (like cortisol) are involved. Glial cells have a role. The rest of our bodies, our sensory systems, and the environment in which we find ourselves also play parts in our thinking, not just within, but also without ourselves.

And each of those things is itself subject to, and entwined with, other processes and systems. And even all of that leaves untouched what philosophers call "the hard problem" of consciousness: why any of this should result in the subjective experience of being us.

Berners-Lee is not alone in the effort to put a bow on the effort to explain what we are by locating the mechanism. It's not "just cells." Our typical approach to science education is forever trying to “solve” the mysteries, to shut the door on this or that question by turning it into an answer for a test. This leads us to the reductionist pursuit in which we attempt to break everything apart, to simplify it down to its component parts, as if understanding all the parts amounts to understanding the whole. The mystery persists because the moment we remove one thing to look at another, we change everything. The moment we take an "objective view," we find we've merely traded one narrow perspective for another. There is no "place" outside the process upon which to stand; we are always an active part in it.

Still, I keep coming back to his core assertion that the world can be seen as connections. It would be a mistake to try to solve the mystery by simply asserting, "Everything is connections." It's too tempting to conclude, Ah yes, consciousness is a process. Democracy is a process. Learning is a process. Life is a process. Next.

What's more interesting is the mystery, the wondering, the recognition that no matter how mind-blowing the insight, it's only one perspective in a universe of perspectives, none of which provides the whole picture.

It's the mystery that makes us curious, that drives us. It's the mystery that provides the inspiration to even bother opening our eyes each morning. If everything is a process, if everything is a connection, if everything is a relationship, what a strange and wonderful world! It's a world without things, without complete answers, without an end, only more beginnings.

I have often made the outrageous assertion that we are born knowing everything only to unlearn most of it as we grow into adulthood. And what if that's the strangest thing of all?

One of our most enduring stories involves losing a perfect Eden or paradise followed by our desire to return to it. We see in each new child that promise, that perfection of being exactly who we are exactly where and when we are. In that first moment, change is not part of our reality because there is no "once upon a time to compare it to." It's all change, including them. Our stories tell of being cast from the garden, being cast forth into an imperfect world. It's only from outside that we see we were once in paradise. From there, we see ourselves in a world of change, of process, of systems combining and colliding, and out of this comes the unsolvable but always compelling mystery.

Perhaps we weren't cast from Eden as much as we learned to imagine ourselves outside it.

Modern schooling too often focuses on declaring the mystery dead by drilling answers into children, answers that might be from some perspectives correct, but most definitely incomplete. Answers are closed doors. Mysteries make us curious.

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