Plastic Hammers

We still have our collection of toy tools, plastic hammers, saws, and drills, but they don't come out much any longer. There are a several reasons why they've been pushed to the back of the shelves, but the primary one is that kids try to kill each other with them, especially the hammers.

I don't usually hide away classroom items that "cause" problems, seeing the situations that arise around them as opportunities to coach kids through a process of risk assessment or conflict resolution or other kinds of problem solving. As politicians say, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," and that's sort of what I like to do as a teacher, over-riding my initial instinct, which is to simply say something like, "If you can't play nicely, then you don't get to play at all."

In the case of the toy hammers, however, I don't often put them into play because we have real hammers. And the funny thing about the real hammers is that in all the time we've been putting them into the hands of preschoolers, I've yet to see a child use one with anything other than respect, both for the tool and his fellow classmates. The same kid who will clonk another one with a plastic hammer, either accidentally, on purpose, or accidentally-on-purpose, will be a study in concentration and safety with a real hammer in his hand.

Even 2-year-olds step up to the responsibility of the real hammer. An adult still needs to be there at first, insisting on eye protection, reminding the child to find a safe area in which to get to work, one free of other people who might be hit or things that might get broken, and to focus her on the concept of targeting a nail (or a bottle cap: we've found that it's quite satisfying to drive them into soft wood). It's not a hard thing to do because a child with a hammer in his hand instantly becomes a calmer child, a more focused child.  A plastic hammer is a toy; a real hammer is a responsibility, children know it, and even the youngest, even the most hyperactive, are capable of taking it on.

This is true of all kinds of responsibility. Children know when they've only been allowed to handle the plastic hammer of pretend responsibility when, say, we give him the false choice of "walking on your own feet or being carried." I know experts advocate this technique, many of whom I respect very much, wanting to permit children a sense of agency over their own immediate fate, but it's never worked for me, and I think that's because everyone involved, including the child, knows that I've not given the child any real choice at all. We all know that the bottom line is that we have to leave a place he doesn't want to leave, even if we give him the choice of leaving in "3 minutes or 5 minutes." 

Responsibility is one of those things that is either real or it doesn't exist. There is no halfway. No amount of lecturing on responsibility will replace the real thing.  There is no way to "practice" responsibility without actually having it in your possession. If we want children to learn to be responsible, we must in fact turn over to them something that is real, and indeed, give them room to make mistakes, and that means the potential for making "wrong" choices. If there isn't that potential, then it's not responsibility at all: it's a plastic hammer. And the kids know it.

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