Junkyard Chic

If you've been reading here a long time, you'll already know this story. Back in 2010, The Woodland Park Cooperative Preschools were located atop Phinney Ridge, near our namesake zoo. Our outdoor space was little more than a small slab of asphalt. We annexed an area we called "the garden" by fencing in a patch of mud and installing a few raised beds, but nothing grew there because it was the only place we had for kids to dig. Several families told me that they'd almost not enrolled in our school because of our meager outdoor facilities; I'm sure many more families actually did walk away without saying a word. During the previous summer, however, inspired by my friend Jenny of Let the Children Play fame, I began to use the internet to explore more naturalistic play spaces, collecting ideas that I then brought to our parent community in the autumn of 2009, which lead to us building our first outdoor classroom, a transformation you can read about here.

In the pictures you see a nice, tidy, newly created space. And in the beginning, as I was learning on the job how to be an outdoor educator, I tried to keep it that way, but that's not how a good educational environment works: it must evolve along with the children and their play. And as I began to let go, that small space did evolve, becoming looser, more adaptable, and yes, to a certain kind of adult eye, junkier. In fact, one parent, as she explained why she would not be returning with her daughter for the following year told me that part of the reason was that she couldn't stand the "junkyard chic." Although she intended it as a pejorative, I've since used that expression in my own internal dialogs about our outdoor spaces.

In 2011, we moved to our current location at The Center of the Universe, where our community, having done it once on a smaller scale, created our current outdoor classroom, which like its predecessor has evolved a personality of its own, looking similar too, but quite different from the nice, tidy, newly created space it was 26 months ago. Periodically, I feel a ghost of my old control freakishness and hear in myself echoes of that dismissive parent as I look around and think in frustration, "damn this junkyard chic," fighting a strong urge to set everything to rights. But on most days I know I'm looking at a place where the children get to make it their own, a place in which we don't use things, but finish using them, a place where children invent, explore, discover, and play as children naturally do, without regard for chic, junkyard or otherwise.

This brings me to the subject of "adventure playgrounds," one of the concepts that has inspired me since the beginning of my own personal journey. I was recently reminded about them by Vermont-based radio producer and documentary filmmaker Erin Davis, who contacted me about her work. She has completed a radio piece and is currently working on a film documentary entitled Of Kith and Kids, focused on an adventure playground in North Wales called "The Land." I wanted to share some of her teasers with you:

An Adventure Play Documentary from Erin Davis on Vimeo.

"We haven't finished yet!" from Erin Davis on Vimeo.

I Am Good At Doing Stuff from Erin Davis on Vimeo.

I'm really looking forward to this film! Click on over to the Of Kith and Kin page to read more about Erin, her projects, The Land, and how you can support her work. And as an added incentive, Erin has included a terrific video from the 1970's about an early adventure playground in Chelsea, featuring one of the most articulate spokespeople for the idea I've ever heard.

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Smooth And Magical

I enjoy teaching our summer sessions, but it's not like teaching regular school. It's challenging, I suppose, in that most of the kids who show up are children I didn't previously know, or who I only see during the summer, but at the risk of sounding cocky, that's one of my strengths: getting kids on my bandwagon (or maybe it's the other way around). What makes it most unlike the regular school year is that the enrollment turns over every couple of weeks, leaving us with an entirely different mix of kids. It's like the first weeks of school, over and over again.

Parents use the word "magical" a lot when talking about our summer sessions, enthusing about how "smoothly" things are going, how well everyone seems to get along, how few tears there are. And all of this is true, but not because of anything I do, although I continue to get credit which people won't let me deflect, so I've stopped trying. You see, we never really get to the hard part of being together, the part where agendas and personalities and expectations start clashing, and maybe that's what summer ought to be about, but a key part of what makes our school our school is missing during these lazier months.

Yesterday, I posted a piece on teaching individual children, on meeting them where they are, meeting them as who they are, and how we, as teachers, try to connect with them. That's the stuff I've been up to this last month, but since 2 week sessions are hardly long enough to build a real community, it all gets to feel smooth and magical because no one really get comfortable enough for the icky stuff to come up.

Community is always forged through conflict, or rather by working through those conflicts and coming to agreements about how we're going to live together. Two weeks, six 2-1/2 hour sessions really, is simply not enough time to create conventions, a culture, a common history, and the bonds that motivate us to work through the tears and pain, to make it not just a place for us, but for all of us. It takes that long just to get your sea legs under you, to get to figure out this silly man named Teacher Tom, to learn a few of the other kid's names, to understand what we do when the drum sounds or someone calls, "Last call for snack!" Sure, we bump up against the other people, or they use the things we want to use, or they stand or sit where we want to sit, but without a community it's just conflict, something to handle, then from which to move on.

Coming off of our very first slate of summer sessions four years ago, a project that was largely run by a core group of committed parents, we entered the regular school year on a kind of high. It had all been so smooth and magical that we, I think, assumed we'd turned some sort of corner as a community, that from now on  things were going to be smooth and magical. Then we ran smack into reality. Our October parent meeting was tense as it was becoming clear that divisions had arisen between the "summer parents" and another group who, at bottom, I think, felt left out. It took us a lot of hard work, tears, the rest of the school year to pull our parent community back together. Since then, we've made a point of taking a little break between the end of our summer sessions and the regular school year to give the summer parents a chance to slow down a little because the process of building a community -- be it adults or children or both -- is one that takes the kind of time that we don't have in the summer.

So yes, I'm enjoying this summer so far, engaging children, playing with them, maybe helping with a little separation anxiety, then sending them off a few days later to other things. I'm not complaining about things being smooth and magical, of course, but I know it's a vacation from the real work that begins again next fall.

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A Typical Day

There are days after which I feel like things could have been better. Those are most days.

Last week, the first week of two in this kick-off session of our 2013 Summer Program, included none of those days. We had perfect weather, eager engagement from both kids and adults, and a kind of wide-eyed docility that often characterizes the beginnings of things as everyone feels things out.

Our Summer Program is more or less run by a half dozen or so key parents. All week, the gist of our "hallway" conversation was along the lines of, "This is going very well, isn't it?"

Yesterday, the temperature got turned down by 10 degrees on our all-outdoor program, we were rained upon, the kids were feeling more confident and assertive, and the mix of stations and activities felt kind of clunky. It wasn't a bad day by any means, but I was back in the game of settling disputes, reminding children of how to treat one another, and dealing with kids goofing off during circle time: a more typical day at Woodland Park.

I'm far from a perfectionist, but that doesn't mean I don't notice the flaws and hiccups, which is why the end of each day usually leaves me feeling an emotion into which a dose of dissatisfaction is mixed. I suppose that's the nature of most human activity, at least if you're engaged in something you care about. I rarely felt that way when I worked for "the man." Back then, my concerns at the end of the day were mostly about myself, what my boss thought of me, how much of my work I'd managed to divvy up to other people, and whether or not the thing that was threatening to be a failure could be made to look like an act of god, or failing that, the fault of someone else. That's no way to live, of course; it's the recipe for a bad night's sleep, a perpetually guilty conscience, and an end of the week emotion that was pretty much all dissatisfaction, with just a hint of relief over whatever it was I'd gotten away with, which is why those drinks after work on Friday were often the highlight of the week. 

My dreams, and I dreamed a lot back then, were of an impossible, perfect life in which obligations were few and choices were many.

I was lucky, I think, to have early on recognized my unfitness for the life of business, a life for which I spent too much of my educational life preparing. I then tumbled into self-employment. If I thought I'd been a bad employee when working for the man, I was a worse employee when working for myself. I went from sticking it to the man to sticking it to myself, which is really a miserable place to be, although I sometimes look back on those schedule-free days and miss them. Yes, I was living the dream of being my own boss, setting my own hours, assuming only obligations I placed upon myself, but it was also a daily battle with procrastination, distraction, and finding other things, anything, to avoid actually sitting down and doing the work. Sure my wife was thrilled at the end of each day with the tidiness of our home and garden, the quality and balance of our evening meal, and the personal grooming of her husband (and believe me, she still sometimes reflects longingly on those days), but none of it was progress, none of it was success, none of it had any meaning because at the end of the day I knew it had all been about avoidance. 

My dreams, and I dreamed a lot back then, were of an impossible, perfect life full of import and meaning.

I was lucky again, then, to wind up as a preschool teacher, and not just any preschool teacher, but one working in a cooperative preschool in Seattle, Washington. This is a job I would want to do even if I wasn't being paid. This is a job I'd do no differently if you paid me the salary of a big time CEO, because I'm already doing it as well as I'm capable, which is to say I end each day feeling good, feeling proud, feeling spent, and feeling slightly dissatisfied, knowing there is still something I want to figure out and make better. 

I'd been looking forward to our summer program as a kind of respite from the long days and weeks of the regular school year. After all, we're only meeting three mornings a week. It was going to feel luxurious, I was going to be able to set myself on cruise control, I was going to let my mind work on other things. But that's the person I used to be. I can no longer section things off into work, play, and family. Nope, I'm kind of surprised to realize this morning that it's now just one, big thing called My Life in which all the parts necessarily support one another. Being a teacher takes up just as much of myself teaching three classes a week as it does ten, and frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I have dreams still, of course, but having found this place for me, this place where the obligations are not things to avoid, and where every moment is full of import and meaning, those dreams don't seem at all impossible. In fact, I expect they can all be discovered in a typical day in which things could have been better.

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But Then What Would Happen To Summer?

For me, today is the first day of summer. The forecast for this week is sunny skies with mild temperatures and a light breeze. Although the chamber of commerce kind of weather is only secondary to the fact that this is the first day of the 2013 Woodland Park Summer Program.

First of all, let me say that it tickles me that we call it the Woodland Park Summer Program, just as our three other schools are named Woodland Park Pre-3's Cooperative Preschool, Woodland Park 3-5's Cooperative Preschool, and Woodland Park 5's Cooperative Preschool, utilitarian names that came into being as part of the process of filing incorporation papers with the state. We needed names and the people doing the work just stuck these descriptive titles in there as placeholders, I think, with the idea that someday we'd come up with something clever or cute.

We're no longer located near the Woodland Park Zoo, which is our namesake, but rather down the hill in Fremont, The Center of the Universe, home of The Troll. The only time we, as a community, ever talked about our name during my time here, was when we made our move two years ago. Most of us assumed that we were going to relabel ourselves to reflect our new location. I openly lobbied for Center of the Universe Cooperative Preschool, but one family spoke up at a parent meeting for remaining Woodland Park. Two of their children had already spent three years each here and a third had just been born and they asked that we'd consider not changing the name. It was powerful, from the heart testimony that ended the conversation on the spot and the subject hasn't been on a meeting agenda since.

The Woodland Park Summer Program is just what it sounds like. We're not "Dinosaur Camp" or "Pirates & Princesses," we're just who we are except outside only and during the summer. I'm particularly proud of the Summer Program because it's the first school we made all on our own, and by that I mean during my 12 year tenure here, because certainly there was a group of parents who started our original schools back in the 70's. Most of the cooperative preschools in North Seattle are affiliated with North Seattle Community College's parent education program. When we had the idea for some sort of summer camp, it came on the heels of us having built our first outdoor classroom, and we were excited to keep using it. Unfortunately, the collage wasn't able to support us, which might have been the death knell, but after checking into things like insurance and hiring parent educators we decided we could just go it alone. It was the model we turned to for starting our 5's program, which just completed it's inaugural year, when the college wasn't able to make a decision fast enough for us.

While the 5's class now operates under the auspices of NSCC, the Summer Program remains an entity unto itself, run with a slight renegade air, featuring parent meetings at trivia nights, bowling allies, and bars. Our other schools must maintain a certain amount of rigor considering that parents are receiving college credit, but since school's out for summer, that's been replaced by a sandals and short pants efficiency. It feels as homemade as street stand lemonade.

There's an edge of devil-may-care wildness, a little more risk-taking and experimentation, lots of water, mud, plants, bugs, and sand between our toes -- and I'm talking about the adults, because that's how the kids always do it at Woodland Park. We mix up the ages 2-6, with some older alumni joining us this year as "play mentors," 7-9 year-olds who will have the responsibility of role modeling, inspiring, and supporting the parent-teachers. Every day feels like some sort of family reunion picnic. If only we fired up the grill . . .

By the end of summer, when we're fully in our rhythm, even when the weather stays stubbornly 64 degrees and gray for much of the time, we begin to bemoan that it has to come to an end and ask why the rest of the year at Woodland Park can't be like this. Could it be? I think so, but then what would happen to summer?

I'm sad for the children whose parents have bought into the BS about "academic regression" during the summer months. Especially those who advocate for longer school days and the outright elimination of summer. Who cares? If you forget something in three months then you really didn't learn it anyway. Besides, that's what summer is for, to fill our heads with more important stuff; to remind ourselves of the raw joy of being carefree; to use our noses on flowers instead of grindstones; to lift our faces up to the sun, to shed our cloths, to smell of sunscreen, and to do the things we do when no one is telling us what to do.

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

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The Fantastic Adventures We Shared

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I Want Turquoise Carpets

I want turquoise carpets and turquoise shoes.

I want turquoise papers with all the turquoise news.

I want turquoise only, not teal or aquamarine.

I've seen my future and it's a shade of bluish green.

~Jim White, Turquoise House

An era ended last week at Woodland Park. We've been preparing for it for a week or more, and it's time, and it had to end sometime, and all the rest of it, but there is an extra heaviness in my heart this morning as I allow myself to feel the passing of the era of the Blue Rug.

Before the Blue Rug, there was the Green Rug, which was also referred to as the "square hexagon" due to the irregular, angular masking tape lines laid down by a previous teacher in a failed effort to get 2-year-olds to actually sit in a circle. Its successor, the Blue Rug, a glorified 15'X12' remnant, has been with us for the past 9 years, serving as a place to sit, raise hands, sing, tell stories, give compliments, make rules, dance, build, and wrestle for hundreds of children.

Never again will I sing what is probably the unofficial anthem of Woodland Park:

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

Come on over to the Blue Rug.

And have a seat on the floor.

Right near the end of last year, a couple of the parents in our Pre-3's class began to worry about our rugs. Their main concern was the rug under our sensory table, which, of course, often gets wet, and has suffered from a few growths of mildew. This conversation expanded to include the topics of off-gassing, mold, durability, and natural fibers, leading to the idea to replace both rugs, a concept that came to be embraced, or at least not opposed, by a majority of our families. As a cooperative preschool, this is how things often happen.

As the owners of the school, these parents then set about figuring out what, in their ideal world, they would rather have under their children's bottoms and feet. Something tough and non-toxic, of course, easy to clean, mildew resistant, and attractive. 

This rug isn't only where we convene for circle time, but also a place for constructive and dramatic play. We are already seeing, even before the rug was installed, how the square tiles impact how the children play.

To be honest, I was not on board. I mean, new rugs would be nice, but I was more inclined to either stick with the Blue Rug, which I felt just needed a good cleaning, or if we must replace it, to do so with another cheap remnant. But, you know, it's not my school: it belongs to the families. I'll always assert my opinion when it comes to matters of curriculum or pedagogy, but this was not that. Besides as the discussions progressed, it started to become evident to me that we weren't really going to replace the Blue Rug. The parents had settled on the absolute "gold standard" for preschool carpeting: they wanted to build one from carpet tiles manufactured by FLOR. By the time they priced it out we were looking at a price tag well beyond our budget, and with the school calendar running out on us, there just wasn't going to be time to do the fundraising, let alone go through the processes required to get all 3 of the Woodland Park schools to approve the expenditure. And even while the process did make me begin to covet a FLOR carpet, I figured once we broke for the summer the momentum would fail and the whole episode would only continue to survive as a few meager lines in our meeting minutes.

Squares on squares.

Now let me tell you, despite my best penny pinching efforts, I became through this process a fan of the FLOR product. For one thing, our parents with architecture and design backgrounds were enthusiastic about FLOR from the start, some of whom had used their products both personally and professionally, saying they are worth every penny. When I mentioned it to my wife, a home design hobbyist, she said, "Oh, that's the best." Made from recycled materials, built for both beauty and abuse, and flexible: it was the flexibility perhaps more than anything else that swayed me. If we somehow managed to completely ruin one of the 20"X20" squares, which is possible in our very messy school, we could simply replace the tile, not the whole rug.

Ah, but as we went into the summer, my private predictions had come true. We'd not managed to figure out a way to swing it, the summer program spends all it's time outdoors where the Blue Rug was off the radar, and I was quite certain it would be years before the subject came up again. 

I was wrong. At the summer board meeting of our new Pre-3's class, our new health and safety officer, said, "Last year's class voted to replace the rugs in the classroom, but they couldn't afford it. We don't have to honor their intentions, but I think we should." And we were off, ultimately getting all 3 of the Woodland Park schools on board.

The tiles are held together by these adhesive dots.

The new FLOR tiles arrived a couple weeks ago. I pulled a few samples from the boxes and spread them on a counter for the parents to see as they arrived. We needed a few volunteers to offer to come in on a weekend or evening to install it and I figured this would be a good way to motivate folks. After a couple days, however, I was too excited, so just brought them into the classroom where we let the kids play with them, making their own patterns and paths. I love that we had this opportunity for all of us to transition from the old to the new.

And yesterday was installation day. Liam's mom Abigail and Rhys and Maya's mom Christina met me in the classroom at noon. The actual installation of a 15'X12' and a 8'X5' rugs took about 30 minutes. We spent more time sweeping, mopping, and hauling the old rugs out to Abigail's pick-up than we did on the actual installation.

I didn't shed a tear for the Blue Rug as I saw it packed up and ready for its final trip to the dump. I could clearly see in the light of day that it was a ratty, stained old thing. We now have a rug made from cool, fresh turquoise, teal, and "tidal" colored squares. What will we call it? Maybe the Turquoise Rug -- we sing a good song about that color. Maybe the Checker Board Rug. Maybe it'll be the Bluish-Green Rug. I guess I'll have to wait until Monday and let the kids decide.

We settled on a fairly straight forward pattern. Maybe we should have gone with something more random. Or perhaps we could have used one color to create a sort of "Teacher Tom zone" up near the front to keep kids from crowding in too closely. The good news is we can change it if we decide we want something different.

Some people get frustrated by a cooperative process. It's not always fast but it's a process that does work to make good things happen, one into which we've all by now bought. The result is that the "third teacher" got a make-over. I can't wait to see what it does for all of us.

Oh, and we also got that new sensory table rug that started the whole thing.

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

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