This Labor Day

(It's become a bit of a tradition for me to re-posted this piece on Labor Day. Have a happy and safe holiday!)

It's odd celebrating Labor Day in this country given the war being waged against labor by many of the most powerful members of our society, and the outright vitriol coming from elected representatives who malign working men and women as nothing more than selfish, lazy, union thugs. At the beginning of summer, on Memorial Day, you will find no shortage of people stepping to the front to wave their flags in honor of soldiers who gave their lives. But at the end of summer, on Labor Day, these very people actually become the "selfish, lazy, thugs" they condemn, enjoying a three-day weekend of picnics and family time, ignoring the thousands who gave their lives so that they can enjoy a middle-class privilege, brought to them by unions.

Indeed the middle class exists because of the Labor Movement, although it's not surprising that so many Americans are unaware of this fact, and can be so easily manipulated by politicians with anti-union agendas, because most public schools have relegated this vital piece of our civic history to a few paragraphs in text books, if it's taught at all.

And just because you don't belong to a union, don't think that your life is not better because of the long fight in which labor has been engaged on your behalf.

The very weekend you are currently enjoying has indeed been brought to you by people who fought and even died because of the radical notion that families should have time to be together, that children should not burn up their tragically short lives in sweat shops and coal mines, that mothers and fathers should expect workplaces where they won't be maimed and killed, that they should not be beaten, have their wages arbitrarily withheld, or be forced to work 61 hour weeks (the average in 1870, meaning many worked far more hours than that) with no hope of a day off. Oh, these were great times for business owners, but they were hell for everyone else.

You can thank labor for your employer-based health care coverage, your living wage, your paid sick leave, vacations, and holidays. Without a Labor Movement you would not have workers compensation for on the job injuries, unemployment insurance, pensions, anti-discrimination laws, or family medical leave. You would have no "due process," living at the mercy of your employer, who may well be a good guy, but just as likely is not.

Wages and the standard of living, even for non-union workers, in states with laws that support unions are higher; states with union-busting laws have lower wages and lower standards of living. That is a simple fact.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow anti-capitalism (as if that's an inherently bad thing). Of course, I see how a strong union might cut into corporate profits (which are currently, even in this horrible economy, among the highest in the history of the world, in real dollars) but from where I sit unions are pure capitalism. Why can't individuals with a service to sell, be it teaching or steel working, ally themselves together to negotiate the best deal possible? I mean, it's certainly democratic. And isn't that what corporations do all the time with their mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships? If capitalism is just for those with capital, then it's clearly and fundamentally anti-democratic and should have no place in our society.

I've heard people argue that unions are somehow selfish. I find that a singularly silly assertion. Really? Selfish? People getting together for the common good, sticking together, sticking up for one another, acting in the best interests of "we" instead of "me." That's selfish? Yet somehow a corporation seeking to  squeeze every nickel out of the hide of it's most lowly worker isn't selfish? Please.

I've heard people use anecdotal arguments that union workers are somehow lazy. I have no doubt that there are actually lazy union workers, just like there is laziness in every aspect of life. But you've got to do better than anecdotes to convince me. The actual research shows that unionized businesses are made more productive through reduced worker turnover which leads to lower training costs and more seasoned workers, which results in not only higher productivity, but better quality. Actual research shows that higher paid workers forces managers to actually do their jobs of more effective and efficient planning.  Actual research shows that employers who involve union workers in their decision-making process see an almost 10 percent increase in productivity. Companies like Costco with a high percentage of its workforce unionized enjoy 20 percent higher profits per worker hour than anti-union bottom feeders like Sam's Club. Productivity statistics put the lie to the claim of laziness.

And as for the argument that union workers are thugs. Look at the history of the Labor Movement and tell me who the real thugs are.

I'm writing about this on my education blog because of the hits teacher's unions have been taking lately, in places like Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, but really right across the country. In fact, more than just hits, they are under full-on assault, and not just from politicians, but by the corporate "education reformers," who seem to find, without any evidence, that those rotten union teachers are the cause of our "educational crisis" (which in itself is a myth made up solely to serve their agenda of high-stakes testing, privatization and the de-professionalization of the teaching profession).

I am not a union member, nor have I ever been, but I'm waving my flag today not only for abused and hard working teachers, but for all of my brothers and sisters who work for a living, who continue to fight for their fare share of this democracy, and who envision a better more egalitarian and democratic future for our children.

Union!

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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Why We Need Cities

A little over two years ago, I wrote a piece that was intended to be somewhat hopeful, although it turned out mostly depressing, about our future on this planet. It was in the midst of the enormous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and while that disaster continues to exact a horrific toll, it has been since been pushed to the background as there have been dozens of other equally grim reminders that as long as we humans walk the earth, nature will never be what it once was.

I made a commitment in that post to try to do at least one thing extra every day to reduce my own environmental footprint, and while I can't say that I've been as methodical about it as I'd hoped, I have, I think, contributed at least a little less to the disaster over the past two years than I did during the two preceding. Pathetic perhaps, but progress nonetheless. I now live in a "green" building, I've virtually stopped driving my car, and I've done my best to eat food produced close to my home. My next step is to attempt to cut sugar and beef from my diet. I expect to enjoy improved health, of course, but mainly I'm doing it because the production of both are, from what I've read, significant contributors to pollution. Please don't think I'm preaching, because I remain a huge "sinner" in this: after all, I just flew on 14 jets in 20 days during my recent trip Down Under.

I'm an optimistic person by nature, a trait that is strengthened by the fact that I work with young children, and to do so without hope, I think, would be a sort of crime. In that old post, entitled "Unnatural Places," I wrote about a project here in Seattle to restore a small piece of the wetlands that once characterized the shores of Lake Washington. I held it up as an example of the kind of "unnatural"  balance we humans must find with nature if we are to survive.

Recently, our 3-5's class took a field trip to those "wetlands," traveling there on a Metro bus that runs on biofuel. We were met by a team of docents, lead by a naturalist. We divided up into groups to study plants and animals that have "moved in." Of course we didn't see all the animals, but rather the evidence of their existence, such as chewed leaves, nests, and scat, including that of a coyote. Animals tend to make themselves scarce when humans are around.

To see how far this wetlands restoration project has come, just compare the photos in this post to the ones from my post of two year ago.

Clearly, this, in a very small way, is working the way we humans have planned, providing an unnatural natural place for us city slickers to learn without exposing what few natural natural places we have left to our trampling feet and polluting automobiles. I understand why it's hard for some folks to get excited about this sort of thing, why they see it as a poor substitute for actual nature, why they view the learning that comes from it as impoverished and second-rate. That said, it is the responsible thing to do. It is, for the foreseeable future, the relationship we need to forge with nature.

For too long, our solution was to flee cities, to move farther and farther in to suburbia, then ex-urbia, to have country homes and beach houses, pushing humanity increasingly into the habitat of bears and wolves and cougars, further destroying the very thing we were seeking to embrace. This is why I am today a committed city dweller. I see now that this is actually the right and proper way for humans to live, stacked up together, rubbing shoulders, embracing social, ethnic and economic differences, linking our fates together to build interconnected lives.

I understand those of you who crave natural nature, but frankly, you're killing it. We need you back here with us, working together with us. The last decade has seen a trend of people moving from Seattle's suburbs and into the city itself. I remember when the evening commute saw most traffic leaving the city, but the tide is turning. And you know what? I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this, living in cities, big cities, really is the only sustainable future for humanity, and not just for environmental reasons, and the first thing that needs to go are the suburbs.

I grew up in a series of suburbs, having come to city life only as an adult. I used to buy into the whole "concrete jungle" thing, viewing cities as impoverished, crime-ridden places. I still know many people who feel fearful in the city. They'll usually tell you it's crime they worry about the most, but in most places around the US it's not the cities with the highest crime rates. In Washington State, for instance, as our most populous city, Seattle's crime rate puts us in the middle of the pack, pretty average when it comes to crime, whereas bedroom communities with names like Gig Harbor and Wapato and Moses Lake and Burlington are the most likely places to be victimized.

Honestly, I feel safer in the city than I do in the suburbs. I like having all those people around me. I can't even recall which city it was, it might have been Melbourne, a city of some 4.5 million, when Niki and I saw a young woman stumble and fall in a cross walk. Before we could even take a step in her direction, four other strangers were already there to help her up, dust her off, and inquire about her well-being. It was the kind of thing that only happens in a big city, strangers taking care of strangers.

I find cites, even with their noise and grit, to be life affirming. Yes, a city puts poverty, crime, and depravities of all sorts in your face, but all of our human virtues are here too: cities also show us beauty and compassion and tolerance. Suburbs, of course, house all these things as well, because there are people there, but they're too often hidden behind their fences, with the primary view into the lives of others being car windows and the fun house mirror of television, views at a distance that too easily breed contempt and envy and, most significantly, fear. The root of most of the world's problems is fear, and most fear is irrational.

I know I'm not going to change anyone's mind by writing this, but when I look at humanity's future, if we are to have a future, it is all about cities with increasingly dense populations, while allowing the suburbs to revert over time to the natural places they once were, turning them back over to the bears, wolves, and cougars. I see abandoned shopping centers overrun with vines, 5 acre parking lots growing meadows through their cracks, and former mini-mansions housing mini-ecosystems.

This is the future of the planet anyway, even in our most populous cities, even if we just continue to spread out until we've made this place uninhabitable for human beings, because nature will prevail. I'd prefer to think we'll overcome our fears and learn to survive, but to do that we'll need you, or at least your kids, to move back into our cities.

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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Only This Time

If there was one non-education related topic that people in Australia and New Zealand wanted to talk with me about during my recent trip Down Under, it was America's relationship with guns. This was true of my trip to Greece in the spring as well. And in nearly every case, the question was some version of, "What the hell is going on?"

I answered as honestly as I could, although not always this diplomatically, "There are too many people with access to guns who should not have access to guns."

A case in point was last week's thrill kill shooting of a 22-year-old Australian baseball player in Oklahoma City by 15, 16, and 17-year-old boys. Another is yesterday's shooting at a Decatur, Georgia elementary school by a 20-year-old who was apparently "off his meds." It's far too easy for kids and mentally ill people to get their hands on guns. No one believes that children or mentally ill people should have access to guns, yet tragically, we seem to be incapable to doing anything about it, and, from what I hear in my travels, the rest of the world is aghast.

This may not be an education-related post, but it is about children. Fifteen hundred America children are killed each year by guns, that's an average of 4 per day, and tens of thousands more are seriously injured. Almost all of these are "accidental" shootings occurring in their own homes or the homes of friends or relatives. Most of these victims are boys, shot by a friend or relative. More than half of parents who own guns keep them in their homes loaded and unlocked: these people, by the NRA's own standards, are irresponsible gun owners. They think they've hidden their guns where the kids won't find them, but 80 percent of first graders say they know where their parents keep their guns. The kids in Oklahoma City may have acquired their gun by other means, but the majority of kids shooting kids with guns got those guns from their own parents.

As for the mentally ill, nearly 90 percent of Americans say they favor more stringent background checks before people be allowed to purchase guns, specifically to be certain of the sanity of buyers, yet our politicians are incapable of making that happen. In contrast, in 1996, a lone gunman killed 35 people with a semi-automatic weapon in Port Arthur, Australia. This lead to new laws prohibiting all automatic and semi-automatic weapons, and imposed strict licensing rules. They also implemented background checks and lengthy waiting periods for all gun purchases. Gun violence has not been eliminated, but there has not been a single mass shooting in Australia in the 16 years since the laws were put into place. These laws were supported by a full 90 percent of the population, more or less the same percentage of Americans who report they support stricter gun control laws. No one can credibly claim that Australia has not been successful in keeping guns out of the hands of children and the mentally ill.

In the US, a recent mass shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut in which 26 were killed, 20 of whom were kindergarteners, lead to nothing but a failed attempt by Congress to strengthen our background check laws and an insane call from many to arm teachers. I'm sorry, but I don't see how armed teachers will do anything but dramatically increase the number of kids accidentally shot and killed, adding to what is already a slow motion mass murder of American children.

And that brings me back to yesterday's shooting at that elementary school in Georgia. A mentally ill man with an AK-47, explosives, and other weapons, got into the school's office, getting off several shots, yet you may not have even heard about it. Surprised? That's probably because no one was killed or injured. All the children are alive today, not because teachers had guns in their waistbands, but because a brave clerical worker named Antoinette Tuff talked to the gunman. That's right, she talked to him. By the time the police arrived, she had talked him into voluntarily disarming himself. When the police came through the door, he was lying on the floor with his arms behind him. She was armed with something far more powerful and effective than a gun: the ability to talk a desparate person down. If we need to arm teachers, this is how to do it. In fact, I would go one step further and say that every American should receive this kind of training as part of their education.

As usual, I'm expecting gun rights people to come here to tell me I'm un-American or that I don't know what I'm talking about because I somehow got my gun terminology wrong or that "gun free" zones like those around schools are the cause of these tragedies. I will challenge these people in advance to come here with their own ideas about how to keep guns out of the hands of children and away from the mentally ill. And I will also point out that every school shooting up to now has taken place in schools that did employ armed security, some even had their own police forces, yet people were killed and injured. Only this time, in a school that was armed only with words, did we manage to walk away with no injuries or death. Only this time did we have a gunman give himself up without carrying out his unthinkable plans. Please at least think about that before you write to me.

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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A Good Mess Of Stuff

This will be a short one because I have to catch an early flight back to Seattle . . .

I'm sitting in my hotel room here in Sydney, Australia after spending the better part of three weeks traveling around this country and New Zealand with Niki Buchan, talking to teachers and parents about the way we do early childhood education at Woodland Park, but the truth is that I've probably learned more from them than the other way around. It's been both fun and edifying, and, as it turns out, a toe in the water as I've been asked to return next August by Natasja and Nicole, my incredible hosts from Inspired EC. Next year we plan to visit even more of the country and talk to more people, inspiring and being inspired.

I expect I'll be writing quite a bit over the next few weeks about my thoughts and experiences, telling you some of the stories about my time here, but right now it's all kind of a jumble, a good mess of stuff to reflect upon.

I ran across Marc Armitage while here, presenting and traveling with him for a time. I got to meet and even play with some of my Australian early childhood blogging sisters, Donna and Sherry, the "Irresistible Girls," Jenny Kable of Let the Children Play, and spend some time with Greg Harvey from Males in Early Childhood, Alec Duncan from Child's Play Music, and so many others who have been my virtual friends and allies over these past five years as a blogger.

There's something special going on here and I'm happy to be a part of it. I'm both moved and encouraged about how much passion people have for high quality, progressive, play-based early childhood education. We're everywhere, it seems, all around the globe.

After all this time going about side-by-side with Niki, one would think we would by now be sick of one another, or at least have run out of things to talk about, but yesterday morning in Auckland, the final time we were to sit waiting for our flight to be announced, we began making our plans for the future, finding ourselves getting increasingly excited when we should have been running on fumes.

I'm eager to get home, of course, to my family and school, but I'm happy to know I'm coming back to continue the conversations we've started.

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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Why We Play Board Games

As a child I was an avid player of board games. I have early memories of Candyland, Chutes & Ladders, and High Ho Cherry-O, all of which are games we play at Woodland Park. I liked the fantasyland of sweets, imaging myself floating, for instance, on the floe of ice cream depicted on the game board. There was something about that long slide of disaster that dissects the center of the Chutes & Ladders board that made me not so upset when forced to ride it to the bottom. And the constant good-natured arguing between my brother and me about whether the cherries should be placed in the trees stem up or stem down bordered on a family tradition. 

But it was the actual playing of the games, according to the rules, or at least according to the rules to which we'd agreed, and the competition and cooperation that came out of those agreements, that made the time spent important. When we break out the board games at school, it's not, of course, with the idea of pitting children against one another, but rather the practice of playing together within the boundaries of our agreements.

Typically, we play our games indoors, set up on a table with an adult nearby, not so much as a supervisor or manager, but more as a playmate and role model. If a child asks how to play, we may walk them through the rules, but there is no obligation to abide abide by them, at least until a classmate seeks to enter into the play. It's then that the agreements come in. 

The point of bringing board games into the classroom isn't to practice following rules or instructions, but rather to practice playing cooperatively. Often for our youngest kids it winds up being something like taking turns with the spinner, ignoring the board part of the game altogether. The older kids are more inclined to want to know what the official instructions have to say, if only as a starting point for a negotiation that becomes, really, the core of their play together.

Our games of Candyland might feature the children taking turns drawing cards, while all of them move their pawns, chosing to take their "adventure" in the company of friends. Our Chutes & Ladders game board stands in as a wild and wooly table top playground. And Hi Ho Cherri-O becomes a farm with repeated cycles of  planting and reaping. 

Some people worry that preschoolers are to young for the winner-take-all kind of competition offered by traditional board games, and indeed, there are sometimes tears. Others figure it's good for them to experience the hard knocks. I think it depends on the kid, but what I have observed time and time again is that when left to their own devices, they chose to play by "rules" that allow everyone to raise their hands over their heads in victory.

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 Best Game Ever

A few days ago, I wrote about how we had been assembling our new furniture at the workbench. Among the items we worked on were several square tables. Naturally, the kids wanted to grab some chairs and sit around the first one we completed.

As we sat there looking at one another, I asked, "What should we do with our new table."

"Play a game!"

I picked up a stick from the ground and put it in the center of our table. I said, "Here's a game."

The children sat for a moment looking at the stick, then one of them reached out and spun it. She said, "Whoever it points at has to sing a song."

Two boys started singing. She said, "No, no, you're the only singer," pointing at one of the boys.

The other boy objected, "But it's pointing at me."

That's when they realized that the spinner-stick, in fact, had two ends, each pointing to a different player, so they decided it was a "two singer" game. After some discussion over which song to sing, they chose the alphabet song.

When they were done, someone said, "We should play an A-B-C game." Everyone agreed, then sat looking at one another as it sunk in that there needed to be more to make it a game. 

"I know! Teacher Tom will say a letter and if it's your letter, you grab the stick." Everyone knows that "your letter" means the letter at the beginning of your first name. We played a few rounds of this, with me sometimes tossing out letters that belonged to none of them, which lead to us trying to figure out which one of our classmates, were they sitting with us, would be grabbing the stick. Then we expanded the definition of "your letter" to mean any letter found in your name. After awhile, the children just took over shouting out their own letters using a turn-taking system that was not transparent to me, but seemed to satisfy them all.

I walked away, leaving them to it. It must have been a good half hour later that I was back in the area. The game had become rowdy, with lots of stick grabbing and laughing. I heard one of them say, "This is the best game ever!"

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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Which Way To Go

On October 9, 2012, Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani 15-year-old was shot by a Taliban gunman as she rode the bus home from school. Many of you probably know her story, but for those who don't, this was a girl who was already an internationally known activist, having started blogging in 2009 for the BBC about every day life under Taliban rule, anonymously at first. By 2011 her activism against the Taliban, and specifically its attempts to deny education to girls, inspired Desmond Tutu to nominate her for the International Children's Peace Prize. When the gunman boarded the bus, he asked for her by name, "Which one of you is Malala?" before shooting her in the head and neck. Presidents and prime ministers, rock stars and movie stars have celebrated her for her activism and courage. And she has only just this month turned 16.

Honestly, I was only vaguely aware of her story until yesterday. Most days, Malala and the Swat region of Pakistan seem far away, both physically and culturally. I knew that a girl had been shot for wanting to go to school. What I hadn't known was that she had already made an international name for herself as an advocate for education, children, and women prior to the tragedy, that she was no stranger to death threats, that she and her family had been standing up every day to the very terrorists that some of us in America, half way around the world, fear so much that we've been willing to sacrifice some of our freedoms.

I occasionally write here about my opposition to spanking or corporate-style school "reforms" or in favor of gun control and people write back to tell me how brave I am for doing so. I am not brave, not in comparison to someone like this. But it makes me wonder how far away we've strayed from our democratic ideals, how unskilled we've become in exercising our citizenship, how threatening the American version of the Taliban (backed not so much by guns, but rather by the equally brutish power of money) have become if what I do can be called brave in the same universe as this girl.

A friend made me aware of this speech (embedded below) that Malala recently gave at the United Nations, which is why I spent time yesterday pouring over her story. As I listened to her speak, I found myself crying, as I'm sure you will. I was moved by her words, of course, by her passion, and yes, by her courage, but I was mostly struck by the straight-forward simplicity of her words. I don't want to use the world "childlike" because of it's negative connotations, but it is childlike, in the best sense of that word, in its clarity of logic and purpose, un-muddled by the prejudice and doubt that too often characterizes the thinking of adults.

I learned that she once served as the chairperson for something called the District Child Assembly, a body, one of many I assume, set up to give children a voice in the Pakistani democracy. Watching her speak so confidently at the UN, seeing her surrounded by earnest-faced adults who applauded her, finishing with a standing ovation, a utopian vision came to me of a world in which assemblies of children made all the big decisions, painting in simple, broad strokes their collective vision, leaving implementation up to the adults, always accountable to the child assembly. Of course, it's only a dream, but I don't think a crazy one. Youth are usually at the vanguard of big change, seeing far more clearly, and with far less rancor, than the adults about such things as ending wars, equality, caring for the sick, and elevating the poor. Polls consistently show that children have far more compassion for their fellow man, far more tolerance, and a far greater belief in our ability to rise up from the muck in which adults too often wrestle. Call it the hopefulness of youth if you will, but I would rather be lead by this, than the cynicism of adulthood.

The word "utopia" has a double meaning, referring to both a "good place" as well as "no place," or an impossible place. When I listen to children like Malala speak, however, it occurs to me that a third meaning is possible: utopia as a direction. This is why I always really listen to children, not so much for the great oratory or brilliant ideas, but rather because they can reliably point me which way to go.

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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What Motivates Me

There's a song I sing when it's time to gather around for circle time, our community meetings. It's something I made up, I think, although it probably grew from a kernel planted by one of my mentors. It always starts off the same way, "Come on over to the checker board rug, come on over to the checker board rug, come on over to the checker board rug, and have a seat on the floor . . ." After that, it can pretty much go off on any number of tangents, each one sillier than the last, usually inspired by something one of the kids has done or said. It's just a way to goof around until everyone is settled in. And then, since I typically don't have anything specific planned, we usually just goof around together some more. In a nutshell, that's the Teacher Tom method.

Honestly, I was never particularly motivated to become a teacher. There were a couple of my high school teachers to whom I looked up, but that had more to do with my perception of their lifestyle as teachers -- being cool role models, coaching sports teams after school, having pretty wives -- than anything to do with helping kids' brains grow bigger. Even when I finally became a father, I had little interest in teaching our baby anything: I just wanted to goof around with her.

People assume I'm interested in pedagogy and curricula and brain development, and I am, I suppose. I've done just enough reading, and taken just enough classes, and attended just enough workshops, to have a working knowledge of most of what's out there, but everything I know about teaching, really, I've acquired more by osmosis than any sort of concentrated study, and frankly, I rarely think about any of it anyway. Likewise, I'm not all that interested in knowing about spectrums or disorders or syndromes or any other kind of diagnosis. I'm not ignorant of them, of course, and I recognize that there is value in this kind of knowledge, but it generally only reveals such a tiny piece of what makes a child who he or she is that it borders on the irrelevant, at least when it comes to the way I do "teaching."

And speaking of irrelevant, I know and care even less about much of the stuff my public school colleagues talk about, like "Common Core," or "WASL Tests," or all those various certifications and qualifications and whatnot. I mean, I've looked into some of it, and found it has so little in common with what I do on a day-to-day basis that it hardly looks at all to me like what I call "teaching." If it wasn't threatening to take over the whole of what we call "education" in America, I would gladly ignore it entirely.

As I'm gearing up for my trip to Australia and New Zealand, where I'll be presenting and facilitating education workshops (information and links at the bottom of this post), people are expressing enthusiasm for learning more about my approach, methodology, and pedagogy. And that's what I'm going to talk about, although I'll never be able to offer a tidy list of "10 Tips" or "12 Steps To Success." I'll probably mostly talk about the fine art of goofing off with kids.

You see, I came into teaching through a back door, not even really knowing where I was, to be honest, holding my own daughter's hand. We found a bunch of kids there and started playing with them. Everyone called it "school," so we did too. I was never particularly motivated to become a teacher, but when I saw what my mentors Sue Anderson and Chris David did in their little cooperative classrooms, I was motivated to do that.

We spent our time together at this kind of school mostly just goofing around, although by virtue of being adults we occasionally had to work with children to help them be safe, to treat one another fairly, to express our emotions in healthy, productive ways. But that wasn't our "curriculum," heavens no, all of that adult stuff was just by way of getting back to the core of why we were together: to have an interesting time goofing around.

I'm still not particularly motivated to be a teacher, but I do enjoy being Teacher Tom. I love nothing more than dropping to my knees and playing with the children, talking with them, listening to them, being their friend. My main job, as I do it, is just to find a way to get each kid on my bandwagon, which can only be done by forging a relationship based upon a two-way street of listening, acceptance, and love -- and a sacred agreement that no one is the "boss" of anyone else. The rest is just goofing off together. 

I may not be motivated to be a teacher, but I am motivated by the unique joys and challenges of creating a relationship with each child. It's endlessly amazing to me that the more I've done this, coming to a place called school each day to goof around with kids, that there is still so much more to learn, that there is always a deeper depth and a higher height and a sillier way to sing that old song. 

Finding those new places is what motivates me; finding them with the kids, going there together, then goofing off. That's what motivates me.

Australia/New Zealand Tour information

I will be Down Under for the first couple weeks of August. Here's the itinerary:

Aug. 2 -- Brisbane

Aug. 3-4 -- Shoal Bay

Aug. 8 -- Melbourne

Aug. 9 -- Adelaide

Aug. 10 -- Perth

Aug. 13 -- Auckland

Aug. 17 -- Christchurch

For details and registration information, click here, the scroll down until you find the event your interested in. I look forward to meeting all you Aussies and Kiwis!

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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In That Direction Lies Happiness

We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin

Happy Independence Day. And “happy” is the appropriate greeting for today. The Declaration of Independence was the first historical instance of the word "happiness" appearing in the founding documents of any nation.

Today in 1776, 56 men signed their names to this radical document. As a result they were, without trial, proclaimed traitors by the government and sentenced to death. These were middle class people. John Hancock was the wealthiest among them and he was not even a millionaire by today's standards. The wealthy sided with the king. Most of the signers were working people -- farmers and tradesmen primarily. None of them left behind a family fortune, or a foundation, or any other kind of financial memorial of their lives. Our nation is their legacy.

Their average age was 33 (Thomas Jefferson's age at the time). The youngest was only 20-years-old. The oldest was Benjamin Franklin, who was 70.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, all 56 of the signers were forced to flee their homes. Twelve returned to find only rubble.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, 17 of them were wiped out financially by the British government.

As a result of having signed the Declaration of Independence, many of them were captured and tortured, or their families were imprisoned, or their children were taken from them. Nine of them died and 4 of them lost their children.

As I read the Declaration of Independence, as I do each July 4, I find myself in awe of their courage. They were all aware of the likely consequences, but they did what they knew must be done. Two-hundred and thirty-seven years later, I still feel the outrage they must have felt as I read through the specific governmental abuses that lead them to that critical moment.

Even more than our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the beginning point for the United States of America. I find it both educational and inspirational to return to the source before heading out for fireworks.

When Franklin was asked what kind of nation they were forming, he answered, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

I worry at times that we won't be able to keep it, that, in fact, we've already lost it. I worry that too many of us have declared our independence not from tyrants, but from one another, not understanding that in creating a constitutional government of, by, and for we the people, we were also declaring our interdependence.

At the signing to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Franklin famously said, "We must hang together gentlemen . . . else we shall most assuredly hang separately." 

And while we come together today to commemorate our independence from tyranny, this is also a day for embracing our fellow countrymen, for celebrating our interdependence. In that direction lies happiness.

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