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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The Myth Of Bootstraps

Sixteen years ago my wife and I considered ourselves the kind of people who would have a wine cellar. We were motivated in no small part by the fact that we'd just purchased a home with your classic cool, dark basement, ignoring the fact that I don't drink wine and she sticks almost exclusively to a few brands of chardonnay. Since there were already shelves built into the space, I ran out and purchased a classic Ikea do-it-yourself "system," which we filled, over years, with bottles of wine people gave us as gifts and that we would likely never drink.

Fortunately, I work in a profession in which nothing need ever go to waste, so when we moved out of that house, the wine rack parts found their way to the preschool where they now serves as a building set.

The system is simple: hexagonal prisms that are about a foot long with each end drilled with four holes into which wooden pegs fit. They can be inserted by hand, but we like to use rubber mallets at the work bench. 

They're an imperfect system, especially when using the mallets. If you hit too hard, your entire structure might collapse like a house of cards. The same goes for if you don't brace the whole thing against the work bench, which makes it a perfect thing for tinkering around, especially with an adult there to lend a hand. This can be a frustrating system to work with, I know, I've cobbled them together before and repaired them frequently over the years. Few preschool-aged children are able to manage it without an adult hand here or there. In fact, I've come to realize that it's the kind of challenge that is almost rigged for young children to fail unless they have a helping hand.

Alfie Kohn has an excellent piece up over at Huffington Post about the myth that children today are too coddled and that they "benefit from plenty of bracing experiences with frustration and failure." 

Research certainly doesn't support the idea that failure or disappointment is constructive in itself. A "BGUTI" (better get used to it) rationale -- the assumption that children are best prepared for unpleasant experiences that may come later by being exposed to a lot of unpleasantness while they're young -- makes no sense from a psychological perspective. We may want kids to rebound from failure, but that doesn't mean it's usually going to happen -- or that the experience of failure makes that desired outcome more likely . . . In fact, studies find that when kids fail, they tend to construct an image of themselves as incompetent and even helpless, which leads to more failure. (They also come to prefer easier tasks and lose interest in whatever they're doing.)

When children come to our workbench, indeed when they freely chose to approach any activity in our school, the emphasis is on "tinkering," not success or failure, not reward (good grade) or punishment (bad grade), not product but process. When a child is challenged by the process of fitting two pieces together, the adult's role isn't to keep their "eye on the prize," but rather to "notice" or narrate the process in which the child is engaging. The goal of struggle is not to overcome, but to gather data:

Jerome Bruner said this: We want students to "experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information."

Most children get to a point when working with this impromptu building set when they need help to do what they want, an extra hand to hold something, a few words of strategic counsel. This isn't, of course, an invitation for the adult to take over, nor a sign of having been coddled, but rather a natural human response to a situation that is too many or too much for them. When a child asks for help with this building set, it is a request to provide support for their exploration. Often the request for help is very clear and specific, "Will you hold this for me?" an acknowledgment that she knows exactly what she thinks she needs to get to where she wants to go. Other times it's less clear, perhaps a groan of frustration or an "I can't do it!" In this case, we engage in a discussion about the nature of the challenge, my "help" coming in the form of helping the child simply formulate his request for help. Often that alone allows a child to see his way through to a solution. Sometimes I find I need to make suggestions (e.g., "If someone held that part, you might be able to do it.") or simply make statements of fact (e.g., "If you hit right here, the peg will go in the hole.")  

I have no formula to tell adults when and how to provide help. It always comes down to the child and the situation. Sometimes, as my friend and parent educator Janet Lansbury suggests, it's totally appropriate to say, "I won't help you, but I won't let you get hurt," but learning how to ask for help, learning to know when to ask for help, is as vital to "success" (however you define it) as anything else one needs to learn.

Part of what Kohn is writing about in his piece is what I call "The Myth of Boot Straps." It's a common theme that runs throughout public debate these days, one that implies that everyone can just pull themselves up by their own boot straps if only they apply themselves, stick to it, work harder. It's part of the mythology of the "self made man"; that it's a sign of weakness to ask for help.

What people have forgotten in this neo-Calvinist ideology is that "to pull one's self up by one's bootstraps" is a metaphor for an impossible task. It's an absurdity. Everyone needs help. If you're stuck in the mud, no amount of pulling at your own bootstraps is going to get you out. Learning when and how to ask for help is a vital life skill, because mythology aside, no one does it on his own.

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What Lies At The Heart Of Every Great Community

In yesterday's post I mentioned that the kids in our summer program spent last week assembling our new outdoor furniture. We could have afforded to purchase the "velvet glove" service which would have meant the stuff arrived fully assembled, but where's the education in that?

Adults often have to hold things in place as the kids tighten the screws. It's a real collaborative process.

I've found that assemble-yourself furniture, such as the stuff you get from places like Ikea, is a sort of "just right" project for our cooperative preschool. Naturally, we can't just turn it over to the kids, but with an adult or two leading these Allen wrench (hex key) assemblies, kids as young as two are capable of making meaningful contributions to these real life projects.

Concentration, cooperation, and fine motor skills are challenged.

It never seems like it's going to work at first. We open the boxes and always seem to find more parts than you think you'll need, and the instructions look daunting, especially since there is often a crowd of kids trying to get there hands on things. 

The first step, however, is a classic preschool sorting project, checking the instructions to make sure you have all the parts, arranging everything by type and shape, comparing the thing you're holding your hand with the graphic on paper, counting out the various screws. These are skills and habits we acquire when we're young that we use throughout our lives.

Once this is accomplished, we know the names of the parts, and naming things always makes projects seem a little more do-able. For instance, the kids and parent-teachers started using the term "lozenges" to label one of the basic pieces required to assemble these chairs, stools, and tables. I don't know if that came from the instructions or their own innovative use of language, but it stuck. "I need a lozenge!" "I found a spot for a lozenge!"

We then find Step 1 in the instructions. It's really remarkable how often it's the kids who figure it out first. Then on to Step 2 and Step 3 and Step 4. This isn't for every child, but for some it comes naturally, this kind of real world puzzling.

Here we are fitting a "lozenge" into its proper place.

There's usually an ebb and flow at the workbench as kids take and lose interest. There are always a few who want to see at least one project through from beginning to end, however, puffing their chests in pride when the finished piece is on the ground.

The first piece we finished was this step stool, which we'll also use to replace our old, wobbly benches.

And, of course, once we finish building a piece, we have to take turns putting it through its paces.

Assembling furniture like this is different than much of what we do in our preschool in that it is a project with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end, much like working on puzzles. Over the course of our three days working on this project, at least six different parent-teachers took turns, and I suspect that at one time or another, every child lent a hand. One of the most challenging parts for the adults, however, was in not becoming too product-oriented, too focused on "getting it done." I kept reminding everyone: "It's not a race. If we only get one piece done today, that's fine."

One of the concerns, especially with our wood chip bestrewn outdoor play surface is that with all those little hands, and all those little agendas, we would wind up losing some of the small, but all-important screws. And it was a real concern given that, like with most of these kinds of products, we weren't provided any extras. I was impressed with how seriously the children, even the very youngest, took this responsibility, often clenching them in their fists so securely that their palms were sweating when we finally pried them open.

Real world projects like helping with preparing dinner or working on the car, in which children can make a meaningful (rather than a manufactured) contribution are great for building skills and confidence, of course, but most importantly, I think, it fosters that sense of pride and responsibility, that sense of true belonging that lies at the heart of every great community.

Note: I will be traveling to and around Australia and New Zealand for the next three weeks or so. I'm hoping to continue posting, but don't be alarmed if I miss a day here or there.

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How We Run Our Stations

I often say both to myself as well as aloud, "I don't know how they do it." I'm referring, of course, to all those teachers out there who don't work in cooperative preschools, and especially those with a play-based classroom that operates around the idea of "stations" or "centers."

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, be assured that I had no idea either until the first time I actually set foot in such a school. The set-up made such immediate sense to me, however, that I promptly enrolled my daughter for the following year. I don't know what I expected school to look like for two-year-olds, but the moment I saw how the Latona Pre-3's Cooperative Preschool classroom worked, a room featuring a half dozen stations -- blocks, sensory table, art, table toys, dramatic play, library -- with which the children were able to freely interact, or not, I knew we'd found our home.

Back in April, I wrote more philosophically about this classroom approach, but a reader asked me recently for tips of the "nuts and bolts" variety, especially when it comes to being the adult responsible for guiding or facilitating the "free play" without taking it over and, well, rendering it not so free. I should mention that I'm writing primarily about our indoor stations here, but all the same principles apply to our outdoor stations as well.

Since we're a cooperative, I have the benefit of anywhere from 5-12 assistant teachers, parent-teachers, in the classroom with me on any given day, depending on the age of the kids and the status of maternity leaves. Each of these assistant teachers, then, are assigned specific roles within the classroom on a rotating basis, most of which involve facilitating one of our stations, which I've prepared in advance. As our parent-teachers arrive, I try to give each one a quick briefing about how I imagine the children will choose to engage with the activities, a head's up about any typical behaviors for which to be on the lookout, and a tip or two about how they might want to extend the play should things either get extra exciting or lose momentum. I then try to always finish my instructions with a reminder to, above all else, "Let the kids make it their own."

For many parent-teachers, that's the hardest part: getting out of the way, dropping an adult agenda or fixed idea about how things ought to go. For instance, we all think we know what's going on when we find easels, paper, paint, brushes, and a bowl of fruit on the table. Of course, we're working on "still life" paintings, and that invitation is indeed implied in this particular collection of materials, although it is by no means the only invitation there. This is also an invitation to paint the fruit itself, to use the fruit to apply the paint to paper, to finger paint, to mix colors; it is an invitation to make art, but also to engage in a sensory exploration, scientific experiments, storytelling, or socializing. When we make the mistake of saying, "Oh look! Today we're painting pictures of fruit!" we are, in effect, withdrawing all those other invitations. No, instead I encourage our parent-teachers, if they must say something, to simply list the materials they see before them, giving them names, but not necessarily purposes, and just so long as the children do not endanger, molest, or otherwise inflict themselves on others, they are free to accept any and all invitations that appeal to their curiosity.

This doesn't mean that the teachers role, then, ought to be limited to merely standing back, keeping things tidy, the children safe, and the materials handy, although some of our parent-teachers chose to do it like that, and it's a perfectly fine way to facilitate the play. Some of us, however, are there to play with the kids. Naturally, we need to guard against taking over the play, but there is often a lot to be gained from a teacher who role models active, creative engagement. I like to narrate my own thought process as I perform my own experiments: "I wonder what will happen when I put this block here," "The rice is flowing through the top part of the funnel and coming out of this little hole -- if I put my finger here, it stops," "I'm putting all the red ones together." Usually, my goal is to get things going before stepping away, although many parent-teachers are quite skilled at continuing to play with the children, almost in the role of a slightly older, wiser playmate, not commanding the action, not yanking them out of their flow with questions, but rather being one of the features of the activity.

Others of us approach the task in a more hand's off, yet still fully engaged manner, carefully observing the children, then finding ways to assist or support them in accomplishing or discovering what they seem to be striving to accomplish or discover, often simply by engaging in what's sometimes referred to as "sportscasting" or narrating what you see unfolding before you: "Sally is making holes in the play dough with her thumb," "You are turning that puzzle piece around and around to see if it fits," "I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bears in your box." I often find these parents cheek-to-cheek with children, wondering and puzzling together.

Sometimes a parent-teacher finds herself all alone at her station either due to the natural ebb and flow of free play or because the invitation is simply not enticing enough on this particular day. The temptation, often, is to seek to liven things up, perhaps by adding bells and whistles or by becoming more overt in re-issuing said invitation, and that's all well and good. Others, however, recognize that they are now the proprietors of a calm, quiet oasis, a place for a child or two to take a break from the action, a valuable thing sometimes in a bustling place like ours.

There are times, however, when this ebb and flow are anticipated parts of an activity. For example, when we play with ice in the sensory table, there is usually an initial surge, then as fingers grow numb, so does the enthusiasm. That's the moment when the parent-teacher will introduce our box of gloves. As the interest in that dies down, we break out the rock salt to sprinkle on the ice, an activity that accelerates the melting process. As the salt burrows holes in the ice we bring out the pipettes and liquid water color that can then inject into the holes, filling the ice with ribbons of color. As our play time grows short, our sensory table has become a pool of colored liquid, rainbow icebergs, and undissolved rock salt, having passed through, along with the kids, a wide variety of stages and phases.

Most of our stations are of the open-ended variety, although every now and then we'll take on a project with a goal. For instance, last week our workbench station was engaged all week in assembling our new outdoor furniture, which involved following instructions, puzzling things together, and using Allen wrenches to tighten lots of screws. In that case, my instruction to the parent-teacher was, "Just start building the stuff and as kids drop by to see what's going on, include them." I often think of these kinds of stations the way I think of parents including their children in preparing dinner or working on the car out in the garage: real participation in real projects.

I suppose the way non-cooperative teachers handle all this is to either offer fewer stations at any given time or to let some of them sort of "run" themselves, and I'm sure that works out just fine, but I find I've become really quite reliant upon having all those extra adults in the room with me, working to make their station the best it can be. Most of all, I think, I enjoy how these stations, these invitations to play, so often take on part of the personality of the parent-teacher involved. We often leave many of our stations the same for more than a single day. For instance I'll set up the same collection of blocks and toys from one day to the next, or the sensory table will contain coffee beans all week, or we'll continue working on the same glue collage day-after-day. But that hardly means they are the same activities. For one thing, the children have the opportunity to continue building upon what they learned the day before, but an inevitable part of the difference comes from what the parent-teacher brings to their role as facilitator and guide, because there are as many ways to do that as there are teachers.

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Why The Rocks Always Fall Down

It is well known that the attainment of a Paretian optimum requires the simultaneous fulfillment of all the optimum conditions. The general theorem for the second best optimum states that if there is introduced into a general equilibrium system a constraint which prevents the attainment of one of the Paretian conditions, the other Paretian conditions, although still attainable, are, in general, no longer desirable. In other words, given that one of the Paretian optimum conditions cannot be fulfilled, then an optimum situation can be achieved only by departing from all the other Paretian conditions. The optimum situation finally attained may be termed a second best optimum because it is achieved subject to a constraint which, by definition, prevents the attainment of a Paretian optimum.  ~Grand Theory of the Second Best (R.G. Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster)

There is a crazy-man artist who hangs-out in the Center of the Universe named Fawzi "Benny" Benhariz. This guy's artform is to balance rocks. Some of his pieces are staggering in their apparent impossibility, large stones, perched atop one another on points no larger than the tip of your pinky, balanced there where even the slightest breeze could topple them over. I swear it looks like a magic trick, surreal and beautiful and as close to perfection as a human being can get. 

But sooner or later the rocks always fall. Or at least I assume they do because of what I know about the world: perfection will not be abided. Something always happens to even the most wonderfully balanced of systems, and when rocks fall, especially big rocks balanced precariously between a well-traversed city sidewalk and a well-traveled city street, they can result in damaging or injurious consequences, which is why the city wants Benny to get a street use permit that would require carrying liability insurance, something beyond the reach of a homeless guy. So he's become a sort of outlaw artist, loved and hated, and not only because he points out by his very existence, there on the streets of Fremont, that the rocks will always come tumbling down.

In 1956, a pair of economists, one Canadian, the other Australian, published a paper in which they detailed their Grand Theory of the Second Best. Essentially, they proved that in any theoretical economic system, if even one of the "optimal conditions" cannot be fully met for whatever reason, then it makes moot all the other conditions required to balance the system. In other words, when it comes to making economic theories work in the real world, it's all or nothing. Close enough doesn't count, and according to the theory, if one persists in still trying attain those other conditions, one can in fact create disastrous consequences. Indeed, the second best option probably requires none of the conditions that would have been required to fulfill the first option, sending everyone, in a rational world, back to the drawing board.

I'm not an economist, of course, and I have no doubt that there's a lot more to this idea given that the authors expanded it into an entire book (which I've not read), but I see the basic principle at work every day even in areas apparently unrelated to economics, so I'm inclined to accept its essential truth. It's why fundamentalist dogma of any sort (economic, religious, educational) always becomes dangerous when it comes into contact with reality and why, when faced with the real world, advocates, unwilling to give up on their other optimal conditions, have to instead resort to increasingly draconian measures to keep the faithful in line, usually with the excuse that this is just a phase through which we must pass in order to get to their utopic promised land.

And that brings me to the rote-based education reform types (e.g., Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, former superintendent of Washington DC schools Michelle Rhee, education dilettante Bill Gates) who believe that if they can only inject public education with the kind of systematic rigor, carrot-and-stick accountability, and bottom-line focus of their neoliberal "Paretian optimum," then, by the magic of the "invisible hand," our schools will invariably tend toward perfection. They are undaunted by the fact that the real world keeps right on toppling their rocks, crushing toes and denting cars, because, they tell us, "this is just a necessary phase." We'll see they were right when we finally get to the other side. In the meantime, we're going broke paying doctors and mechanics, with no real hope of meaningful reform.

From the moment a child is born into our bright, cold, noisy world, she knows it is an imperfect place. I know it. You know it. And Bill Gates knows it. And all of us, given that sure knowledge, seek the next best thing, which is to get as close as we can to our ideals, even while knowing that perfection is impossible. The perfectionists among us bang their heads against the wall, but the rest of us scramble and scheme and shrug our way toward a "good enough" or "as good as it gets." And we know to append that with "for now," because we also know that everything important requires constant re-balancing, re-organizing, re-assessing: that the ever-changing world will upset our best laid plans, unsettle what we thought was settled, and break what we've recently mended. We get up each morning and wrestle life back into shape, knowing we'll have to do it again the next day and the next. We have all always known this.

Yet there are those who persist in devising "general equilibrium systems," which are often fascinating, even inspirational, but that are mere thought experiments designed for the two-dimensional world of paper. In the proving ground of the 3D world, however, they fall apart the moment it becomes clear that  the "optimal conditions" cannot be met. Their tendency is to persist in balancing those rocks, striving to come as close as possible to the ideal, but they do so at inevitable peril because the Grand Theory of the Second Best always comes 'round to bite everyone in the ass.

When Benny, in the moments when he isn't drunk or throwing rocks at people in fits of rage, talks about his art he says he is "playing with rocks." I've seen him playing with them, a true tinkerer: gently, carefully, focused, a man who is fully present. There is no system or dogma that can balance a rock. Only a human at play can do that. 

I do appreciate that there is right now such a focus on education in America, and indeed much of the rest of the world. The talk is of reform, of progress, of improvement. This is the conversation to be having, but not because our current system is a bad one, but rather that it's been neglected for too long, and from what we all know about systems, no matter how beautiful they look on paper, someone needs to be constantly messing with them, playing with them, tinkering with them, or the whole rock pile comes toppling down. All that the Duncans, Rhees, and Gateses are trying to do is replace one ultimately fallible human system with another, their version made particularly dangerous by their "invisible hand" fundamentalism.

Education reform is something that should be happening every day, in every classroom, as teachers, parents, administrators, and students play together, wrestling their world into a newly, temporarily balanced system. Then we do it again tomorrow. That's how we make the best schools possible, not with an invisible hand moved by pretty formulas that live only in the fantasy world of thought experiment, but with our own hands, our many hands, the only ones capable of balancing those damn rocks.

          Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,

          Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night, 

          Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day 

          And with thy bloody and invisible hand 

          Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond 

          Which keeps me pale. 

          Light thickens, and the crow 

          Makes wing to th' rooky wood. 

          Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; 

          While night's black agents to their preys do rouse. 

          Thou marvel'st at my words: but hold thee still. 

          Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill. 

          So, prithee, go with me.  ~Shakespeare (Macbeth)

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The Future Belongs To The Tool User

I've written before about our two-level sand pit with the cast iron hand water pump installed at the top, a wonderful place to play with both sand and water, and an object lesson in erosion. Before the summer session started, it was the responsibility of the parents in our 5's program to give up a couple of hours on a Saturday to help spruce up the place. The lower level of our sand pit had been overflowing for some time, while the cistern below the water pump in the upper level was almost entirely exposed. We were faced with the choice of purchasing more sand or hauling sand from the bottom back up to the top. Since cooperatives are notoriously short on money and long on labor, we elected to haul.

In hindsight, we probably should have sent a couple people home for their wheelbarrows, but we settled on using a wagon for the task, which is really a poor substitute. The truth is that we find ourselves using wagons instead of wheelbarrows several times a year, so after watching those poor parents work so hard and so long to move so much sand uphill, knowing all the while that it was destined to come back down, I made a point of acquiring an actual wheelbarrow for the school.

In the meantime, between adult projects, the kids get to use it for their own projects.

As with any new tool we introduce to the kids, we're now witnessing a lot of clumsy first attempts involving challenges with steering, frequent dumping of the entire load, and experiments with weight distribution and navigating a less than ideal terrain. No one is "helping" the kids. No one is "teaching" the kids. No one is "instructing" or "coaching" or doing anything other than pointing out potential safety matters, yet the kids are learning how to use the wheelbarrow. It's what humans do.

Humans are driven to use tools to imprint their vision on the world. Almost everything we make or do involves, at some level, a tool, the mastery of which requires practice. In preschool, we need ample opportunities to sort of mess around with a wide variety of tools like wire, scissors, hole punches, hammers, paint brushes, saws, glue guns, pencils, screwdrivers, knives, and paper clips. We need to get our hands on brooms, clothes pins, drills, shovels, rulers, pulleys, trowels, staplers, rakes, and wheelbarrows. As humans we have being alone and we have talking face-to-face; for everything else we use tools. And with every tool we learn to use, a new part of the world opens to us.

The future belongs to the tool user. The more tools we can use, the better that future will be.

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I Wish We Could Tell The Truth

I wish we could tell the truth about teaching, that it's really the simplest, most natural thing in the world.

I've had these large pieces of non-slip material you put under rugs to hold them in place for quite some time. I was saving it mostly because I had a lot of it, which is one of my primary criteria for saving anything. I've had a vague idea of using it at the art table, but figured, as I often do, to see if the kids had any better ideas of how to use it.

I wish our profession wasn't in a fight for its life against deep pocket foes with a political or economic agenda, because this simplicity is really its beauty and joy.

Our main idea on the first day was to play under it together, making a kind of tent into which to crowd ourselves.

We've learned to protect ourselves with an armor of jargon like every other profession as a way to sell ourselves in this sell-or-be-sold world.

Cooperating enough to fit all of our bodies under there isn't easy when you're two.

But teaching is not every other profession. I'm not even sure it is a profession as much as a calling. Because when we strip all that "professionalism" away, we see that the core of teaching is to love the children: every one of us knows that. And when you love, you listen. That's what teachers do.

It's especially hard when one of those bodies is that of a grown man, taking up far too much of the space, but we managed.

It's when we listen with our ears and eyes and hearts that we can access not only their genius, but our own.

Teaching greatness is not a rare thing, I don't think, but it's hard for others to see because it takes place in intimate moments when we're down on our knees, face to face with the children, ears, eyes, and heart wide open. And then to try to talk about it after the fact, to try to satisfy the demands to make learning "transparent," we wind up wraping the moments of genius in words that detail techniques and strategies that describe only the surface manifestation of what happened because to say, "We connected," sounds too hippy dippy and namby pamby.

Teaching is not a complicated thing, but it does take practice, lots of it, every day with lots of different kids, and even after ten or twenty years there's still a new thing to learn every day, its profundity often lost in its simplicity.

When we play with children, we engage them as they engage with their passions and curiosities, and when we listen with our whole selves, we notice instantly when that moment comes around, and then it's just a simple matter of making a statement of fact, or asking just the right question, or sitting quietly in the knowledge that that is what this child needs right now. How much better that is than to assume they are all ready for this particular knowledge at this particular time delivered in this particular manner by virtue of being more or less the same age -- what Ken Robinson calls their "manufacture date" -- then bang heads against the wall in frustration that many of them just don't get it.

To be a "gifted" teacher is really just possessing the knowledge that children are people and then proceeding to treat them like people, loving them, and listening.

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