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.

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Kids In The House: Cooperative Preschools

Despite having been around for nearly a century, the cooperative model of early childhood education has retained a sort of underground status. The first cooperatives of which I'm aware sprung up around the turn of the last century, reaching their heyday during the 1940s and 50s as a kind of middle class housewives revolution, one that found mothers creating schools they ran from their homes. These school often rotated from home to home, with families taking turns hosting their school. I imagine that part of the motivation was a dissatisfaction with the quality or quantity of early childhood options, but I'm guessing the real driving force was a desire for connection with other families in a world that was becoming increasingly fragmented and decentralized as the middle classes increasingly moved to the suburbs where the flip side of lower prices and greater space was a sense of isolation from a larger society. 

That, to me, remains one of the greatest benefits of the cooperative model: at our heart we are about creating community. Cooperatives are thriving today, with thousands of schools across the US, Canada and elsewhere, but only in pockets. For instance, the Pacific Northwest, Coastal California and the New England states seem to be home to thriving cooperative communities. From what I hear from readers, however, there remains large portions of our country in which cooperatives don't appear to be an option. Awhile back, prompted by readers, I wrote a five part series entitled "Cooperative Nuts & Bolts" (I would encourage you to read the posts from the bottom up) in which I tried to provide tips, ideas, and background that I thought folks might find useful in starting their own cooperatives, which is, after all, where new cooperatives come from: parents getting together and deciding this is what they want to do with and for their children.

If you don't have time to read the five parter, you might want to check out my go-to post when I want to inform people about how cooperatives work, entitled, appropriately, How Our Cooperative Preschool Works. And if you have even less time, below is a short video I made with Kids In The House on the topic of starting a cooperative preschool:
 

If you liked the video, you can find not only the rest of my videos (search for "Tom Hobson"), but also some 8000 more two minute parenting videos at Kids In The House.

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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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"I'm Not Talking About Poppin' Tags"

Sometimes I sort of overwhelm some kids. Not me, per se, but rather the idea of me, Teacher Tom. Their parents say they love school, that they sing our songs in the car, and talk about me at home "all the time," but at school they seem to prefer me at a distance. Many years ago, Sammy was like that, a 2-year-old who would flee to another corner of the room any time she found herself too close for comfort. I've written before about my basic approach to these kids, but the bottom line is that there's no rush, it's a long school year, it's a long three or four years at Woodland Park, it's a long life: we'll get there when we get there. The last thing they need is Teacher Tom getting in their face.

I recently completely outraged my teenaged daughter by finally discovering local artist Macklemore's hit song entitled Thrift Shop, you know, the one with the line "I'm gonna pop some tags," about shopping in thrift stores and wearing "your granddad's clothes." It's not that I knew about the song that got under her skin, but rather that I found out about it "at least a year" after it was cool. "If people your age know about a song, you know it's over, Dad. It's not even one of his best songs. I'll bet even your preschoolers are singing it."

And sure enough, she was right. Only a few days later, at a parent meeting, we all learned about one of our two-year-old classmates who could sing the whole thing a cappella. When the kids won't talk to me, I make sure to listen to their parents, trying to find anything I can use to start making a connection, and I was hoping that Thrift Shop was exactly the hook for which I was looking.

This girl tends to hang out with her mom at school (we're a cooperative, so that's always an option), using her as a sort of base from which to make forays into the classroom. I see and hear her talking with her mom and other adults, and she even has a reputation for being chatty when I'm not in the area. For past week or so, as she hides from me behind her mom's legs, burying her face, I've been singing the Thrift Shop chorus, not at her or to her, but just the way I sing all sorts of songs at school. There have been a few moments of recognition where she would suddenly forget herself and lock eyes with me before remembering to go back to avoiding me. That's enough for now: it's a long life.

Yesterday, I assigned her mom the job of managing our Stomp Rockets activity at the bottom of the hill, while her daughter elected to stay at the top of the hill, maybe because it attracted such a throng and she was more uncomfortable with the crowd than being on her own at preschool.  She was concentrating on climbing up our A-frame ladders and walking across the "monkey bar bridge." I casually positioned myself near her and started singing, "I'm gonna pop some tags. Got twenty dollars in my pocket . . ." She ignored me, picking her way across the climber, so I moved a little closer. I said, as if to no one in particular, "Tomorrow I think I'm gonna wear your granddad's clothes."

Without looking at me, and without stopping, she said, as if picking up right in the middle of a conversation, "I'm not talking about poppin' tags. I'm talking about going to the aquarium and we saw scuba divers feeding fish . . ." And she was off on a story with no punctuation.

As she spoke, she kept moving, climbing, repeating patterns, all the while keeping up her story that was not about poppin' tags. At first she stuck with climbing the ladder, crossing the bridge, climbing down the other side, repeating it over and over as I followed her from the ground, listening to this one-sided conversation, a stream-of-consciousness rant worthy of James Joyce. When another child joined her on the climber, without a hitch she looped our wooden pony into the cycle, climbing on its back, shaking her body as if galloping, then returning to the climber, still always telling me her story that was about everything, it seemed, except poppin' tags. When another child, while she was busy in another part of her circuit knocked over the pony, she smoothly switched to climbing on then off one of our wooden boxes, incorporating it into her movement pattern that seemed to be one with her story.

Constantly in motion, constantly climbing, constantly talking, she told me her story that was not about poppin' tags. It was as if she had been telling me this story for a long time, perhaps since the day she met me, and now I was finally able to hear it. 

(Please note, I've written this entire post without once referencing the emotion called shyness.)

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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!

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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.

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Making A Mess

We've always painted at our easels on the last day of school. I've assumed it was because we always start our school year with easel painting and the two sessions served as symbolic bookends, or maybe a framing story, for the year, something for me to know. This year, however, something popped from my mouth as I talked to the parent of a child ready to move on to kindergarten, something I'd not thought about before, or perhaps that I'd simply avoided thinking about it: "Unless you do it at home, this might be the last time she sees easels painting."

The words, as I heard myself say them, hit me like a physical weight. I stood there watching her paint the arcs of a rainbow. There is painting in kindergarten, of course. My daughter Josephine brought home paintings she'd made in her twice weekly session with her school's art specialist. In fact, she produced more paintings during her kindergarten year, I think, than she had the previous year in preschool. That's because they made all the kids go to the art room together and painting, usually on a theme, or experimenting with a technique, was the only choice. In her preschool, like in our preschool, the kids only painted if they were moved to paint, and when given a choice it was usually dramatic play for Josephine.

Next fall when I run into my former students, the ones not painting at easels in kindergarten, most of them will enthuse about how much they love their new school, about their new teacher, about their new friends or playground or lunchroom. Sometimes they come back to the preschool for a visit and I'll ask them, "Does this place look as big as you remember it?" and they'll usually answer, "No, Teacher Tom, it seems really small." And they might even affect a bit of the too-cool-for-school attitude, but it will only last until they get their hands in the sensory table, their feet in the sandpit, or their fingers around a paint brush.

During our last week of school we explored a technique I learned from Josephine's elementary school art teacher. The idea was to experiment with the solubility of oil pastels by first drawing something, then dipping cotton balls in baby oil which you then use to blend and smear your colors around the paper. We've been doing this at Woodland Park for awhile now. Our finished paintings never look anything like the ones that hung gallery-style in the hallway of my daughter's school. I'd asked the art teacher about the technique because the results had been so striking, and yes, we always manage to produce one or two that achieve the ghostly translucence of those kindergarten paintings, but most turn out looking like oily chicken scratches. No, our baby oil-pastel paintings are definitely about the process, one that usually involves the excessive use of oil, slippery surfaces, slippery skin, and the overwhelming scent of an infant's nursery, an odor that Calliope and Henry's mom Megan told me "is not a selling point" of the activity.

In other words, what we do, in the language of most kindergarten art teachers, is "make a mess." If we make "paintings" that's often just what we've agreed to call whatever's leftover when the kids are done. I've sometimes sent the paper towels used for "clean up" home with the kids because that's all that remained of their exploration.

I really don't mean this as a criticism, but the whole idea of "making a mess" as something to avoid becomes a more prominent part in children's school lives as they move away from our preschool. For some children, this is a huge loss, while for others, the ones who have always been averse to getting messy, like my own daughter, it might seem like it's not such a big deal. I would assert, however, that it impoverishes education for everyone. I mean if nothing else, there's a lot to be learned from watching others make a mess, or from having to summon up the courage to give something that looks fun a go. Every now and then a parent will suggest that I have prejudices about kids who don't like to get messy. I don't think that's true, but even if it is, certainly I serve as a kind of counterbalance to the majority of adults in a child's life who have prejudices about kids who like getting messy.

Making a mess means cleaning up. Listen, I get that. I just spent most of last Saturday with a team of parents cleaning up our outdoor classroom. A couple parents spent two hours just picking garbage (bits of paper, broken toys, snarls of twine, etc.) from the wood chips, a project that could have gone on for hours longer. I've always said that an ideal preschool classroom would be one with a large drain in the middle of the floor and access to a high pressure hose nozzle. I understand that as a teacher in a cooperative, I'm blessed with plenty of adults who can help with the messes we make: I'm sure I would have a different attitude if I, on a day-to-day basis, was solely responsible for dealing with it. 

When Josephine was in kindergarten her teacher Janet started asking me to "bring in" projects for the kids. For instance, she wanted me to temporarily install the cast iron water pump on the playground. The kids, of course, got wet and muddy. As we helped towel them off, I said to Janet, "You should permanently install a pump," to which she replied, "I'd love to, but the parents would complain about the kids coming home messy."

"Aren't they going to complain about today?"

She laughed, "Yes, but today I can blame you," and she did.

I know a lot of schools have eliminated sandpits because they don't like how much of it winds up on the floors and in the carpets. It's a legitimate concern. When we went to move our new rug earlier this year in order to wax the linoleum floors underneath, it was so heavy with sand despite being vacuumed twice a day, that it had to be disassembled, carpet tile by carpet tile, beaten clean, then reassembled.

So yes, I understand the ethic of avoiding messes in elementary school, even while I can bemoan what is lost when we defer to this adult agenda. I mean, the kids don't care if there are bits of paper mixed in with the wood chips.

But I worry that it's not just "dirty" messes we start to avoid. Another thing kindergarteners won't see in school are glue guns or homemade ladders or concrete slides. We also have to avoid the "mess" of everyday bumps and bruises, the kinds that make us cry and bleed and from which we learn so much about ourselves and about risk-taking.

I worry that this ethic of not making messes spills over to include social, emotional, and political messes as well, the kinds that make us cry and rave and from which we likewise learn so much.

It was a joy to watch the youngest kids, happily painting themselves up to the elbows, making a canvas of their own bodies, exploring, learning, making a mess, knowing that it will be two or more years before they will have to give it up. It was a crushingly sad to watch the oldest kids, industriously working together with the cast iron water pump and shovels, filling their shoes and pant cuffs and hair with sand, making a mess, not knowing that, for some of them at least, this will be the last time for school to be like this.

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