He Didn't Want Me To Feel Unloved

I've known this boy for two years. He didn't want his mom to leave today, although she had left him at school hundreds of time before. He stood at the top of the stairs at the schoolyard gate, yelling after her, crying through the slats, saying, "Come back! I want to go with you!"

I sat beside him as he yelled. I said, "You want your mom to come back."

"Yes, I want her to come back." He cried and yelled some more.

"I think she has some things she has to do."

"She does," he answered. We had both heard her tell him that as she walked away. He cried and yelled some more.

When this happens with younger, less experienced children, I remind them of when mom will come back, but I knew that he already knew this. Instead, I said something else that was true, "I wish your mom would come back."

"Me too," he replied. He cried and yelled some more.

"I'm going to miss her."

"Me too," he replied.

"I wonder why."

"Because I love her."

"I love my mommy, too."

He started to cry and yell again, then stopped to tell me, "And I love my daddy."

I nodded, trying to wordlessly convey the idea that I was right there with him.

He was looking at me, tears still hanging from his lower lids, fingers still curled through the gate slats. He was thinking something through. Finally, he said, "I love you, too . . . " as if wanting to make sure I didn't feel left out.

I answered, "I love you," a little too eagerly, I guess, because he hadn't finished his thought.

". . . but not as much as Mommy or Daddy." Then he stopped again, perhaps taking a moment to absorb what I'd said on top of his words. In any case, after a moment, he let go of the gate and stepped toward me, "I actually love you the same." He didn't want me to feel unloved.

I said, "I'd like to play a story with you."

And he answered, "Me too."

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What Love Is

Sympathy is when you pity a man carrying a heavy burden.

Empathy is when you feel his burden in your own back and legs.

Love is when you help him carry it.

And God is Love.

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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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Intelligence Is Not Enough

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education.  The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleagues will produce a group of closed-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, brethren! Be careful, teachers!  ~MLK

It's a small wonder, a miracle indeed, when they discover an aspect of "we," often at first stumbling across it like over a super cool toy left in the middle of the living room floor.

Even if it's as simple as saying, "We are going up here now." Even that gives me confidence about our future.

The ones with siblings just a little bit older tend to learn it first, the joy of connecting with another child, and find their classmates a little slow sometimes. These are the ones who might take the lead, practicing the sentences that begin with the invitation of "Let's . . .," working their human power to bring themselves together with those other suns around whom the universe so recently revolved.

This is the work we're here to do: to make me into we, because otherwise it makes no sense. 

There are things, so many things, over which to disagree. It's hard enough learning how to do that without having to also overcome closed minds that reject the universal language of objective "scientific" truth in favor of illogical propaganda. The same is to be said for that set of moral values we must share if we're to make this democracy work, let alone our day-to-day lives: non-violence, equal opportunity, fairness, the values without which the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness simply cannot be fulfilled.

It's true we attempt in school to transmit our "accumulated knowledge," but without also working diligently to transmit the "accumulated experience of social living," we risk creating sociopathic monsters, people rendered less than human by their inability to join us in our work of making me into we, instead seeking to exploit, to use up, to devour their fellow man in a dangerously misguided attempt to fill up that abyss that opens inside each of us when we stand all alone in the world. If we don't fill it with love, it becomes a vacuum for wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.

When a boy and a girl and a tiger find themselves together and one of them says, "Let's go up there," and then they all pick up, still together, and go up there, sitting once more together I see the work of we being done and I don't worry about our world so much.

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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Our Magnificent Boredom

Last week was a gift here in the Pacific Northwest. Warm, bright blue skies, lilacs in fragrant bloom, a light breeze: an early week of summer, one the likes of which we didn't experience until mid-August last year. 

Our 5's class normally spends a little over half its days outdoors. Last week we elected to spend our entire days out there. No one appreciates a sunny day like us mildewy Northwesterners. When I worked at the chamber of commerce, the offices would more or less clear out around lunchtime and stay that way on days like these, most of us claiming an afternoon meeting out of the office that would run late enough that it didn't make sense to return to the office. Of course, we all knew where everyone was, out there in a patch of sun, and we all let one another off with their little lies without even a wink.

Lazy joy! The running around was half-hearted. None of us wanted to let one moment of our day go by unappreciated, so we slowed way down, all of us. We were together in shorts and sun dresses for the first time in months, feeling almost scanty with our bare arms, legs and toes, Huckleberry runaways, with dirt under out nails, a bit of something in our hair, and the often clearer perspective of youth. 

Oh, we're the ones who know how to play in the damp, windy cold: that we do with aplomb for most of the year. But days like these: they play with us. There was Cooper over there, in a chair, his journal on a knee as he drew a detailed illustration with ballpoint pen, feet rested on an edge of the table, his head in the sun, while his body rustled with dappled shade. 

There were none of those wild good guy-bad guy games we've had so much of this year, while around the workbench was a casual congress of chatty machine dismantlers, taking their time removing parts that we would later use to repair our robot. Another group gathered in the shade with large paint brushes and rollers -- house painting tools -- methodically making a pastel masterpiece of the door that most recently hung on our new play house. There was much discussion, but no resolution, about whether or not it would go back on its hinges or just serve as a piece of art. The day gave us permission to leave the question hanging, showing us the folly of our usual rah-rah urgency to resolve things.

People who live in places where almost every day is like this simply cannot fathom the giddy happiness we people of the dark and damp experience when we get even one day like this, let alone a run of them in mid-April. We got sunburned. We purchased new sunglasses and promptly lost them. We continued to wear our shorts and sandals even when temperatures dropped down into the low 50's at night.

The nation of Bhutan uses a measurement it calls Gross National Happiness (GNH) to assess it's national well-being. I love this idea, even while recognizing the challenge of really measuring what we call happiness. But I sure love that Bhutan seriously tries, basing its government's 5-year planning upon certain psychological and social indicators to try to get at the overall "satisfaction" of the people. Critics complain that it's an inexact, subjective kind of measure, too reliant upon the vagaries of self-reported happiness, and the fact that it can never be used to accurately compare nation-with-nation given cultural differences, expectations, and definitions of happiness. If Seattle were surveyed last week, our self-reported happiness would indeed be through the roof.

Of course, who cares, right? If I'm self-reporting as "happy," does it matter if my happiness can be judged against the happiness of another, be they my countryman or not? If I'm not so happy, I'm not so happy. If I'm happy, I'm happy. It's not a comparative statement, but always a purely subjective one. GNP will always be an averaging of subjective reporting, data created by unique individuals, each of whom has her own criteria, some of whom are happier on a sunny day than those who live in places where it's commonplace.

It's not that the clouds and rain depress us, I don't think, at least those of us who've been here for a long time, but rather that when sky opens, clean, so blue it hurts your eyes to look at it, inviting us to expose our pasty skin, we're all simultaneously filled with an appreciation, a gratitude, and even a love. And that's what lies at the bottom of all happiness. When the sun shines in Seattle, we don't have to count our blessings, they count us. There is no better place to be than amongst these truly happy people, moving slowly, appreciating every blessed moment.

Up under the cedars, we wove a plank between our two swings, inventing a kind of front porch swing upon which we idled for awhile side-by-side. We hung there, barely swinging, chanting together, "Blah, blah, blah, blah. This is boring. Blah, blah, blah, blah. This is boring . . ." loving ourselves and one another and our magnificent boredom.

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The Only Religion

One word that sums up the basis of all good conduct . . . loving kindness. Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. ~Confucius 

Rex was insistent we read his book at circle time. It was entitled "The Golden Rule." It probably had a subtitle and an author, although I took no notice. What compelled me was his insistence. There was something here that he really wanted to share with all of us.

We've all been there, of course, full of epiphany, overfull, giddy to share something that has moved us mind, heart, and soul.  

The Golden Rule is really the only religion. This is the great truth found at the heart of all spiritual life when it comes to our relationships with the other people. And as far as I can tell, relationships are the only reason we're here.

Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. ~The Buddah

I asked, "Rex, is this your show-and-tell item?"

"No, it's a book. Read it."

In his class we usually vote on which book we're going to read each day. Sometimes you don't get to read the book you want. I said, "I have some other books too. We can vote on it."

"No, we have to read it."

In everything do to others as you would have them do to you. ~Jesus

We have a list of rules on our wall at school, dozens of them, all of which we, as a democracy of children, have agreed to by affirming that none of us want these things done to us. "Does anyone want to be hit?" I ask. When no one speaks up in favor of being hit, I say, "Then we agree. That's a rule."

"I can tell you really want to share this book with everyone, Rex. We'll read it at circle time."

Rex was satisfied with that.

What is hateful to you, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. ~Hillel

Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baha'i Faith, Zoroastrianism, and every other religion you can name: the simple message of the Golden Rule stands at its core. 

When children break one of our rules, after reminding them of the agreement they've made with their friends, once some of the emotion of the moment has faded and we've found a better solution, I more often than not calmly ask, usually smiling with an acknowledgement that I'm asking a question to which we all know the answer, "Is it okay for people to hit you?" "Do you like it when people take your things?" And when they reply "No," usually smiling themselves at the ridiculousness one finds in answering such obvious questions, I state the simple fact, "No body does." Then we sit there nodding for a moment, silently understanding that we're all in this together.

Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. ~The Prophet Mohammed

Rex was an evangelist for a day, a proper prophet, bringing us the good word. We read his book together and discussed what it meant. He kept watching the faces of his classmates as I read, watching, I suppose for them to show signs of their own enlightenment. What a gift he brought to us.

Then, when the book was done, we sat there nodding silently in the ancient wisdom: the simple, sweet, perfect heart of humanity.

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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It's Just Life Itself

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey

For those of you who are unaware of John Dewey, he was, among other things, an educational reformer working during the early part of the 19th century and who can rightly be called the grandfather of our current notions on progressive education. He was born and raised during the Victorian era, a time not unlike our own, when the prevailing ideas about education were that children are simply incomplete adults who needed to be stuffed with knowledge, forced into stillness and silence, and "manufactured" into little adults ready to go to work. If you've ever used the terms "hands-on education" or "experiential education" (the actual slogan of my daughter's school here in Seattle), you're quoting Dewey.

The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences. ~John Dewey

A typical day at Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool begins with the children arriving with their parents, washing their hands, then freely playing, or not, at any one of the "stations" I've prepared for them. We've given them names like "Blocks" and "Art" and "Drama" and "Table Toys" and "Sensory" and "Do-It-Yourself" and depending on what those things are, there can be as many as a half dozen more mini-stations in the form of special toys or objects I've planted around the room for children to discover. Our outdoor classroom functions the same way.

But, of course, as much as this description sometimes makes it sound like the kids get to do anything they want with the things and people they find at those stations, it's not free play in the sense that anything goes. For one thing, we're already pretty tightly hemmed in by the rules the children have created for themselves. If anything, we adults must strive to temper their enforcement, which is in and of itself a refreshing role for adults to be playing in the lives of young children. And as much as I resent it, there are a number of insurance company imposed "safety rules" that we can't circumvent without leaving us legally exposed.

But we teachers, of course, have a more important role than that imposed on us by mere rules. The main reason we have a name for each of those stations isn't for the kids, but rather so our parent-teachers know where I expect them to spend their morning, guiding and facilitating the "free play." If necessary, I typically start off each of the adults with a brief description of what I envision transpiring at their station, more often than not finishing with the advice, however, to "let the children make it their own," which is why so many of our art station projects, for example, turn into finger painting.

I approve of Dewey's definition of the role of teacher as "facilitator" and "guide." These are, importantly, open-ended terms, left for teachers to adapt to suit the child, the circumstances, and our own personalities.

Some of our parent-teachers tend to interpret their teaching role to mean they get to play with the kids, usually in a role that looks and feels like an older, wiser, more responsible child. More often than not, I find them "playing stories" with the kids, using the materials at hand to facilitate imaginative, inclusive games, that often grow to take over the room, but just as often contain themselves to small group in a corner going deeply into their ideas.

Others tend more toward the role of guide, often huddling up cheek-to-cheek with a child or two, asking questions about what they see happening, wondering aloud about the physics or the social dynamics or the consequences, not imposing their adult views, but rather role modeling inquisitiveness and thoughtfulness by asking aloud the questions one might logically ask oneself.

Other parent-teachers tend to say little, but fulfill their role of facilitator and guide through physical touch, by placing a hand on a shoulder, or balancing children on their loving laps. Some sprinkle the children's play with large, descriptive vocabulary words that may or may not sink in this time, but eventually will, expanding both understanding and the ability to communicate that understanding when the time is ripe. And all of us seek above all to express warmth to the children around us, always, whatever is happening, even when we forget and slip back into our Victorian habits of bossing around the "unformed humans," letting them know that we love them, that they can learn what they want to learn, be who they want to be, and that we are all in this together.

I'm expressing an ideal here, of course. Some days are better than others, but honestly, most days, most of the time, as the children freely play, we are there with them, warmly, as collaborators and partners in learning. Not telling them, but guiding them. Not controlling, but facilitating. Letting children get their hands-on, to have real experiences with materials and the other people, and to create an environment in which they can independently discover meaning for themselves.

People sometimes ask me if it's hard to work with all those "amateur" teachers. The short answer is "no." I find that each and every one of our parent-teachers already knows everything they need to know to be loving facilitators and guides, the only training any of us really need is a kind of "un-training" to help us overcome the bad habits that come from living in a neo-Victorian era.

This is what school looks like at Woodland Park. This is what teaching looks like. It's nothing special really; it's just life itself.

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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