High Heels

When our daughter Josephine was 12, she and I decided it was time to give her bedroom a good purging, with the main objective being to get rid of "toys." To expedite things, I emptied all her shelves, drawers, boxes and bins onto the floor, making a pile of everything that I felt she'd outgrown. I then called her in with the idea being that we'd turn that into three piles: keep, pitch, store in the basement. She took one look at the pile and said, "Let's get rid of all of it."

I was stunned. "Don't you want to at least keep this? No? How about this?" Impressed by her lack of sentimentality about stuff, it was then left to me to play a new game of sorting into four piles: save as a keepsake, donate to Goodwill, take to the school.

For the most part, this explains why Woodland Park has such a large collection of shoes, the core of which I've augmented over the years with interesting cast-offs from other sources. We've mainly used them over the years for purposes of counting, matching, and sorting, as well as to use as painting tools -- the soles make interesting prints. We have sneakers, and wooden clogs, and soccer cleats, and tap shoes in there as well, but much of the stash are of the fancy, girly variety, and when I pulled them out last week to put with our day-to-day dress up clothing, it was a set of cheap, plastic "princess" high heels that got most of the attention.

In fact, when the 3-5's class convened last Monday, we saw the kids fall out by gender in a way we've not seen so much of this year, the boys on their knees pushing around the toy fire trucks, while the girls tried on shoes, who then began tottering around the place like stilt walkers. There was a certain amount of quiet joking among our parent-teachers about the cliche of women and shoes. And I'll admit, it's a bit hard to watch these little girls, their lower torsos angled into uncomfortable shapes that have become equated with "feminine," their feet pinched and mangled, too reminiscent of those bizarre looking junior beauty queens, all in the name of "fashion." My own daughter, of course, is now wearing real heels to dances and other fancy events, having practiced in these very toy shoes. 

A couple of the boys tried out the shoe box, un-ironically giving the heels a try, even going about the business of pushing their fire tricks with them on their feet. When the Pre-3 class had their turn, many more of the boys tried walking around in them. But it was our boy-heavy 5's class that surprised me the most, as many of them, without joking or even any outward acknowledgement that they knew they were gender-bending, slipped on those shoes for a turn around the classroom. 

But, you know, it was mostly the girls who were drawn to these shoes. And despite the joking that "she came out of the womb loving shoes," it's obviously not nature that causes them to seek out body deforming fashion, any more than it's nature for boys to be drawn to superhero play. In fact, I guess it's more or less the same thing: for better or worse we've managed to imbue high heels with a certain symbolic power and children will always be drawn to that in their dramatic play.

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The Shape Of The Block In My Hand

Last week, on a field trip to the Seattle Children's Theater, we stopped with the kids to have a snack. They began to chase each other around using their mozzarella cheese sticks as "weapons." You'll recall that this is the class, the first I've ever had to do so in over a decade of doing this, that democratically, nay universally, agreed that they would not ban pretend weapons in class.

A few days ago I was talking to a new grandfather who has found his wife and himself in the position of primary caretakers of their 18-month old granddaughter. He was asking me about her "education." I saw him sigh from relief as I explained the basic theories of play-based learning. I finished by saying, "You know, kids should be doing the things you and I did when we were boys: playing with sticks and rocks and mud and getting outside at every opportunity."

He said, "You know, one of my strongest memories of childhood is building with those wooden blocks." I could tell he was momentarily visiting the past as he pantomimed placing one block atop another. It was such a precise gesture that I could tell he was holding a wedge-shaped block. I'm quite certain that he could actually feel that block in his hand: the past made present. There was a moment of reverie before he added, "I also remember playing chase and, of course, shoot-em-up games." With that, he formed his fingers into a pistol and took a practice shot into the air, just as he had 60 some odd years ago.

I have a theory, one that is unsupported by any evidence of which I'm aware, that the things we remember the most vividly are the times we were learning the most important things. That's why we have far more detailed memories of play than of sitting in classroom lectures.

I have very strong memories of "shoot-em-up" games as a boy. I can still feel the thrill of hiding in ambush or running wildly in retreat. My heart still beats when I think of it.

Yesterday, I'd brought out some swimming pool noodles and pipe insulation with the idea of at least providing the kids with something with less eye-poking potential than the sticks they've been using in their games. They were, to say the least, a huge hit. Soon the kids, not all, but more than half, were charging around hitting one another with their foam "whips," rollicking over the terrain of our outdoor classroom. As usual, I was staying close, watching their faces and body language, and listening for sounds of distress, displeasure, or conflict. I've written in previous posts about my discomfort with this sort of play, even while acknowledging that there is absolutely no evidence that it leads to future actual violence, and that, in fact, there are many pedagogical and educational benefits of this universal manner of play. It's why I hover so much when it's happening: I need more convincing. I think I'm just not yet ready to take the researchers' words for it. In a way, I guess, I'm doing my own personal research.

At one point, while reminding the kids of some of their agreements regarding this kind of play, I took a seat in our new boat which was the center of the "whip" game. 

Marit said to me, "We're the Ga Ga team," indicating herself and the others on the boat. "I'm the Ga Ga princess." She informed me of this while exchanging "blows" with members of the unnamed foes. Rex said, "And I'm the guard." 

I replied, "I want to be a Ga Ga."

Marit stopped to look at me, then her eyes grew rounder as a huge smile spread across her face. She liked this idea. "You can be the king!"

"I'm the Ga Ga king!" then, "What do I do?"

"We're defending the boat."

I turned to the kids outside the boat and announced, "I'm the Ga Ga king!" Prior to this, they'd been hitting me with their "whips" inadvertently. Now they were doing it on purpose. I couldn't bring myself to actually engage in the weapons play, but I did want to stay right in the center of things performing this spontaneous field work. Instead I picked up a toy fairy figurine and said, "The king has a magic fairy who can use her wand to turn your whips into feathers." 

There was a flurry of whipping, then our "enemies" ran off in one of their regular, wild circuits of our outdoor space, leaving us Ga Gas on our boat unmolested. I said, "We've defeated the bad guys."

Marit stared at me as if I were an idiot, "We're the bad guys."

"We're the bad guys?"

"Yeah, they're the good guys and we're the bad guys."

My normal response to good guy/bad guy talk is to say that I would rather be a good guy, but this time I said, "I'm bad!" I said it several times. Marit and Rex and the rest of the Ga Gas thought it was hilarious. When the good guys returned from their jaunt, I said, "I'm bad! I'm bad!" announcing that, this time, Teacher Tom was in.

As I sat in the midst of this game, in a flurry of foam whips, I watched the children's red faces, smiling, exhilarated, their eyes sparkling. There were periodic lulls in the midst of it all, something I'd not really noticed from the outside looking in, during which rules and ideas were discussed, spaces for us to tell one another what we were now imagining ourselves to be.

"I'm a ninja and this is my poison sword!"

"My whip has magic in it and turns you into a toilet!"

"We have a invisible pet monster that eats your whips!"

And all the while I said, "I'm bad! I'm bad!"

This game is much, much better from the inside, even while it appears unsavory from without. It wasn't an experience for me so much as a memory made present. I could feel the shape of that block in my hand.

I plan on returning there soon.

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How Dare They Tell Me I Cannot Be A Princess?

When our daughter was young, I was the stay-at-home parent, taking on the stereotypically female roles of cooking, house keeping, and grocery shopping, while also engaging in such stereotypically male things as yard work, building things with power tools, and being a sports fan. Having been educated as a behaviorist, I simply assumed that my daughter, raised in this way, with parents assuming non-traditional roles, would grow up without having internalized many of the gender role ideas of former generations. In fact, I was quite confident she was more likely to be what we used to call a "tomboy" than anything else. I strived to make sure she had both cars and dolls, avoiding such extremities as Barbies. On a day-to-day basis I tried to keep her attire gender neutral and, in fact, took it as a sort of compliment when strangers admired my "little boy."

Upstairs in our loft, girls were playing castle, surrounding themselves with dolls, stuffed animals and purses. When I asked them if I could play I was told I would have to be a prince or a king.

Before she was 3-years-old she had rejected her overalls, telling me firmly, "Girls wear dresses." When I pressed her about it, pointing out that, in fact, the majority of girls and women in our lives wore pants, she simply said, "You're a boy. You don't know about girls." Before long she began agitating for long hair, while adding crowns and tiaras to her daily repertoire, something she only gave up when she hit kindergarten in her K-12 school where dresses (and tiaras) weren't the style of the older girls, and therefore not the style of the younger, although long hair remains the standard.

I don't know if I failed her or not in all of this, but she is still "all girl" on the outside. That's where the stereotypical girl ends, however: this young woman, from this father's perspective, is a complex, one-of-a-kind human being who seems to feel free to embrace and reject gender roles, at least those of which she is aware (there always remains the issue of the gender roles to which we all unconsciously adhere). She doesn't seem to feel trapped by them, which, I think is the lion's share of the goal.

Under the loft, a pair of boys, pretended to be plumbers, repairing damaged pipes.

As a teacher, then, I see this same pattern coming at me in waves year-after-year, as the 2-year-old girls adopt the frilly dresses, while the boys don the yellow construction-worker helmets. As for me, I horse around with gender roles, pretending to be a princess or joining a game as the mommy, but the kids aren't buying it, laughing at me or sometimes even angrily telling me, "You can't be a girl, you're a boy." Some even command me to "stop!" as if the whole idea is too unsettling to contemplate.

And here I am a big, mature adult who thinks he knows himself, who can even predict how the children will react, yet who still feels a pang of rebellion, a flash of anger, each time the children tell me what I can and cannot do. How dare they tell me that I cannot be a princess?

I know I always open myself up when I write about gender. The last time I did the words "chauvinistic" and "misogynistic" were thrown back at me. But, you know, it's an unavoidable subject when you're a preschool teacher engaged in a reflective practice. I suppose some people read what I write and feel like I'm trying to tell them or their daughters or sons what to do based upon their gender. Believe me, I understand; I don't like that any more than you do.

Tomorrow I plan to write about gender again, this time about some new developments regarding boys and guns.

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They Will Grow Into Gentle, Loving Men

(A while back I posted my Greatest Hits as determined by readership statistics, which then got me thinking about older posts that I wish more people had read, which has now become a sort of irregular series. When I wrote this post we were in the midst of a "raw" time in our school's history. Due to a quirk in demographics, all 9 of our oldest children were boys and while none of them were doing anything out of the ordinary or "bad," all of them together created an intensity that was challenging for many of us. As we tried to walk the balance between the needs of our older children and the fears and frustrations of some of the parents, we had a lot of important discussions about what to "do." This was originally published in January, 2011 under the title "This Is A Complicated Thing." At the bottom of the post you'll find links to others in this series of posts I wish more people had read.)

I've written about this before, but I really do want to know why male primates show a strong preference for toy cars when it comes to choosing with what to play, but no one knows. I haven't even seen a credible sounding theory. Why wheeled vehicles? It doesn't make sense. What did caveman boys play with before the invention of the wheel? Whatever the case, I'm sure the wheel was invented by a tinkering child long before it was adapted for "useful" purposes. 

The universality of play among children across all cultures throughout human history, and indeed across mammal and bird species, indicates that a period of play is adaptive and necessary. That it's the primary way by which we learn in our youth is really, ultimately, why the so-called "education reformers" will fail in their efforts to turn learning into work (although that doesn't mean they can't damage an entire generation of children if parents and teachers don't continue to push back). As the great psychologist Karl Groos wrote:

The very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.

Through a quirk of demographics, I've wound up this year with a Pre-K class (my oldest group) of all boys: nine of them. Some are more motivated by cars than others, but they all share to one degree or another their vervet and rheus brothers' preference for playing with cars. If play is essential and cars are universal, then the boys are clearly learning something very important from this kind of play. I can only assume that the survival of our species is dependent upon these boys learning the basic concepts of motion, density, gravity, friction, and momentum, and naturally, they are learning important social skills when they play together, practicing for adult roles when they engage in dramatic play, and bonding as friends over their shared passion, all of which are clearly important.

In the series of photos with which I've illustrated this post, you can see I've used their interest in cars to extend our MLK color mixing experiments from the prior week. Boys aren't always interested in sit-down art projects, but this wasn't one of those times. (I buy a lot of these plain wooden cars from Discount School Supply. I find them useful for all kinds of purposes.)

I don't need to know why, but do want to know.

What I really need to know these days, however, is why boys are so prone to be attracted to violent play. The standard explanation is that they are socialized into it, although I've seen surveys and studies that show gun play and other forms of violet play among boys is pretty universal (although I know of nothing that shows it crossing into the animal kingdom). I'm also not generally disturbed by boys who play superheroes, or soldiers, or pirates, but our 9 boys together, our oldest students, the guys who are looked up to, have begun to feed off one another in a way that is starting to make even me feel like we need to take some action to re-direct their play. It can get pretty intense and, at times, overwhelm some of the younger children who find themselves caught up in it.

It's a delicate balance we need to walk, I think. None of these boys, of course, are actually violent. They are not doing anything "bad" or wrong. In fact, it reminds me very much of my own boyhood when we used to play the same games, big and little boys together, "shooting" and "punching" and saving the world. I also remember it becoming too intense for me at times. I'd come home scared, nervous, and full of disturbing ideas. I'd revert for a few days of playing with my cars or stuffed animals or coloring books, but ultimately I'd always go back.

On Tuesday, we revisited MLK, the great man of peace. I retold them the story, going back to slavery, emphasizing how angry it made people feel and how many of them turned to violence. Then, as I showed them a particularly heroic and patriotic illustration of MLK, I explained how he taught us to fight with words not fists, with love not hate. I then brought up my concerns, emphasizing that some of the younger children, sometimes, were feeling afraid at preschool. They all agreed that they didn't want their friends to feel afraid.

I tried to let them direct the conversation from there as we discussed ways to deal with "bad guys" which quickly became a discussion of Batman, Star Wars, and other fictional depictions of good vs. evil. I responded, each time, "But that's not real, Martin Luther King was real," pointing to the picture I still held. "In the real world," I said, "Words are better than fists."

I'm not sharing this as an example of the right thing to do, but it is what came to me in the moment. And some of the boys even pushed back, insisting that indeed "Star Wars is real. I saw it." (The media is clearly a very potent drug in this question; one we as adults in children's lives must strive to counteract.) But they were engaged. They were sitting together, eyes forward, hands off one another. Most of them said, "Pretend," when I listed examples of popular heros, asking, "Is that real or pretend?" Charlie L. suggested that we could hug or stroke people instead of hitting them. 

I don't want to lecture kids -- that never works -- and I certainly don't want to make them ashamed. It's about empathy, I guess, a notoriously challenging thing to teach young children. I don't want them to stop fantasizing about these heroic figures, but rather to be aware of how their play, especially when it's all 9 of these virtual brothers together, is impacting others. I don't expect them to suddenly become a classroom full of MLKs, but I do want them to understand that in the real world we don't solve our problems with fists or guns.

I suspect that this tendency toward what we label violent play, like the proneness of males to choose to play with cars, is an adaptive trait with roots deeply sunk into our evolutionary past. And just like we don't really know the source of the attraction to wheels, we don't understand the source of the attraction to "violent" play. I know I barely made a dent last Tuesday, but we have 4 more months together. This is a time when they need our adult helping hands.

At the end of the day on Tuesday, about 15 minutes after we'd wrapped up our conversation, I sang our "goodbye song." As parents chatted, some of the boys began to thrust their hands at one another, violently, shouting, "Shock!" They were excited, beaming, alive. It looked like a lot of fun. I've known these boys for a long time. They don't want their classmates to feel afraid. They are gentle, loving boys. They are going to grow into gentle, loving men. 

This is a complicated thing.

UPDATE:  I'm not writing here about aggressiveness or actual violence, but rather pretend violence as part of dramatic play. Labeling preschoolers as aggressive or violent is name-calling and is not acceptable for any adult. If you'd like to read how I really get this point "off my chest," click through to this post: "Aggressive And Violent." You wouldn't call a preschool girl "sexy" or "bitchy." Please do not call boys "aggressive" or "violent."

Other posts I wish more people had read:

Can You Teach Me?

We Are Only Two

Mister Rogers

Rebellion Is Built Into Us

The Real Life For Which We Prepare Children

Courage To Screw Things Up

Teaching Self-Governance

To Live Is To Play, And To Play Is To Live

How Our Cooperative Preschool Works

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This Commitment To "Normalcy"

In a comment on Facebook about yesterday's post, reader Donna shared that her son is on medication that could make even a run-of-the-mill childhood injury into a life-threatening one. 

I have a 4-year-old boy who has been on blood thinners since he was 2. Fortunately, we have a good cardiologist who told me to let him be a boy! How would he ever learn to be careful if I completely took away all risk of physical harm? He has learned to be careful, but still climbs trees, rides a scooter, still plays out in the backyard with sticks, rocks, and all sorts of things. You can't just keep them in a protective bubble, it is not good for them and they don't learn anything.

What a challenge that would be for a parent. What a temptation it would be to attempt to enclose your child in a "protective bubble." And what bravery it must take, every day, for parents like Donna to let their children freely engage the world.

Many years ago, I taught a boy with hemophilia, a condition that prevents blood from clotting properly. I can tell you that I spent my first several months in the classroom with him on the edge of panic lest he encounter even the mildest bump or bruise, so I can imagine what it must have been like to be his parents. Like Donna, however, they arrived on day one wanting me to be aware of the situation, but urging me to not coddle him, to allow him to run, jump, and otherwise play with his classmates. He was not a daredevil by nature, thank God, but he was a typically bright, inquisitive boy who could throw his body around with the best of them.

His father Joe told me that the greatest danger wasn't the blood we could see, but rather the blood we couldn't see: internal bleeding, which might result from even apparently insignificant impacts, something that is always a minute-to-minute possibility in a preschool classroom. Joe said, "If he seems woozy or dizzy, that's a sign, but he'll probably let you know if he's having a bleed. He knows what it feels like." This at an age when many kids aren't even self-aware enough to know when they're hungry, tired, or need to go potty.

Cooperatives are a natural choice, I think, for parents in these circumstances. I can imagine it would be awfully hard to simply turn over the care of a child in Conail's situation for the first time to a traditional school. In the beginning, his parents chose not to leave him alone at school, which is a choice many parents make during the first few months at Woodland Park, especially in our Pre-3's class. I put them to work as I would any other parent-teacher. This gave us all -- myself and the other parent-teachers -- the opportunity to observe how they interacted with him, how they reacted to his occasional mishaps, how much they hovered or didn't hover. This period of role-modeling was a valuable education for all of us, especially on the day when this 2-year-old boy told his dad Joe, "I'm having a bleed." No amount of abstract "training" could have better prepared me for being on the "front lines" than to be there as Joe calmly and lovingly took Conail into his care and got him off to the doctor, two "men" (and Conail was truly his father's peer in this) dealing with a problem without hysteria.

By Conail's Pre-K year, most of us didn't really think about his hemophilia on a day-to-day basis, although we were reminded each Tuesday afternoon, when Joe would arrive to administer his "factor," a clotting agent that needed to be administered on a schedule. At first it was something for which they left the room, but at some point, not wanting to miss a moment of school, Conail started just removing his shirt right there where we sat together on our circle time rug, showing us the shunt a doctor had installed in his chest, puffing out his chest while Joe injected the factor. By the end of the year, this process was a regular part of our circle time routine: sing a song, talk about our science experiment, give Conail his factor, read a book . . . That's just how we rolled with our super hero friend.

This is Alex, a girl who lost an eye to cancer, wearing her super hero cape in the hospital.

Over the years, I and our parent community have learned all kinds of "medical" skills, from administering Epi-pens and insulin injections to replacing a glass eye. In every case, we were dealing with children who are at one level wise beyond their years, with advanced self-awareness and self-care abilities, kids who had in their own ways learned to "be careful," but who were otherwise just "normal" kids with very brave parents, who must every day fight that urge to inflate a "protective bubble" around their babies. 

This commitment to "normalcy" is an inspiration. In a very real sense these brave children with hemophilia or severe allergies or diabetes or cancer, and their brave parents, are reality-checks to the rest of us and our media-inflamed fears of boogy men, eyes getting poked out, and heads being split open. It is through them that we can appreciate what a gift the bumps and bruises of a normal childhood truly are.

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What We Do In School

Today I want to write about this photograph.

It was a picture I took by accident the other day. It shows a segment of our outdoor classroom in action from the perspective of our workbench. In the foreground you see a couple of girls riding their stick ponies. Those stick ponies are outdoors every day, mainstays of our school, abused by the weather, their fabric heads probably damp from the last rain storm. The girls are engaged in an adventure story they are spinning together, probably about princesses. You see they're moving from one level to the next, I'm guessing they're on their way up into the lilacs, perhaps to the top of the concrete slide.

Behind them is a boy, digging through a tub that is perched on the edge of the sand pit. He's holding a piece of pipe insulation in one hand, which the kids mostly use as fire hoses. There are some toy fire fighter helmets in that box as well, which is probably what he's looking for. Unlike the stick ponies, the box has only been out there for a few days, ever since our field trip to the local fire station. There is another group of boys you can't see in this picture. They're already wearing helmets and holding hose. This boy is preparing himself to enter their game.

Up behind the trees there at the top of the hill, you'll see two children at the cast iron water pump. One is holding a bucket in which he's been collecting "jewels" (florist marbles). The other is pumping water. They appear to be engaged in a conversation. I know that washing the jewels has been a self-selected activity lately, so it might be about that. One of our parent-teachers is making her way up there, perhaps anticipating some sort of conflict and so putting herself in a position to help them through it, but probably just heading to where the children are to be nearby.

There on the left edge of the photo, you'll see a couple boys testing themselves on some of the planks we've placed as bridges to create a more challenging way to move between the upper to the lower levels of the classroom. One of them appears to be approaching cautiously while the other seems to have already completed his traverse, perhaps having inspired his friend to give it a try.

There are more than a dozen other kids and 5-6 other adults you don't see in this snapshot of what we do in school.

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