Be Not Afraid

My most memorable Easters were spent in Greece when I was between 9 and 13 years old. It was the highest holiday, as it should be. Resurrection, to me, is a much bigger deal than any of the other miracles. Americans tend to put Christmas at the center of our Christian calendar, but we all get born. It's the coming back from death that's the more celebration-worthy feat.

Everyone carried candles home from church at midnight, a beautiful ceremony that filled the streets in candlelight, and later used them to "burn" crosses over their front doors. What a miraculous thing, as a boy, to be entrusted with a candle to carry all the way home. And what a manly thing for dad to paint that cross in soot over our doorway. It was a powerful experience to walk under that cross for the next several weeks, evocative of fire and night and facing death. We've never celebrated Easter at Woodland Park because we're a community of many faiths, but if we did, this is one of the things I'd want to try to recreate.

Deborah at Teach Preschool came up with this terrific method for managing balls of yarn.

 She put hers in empty tissue boxes, but what we had were coffee cans. Just drop the

 whole ball inside, thread the end through a hole in the lid and the kids can take

 what they want.

I never cease to be amazed at how many children express fear when I light candles at school, which we do at Halloween and for the occasional Pre-K science experiment, such as when we melt lead figurines. When did candles become dangerous? Of course, we need to be careful around fire, but that was what made carrying those candles home in the dark so miraculous, the fact that we, as children, were being entrusted with something as powerful as fire. It wouldn't have crossed our minds to be careless as we struggled to keep our flame alive, while avoiding the drops of hot wax that managed to elude the piece of cardboard protecting our fists. When dad showed us how to pass our fingers through our flames without burning them (quickly, smoothly, carefully) the experience of mastery was as complete as it gets.

We were painting tag board eggs, then using our yarn bits to decorate them.

We died eggs at Greek Easter, but the only color was red -- a deep red unattainable with our US dyes. The red represents the blood of Christ and it is indeed blood red. And so beautiful, but the only way to attain that is to cook your eggs in the dye for 10-15 minutes. If we celebrated Easter at school, this is the way I'd want to dye our eggs, just the way we cooked our most recent batch of playdough on an electric burner set on a table low enough that the kids could peer right down into the pot as it cooked. I would want them to experience that face-full of vinegar-y steam as we cooked up a batch of bloody eggs. I would want them to handle the hot eggs and to rub them with oil to make them lustrous.

They functioned imperfectly, which probably had to do with my crude

manufacturing methods. The yarn occasionally snagged in the angular

holes I'd cut -- round holes or putting some tape around the holes to

allow the yarn to slide through more easily might have fixed that. And

the ends sometimes slipped back inside the can. 

For my brother and me the absolute highlight of Greek Easter were the egg fights. Everyone would choose an egg and then gently tap the tips together until one broke, the last whole egg standing being the winner. The discovery of this game completely superseded any egg hunt. Sure, the loser was expected to eat their egg, but the competition was a blast. To this day the 14+ of us who celebrate Easter together engage in a sort of March Madness egg cracking tournament. My brother's oldest daughter Sarah was last year's champion and she remembers it. This ranks right up there with the annual Hobson family Christmas wrapping paper fight. If we celebrated Easter, we would definitely have egg fights.

Vivian and George's dad Terry (our parent-teacher managing the project)

 was simply resetting the malfunctioning dispensers. At one point he

 had walked away from the table and I noticed that one of the cans wasn't

 working. I asked Violet, "Should I fix that?" She answered, "I can do it.

I watched Terry." She proceeded to remove the lid, untangle the yarn, re-

thread it though the hold, then replace the lid. From that point forward, 

the kids took charge of repairs and maintenance.

Sure, the Greeks had plastic eggs that got filled with candy, all red, but the ones I remember most were ones that were designed for the tips to be fitted with little plastic "caps" that would explode when you played the egg fight game with them. Pow!

And we ate lamb in Greece. We were once guests at an Easter party at which several whole lambs were being roasted over huge open pits of coal in an olive orchard, while we kids ran around them playing tag and hide-n-seek. The sight of those entire carcasses suspended on spits over fire was a bit grisly for us foreigners, but what a memory, and like everything cooked outdoors over fire, it smelled and tasted better than anything. Now that's the kind of Easter experience I'd love to be able to recreate with the Woodland Park kids!

When we returned to the US, our "traditions" of the Easter Bunny (the poor man's Santa), egg hunts, and loads of candy seemed, frankly, lame to my brother and me: pastel-colored eggs dyed in tepid water, plastic eggs that didn't explode, no fire, no being out after midnight. We still get our egg competition, but we both know the experience is weaker than it could be.

Yesterday, 2-year-old Maya arrived in the classroom and immediately approached the art table where we were making the yarn eggs in these pictures. She dipped her hand into a bowl of glue, was startled that it was glue, looked at me, hand dripping, and said, "I put my hand in glue." She laughed. 

She then started walking around the classroom, carefully holding her hand up out of the way, glue dripping from her fingertips. The parent-teacher at the art table said, "Let me wipe that off," but I waved her away. I'm not sure why. I guess I wanted to see what she would do. I followed Maya to the sensory table, where she used her dry hand to manipulate the materials, the other hand still held so as not to get glue on anything. The parent-teacher there said, "Let me wipe that off," but I waved her off too.

I followed Maya to where others were shaping play dough, then to a table top set-up with Hot Wheels and track, I was waving off parents-teachers, while she assumed responsibility for not getting glue on anything, holding that hand up out of the way. Only then, only after she'd completed her tour of the room to see what was happening did she go over to where we have a laundry basket full of towels and use one to wipe her hand.

I would trust Maya to carry an Easter candle; look how responsible she is. I would trust Violet to boil-dye a batch of blood red eggs. Children are as competent as we allow them to be. They step up to the responsibilities in their lives, but only when we leave them enough freedom to assume them on their own. I hear a lot of people this time of year saying things about the "real meaning of Easter." The part of that real message that I always took home with me as I carried my candle through those dark streets was the part that said: "Be not afraid." 

It's a good message because it's only when we can move beyond fear that we can trust. And trust is what our children need from us.

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Mostly We Found Ways To Agree

A couple weeks ago my friend David gave us a big box. He said it could be anything we wanted it to be. What we wanted it to be was a big box.

We got inside and pulled the flaps shut. Sometimes we were in there alone, but usually we were in there together. 

It's quieter in there, our senses are deprived of the hubbub of the classroom, brought alive instead by the other people with whom we are now in enclosed proximity, breathing their steamy breath, smelling of skin, soap, fabric softener, breakfast, sounding muffled and intimate when they speak, a shadow barely visible in the faint light leaking through the cracks.

Our bodies touch in there, thighs against mine, living flesh, flesh and bone: negotiating for a parcel of the limited space, clambering over, being stepped upon, fingers pinched under a shoe.

Sometimes there are too many of us: hot and crowded and the person in the darkest part wants out, crying to be let out, shouting to open the door.

But mostly it's about us on the inside, while they, our dimly heard, unseen friends, are on the outside. We know they're there, we hear them, they knock on the box, beating it like a drum, or they shake it, saying, "Earthquake!" We're in here, in here together, and all of that going on out there is another world where they understand nothing about making eye-contact in the dark, or the warmth of our bodies pressed together, the intimacy of being in a box together with the lid shut.

Later Teacher Tom started cutting windows in the places we said we wanted them, windows with flaps so we could open and close them. 

Now the outside can get in whenever it wants, is always getting in as friends pop a hand through, or a head. 

Sometimes we yell at them from the inside to "Close it! Close it!" And they do, but not for long enough, as they are curious about us, the people on the inside.

Now the inside can get out too, through these windows. Here I am! 

Pop! Did you think I was lost?

We brought everything we know about ourselves and other people to bear on this project of playing with this big box, we had to because the space on the inside was so small and dark and inviting.

And even on the outside the space was small, the surface space, and everyone wanted a part of it. 

There were frustrations and intimacies, cheers and tears, people not doing what we wanted them to do and us not understanding when they needed something from us. There were times to fight our battles and times to let it slide. We took turns, we waited, we changed our plans, we came back later. We were persuasive and persuaded, we lost and we won, but mostly we found ways to agree because there was only one box and many of us.

We wanted it to be a big box. We used it to practice what we know about getting along.

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When I Most Felt Like A Hero

Links to this video of a mother and child reacting to an earthquake made it around to me recently. It's cool and short: I put it here so you'd watch it. 

My daughter Josephine was 4 and we were at the Latona 3-5's Cooperative Preschool, temporarily located in a couple of classrooms in a former high school that had already undergone an earthquake retrofit and was at the same time the temporary home for an elementary school while their usual building was being made earthquake "safe."

I was walking in the hallway, returning from the playground, just before 11 a.m. Josephine was holding one of my hands, her friend Erin the other. We were right outside the classroom door when the shaking started. It was the beginning of what we now call the Nisqually Earthquake, a 6.8 event that is one of the most powerful ever recorded in our area. I knew right away what was happening, so I ushered the girls, along with a couple passing first graders, into our room and under a table.

The world was shaking, but I was completely calm -- much like this mother appears in the video. I was alert, for sure, wary of my surroundings.

Josephine asked, scooting under the table on her bottom, "What's happening?"

I said, "It's an earthquake."

"I don't feel it."

I surveyed the room. I could see most of our cooperative parents in there, as well as my mentor Teacher Chris David. The children were out of sight, safely under the classroom tables. The building shook. I made eye contact with Chris as well as several other parents. We seemed like we knew what we were doing, not panicking, looking out for the children. As one, we started clapping, just as we had during our earthquake drills, making it just like how we had practiced. It was only after the shaking stopped that we adults realized we'd done nothing to protect ourselves.

Afterwards we gathered the children and took them to the parking lot according to plan.

Josephine asked, "What happened?"

I said, "We had an earthquake."

"I didn't feel it."

We had this exchange several times over the next few minutes. It was if she felt left out.

No one seemed particularly upset. None of the kids were crying. I was joking around with the other parents. There was a certain buzz, of course, but in the particulars we were behaving just as we had in our drills, right down to kids goofing off and our hokey adult gallows humor.

Office workers gathered in an adjacent parking lot. From them we heard wailing and shrieks, shouting and panic. We, on the other hand, parents and teachers and children, were just talking, the way we always did. Within 10 minutes every single child had been retrieved by his or her parent, with the exception of Erin who was riding with us that day. The plan was to have lunch at Erin's house with her mom Donna and newborn baby, which is what we did. While the children played, Donna and I exchanged earthquake stories.

At one point I said, "I was expecting you to come pick up Erin."

And Donna answered, "She was planning to ride with you and I didn't want to change the plan."

That's what we did that day: calmly stuck to our plans. It's the time in my life when I most felt like a hero.

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The Real Story Of Art

Yesterday I wrote a much too long post in which I discussed, ostensibly, the children's 40 minute conversation on fine art, although it was really just as much about what I myself subsequently learned because they so inspired me. Where I was going with the post before running out of time-space was a little show-and-tell about how we tried to build on that discussion.

Now, as I mentioned, I'd hoped the discussion of masterpieces would go well so I'd prepared myself with some options, including Nina Laden's book When Pigasso Met Mootisse, a picture book about the two great modernist painters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. (I met Nina many years ago when we were both invited to a book signing event here in Seattle.) This brilliantly illustrated book is a wonderful, if not entirely historically accurate, overview of the personal relationship between these two modern art giants, with a nice, child-sized portion of cubism, fauvism, and modern art in general.

As I'd prepared for our afternoon together, I'd been frustrated that while I'd brought a print of a Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" to hang on the easel as I read to them, I didn't have anything by Matisse to hang beside it. I was apologizing to the kids for this omission, when I opened the book and out dropped this folded computer printout of his masterpiece "Le bonheur de vivre" (Joy of Life).

I'd apparently suffered this frustration before and solved it by tucking it into the book, knowing I'd once more find myself in this position. So I thank my younger self for knowing my future self so well.

I like how this book gives personalities to the artists, showing us something of the people behind the art. After "The End" there's a page on which Laden has included additional biographical information for adult readers as well as a pair of illustrations of the artists as humans. I only turned to the page by accident, planning to move our end-of-the-day crew on to what's next, but Archie stopped me by asking, "Is that what the real guys looked like?" Even now, after 2.5 hours, they were still engaged enough in fine art to be asking questions. Very cool.

The following day, as Violet had suggested, we tackled Mondrian at the art table. Elena's mom Amity not long ago scored us a whole bunch of free mat board simply by asking at a framing shop for their scraps. I used a few sheets of that and some black masking tape to set the stage.

Violet had speculated that the artist intended for kids to fill in his white squares and rectangles with color, so that's what we did.

I decided to go with crayons mainly because they're so easy for young children to control and if we were going to be "successful" with this group art project we needed everyone to be able to stay within the lines. I sometimes use liquid watercolor specifically so the kids can't stay within the lines, but in this case we were making art "in the style of" so I wanted to give them their best opportunity for doing that.

It would have been so easy for one child, feeling full of vinegar, to swing by, pick up a crayon and scribble over the whole thing, ignoring the lines entirely.

And there was no one there warning them not to do it. And I was waiting for it.

To be honest, most of the younger children, the ones who were not part of Tuesday's fine art discussion, found other things to do at first, leaving the task primarily to a core group of our Pre-K girls.

I wasn't right on top of things over there, so I don't know if the children were instructing each other or just setting an example . . .

. . . but we completed two of these large pieces, all pretty much within the lines.

I think this is quite an accomplishment in group art. For the third large piece, Sasha's mom Vicki, the parent managing our art station, asked for oil pastels, which I pulled from the storage room.

It may just be that we were running out of gas on filling in squares and rectangles, or maybe this is when the younger children discovered the project, but this is when we began to "free lance" a bit more. As you can see above, a few kids started using the white spaces as individual canvasses.

I'd also pre-prepared a few individual-sized Mondrian templates. Some of the kids really seemed to prefer that.

We were using some very high quality oil pastels; by that I mean quite a bit more oily than the usual preschool fare, meaning softer and more paint-like than the usual crayons. A few of the children started talking about washing their hands when it hit me, "You can't wash your hands with water. You can wipe them on a towel, but you'll need to use oil to wash your hands."

We had a nice discussion about why this would be. I would have got out some oil on the spot to demonstrate the phenomenon, but I knew we were out. So on what I'd earlier boasted of as being the "least messy art project in Woodland Park history," we sent them home with hands requiring linseed oil. Archie showed me his fingers, "Now I'm as messy as that pig in the book!"

And that, in the end, is the real story of art.

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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