Students Refuse

A little over a month ago I posted about Seattle's Garfield High School teachers refusing to administer the standardized MAP test to their students, saying it wastes time, money, and precious school resources. Teachers at 3 other Seattle schools have joined the boycott and have received letters of support from hundreds of other teachers across the district. As I wrote in an update, parents and students have also thrown their support behind the teachers.

Things are now coming to a head as Seattle School Superintendent Jose Banda has threatened to discipline the teachers if the tests are not completed by the end of this month, and has taken further steps, ordering Garfield's principal and vice principals to start administering the test. The good news is that not only are the teachers not budging, but reports from the campus yesterday indicate that a full 3/4 of the 9th graders expected to take the test have refused, and among those that did sit down in front of the computers, many have protested by simply pushing the Enter key repeatedly.

Garfield history teacher and boycott leader Jesse Hagopian called Banda's decision "a callous disregard for the will of the educational community that makes up Garfield."

My long-time friend and president of the PTSA (Parent Teacher Student Association), instigators of a campaign to inform families of their right to refuse to allow their children to take the MAP test, Phil Sherburn said that Banda's decision has turned this into a power struggle and has "just escalated the conflict."

The good news is that despite all this, the message does seem to be getting through. While Banda still insists the teachers will be punished, he has taken his threat to suspend them for two weeks without pay off the table. He has also formed a task force to review the districts entire testing program, a process that he promises will include teachers and parents.

The MAP test is one that is used nationwide, being taken by millions of students a year. It does not test material being taught in the classroom, has a margin of error greater than the average number of points an typical 9th grader is expected to gain, and closes the library for an entire month. The test is also being mis-used to evaluate teachers, and to determine promotions and pay, something even the test-makers say should not happen, a point the teachers themselves are not making, but I will.

If you want to express your support for the Garfield educational community, you will find a number of steps you can take and more information at the Scrap The MAP site.

Let's hope the fight for real education reform starts here. I'm proud of us.

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Hearing Voices

As we approach the halfway point in the school year, the children in my 5's and 3-5's classes seem to be chattering all the time, building complex worlds together with their words. But it's not uncommon for me to have not yet heard the actual voices of some of our 2-year-olds. I don't think I'm talking about selective mutism, but rather a more common phenomenon that results from very young children who are still learning to trust their ability to communicate, still learning to trust the world beyond the walls of their home, still learning especially to trust Teacher Tom with their words, their thoughts, and their ideas.

This is not to say that I've not heard their voices at all. They, of course, speak with their mothers and fathers, which is one of the strengths of the cooperative model, because in a way, it removes the wall between home and school, or at least blurs it, allowing me peeks into the lives and personalities of very young children I might not otherwise get to see. Parents of these quieter, thoughtful children are often eager to help fill in those gaps ("She sings all the songs at home," "He talks about you all the time") but it's not the same as hearing from the children themselves, even if it is just overhearing them.

There's something about this time of year, right around Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day, almost halfway through the school year, all of us having fully reacclimatized after the interruption of the December holiday break, that brings out the words of children who have otherwise been fully and productively engaged with their hands and bodies.

Sometimes these small, brave people have something so important on their minds, something so pressing to convey to Teacher Tom that they'll have to summon up all their courage to speak directly to me, often after several prior approaches when the words simply will not come out, but the imperative to convey this idea or information is ultimately too strong to ignore.

I know that many of these kids have not yet seen a television, that for them I am the biggest celebrity in their lives and that it's not about what they say to me, but simply that we speak, that the fourth wall is broken. They toddle up to me, eyes wide, saying only my name, "Teacher Tom," and I say their name in response. That's enough for now.

Most often, however, it comes gradually, as a matter of course. Perhaps we're building something side-by-side on our new checkerboard rug and as naturally as all that, he'll turn to me with the stack of gears he's pressed together and say as calmly as you please, "Green, purple, yellow, blue, orange." It's as if we've been bantering back and forth all along. And perhaps we have: I just couldn't hear it.

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This Is A Long Game

One of the important parts of getting ready for the Chinese New Year is cleaning. We already keep whisk brooms, dust pans, and dusters around the place for the kids to use, but in preparation for the holiday, and in keeping with the theme of "out with the old, in with the new," I went out and augmented our collection of cleaning supplies.

As the children busily "scrubbed" the school down yesterday, parents joked about how they could now help out at home, getting their own house ready for the new year, and the children smiled, knowing it was a joke.

I don't claim to be a parenting expert, we have parent educators for that, but if there's one frustration parents speak with me about more than others, it's around the topic of their children and cleaning up. No one is expecting their preschool aged children to handle major cleaning chores, but it's quite common to want your kid, especially as she gets older, to at least start taking responsibility for putting her toys in the toy box, for dropping her dirty clothes in the hamper, and for bringing her dishes into the kitchen, if not putting them in the dishwasher.

The questions I get aren't about how to get their kids to do these things, because everyone knows they can command or bribe or threaten their kids into doing it: what they want to know is how to get them to do it without bossing or manipulating. They know, for instance, that at school, most of the kids, most days, take at least some part in our clean-up time. They also know that I'm an advocate for teaching through the "law of natural consequences," that the best way to learn about asphalt is to fall on it. So, they assume I know some trick for making it happen.

As a parent I spent some time struggling with this. Indeed, my teenaged daughter's bedroom still usually looks like a teenaged daughter's bedroom. I don't struggle with it any more because I've learned to close the door.

There was a time when I figured that the natural consequence of a messy room was that she would not be able to find the toy she sought or the clothes she wanted to wear, and that happened sometimes, but instead of cleaning her room, she learned to live with the consequences. You see, having a clean room was my agenda, not hers. At school, the kids tend to pitch in because 1) it's just what we're doing, and 2) they know the natural consequence of not cleaning up is that we simply don't proceed with the rest of our day until the job is done and the grown-ups are not going to do it for them. At home, a clean room is an aesthetic value that our young children simply don't share with us. What makes us crazy doesn't bother them in the least.

Some parents talk to me about what they call "logical consequences." For instance, they take away the toys that are left on the floor, putting them, say, on a shelf out of reach, saying that this is the logical consequence for not being put in the toy box. I'm sorry, but I don't see how that's any different than a punishment clothed in a gentler sounding garment. Believe me, your kids know it's a punishment.

I came to the conclusion quite some time ago that there really is no natural consequence for a messy room, at least for a child. They don't obsess like we do over tidiness and order, they don't mind wearing dirty clothes day after day, if they even notice it at all. We're the ones with the agenda about cleanliness. And since that's the case, I realized, it's rightly our own responsibility. 

The way I took on that responsibility was to stop pestering my child about her room. I also stopped buying her so much crap, which I think is a huge contributor to messy children's rooms. When her things wound up in the common spaces in our home, I merely carried them to her room and left them there. And, most importantly, I attempted to role model the kind of cleaning behavior I valued.

I decided to quit looking for a quick fix; it seemed to only lead to frustration. And who needs that? The better part of parenting is learning to pick your battles, and this wasn't a hill upon which I was prepared to die.

A funny thing happened. When my daughter was 12, she piled all her toys, and I mean all her toys, in the middle of her room and declared she wanted to get rid of it. Today, her room is still messy by my own standards, mostly with a floor littered with clothing, but when a friend is coming over, guess what? She puts the clothes away and loads the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. Again, not leaving a room as tidy as I might like, but at least presentable.

I've come to realize that this is a long game.

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And After That We Were Done

We found a giant cardboard tube. We rolled it to the top of the hill, then rolled it right back down.

We rolled it up and rolled it down and rolled it up again.

We did it alone, we did it together, we tried pushing both ways at once.

We barely spoke, we pushed, then laughed when things didn't go as we expected it would.

There was nothing to memorize, nothing to prove, except our own curiosities.

We rolled it up and rolled it down and rolled it up again.

And then we climbed upon it and sat, together.

And after that we were done.

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Metamorphoses

I've been watching my daughter perform for the past three days in her school's production of Mary Zimmerman's retelling of Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses.

We toss about the word myth as a synonym for false. Sometimes we say "myth" when we mean "lie." It's a word quite often used dismissively, as in, "Ah, that's just a myth." But these are all abuses of the word. Myths are in fact true; maybe not literally, but they are always unflinchingly honest in the same way that our dreams are always honest.

It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunatelly we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly. ~Mary Zimmerman

I wonder if it's true that we give scant attention to our mythic side these days.

Some say that Hollywood is our modern myth-maker and it's certainly true that American film has given us a large collection of shared stories, archetypes, symbols, and even gods, but for the most part it's failed as myth-maker in one significant sense: there's nearly always a happy ending. As Zimmerman's Greek gods say, "Almost none of these stories have entirely happy endings."

I suppose you could say that our cultural obsession with celebrity is holding the place of mythology, these glittering gods we read about in supermarket tabloids. They certainly provide both tragedy and comedy at least in equal measure, and their endings are often far from happy, sometimes even providing object  "lessons" in the style of myth. That said, I have a hard time finding anything important or salutary in these stories. It's more like rubbernecking at the scene of a proverbial car crash, and I'm not talking about Phaeton setting the Earth ablaze by driving his father Apollo's sun chariot too close to the ground.

After the closing performance last night I complimented the head of the drama department, the director, and we started talking about the play. I told him, honestly, that I'd been teary several times, a phenomenon that had intensified with each successive performance. He said he'd had a similar experience, saying, "I think we forget that myths are more than just stories that end with a moral like, and that's why trees have bark."

Is Zimmerman right? Do we have anything in modern life that compels us to expend more than scant attention to our mythic side, our public dreams?

I'm tempted to suggest that our mythic life today resides in our politics. For one thing, we have the entire pantheon of gods from Obama and Bush to Romney and Pelosi, complete with lesser deities, and demigods, while other nations, just as in the times of the ancients, have their own political Zeuses and Aphrodites. These political gods, while on the one hand supremely powerful, also have the same flaws, failings, jealousies, and lusts that drive the plots of mere humans and gods alike. While their names may change over time, their stories really do not as we've more or less been having the same debates and have been courting the same disasters since the founding of our nation. Where the metaphor falls apart for me is that most of what I see in politics is effect rather than cause, and if there is anything myths do it is to attempt to explain our world.

As Zimmerman's narrator says, "Myths are the earliest forms of science." Maybe this is why we give scant attention to our mythic side these days, why we dismiss our dreams, both public and private as false. We live in an age in which science has answered, truly answered, so many of the questions raised by myths, at least those of the 'why trees have bark' variety, but as I've come to realize over the last three nights, these are only superficialities. Myths are about the enigmatic, the irrational, the ambiguous. The only answer science has for these things is to say, "I don't know," a true, but unsatisfying answer, even if appended with the hopefulness of "yet."

Myth, like science, attempts to bridge the maw of not knowing, but takes it one step farther by not waiting for the hard proof of evidence that may never come.

There is wonderful comedy in Metamorphoses, but also great, unspeakable tragedy. My own daughter played a character so anguished that she literally dissolved into tears, being laid down by Aphrodite into the pool of water that forms the stage of Zimmerman's play, a scene that leaves the audience with the same kind of impotent despair that we feel after real life horrors such as what happened in Newtown or on 9/11. Science will never satisfactorily answer our hopeless "Why?" That is a place only for myth.

At whom do we rail and plead in our anguish if not at the gods? To whom do we sacrifice? Without the gods, we're left with only ourselves or each other, a game of blame that takes us no where but into loathing. I know there are some who will suggest that I'm neglecting our more contemporary monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, and the grace they offer through forgiveness and mercy, and those are powerful salve. But even so we're still left with the white hot unbearableness of human failing, those of others, and even worse, ourselves, when we all know in our hearts that sometimes it's "the gods" who are behind it and there is neither forgiveness nor mercy. Then we are left to rail and curse, something monotheistic gods do not tolerate, while the more ancient polytheistic gods seem to take it in stride, often agreeing that they or their colleagues have mucked things up.

I find myself drawn to the idea, one that I believe is original to the mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell, that myth is a public dream and that our dreams are private myths. When Zimmerman writes that we give scant attention to our mythic side these days, maybe what she means is that we simply won't or can't look into the abyss that so often only reveals itself to us in our dreams; that we tend to ignore it and deny it while waking. I don't know if we have public dreams any more, but I do know we have public nightmares. I can think of no better way to speak of the enigmatic, irrational, and ambiguous than through myth.

I can't tell you how happy I am that my child has spent the past several months thinking about these things as well, but more than thinking about them, living them, dreaming them. It was one of the hardest things in my life to sit there night after night and watch her dissolve into tears, knowing that my baby has been looking into that abyss day after day and is now able to show it to the rest of us, giving us a tour of this public dream. Do not ever let anyone tell you that drama and the rest of the arts are somehow less important than the pedestrian pursuits of math and literacy. It's a tragic thing to hear people say, "It's just drama." It's just a myth. It is a true failing of our educational system that every child is not acting in great plays every day.

Maybe art is where mythology is hiding today, and as we cut it from our schools, we are cutting out the heart of education, because, after all, what is education if not to examine the enigmas, irrationalities, and ambiguities. Mythology, I've come to see, is the only tool we have for doing so.

As I sat through these powerful, ancient stories, made so new and fresh by both Zimmerman and these young actors, I cried. I cried for how nothing has changed, at how we still walk in the world of Midas and Erysichton, Aphrodite and Hermes, Hunger and Sleep. I cried for these child-actors who understand as much as any adult, perhaps more. I cried for the enigmas, irrationalities and ambiguities, the anguish and dark comedy. I cried for the unflinching honesty.

If this all sounds too dark, I suppose it is, even while it's also true. But like Pandora's box, there at the bottom is Hope. In the penultimate scene of Metamorphoses, the questioner asks: "So it has a happy ending?"

The answerer replies, "It has a very happy ending."

Q: "Almost none of these stories have entirely happy endings."

A: "This is different."

Q: "Why is that?"

A: "It's just inevitable. The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul."

Q: "It always happens?"

A: "If we're lucky. And if we let ourselves be blind."

Q: "Instead of watching out?"

A: "Instead of always watching out."

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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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"Our Children Are Not Our Masterpieces"

(It's been over a year since I first published this post, but it's one I feel deserves to see the light of day on a semi-regular basis. If there is a single thing loving parents tend to forget, it is this.)

Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing. But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.  ~Barry Schwartz

In recent days, at least a half-dozen people have sent me the link to an article in The Atlantic entitled "How To Land Your Kid In Therapy" by Lori Gottlieb. I'll admit to having avoided clicking through to it, assuming that she was going to tell me that just about anything and everything we do can put our children on the therapist's couch, and the last thing I need, as a parent or a teacher, is one more voice telling me that I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. We're all flawed, fallible human beings and we will inevitably raise flawed, fallible human beings. At best, if I'm aware of my own defects, I may, if I'm very conscious, be able to help steer a child away from some specific flaw or fallibility, but even that isn't certain. My underlying parenting philosophy is to love them and do the best we can, to ask for help when we get stuck, and to love them. That goes for teaching as well.

All this to say, I tend to avoid the latest book or article on parenting, relying instead on the tried and true like Mister Rogers, Piaget, and my mom, but as the number of folks from various parts of my life who felt I ought to read this article grew, I started getting the idea that I'd better take a look just in case they were trying to tell me something.

Gottlieb, a therapist, began to see young patients in their 20's and early 30's who felt adrift, empty, and vaguely dissatisfied with their lives. There were few specific complaints, yet they were depressed, had trouble with their relationships and careers, generally felt a lack of purpose, and yet reported having good relationships with their parents. In fact, one of the most common sources of anxiety was feeling so awful while really having "nothing to complain about."

Yesterday evening I drove my wife crazy by interrupting her to read aloud from the article. I thought I'd do the same thing to you:

Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids? . . . Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock . . . Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying.  (T)his actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life . . . If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it . . . (T)he child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection.

I love this metaphor:

It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops . . . You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle . . . Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’

I can't read this next passage without cracking up. The image of those parents being ushered away by bagpipe is just too much:

. . . colleges have had so much trouble getting parents off campus after freshman orientation that school administrators have had to come up with strategies to boot them. At the University of Chicago . . . they’ve now added a second bagpipe processional at the end of opening ceremonies—the first is to lead the students to another event, the second to usher the parents away from their kids. The University of Vermont has hired “parent bouncers,” whose job is to keep hovering parents at bay . . . (M)any schools are appointing an unofficial “dean of parents” just to wrangle the grown-ups. Despite the spate of articles in recent years exploring why so many people in their 20s seem reluctant to grow up, the problem may be less that kids are refusing to separate and individuate than that their parents are resisting doing so.

Boy, am I guilty of this one. Whose happiness am I thinking about?

We want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them—the banker who’s happy, the surgeon who’s happy . . . We’re not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day with a smile on their faces . . .

We always start each school year by talking about empty praise like, "Great job!" but not a day goes by when I don't hear it in class a dozen times, so ingrained this style of parenting has become. I'm pretty good about avoiding it in school, but I know I did it as the parent of a preschooler.

When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special . . . (A)ll of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing” her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that?

(P)arents would prefer to believe that their child has a learning disability that explains any less-than-stellar performance, rather than have their child be perceived as simply average . . . They believe that ‘average’ is bad for self-esteem.

“My parents would feel like failures if they knew I was here (in therapy) . . . At the same time, maybe they’d be glad I’m here, because they just want me to be happy. So I’m not sure if they’d be relieved that I’ve come here to be happier, or disappointed that I’m not already happy.”

I'm glad I read this, Gottlieb is an entertaining writer. Her bottom line seems to be that we don't have to be perfect parents, just "good enough," and that sounds about right.

And maybe they will wind up in therapy. So what? As my friend Rich, a prominent psychiatrist says, "It's never a bad thing." A child in therapy, after all, may simply be a sign that we've raised them to know how and when to ask for help, one of the greatest skills there is. I urge you to click through as well.

Our children are not our masterpieces. ~Wendy Mogel

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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