Komodo Claws And Clothespins

"Clothespins are machines for clipping onto things." That's what the Komodo Dragon told me. "These are my Komodo Dragon claws," referring either to his pinching fingers or the clothespins themselves as he attached them one by one, side-by-side on the box. 

As he went into more detail about what it means to be a Komodo Dragon it appeared that the sheet fort, the one that had once been held up on one end by those very clothespins, started to slip down. I absent-mindedly used one of the Komodo Dragon's pins to prevent that from happening.

The Komodo (as we were now calling him) watched me do it while maintaining this narrative about himself. The moment I'd completed my project, he said, matter-of-factly, "These are my Komodo claws," and used his pinching fingers to return the pin back to the row where he had previously clipped it, finishing by telling me, "Clothespins are machines for clipping onto things." I held the fort with my hand as we finished our conversation about being a Komodo.

Later, when I said, "We need to clean up these clothespins," I had a shoe box into which I figured they would go. Naturally, I was wrong about that, because by now we all knew these were machines for clipping onto things. There was no discussion. The clips clearly were to be put away on the lines of the rack we usually use for hang-drying wet artwork.

Clothespins don't go into a box, they're for clipping onto things, so that's where we'll be keeping them. The jury is still out on whether or not they're Komodo claws or just something those claws can do.

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!

-->

Read More

Meditating Upon Round-And-Round

We do this turntable-paper plate set up every year, usually around Chinese New Year, then use the hundreds of rainbow spirals we wind up making, and it's always hundreds, as scales for the dragon we will then carry in our impromptu New Year's Day dragon parade.

When I got to school yesterday after a four day weekend, I remembered that for a variety of reasons, our 2-year-olds missed out on the record player art, so I set it all up again.

The older kids typically wind up treating this as a kind of manufacturing process. If they don't know it when they start, by the end of the session the word is out that the plates are going to be used to make a dragon and all it takes are a few kids who are motivated by the idea of a "super long dragon" to put the focus on quantity over quality, hence the hundreds of plates. This isn't to say some of the children don't treat it like a kind of artistic endeavor, but it's mostly a social process whereby the kids crowd around, working together, often 3 or 4 to a turntable.

The Pre-3 class, however, doesn't tend to dig on any of that. They're here to get lost in the slowly spinning plate, the gentle pull on their marker, and the magical spirals that seem to appear on the white surface. It's a meditation upon circles and curves and revolution. Some of them, like Ishi, are making them for his mom, but most of the kids are just here to make a study of going round and round and round.

I watched Cecelia try to draw her own circles on the plate as it moved in its own pre-ordained circular orbit. She, of course, did not know this, but I couldn't help reflecting as she did upon the all the complicated, imperfect "circles" of our universe, from the spinning of planets and their revolutions around one another, right down to the movements of subatomic particles. As she played with round-and-round within round-and-round, it evoked the cycles of seasons and new years and life and death: fundamental stuff.

At one point Sirus removed his plate from the turntable in order to have a bit more control as he drew a few circles in a stable environment, creating the kind of "frictionless universe" in which to study some specific aspect of these shapes and motions he was exploring.

Unlike the older children who have already experimented with this turntable and paper plate set up two or three times before in their years at Woodland Park, and I'm sure in other environments like dance classes and on playground merry-go-rounds, and so turned it into a kind of quilting bee, these younger children needed yesterday to begin taking it all into themselves, or perhaps to discover it already within themselves, or to begin understanding it as a part of themselves: not something to be regurgitated later to prove what they know, but to be ready for when it is their turn to make the dragon.

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!

-->

Read More

Functional Strength

You can hardly be anywhere with young children without finding at least one of them engaged in an experiment with balance, usually of the full-body variety. On our recent trip to the zoo, every time I turned around there was a child walking atop a wall or carefully navigating a curb. Almost every day a child will demonstrate for me how she can stand on one foot or perform the arabesque she learned in ballet class.

Falling down and not falling down are clearly important aspects of a high quality early childhood education, but it's clearly not as simple as that, because the moment they learn to move, children engage, as long as they're given an opportunity, in increasingly challenging feats of balance. Not all of them are daredevils, of course, but all of them work on their balancing skills.

Awhile back I was talking with a new acquaintance who is a fitness trainer. He said that one of the most common phenomena in his business was adults who commit themselves to getting into shape, join a gym, adopt a regimen, work hard at if for awhile, then less hard at it, then stop altogether. "It stops being fun and just becomes work," he said. "I'm trying to get my clients to understand that they could be working out all the time if they'd just stop being embarrassed -- and it would be fun." He then proceeded to describe to me what children do all day long as they go about their days: balancing along curbs, jumping on and off of low walls, swinging from tree branches, running up and down hills. "It won't necessarily result in a chiseled physique, but it is all about developing full body functional strength."

That's what the kids are doing, of course, when they tackle these challenges, developing their full body functional strength. It's not a commitment they make, because it's one of the natural aspects of their urge to simply play and it's an urge, I fear, that becomes stunted by the addictive lure of screens and by the fear implanted by those who perpetually warn them that they're going to kills themselves. It's an urge, that as we get older, we come to find as embarrassing, as somehow not "mature," as a set-up to be accused of not acting our age by both our parents and our peers.

I forget about this all the time in my day to day life and I'm one of the lucky ones for whom it's always okay to be a bit sweaty or dirty (you know, from the falls). When I pass rockeries I usually fight back the urge to leap up on the first rock, then hop across them. When I see a grassy slope I typically just think about running to the top, then rolling back down.

Lately, I've been trying to remind myself to not fight the urge, to go ahead and jump up and try to touch that awning or stride along the sidewalk two concrete slabs at a time. So if you see a 51-year-old man with his arms flailing as he balances along the back of a park bench, it might just be me, playing, learning, and as a side benefit, working on my functional strength.

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!

-->

Read More

A Bad Idea, Badly Executed

Every time I write about my opposition to charter schools, vouchers, and other methods of privatizing public education as I did most recently last Fall, there are those who write to set me straight, tell me of the wonderful charter school their child attends, or the one across town they are hoping to get their child into, or about their opinions of the horrible public school they hope avoid and what choice to they have other than a charter?  And certainly there are some non-profit charters that are actually approaching children as human beings, using pedagogically sound approaches, employing research and evidence and best practices to shape their curriculum, but the evidence is that most are not.

The whole charter school movement is based upon a Big Lie, one propagated by the public relations teams of large for-profit education companies and their henchmen in government. The truth is that our public schools are succeeding. And parents know it. Fifty-one percent of us give our local public school, the one we know the best, an A or a B. If you throw in the C's, a full 88% of us give our schools a passing grade (leaving 12 percent of our schools in the unsatisfactory category, a number that pretty much parallels our nation's poverty rate.) Room for improvement, but hardly a disaster. When asked to grade our public educational system as a whole, however, only 17 percent award an A or B, clear evidence that the Big Lie is being successfully propagated. Why the lie? Because these corporations want to get their hands on the billions of dollars that we've set aside to educate our children and they need to create a crisis in order to do it. And, of course, also because public school teachers have strong unions and Wall Street types love nothing better than a little union busting.

But that's not why I'm writing this morning, although I encourage you to click through to those previous posts if you doubt my assertions. No, today I want to share some links I've come across recently on the topic of charters. The first is a deep, detailed and damning look at the history of "school choice" in America, one that reveals the charter movement as a contemporary manifestation of our nation's racist past. The second two posts are horror stories of how charter school corporations, as do all corporations, game the system, screwing over kids and their families, while protecting their profits.

From Robert Levin writing for The Cucking Stool:

School Choice, the bedrock of modern education reform, was born as an educational strategy in 1954, after the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal black and white public schools were unconstitutional. The order to desegregate public education motivated Southern racist authoritarians to search for new ways to maintain their dominance and racial apartheid. After first trying pupil-assignment schemes to maintain segregation they eventually implemented educational "freedom of choice" and public support for private whites-only schools as a way to get around the court's order, a notion immediately endorsed by free-market evangelist Milton Friedman.

The link I've provided here is actually to the third in an amazing nine part discussion of charter schools and how it has been driven by first racism, then racism blended with the kind of discredited neoliberal orthodoxy promoted by Friedman and his modern day devotees like charter school promotor Bill Gates. It goes a long way toward explaining why the charter school movement is so incredibly disconnected from the reality of research and data. It's a long, well-documented piece. I defy anyone who values reason to read it and still come out as a supporter of privatizing our public schools.

I also wanted to share this special report from Reuters about how charter schools, which are supposed to be public schools, are skirting laws and regulations in order to cherry pick students, excluding large segments of the student population who they fear will reduce their profits:

Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found the across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law . . . from New Hampshire to California, charter schools large and small, honored and obscure, have developed complex application processes that can make it tough for students who struggle with disability, limited English skills, academic deficits or chaotic family lives to even get into the lottery.

Frankly, this report confirms most of my worst nightmares about how charters operate, looking out for their own bottom line over educating all-comers which is the mandate of public education.

And finally, there is this damning piece about one particularly unscrupulous education corporation from EduShyster, a site dedicated to "keeping an eye on the corporate education agenda." Apparently, the family of a student enrolled in a charter high school being run by one of the largest charter networks and the country, one apparently much beloved by former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel, received this letter about their child:

To Whom it may Concern, NAME REDACTED is a student who was required to repeat the eleventh grade at Rauner College Prep because he failed to satisfy all of our promotion requirements. Because he is a reclassified student, the credits he earned during his first attempt in eleventh grade have been deleted. If the student were to transfer to another school, those credits would be repopulated as earned credits.

In other words, instead of taking responsibility for educating the child, this corporation is just washing their hands of him. Obviously, this is part of the way this slimy business maintains it's high academic ratings. It's particular noxious that if he leaves the school he gets to keep the credits he earned. This is the same corporation that "made headlines with the news that the charter chain charges low-income parents for their children's disciplinary infractions -- like untied shoes, unbuttoned polo shirts and failure to keep their eyes on the teacher." It's actually surprising to me that the for-profit prison industry isn't trying to get into this game.

Listen, I know there are some charters that aren't total bad guys, but it's become increasingly obvious to this reporter that this corporate financed "movement" has nothing to do with "fixing" broken public schools and educating children, and everything to do with turning a quick buck off frightened politicians, worried parents, and innocent kids. It's a bad idea, badly executed.

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!

-->

Read More

Strange Adventures

One of the most common themes in children's literature, indeed all of literature, is the idea of leaving home, experiencing strange adventures, then returning in the end to the familiarity of home. It's the story of Maurice Sendak's Where the While Things Are, Paul Owen Lewis' Storm Boy, and L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, to name only three from what is certainly a limitless collection. 

These are all photos from a recent adventure we took together to Seattle's magnificent downtown library.

It's a fundamental concept, especially for young children, who know from very early on, even if they don't want to know, that it is their ultimate destiny to leave the nest, to make their own way in the world. It's, of course, both a terrifying and exciting notion, so we tend to offer the promise of always returning "home" as a kind of comfort, even while we know that someday they will leave and not really return except as a visitor, because they will have made their own home elsewhere in the world.

It's not just through literature that we prepare them. We send them off into the real world to have adventures from the time they are quite young, first with grandparents, relatives, and friends, then later to schools and summer camps, which is on one level really a process of expanding the idea of "home," but also a real-world "proof" of the stories we read to them as we snuggle in bed night after night with Harry Potter or Alice or Peter Pan.

No one tells the story of the parents who remain at home, the home that we've created with and for our loved ones, even if it is every bit as universal as the story of Max in his wolf suit. That's because it's a boring tale, I suppose, one full of convention and routine, perhaps also full of meaning to those who've created it, but far too subtle and personal to attract an audience of more than a handful.

I once lived in an apartment that had a full view through a glass roof into the condo-home of a well-known corporate executive. The novelty of spying on him as he read the newspaper, tapped on the computer, and puttered around the kitchen wore off after less than a week, even as he was as dynamic a corporate titan as there was at the time. As important as it is, the story of staying home is not one for the wider world.

No, our story, like all great stories, is a bitter-sweet one in which we repeatedly kiss our babies goodbye, then welcome them home until they don't come back. Perhaps many of you still see yourselves as out there on your own strange adventures, those babies you hold on your laps as you read here being part and parcel of your grand story. But for most of us, it's an increasingly domestic adventure, at least while our children are young, and that's as it should be. Before a child can chase the rabbit down its hole he must first have a home to anchor the first part of the story. And, of course, have a place to which he can return to find a supper that is still hot.

My own parents are now retired and at any given moment they're somewhere else in the world, traveling, having strange adventures, then returning home. 

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!

-->

Read More

"I'm Going To Need The Black Eye"

It's funny because it happened to someone else.  ~Homer Simpson

I don't think anyone who knows me would say I'm a cruel person, but I can't help myself. When anyone falls or gets hit in the head by something, I laugh. No, not a big, old, mean-spririted belly laugh, but it's still clearly a guffaw, one that explodes from my chest far too quickly to be stopped. My mom did it too, even when it was her own kids landing on the pavement, so I come by it honestly, but I suppose it's a reaction that could be considered a real liability for a preschool teacher who is responsible for other people's sweet, innocent lion cubs. I've never had the lioness take off my head for it, but, you know, I could hardly blame her.

Sometimes it comes in handy, of course, this knee-jerk reaction at the misfortune of others. It causes me a moment's pause, it means that when the child looks around the first thing she sees is a smiling face, and often in that moment the child decides she's going to laugh too, sometimes right through her tears. It is, I think, a much more productive response than rushing to her side with furrowed brow -- that usually just makes it hurt worse -- but I can see why it sometimes makes me come off as heartless, even if in the next second I'm holding her in my arms, cooing soft words. I can only hope that I've made enough deposits into my loving-caring-nurturing account that when this happens the balance is still in my favor.

Last week, one of the guys in our 5's class, almost by accident, discovered a "catapult" made from wooden blocks. Before anyone knew what was happening, he'd stomped on one end, launching a small block high into the air, where it came down directly atop his own noggin.

I laughed, then said, "You hurt yourself."

He laughed too, "No, I didn't. It didn't hurt at all." 

As he re-loaded the catapult for a second launch, I said, "This time you might hurt yourself."

"No I won't." He stomped again and ducked almost simultaneously, causing the block to just miss his head. He repeated the process several more times, sometimes avoiding the falling block, sometimes not. A couple other kids gave it a go, each of them hitting themselves in the head. The whole time I was making the informative statement, "The blocks are hitting people in the head," although chuckling all the while.

One of his friends said, "Cool! I want to try it."

I said, "You're going to hurt yourself. The blocks are hitting people in the head." He ignored me, forgetting to duck and shooting the block with great velocity into his own eye.

Yes, I laughed again, even though this time it looked like it might have really hurt. As he held his eye, I said, "Let me see it." 

He uncovered his face to reveal a red mark just below his eye and a huge smile that covered for the pain. He said, "I guess you were right, Teacher Tom."

I said, "I think you're going to have a black eye. I'll get an ice pack."

He answered, "What's a black eye?"

"It's when you get hit by something hard by your eye and you get a big bruise. Check the mirror, you already have a red mark."

He looked into a classroom mirror. I said, "I'll get the ice pack."

He answered, "No thanks, I think I'm going to need the black eye to remind me not to do that again."

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!

-->

Read More

Seeds Of Revolution

A few years ago on the first day of school at Shadle Park High School in Spokane, Washington, an English teacher handed out the lyrics to a song called "Commencement Day" by the Seattle hip hop duo Blue Scholars and was suspended pending an investigation. It's not clear whether the school objected to the sprinkling of swear words or the content of the lyrics themselves, but I suspect it's more the later than the former because when I walk the halls of my daughter's high school I hear much worse language and while I'm far removed from high school myself, I'm confident that there was no one in my graduating class with virgin ears, just as I'm equally certain that no one has ever emerged from a US public high school whose eardrums haven't vibrated to the beat of f-bombs.

No, I'm pretty sure the school is concerned about the content.

I wasn't familiar with this act until that event, but Charlotte's dad Rob, a fine, respectable citizen by anyone's standards, told me that "Commencement Day" was a song from one of his favorite albums. Having listened to the song and read through the lyrics, I have to say I find it a thoughtful critique of public education.

But peace to the people who don’t ever preach in the front of a classroom
All day long, planting seeds of revolution,
We dedicate this song.

Because isn't that what a teacher really does, after all, plant seeds of revolution? I'm certainly trying to plant those seeds, even as a preschool teacher. I want the children to think, to question, and to develop their own ideas about how the world could and should work -- you know revolutionary ideas. I want them to know that they can speak up, stand their ground, and be heard even if it seems like "people ain't gonna change," because "there might be somebody out there, you never can tell."

Humanity always winds up placing its hope in the next generation, but what hope is there if we haven't planted the seeds of revolution? That is the essence of education, it seems to me, planting those seeds, and if we aren't doing that then, really, isn't it just indoctrination? If all we're doing is treating children as empty vessels to be filled with officially approved facts and formulas, then how can things ever get better? And there is always room for improvement.

Revolution in thought, in art, in science, in politics, in education, this is the way we move forward as a species. I can understand this might seem threatening to the defenders of the status quo, those who are afraid of change, who are threatened by the idea that the world isn't already a perfect place. They tend to conflate "revolution" with "rebellion," and it certainly might include that. They are worried that they might have to learn a second language, or absorb a new theory, or change how they have always done things. Revolution is hard and for the most part it must be lead by the young. We old people, when we feel the world spinning out of control tend to look backwards to supposedly better times, but there's no turning back. This thing only moves forward and it is fueled by revolutions, both large and small.

One of my proudest moments as a teacher was the day my Pre-K students revolted against me, in fact they rebelled. I've written before about our examination of Martin Luther King, one of the 20th Century's most important revolutionaries:

Traditionally, I introduce our Martin Luther King, Jr. Day material in our Pre-K class with an object lesson in fairness by taking something like these jewels (which are really just bits of plastic from our art supplies) and imbuing them with value by making them seem scarce. In a normal year, I’ll say something like, “I’m going to give each of the girls one of these jewels,” which elicits howls of protest from the boys. I then take the jewels back and instead exclude the girls to similar effect. Tears are not uncommon. I’ll then give them only to children with curly hair or stripped shirts or other arbitrary dividing points until someone suggests just giving one to everyone. After all, that’s the fair thing to do.

This year, however, something happened that has never happened before. Even before I was done distributing the jewels to the girls on the first round of the activity, Annabelle said, “That’s not fair, you should give them to everyone.” While the boys sat in silence, the girls, already clutching their prized jewels, joined Annabelle, “Give them to everyone.” I tried to continue the process of unfair distribution, but I had a mini-rebellion on my hands. Katherine said, “You should either give them to everyone or don’t give them to anyone,” and she tried to hand hers back.

I gathered all the jewels and tried to plow forward with my plan to give them only to the boys, but the protests grew louder. Instead of the usual tears, I was looking out at genuinely angry little faces. “Give them to everyone!” “That’s not fair!” “We should all get one!”

I felt like the segregationists must have felt. This is why I want the children of Woodland Park to know it’s okay to question authority. I’m here to teach children so that they can grow up to be well-educated citizens, and there is no more important responsibility of citizenship than to stand up to authority when it is being arbitrary and unfair. I didn’t just let them “win,” they compelled me to give up on my nefarious plans through a powerful, peaceful protest that relied on words and reason.

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!

-->

Read More