Monday, March 18, 2024

"You're a Bad Teacher"


A five-year-old boy once accused me of being a "bad teacher." He wasn't mad at me. It wasn't intended as an insult. He was grinning as he said it, but he offered it more as a statement of fact than a joke.

I've had children tell me that I'm "supposed to be a boy," "you smell stinky," and "you're a big, fat guy." Learning the unvarnished, unblinking "truth" about yourself, at least from one person's perspective, is one of the "perks" of being a preschool teacher, but I'd never been told I was a bad teacher. 

"What do you mean? I'm not a bad teacher."

"You are a bad teacher."

"Why am I a bad teacher?"

"You never teach us anything."

"That means I'm a good teacher. I get this place ready and then you all come here and teach yourself things."

He was in the midst of a project he had been working on for a week. To an outsider, it probably just looked like he was gathering junk from the playground and putting it in a big heap, but we all knew by now that he was building a machine. He hadn't yet decided what this machine did.

"But you are supposed to teach us."

I thought about this for a moment, watching him fit the guts of a defunct clothes dryer into his machine. "Maybe you're right. What should I teach you?"

"I don't know." 

"Do I get to pick what I teach you?"

"Yes, you pick."

I said, "Did you know that my fingernails are dirty? See?" I held my hand out to him. "Now you know that. I taught you."

"You didn't teach me. You have to teach us about something like . . ." He paused to think. "You have to teach us about science."

"Okay, Did you know that everything is made out of atoms."

"I already know that."

"Gravity is the force that keeps us from floating away."

"I already know that."

"Dinosaurs are extinct."

"I already know that."

"What can I teach you about? You already know everything."

"I do. I know everything."

"Well, that's good because I don't know everything. Maybe you should be the teacher."

He quietly worked on his machine for several minutes before saying, "I don't know everything."

I nodded, "But you know a lot. How did you get to know so much?"

This was a question that required his full attention. He stood on his pile, his eyes rolled upward, his forehead furrowed. Finally, he said, "I taught myself."

"Wait a minute, you taught yourself?"

"Yes, I taught myself."

"Then I guess I'm a better teacher than you thought."

He laughed. "You're a bad teacher."

"Well, at least you're a good learner."

"I am a good learner," he confirmed while shifting a wheel-less wagon bed into place.

I said, "Maybe you're building a learning machine so you can teach me."

"It is a learning machine, but I can't tell you how it works. You can use it when I'm done." He then peered at me earnestly and added, "And then you will learn."

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.


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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Friday, March 15, 2024

"Listening is Where Love Begins"


Mister Rogers:

"More and more I've come to understand that listening is one of the most important things we can do for one another. 


Whether the other be an adult or a child, our engagement in listening to who that person is can often be our greatest gift. Whether that person is speaking or playing or dancing, building or singing or painting, if we care, we can listen.


In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.


Listening is a very active awareness of the coming together of at least two lives. Listening, as far as I'm concerned, is certainly a prerequisite of love. One of the most essential ways of saying, "I love you" is being a receptive listener.


Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.


(And) when we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong along with the fearful, the true mixed in with the facade, and of course, the only way to do it is by accepting ourselves that way."

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.



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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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Decision-Making is Stressful


The boy stood outside the door. I smiled at him from the inside as his mother tried to coax him forward. He smiled back at me, but didn't move.

His mother asked him, "Don't you want to go to school?"

He nodded that he did, still smiling. Indeed, he appeared relaxed, almost like he was just taking his time, breathing, pausing before launching into his morning.

"Then let's go," his mother urged, taking a step toward the door, but he still didn't move. She gave me an apologetic look, then turned back to her son, "Are you coming?"

He nodded that he was coming, still smiling, and still not moving toward the door.

"Well, I'm going inside," she said, "It's cold out here. You can come in when you're ready." She shrugged at me as she descended the stairs. The boy looked after her until she was out of his line of sight, then he began scanning the brick face of the building, taking it in as if he had never noticed it before. He looked straight up at the sky. 

There was no reason to rush. In fact, they were early, among the first to arrive. His mother lowered her voice, "I don't know what it is. He loves coming to school. It's all he talks about."

I answered, "It looks to me like maybe he's savoring the moment."

"Maybe that's it," she replied, "but if it is, he's the master of savoring moments. He does this all the time. He did the same thing at the grocery store yesterday. When I ask him what he's waiting for, he tells me he's waiting to know what to do."

I asked her, "Is he waiting for you to tell him what to do or something?"

"Obviously not," she laughed, "You heard me. It's like he's waiting for an inner voice."

By now others were arriving, stepping around him to get through the door. Still he stood, smiling, breathing, waiting for his inner voice.

After several minutes, his mother did what some parenting books suggest: she gave him a choice. "You can walk in by yourself or I can carry you."

In a flash, his sanguineness left him. His body visibly stiffened, his eyes rounded. Then he burst into tears.

Perhaps he had, all along, been submerging his real feelings behind smiling and stillness, but two-year-olds typically don't try to hide their feelings. More likely, it had been his mother's gentle insistence that he make a decision that had suddenly stressed him out.

I think, as adults, with all of our practice making decisions, we tend to forget how very stressful it can be to make decisions, even seemingly small ones. After all, only a few months ago he was a baby. We don't expect babies to make decisions. It's something we must learn how to do. And without practice it can be hard.

Indeed, among the living things, it seems that humans are unique in terms of decision-making. A flower becomes aware of the sun and turns toward it. My dog barks at sudden noises. The rabbits that live in my neighborhood react to the same sudden noises by hiding in the shrubbery. Flowers, dogs, rabbits, they don't make decisions, they react to their "inner voice." And while we humans certainly remain at one level instinctive animals, we are the only living creature, as far as we know, that can override our instincts, and actually make a decision about how to behave in any given circumstance.

And making decisions is stressful. The onus to choose among one or more courses of action is something we must practice. We talk about the impulsivity of young children. If we ask them why they did this or that, they usually can't tell us because there was no point at which they made a decision -- they just reacted according to instinct in the same way they instinctively react to a breast by suckling. But the uniqueness of humanity is that we have developed a kind of consciousness that is capable of ignoring our inner voice and choosing how to behave.

It must be incredibly confusing to be a very young child, stuck between the natural imperative of instincts and the learned social imperative to make decisions. 

In many ways, decision-making can be considered the essence of our lives. 

Of course, we all know the stress of making big decisions, like choosing a university, buying a home, or getting married. Making these decisions are often so stressful that it impacts our eating and sleeping.

On the other hand, most of us have figured out ways to reduce the stress of day-to-day decision-making. One strategy we all use at one time or another is to make a decision once, then stick to it as a way to avoid the stress of on-the-spot decision-making. We call these habits. It is stressful, however, when something happens to thwart us. We choose a brand at the supermarket and stick to it, but are thrown for a small loop when our favorite is out of stock. We make schedules, then get stressed out when something comes up. We're suddenly made anxious when our normal route to work is blocked by construction. Even our little decisions, and the gyrations we go through around them, shape our lives, often profoundly.

Young children have not learned the trick of habits and so are forever faced with decisions that we consider inconsequential. No wonder they cry.

There is only one way to learn to make decisions and that is through practice. This is why play is so important for young children. It is the mechanism by which children can grapple with the dilemma of decision-making. Through play, we learn, in a relatively safe way, about the consequences of our decisions, we learn how to consider others in our decision-making, we figure out those habits that make our lives less stressful, and also what to do when our expectations are thwarted. 

There is pain, fear, and loss: these are the stressors we share with all living things. But the stress of decision-making is ours alone. And it is our blessing and our curse.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.


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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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Life is Suffering


Awhile back, I was experiencing a little lower back pain, concentrated on the right side. After a series of massage appointment, the pain was gone, but, irritatingly, now there was pain on the lower left side. Again, I booked a series of massages, this time focusing on my whole back. Soon, all my back pain was gone. That's when I noticed that my knees ached. 

I saw where this was going: each time I alleviated one pain, it left the space for another to rear its head. When I was a child, this wasn't true, but since I've been an adult, something always hurts . . . Except when I'm working with young children. The pain, wherever it's located,  returns the moment the last child has gone home.

Both Buddha and the Stoics have said, in so many words, that life is suffering. But we don't need the ancient philosophers for us to know this. I think we can all agree that there is enough suffering to go around. And while "life is suffering" may strike many of us as depressing, we can't ignore the truth of it. Everyone suffers. And I suspect, in the spirit of noticing a new pain each time an old one is eliminated, that everyone suffers equally.

The best part of having posted on this blog for so long (15 years!) is when a reader tells me that I've changed their mind or blown their mind or given them a new way of thinking about things. I know that when I read, my hope going in is that I will emerge a changed person. If nothing else, I seek to walk away with a new perspective from which to view the world.

When we're in school, we're taught that good writing starts with an outline, one that germinates in a premise, which we then support, followed by a conclusion. I don't write that way. Indeed, most mornings, at best, I have a quote or an idea or a story to get me going. I sometimes have an idea of where I'm going to wind up, but often, in the process of writing, the idea I started with leads me to something entirely different.

That happened yesterday. I had come across a series of Gallup polls of K-12 teachers that indicated that our profession is in trouble: we're burnt out, disrespected, and robbed of our agency as professionals. I thought I was writing a post about how something must be done about our increasingly toxic workplaces. But then, as I bounced back and forth between articles and the post, I saw that, despite it all, the people in our profession come second only to physicians when reporting an overall sense of wellbeing. We teachers tend to love our jobs.

I think we can all agree that life is suffering, so the question is, How do we live? There is a lesson in the story the surveys tell about us teachers.

Most of us, most of the time, I think, do what I did with my lower back pain. We take measures to alleviate our suffering only to find that the suffering emerges elsewhere. Some of us go from doctor to doctor. Others from guru to guru. Still others chase riches or fame or power in the hopes that if we just have a little bit more we can make the suffering go away. In yesterday's post I shared the conclusions of a study (and there are others) that indicate that if our goal is a sense of wellbeing, then we are best served by focusing more on other people, and specifically on helping them reduce their own suffering.

This is exactly what teachers get to do. As Aristotle stressed, a happy life must involve engagement with others, not just with the self. It's not surprising that physicians likewise report high levels of wellbeing.

Of course, a sense of wellbeing doesn't mean the same thing as the alleviation of suffering, because that is impossible. But when we help others, when we serve others, when we stop focusing selfishly on ourselves and turn our attentions outward, that is when our own suffering tends to recede into the background. It's still there, but it matters less.

In Leo Tolstoy's short story Three Questions, a king who suffers searches his kingdom for answers to his three important questions:

(H)e had it proclaimed throughout his kingdom that he would give a great reward to anyone who would teach him what was the right time for every action, and who were the most necessary people, and how he might know what was the most important thing to do.

And in the end, a hermit helps him to his answers:

Remember then: there is only one time that is important -- Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are . . . and the most important affair is to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!"

The most important time is now. The most important person is the one we are with. And the most important thing to do is help them. These, to me, are the answers to the question of how to live. 

This is what teachers do.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.


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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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Are the Teachers Alright?







Despite all this, of the professions surveyed, teachers rate their overall wellbeing very highly, second only to physicians. Teachers say they get to "use their strengths and do what they do best every day."

Teachers are also a happy bunch. They are the most likely of all professions to say they "smiled or laughed a lot yesterday," and the most likely to report experiencing "happiness" and "enjoyment" yesterday. What's more, teachers rank No. 2 in saying they "learn or do something new" each day.

Does any of this resonate with you? These surveys were focused on K-12 educators, so maybe it's different with preschool teachers. Maybe we have a bit more autonomy and agency in our jobs, but I doubt it. Over the past decade, I've had the opportunity to meet teachers and preschool directors from all corners of the country. Everywhere I ask, "What's the number one challenge you're facing?" Almost every one of them says, "Finding teachers."

And no wonder, right? Not only are we notoriously underpaid, but we're prone to burn-out and disengagement. At the same time, there is the "happy bunch" phenomenon. These same people I talk to always tell me that they love their jobs, despite its challenges. And that doesn't surprise me. It's not an accident that we rank right up there with physicians in terms of wellbeing: everyone knows that the secret to happiness is to serve others, laugh, and to continue to learn. 

Those who have studied such things tell us that the typical child laughs some 400 times per day, while the typical adult might laugh 15 times on a good day. Laughter is an indicator of pleasure, delight, and surprise. It means we are learning. It means we are fully in the moment. We get to laugh with children for a living. 

In her book Flourish, philosopher and publisher Antonia Case writes:

The American psychologist Tim Kasser asked university students to write down their goals for the months ahead. They were also asked to rate how happy they’d feel on attaining these goals. Their progress towards these goals and their current feelings of well-being were tracked in student diaries. Interestingly, students who pursued materialistic goals — like money or fame — tracked absolutely no gains in happiness after progressing towards these goals. In fact, their sense of well-being was no higher than it was in those who failed to make any progress at all. “The implications of this for a materialistic orientation are deep,” writes Kasser. “First, when people follow materialistic values and organize their lives around attaining wealth and possessions, they are essentially wasting their time as far as well-being is concerned . . .” Kaser found the students who sought non-materialistic goals like personal growth, close relationships and community contribution displayed very steep gains in well-being as they progressed towards these goals. Kasser is in good company here: the Greek philosopher Aristotle also stressed that a happy life must involve engagement with others, not just with the self.

We should make more money. We should have full benefits. We should have more agency. Our opinions should matter. All of this is true and would go a long way toward attracting more young people to our profession.

At the same time, especially when things are difficult, when we're feeling down, when we're feeling burnt out, there are blessings to count. We make a difference. We know we do. We see it every day. We feel it every day. We get to live lives of purpose and meaning, surrounded by laughter.

Of course, we must continue to speak out for better compensation and more respect, but we can't only do it for ourselves. We must do it on behalf of others: our colleagues, the children, and their families. This is what gives life purpose and meaning.

Life as an educator can be hard, but life itself is hard, there is no escaping it. That's not the point. Engaging with and for others is. Living a life of purpose and meaning is the surest path to a life worth living.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.


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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Monday, March 11, 2024

This is What My Dog Knows

What is she thinking about?

I don't understand. Not even the most fundamental things come to me easily. I seem to be totally unaware, for instance, that the building we're passing is grilling meat because if I was aware, of course I'd turn and go inside . . . And eat the meat!

I never seem to know that now, right now, is a perfect time for going outside and walking around, because exercise is good. 

I'm ignorant of the impending invasive danger possible from the vehicle that is idling in the road outside our house. 

I don't know that there is a family of noisy, cheeky, thieving mice living in that hole in the ground. 

I fail far too often to respond to wounds in my relationship with my wife that must be healed, again, right now, and the way to do that is through, compassion, forgiveness, and physical contact, preferably cuddling. And our dog has to constantly remind me of this.

I love them, our dog Stella seems to think, But my goodness are my people dense.

In our arrogance, we've come to believe that human intelligence has emerged at the top of this planet's hierarchy of intelligences, that ours is the best and most profound way of knowing. But if we take even a small thoughtful moment to look behind the simplistic dominant-submissive narrative that many of us use when discussing canine intentionality, we find that our dog's behaviors demonstrate a genius for cross-species sociability. That their's is an intelligence that embodies the collective ideal. Self-actualization for domesticated dogs is about mood enhancement, not just for themselves, but for everyone. The dogs I've known care far less about individuality or getting their own selfish needs met, and far more about the wellbeing of the pack. And while they may not possess the kind of self-conscious awareness -- the knowing what they know or that they know -- that humans do, they are the masters of unselfconscious love.

I've often asserted that domestic canines stand as one of the most important human inventions. And they are human inventions at least to the degree that we've selectively bred these formerly wild animals, even our working dogs, for their sociability and their capacity to love us.

I've lived with many dogs and while they've each had unique personalities, interests, and aptitudes, they've all reminded me, daily, that there is so much in this world about which I'm ignorant. At one level, it's their superior ability to hear and smell that gives me pause. What is she following with her nose to the ground? What is she hearing outside the door? But it goes beyond that. She notices the birds sitting on the wire or the butterfly in the bush. She responds to both friends and strangers in ways that make me believe that she must know something about them I don't. I've read that our dogs can hear our hearts beating. I imagine they always know when someone is insincere or lying, even if they might not know exactly what they are insincere or lying about.

Like so many things, our ability to know that we know and what we know is one of our greatest strength as a species, yet within the soil of this superpower lies the seed of our destruction. When we make the mistake of believing that knowing-that-we-know makes us superior to other intelligences, then it tends to blind us to the great genius found in unselfconscious knowing: the knowing a seed has about growing, a bird has about nesting, and a dog has about connecting. We dismiss these things as mere instinct, as thoughtless, automatic responses to internal and external signals, but anyone who has ever loved an animal knows that their intellectual and emotional range is at least as expansive as our own. Just different. And by striving to understand their perspective, with their help, we can come to a fuller understanding of reality.

We will never have the sensory capacity of dogs, but we are born with a similar genius. We are not born consciously knowing that we must connect in order to survive, but through our every behavior we demonstrate that we do know it. Scientists have labeled a dozen or so behaviors as "instincts" or "reflexes" with which most of us are born. But consider the difference it would make if we could teach ourselves to view those behaviors -- crying, startling, nursing -- as intelligence.

We are born with the kind of unconscious intelligence that comprises most of the wisdom of the universe. As we grow and develop, our human capacity for self-conscious knowing naturally emerges, but we make a mistake when we strive, in our ignorance, to hurry children along to it. This is exactly what we are doing when we attempt to teach two-year-olds to read or three-year-olds to cipher, or four-year-olds to memorize science facts. When we dismiss a child's intelligence as mere instinct or reflex, what we do is assert our intellectual superiority over that child. We say, in effect, that the child is ignorant or innocent or unformed, and we give ourselves permission to "fix" them through educational efforts. In our hubris, in our own ignorance, we believe that we can one-up Mother Nature who has been working on human intelligence for billions of years. 

I can't prove this in a scientific sense, but it seems self-evident that our intelligence has evolved to develop, at its own pace, starting with the foundational unconscious intelligence with which we are born. This is wisdom that will remain true throughout our lives. It will not be overturned by some new scientific revelations or epiphany. It is the foundational knowledge that a seed has about how to grow, which is no less wise because it is unconscious. Self-conscious knowledge is far less reliable and far more subject to change than those things we dismiss as instincts. Today's scientific fact -- The earth is flat! -- is tomorrow's fiction. It seems self-evident to me that when we attempt to rush our children through the foundational part of their intellectual development, the part during which we engage the universal truths, we disrupt, even derail, their natural development.

Among the things that every human unconsciously knows from birth is that they must play, which is to say explore, experiment, and discover, a learning process that is driven by curiosity. When school-ish people see play, they dismiss it as a distraction because it looks like mere instinct, when, in fact, it is the foundation upon which all learning, all knowledge, all wisdom, is built. This is what my dog knows.

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.

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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Friday, March 08, 2024

To Understand, Reflect, and Judge



In his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Jacque Ellul writes: 

People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important thing is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what ones reads. Outside of that, reading has no meaning (and even destroys certain automatic qualities of memory and observation). But to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe — or disbelieve — in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardest, reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.

A child begins developing their capacity for understanding, thinking, and judging long before they learn to read. From the moment of birth, from the moment the familiar world of the womb gives way to the bright, noisy world outside, children are faced with the lifelong reality that what they thought they knew, the status quo, is nothing more than a temporary condition and that to understand life, they must, often radically, completely revamp their perspective on truth. I'm not saying that baby's do this as an overt intellectual process, they don't yet know they know, they don't know they are learning, but their entire being is taken up with making sense of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that now comprise their world.

No amount of instruction will help them. We hold them, keep them warm, feed them, love them: these are the things that babies are born "knowing" they need if they are to have any chance at survival. These are the things that form the foundational levels of the famous Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: physiological needs, safety needs, and love and belonging needs. 

This is why it's so important that our youngest citizens be allowed to play, not just for an hour or two per day, but as the core of their day-to-day life. When we are spoon-fed our education, told what we must learn, there is no room for applying or developing our critical faculties and discernment which opens us up to those who would manipulate us. We are learning skills, like reading, but because they are abstract from critical thinking, they are rendered meaningless except for those who would now use those minimal skills to manipulate, even harm, them and their loved ones.

When we play, we make everything we do meaningful, relevant. When we play, we play with the status quo, any status quo, until we break it, revealing something new that can stand in its place. That's what learning is. Reading is a wonderful thing. At its best, what we read is the product of a human who has upset the order of things, who is inviting us to see the world in a new way, and who inspires us to do the same. A reader is exposed to the author's ideas. A critical thinker, one who knows that the world is their's with which to play, turns those ideas over and over, looking at them from every angle, comparing them with what they thought they already knew, feeling curious and outraged and inspired to contemplate something entirely new. In today's schools, the student who can most accurately summarize a story's plot receives the highest grade. In a school committed to critical thinking, it's the student who doubts, wrestles, experiments, and invents who is doing the real work of learning.

These are also the people who are most immune to propaganda and other manipulations.

Long before we learn to read, if we are permitted to play, we have learned the most important aspect of reading -- or math or science or history or art -- which is to understand, reflect, and judge. 

******

Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.


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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