Hard Work And Suffering A Kids

Teaching preschool is hard work. It is physically and emotionally demanding. At the end of a day in the classroom I'm done.

This is not a complaint, but rather a statement of fact. In almost any other job there are times, even entire days or weeks, when it's possible to just phone it in, but that's not an option for preschool teachers. The routine physical demands of up and down, of playing, of lifting and carrying, being on your knees all day, day-after-day, take their toll. I don't know any teacher who has been at this for any length of time who doesn't experience back and joint pain. And it's even more taxing emotionally. At any given moments we're listening with our entire selves, consoling, counseling, coaching, or otherwise supporting highly emotional people through what for them is a crisis. We pour ourselves into these children because it is our job, but also because we love them. More often than not, I finish a classroom day buoyed and proud by the work I've done, but I'm also wrung out in a way that nothing else wrings me out.

I love the work. We love our work. It's hard work.

Earlier this week, I wrote about people who worry about the children we teach. They worry that if we leave them to educate themselves by asking and answering their own questions through their play that  they will never learn about hard work. This is BS of the highest order, of course. Indeed, I've never seen a playing child who was not working hard. They show us they are working hard in the intensity of their concentration as they try to add one more block to the top of their tower. They show us their work ethic as they fully engage in the intense back-and-forth of negotiations over who is really going to be the queen. No one works harder than a child who is struggling with a puzzle or with balancing along a curb or trying to summon up the courage to take a leap. They are always working hard to process the confusing world around them through their dramatic play, their storytelling, and the strong emotions they wear on their sleeves.

No, children who play show they know everything they will ever need to know about hard work. What they may not know about it arbitrary suffering. It occurs to me that this is really what people are saying when they "worry" about play-based education. Life is hard, the reasoning goes, it is full of all sorts of things you don't want to do, but you must do them nevertheless so, in the name of teaching this lesson, we must require young children to suffer at least a little by commanding them to do things they don't want to do. What's missing in this argument is that children, just like all humans, are already doing plenty of things they don't want to do. We don't need to go out of our way to create arbitrary, even punitive, suffering, like say (for many of us at least) algebra, in order to "teach" this hard lesson. Our first communications are cries of pain or hunger, of suffering, of experiencing life as suffering. It's such a self-evident lesson that even infants know it. Manufacturing lessons in suffering strike me as unnecessarily cruel. 

As a preschool teacher of a certain age, I don't necessarily want to squat and lift. It hurts my knees, but of course I do it because some amount of suffering is required to do this thing I love to do. Hard work and suffering are built into life no matter what. The answer is not to "get used to it" as the worriers would have it, but rather to play, to spend life doing things you choose, things you love, because that's the only thing that stands against the suffering.

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"Are They Pretending?"

A group of three and four-year-olds were playing a game of camping. They had draped a blanket over the backs of some chairs, under which they huddled together, alternating between being asleep and waking up. A pile of building blocks served as their campfire. Suddenly, a pair of bears stomped onto their site, kicking out the fire while roaring menacingly. There were screams as the campers cowered in their tent.

I was sitting off to the side with one of their classmates, a bright boy, an early reader and sophisticated talker who many would have considered "gifted." He was watching the game with a glassy gaze until the arrival of the bears when his eyes widened into alarmed circles before, after a moment, narrowing into a look of suspicion, "Are they pretending?" At the time, I took his question to be referring to the entire scenario, but in hindsight, I realize he may just have been asking about the shrieks of terror, but whatever the case something about it struck him as "real," at least for a moment. I assured him it was pretend, pointing out that everyone was smiling, and no one was really being eaten and he seemed satisfied to have his suspicions confirmed.

Young children spend a lot of time exploring that line between real and pretend, playing with it like a curtain, dancing in and out, examining the world from both sides. We make a mistake when we consider their pretend worlds to be frivolous. Dramatic play is an important part of how children come to understand reality, a safe place where they can explore themes and concepts they want to better comprehend. In this camping game, for instance, which emerged from one of the children having recently experienced her first family camping trip, they were playing with what it means to sleep outdoors, away from home, snuggled together with only a piece of fabric for protection. They were playing with the idea of fear, violence, ferocity, and the ruthlessness of the natural world, where bears might very well eat you. By adopting roles like mommy and daddy and big sister and bear, they were assuming the "costume" of another, trying to imagine how the world looks from the perspective of another person whose station in life is very different from their own. No, these games are far from frivolous: they are essential.

When the boy asked me "Are they pretending?" I assured him that they were, but I could have just as honestly answered "No," because like every game of pretend, reality stands at the heart of it. Quite often, for instance, the emotions are real, even if the characters involved are unicorns and superheroes. The negotiating required to come to the collective agreements required to manufacture pretend worlds is as real, and often as intense, as any international diplomacy. The working together, the cooperation, and the collaboration are valuable currency in the real world as well as their pretend ones.

Yet still, even as reality and fantasy slip back and forth, even as the line is as fine as gossamer, most children, most of the time, know exactly where they are at any given moment, which is why the boy's question has stuck with me. Yes, they sometimes get momentarily lost in their games, sometimes they pretend so well they frighten themselves or actually hit or forget they're not really the queen, but taken all together, it is really quite miraculous how well they keep it all sorted in their individual as well as collective minds. Most of the time, as I was with the camping game, I'm just watching, marveling at their natural ability to walk that line or dance with that curtain, together, weaving a world beyond our hidebound one, a new reality that usually begins with the invitation "Let's pretend . . ." and is propelled by agreement.

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A Process Of Godlike Creation Children Education

"Those clouds are having a race."

"My tummy's full of happy bubbles."

"The thunder growled at me last night."

"I feel love flowing through my whole body."

Humans can hardly communicate, or even think for that matter, without the use of metaphor. It's how we construct our collective reality. Clouds don't actually race, happiness does not come in bubbles, thunder cannot growl, and there is no river of love, yet these things are, nevertheless, real. On one level, the creation of metaphor seems like an incredibly complex thing: the projection of the qualities of one domain onto another, creating an entirely new reality linking both domains. On another level, however, metaphor is a piece of cake, something that even the youngest humans can do.

One of the great joys of working with young children is to be present as they employ metaphor to construct knowledge and understanding. They delight us, not just with their joy, but with the sheer inventiveness, ease, and humor with which they create new meaning from this old, stale world, a place where we adults have long ago settled upon our metaphors. They surprise us out of our humdrum, showing us a new world that has, in a moment of childlike epiphany, come into existence. We take it as evidence of their genius, and it is, but it's more than that: it shows us that humans are, in fact, creators, all of us, and metaphor is a no less important building block than the atom.

There are many reasons for adults to practice listening in the presence of children. We think because we've lived more years that what we have to say is of more vital importance, that we can and should always be teaching. But much of what we do amounts to sucking oxygen from the room as we play an inadvertent demon to a process of godlike creation.

I've just published a book! If you are interested in ordering Teacher Tom's First Book, click here. Thank you!

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!