The Best Way to Improve the Literacy Rate in America

Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.  ~Nelson Mandela

A while back, I was reading about a Stanford University study about brain waves and how different teaching methods affect reading development. They looked at brain waves as teachers worked to teach their students to read and their findings were actually the opposite of what I would have expected.

Of course, I've never tried to teach children how to read, and I never will, but there are a lot of preschool and kindergarten teachers out there who are expected to, despite the overwhelming evidence that early reading instruction actually damages a child's reading future. What I do, what is appropriate for children under seven, is read to them, write down the stories they tell me, play stories with them, tell stories as they happen, encourage dramatic play, write the rules we make together and post them on the wall where we can all reverently "read" them, and make sure there are always books among our loose parts.

This Stanford study talks about things like phonics and whole words and the rest of the stuff direct instruction focused teachers do with the children in their charge. So let me be clear, this wasn't a study about how children best learn to read, but rather on how teachers can best "teach" children to read in schools. This is the kind of research that Carol Black equates to studying the orca whales at Sea World and claiming to understand orca whales, but that's not the point of this post.

As I reflected on what I'd read, I thought about how high stakes standardized testing is increasingly narrowing our public school curricula to the point that they we focus almost exclusively on math and literacy. Then I asked myself: what problem are we trying to solve, especially when it comes to literacy? So I looked it up. I checked several sources. There are lots of different ways to measure literacy, but most agree that our average literacy rate, as compared to other nations, has declined over the past couple decades, a timeframe that matches exactly with the advent of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core and other federal interventions into our public schools. Perhaps these efforts aren't hurting our literacy rates, but they are failing to reverse the trend.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything; I'm just saying that we appear to be doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, tracking quite closely to the illiteracy rate, one in five American children now live in poverty. I'd like to suggest that instead turning our educational system upside down and spending billions on unproven efforts that may actually be eroding our children's ability and desire to read, maybe we should spend our billions on doing something about the 22 percent of our children (and fully 50 percent of public school students) who go to bed hungry each night. We know that poverty is directly linked to lack of success in school. There is nothing we could do that would have a greater impact on education in America.

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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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The Urge To Destroy In This Year 2020 ?

The nineteenth century anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin famously asserted "The urge for destruction is also a creative urge." This concept came to mind recently when I came across a tree trunk that had clearly been vandalized. I suppose it could have been an animal or some other natural phenomenon that created the hole in the trunk, but it sure looked to me like the work of human hands, and it did not strike me as the result of any sort of creative urge.

I live in a densely populated urban area where I am regularly confronted by the human urge to destroy. Graffiti I can understand as the result of a creative urge, but branches ripped from saplings, litter, and over-turned city bikes? Not so much. I imagine that someone could argue that destruction is a precursor to creativity, like slums that must be bulldozed to make way for palaces, but it's a stretch. The most one can say for random human destruction is that it can, maybe sometimes, like in the case of graffiti, be considered in the benevolent light of creativity.

Every day in every preschool classroom, the urge to destroy is nevertheless evident. Even if it isn't part of the creative urge, it is, apparently something deeply human. Paper is torn into tiny bits and scattered on the floor, carefully constructed block towers are joyfully toppled, pages are ripped from books, toys are dismantled in ways that they can never be put back together. Some of it is accidental, of course, but as a boy once replied when I asked him why he had intentionally broken something, "I wanted to see if I could break it."

When I passed around to the other side of the tree with the vandalized trunk, I saw that it was notable in the sense that it's trunk was bizarrely deformed, looking something like one of those candles in a Chiati bottle stereotypically found in an Italian restaurant. It was strikingly different from the trees around it and because of that it roused my curiosity. It occurred to me that perhaps it had been curiosity, the primal scientific urge, that had caused someone to begin picking a hole in the trunk. If the trunk was so different on the outside, one could wonder if the interior was equally deformed.

I think it's safe to say that much of the "destruction" we see around the classroom can be marked up to curiosity, even if misguided, but that still leaves the question of broken bottles, wantonly discarded fast food wrappers, and knocked over bicycles. I suppose some of it could simply be chalked up to laziness, although psychologists tell us that there is no such thing. Feelings of depression, alienation, disenfranchisement, or just plain old anger at the world seem more likely causes of this sort of destructive behavior.

A psychologist friend told me that he was once engaged to treat an eight-year-old who had been referred by his parents for his "destructive behavior." The boy slumped into a chair and started the conversation by declaring, "I'm bad because I'm sad." If only we all could be as insightful as this kid.

Humans destroy to create, we destroy to explore, we destroy to express despair, and perhaps we are sometimes unconsciously driven to join the universe's unstoppable quest for ever-increasing entropy. As teachers and parents, we are too often poised to punish, to scold the child for something that he's broken, but it's never that simple with us human beings.

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Not Teaching Your Child With This. . !

I never pretend to know what kids will learn on any given day and, honestly, any teacher who does is either deluded or blowing smoke. No one can possibly know what another person is going to learn. You can hope. You can plan. You can lecture yourself blue. You can even, if you're especially clever, trick someone into learning something, but the idea that one person can "teach" something to another, except under narrow circumstances, is one of the great educational myths.

There is a quote that is most often attributed to the Buddha, but is more likely of Theosophical origins, that goes: "When the student is ready the master will appear." I like these kinds of quotes that persist because they are true even when they can't be traced back to the utterances of Buddha, Socrates, or Einstein. This one is even so true that there is a corollary: "When the master is ready the student will appear."

Some days I accidentally "teach" something to a kid. For instance, I once improperly used the term "centrifugal force" (when I actually should have use "centripetal force") while a child was experimenting with a hamster wheel and the kid, months later, was still misusing my term while performing his experiments, even as I repeatedly tried to correct him. But most days I teach nothing at all except, perhaps, what I convey to my students by role modeling. I've tried, believe me, to convey specific information to kids, like when I tell them that dirt is primarily made from volcanos, dead stuff, and worm poop, but most of the time the only things that stick are the things about which the kids are already asking questions.

And still, despite my utter lack of "teaching," the kids who come to our school are learning. How do I know? I watch them. I listen to them. I remember when they didn't know and then I hear them saying and see them doing things that demonstrate that now they do. And even though I'm not teaching them, they mostly learn exactly what I want them to know.

What do I want them to know?

The joy of playing with other people.

The frustration and redemption of failure.

Emotions come and go and they are important.

I'm the boss of me and you're the boss of you.

Our agreements are sacred.

It's not only important to love, but also to say it.

It's not my job to "teach" these things. It is my job to love them and to do what I can to create an environment that is stimulating, beautiful, and safe enough: a place where children can ask and answer their own questions about the world and the people they find there. A place not of teaching, but of discovery. We call it play and it's everything.

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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!