Tomorrow's Gonna Be A Better Day

Once again, I was listening to the radio.  Like my fellow Americans, I find moments to muse in my car, when I am alone.  My morning drive to work is a little island of time in a constantly rolling sea.  Once in a while, I actually stop going over my mental To Do list and, as my boss would say, I "reflect."  

First, a couple weeks ago, I was listening to music, a song by Billy Bragg.  And then this morning, I was listening to the news.  This news had a human interest-y story about electronic gaming, and how game designers and companies are actually targeting specific demographics to enhance what game makers call "fun pain."  Apparently, games, especially the initially free ones, are designed to hook kids good, and then make it extremely painful to stop playing the game, so painful that the player is willing to buy his way into continuing or improving.  The games are designed to bring players, particularly young, male players to the brink of devastation by threatening the loss of all the material created so far, all the points earned or the death of their character if they so much as think about turning the game off.  The games are designed to addict and frustrate kids in the pursuit of the addiction so that they will do anything to get a continuance of the game, including buying more power or time within the game.  So a player can ka-ching right inside the app to buy more resources for his character, or to just continue playing.  And the gaming companies, as well as the big computer and phone makers are gathering real time data on young players as they play in order to enhance this "fun pain" principle.  I hear this and I feel a bit sick.  Parents are quoted right there on the radio, saying things like, "it's a real addiction," and "I hate those games more than anything else" and "He can play for twelve hours straight.  Tennis, hockey, all those fun things, they can't complete with the games."  I think:  smash the device, go outside.

As a teacher in a place that is dedicated to land-based learning, I am especially susceptible to looking for the evil in technology-- or society, or really, anything to do with the world that people have constructed out of this earth.  I feel guilty about every plastic bag, about the stuff that runs my phone that kids in Africa are digging out of pits with their fingernails, about fracking and pipelines and driving my car.  But, remember, I said I was also listening to Billy Bragg.  Before you jump on my bandwagon of doom, please consider Billy Bragg.  

Okay, Billy's a bit of a sad sack, a rambling romantic rake, but I like his music, and I like his world view. The guy generally stands up for people and ideas who don't always have a voice.  He's political and unapologetically so, but here's the thing:  Billy Bragg is an optimist.  Time and again, the guy speaks out about the worst of the worst ills of society, but he has faith that we people, the ones screwing things up, also have the power to fix the screw ups, the power to change things for the better.  He has faith in us.  Consider his song, Tomorrow's Going to be a Better Day:

To the misanthropic misbegotten merchants of gloom,
Who look into their crystal balls and prophesy our doom,
Let the death knell chime, its the end of time,
Let the cynics put their blinkers on and toast our decline.

Don't become demoralized by this chorus of complaint,
It's a sure sign that the old world is terminally quaint,
And tomorrow's gonna be a better day,
No matter what the siren voices say,
Tomorrow's gonna be a better day,
We're gonna to make it that way.

To the pessimistic populists who harbor no doubt,
That every day we make our way to hell in a hand cart,
And the snaky set, who's snapping to get,
Anyone who sticks their head above the parapet.

Oh don't become disheartened baby, don't be fooled,
Take it from someone who knows the glass is half full,
Tomorrow's gonna be a better day,
No matter what the siren voices say,
Tomorrow's gonna be a better day,
...We're gonna make it that way.

Nice writing.  Big idea.  But what does this have to do with land-based education for young children?  A day ago a friend of mine, and a parent of one of my students said to me, "When does play end?"  She read my previous blog and was thinking about her older son, a graduate of Dodge.  I know she felt like she was crying in the dark, calling out in the wilderness.  For her school-age son it seems like play is over.  She related a story about a kindergartner who returned from winter break to discover that the play kitchen, once residing in the classroom, had disappeared.  Playtime was over.  Seems dire, right?  Here we are at Dodge, standing on our lovely, ivy-covered soapbox, telling you how great all this outdoor play is and then you have to send your kid to kindergarten where all they get is twenty minutes outside (if they are lucky) and a lousy play kitchen that evaporates mid-year.  There seems to be a disconnect here, right?  

So, if the glass is half empty, we see the terrible impact of all that structured time inside of a nearly barren utilitarian school.  My daughter's first grade class did not have windows.  I went home and cried.  The students bend to the will of a system that is organized around standardized curriculum supplied by big publishing business.  Teachers seem to teach to tests and learning seems codified to a degree that we would not have recognized as late as the late eighties.  

But, if the glass is half full, we see kids enter a broader social arena that seeks to meet the needs of an incredibly diverse population.  Each public school class, kindergarten and beyond, includes every kind of child you can imagine.  Kids learn to cope and get a long with each other.  In elementary school, most learning, indeed the focus of learning, seems to be social and emotional.  Can you get along with all of these people?  Can you control your impulses when they should be controlled?  Can you listen to the teacher and try to ascertain and meet her needs, and yours a little bit too (this is a neat trick!).  Can you make yourself known and heard?  Can you discover what kind of a person you are in this wider community?  Can you jump through societal hoops and still be yourself?  Can you see the value of going to school with all of these different kinds of people (including your teachers)?  These are questions that arise for students and parents in elementary school and I think they are meaningful.  I learned the most the year that my daughter had a teacher who just plain didn't understand her.  I learned about myself and my issues around tolerance.  I learned that I had choices too.  I could get mad at the teacher (I did).  I could stay at home and complain about my district and my school (I did that for a while too).  Or I could participate in this new system and join the community, with my voice and actions (I eventually arrived at this).

But what of play?  I couldn't change recess in elementary school, but I talked to the teachers about it, and discovered that most of them were also frustrated about the lack of outside time, and the lack of hands-on learning.  Most of the teachers I got to know at our neighborhood school were working with the system they have in order to create opportunities for physical activity and project-based learning.  And, I believe, project-based learning is where play goes as kids mature.  At least it is where older kids should go, and it is where good teachers take them.  There was the teacher who dissected eyeballs and owl pellets and grew crayfish with the kids.  There was the teacher, who, when the kids read, "The Indian in the Cupboard," hauled in an old cupboard, let the kids paint it and populate it with their own mysterious bits and bobs.  There was the teacher who insisted the kids go outside at least twice a day, and snuck the kids out to race or sled during that last hour each day.  Another did yoga and let the kids make murals and read on their tummies in the hallway.

In elementary school, there seemed to be a heavier emphasis on learning routines and developing habits of organization.  Could you read independently for twenty minutes and then at precisely twenty after close your book at transition to spelling?  Learning in discrete boxes of time seemed ludicrous to me.  But, in retrospect, I see this as more about developing habits of control and social skill rather than developing cognitively.  Now, as my kids enter middle school, I hear a lot more about project-based learning.  I see kids in the school making things with their hands, moving outside for activities whenever they can and having fun.  I see kids laughing, playing in the halls socially right in the midst of science lessons.  Our kids have recently joined the Science Olympiad team and, come to find out, they are having fun, literally playing with scientific concepts as they create and prepare to compete.  I have come to realize that most interested, invested teachers know that kids need to have ownership of discovery if they are to learn about the world and succeed.  And most teachers, once you take the time to talk to them, seem to recognize and to value creativity and thinking "outside the box."  And, when you come across the occasional dud teacher who doesn't recognize or value creativity and hands-on learning, who can't get her head out of the workbook, you have to either live with him or her, or speak up.  This too, after all is a learning opportunity.

So, here at Dodge, we may be tempted to think that "out there" is a pretty bleak place.  Time and again, though, when I tell public school teachers where I work, they smile and say, "I love that place.  Our kids have such a good time there."  See?  We have some choices to make.  What we do at Dodge, the fact that families and schools choose to participate in land-based activities with us has an impact.  We can carry land-based, project-based, hands-on learning values forward by participating in our communities.  At my first ever middle school PTO meeting I said, "Could we have a school-wide outdoor learning event  here on our own grounds?"  The principal nodded enthusiastically and said, "That's a great idea. We have a spectacular woods right out our own back door and we don't use it enough."  Another parent, a teacher said, "At my school we now do a bunch of all outside days, and we invite naturalists-- teachers and kids participate together."  

So tomorrow's gonna be a better day, if we decide to make it that way.