Tornado Alley

A couple of days ago, a kid in our "big kid class" of campers, one of the five and six-year-olds said, "I know a place!  Tornado Alley!  I know Tornado Alley!"  Turns out that this class of ours loves geography and so we embarked on a rather wide-ranging and existential class discussion of "places we know."  "Heaven," "Zanzibar," "Outer Space," and "Duluth" also made "The List."  But it is Tornado Alley that sticks with me.

Here at the Preschool, we spend a lot of time and energy thinking about and talking about coping skills like resilience, flexibility and patience.  We teachers pretty much agree that Nature (with a capital "N"), is a very good life skills coach.  Change of any kind usually presents a learning opportunity for young children, often challenging them to call upon new coping skills.  For young people, change often looks like a transition:  coming to school for the first time, separating from a care taker (if only for a few hours), putting on shoes or simply stopping what one is doing and going to the bathroom (preferably in a toilet).

Nature is full of transitions too.  Out on the trail, children not only observe change all around them-- a tree falls, an animal dies, an apple grows-- they must also cope with shifting terrain, obstacles and surprises.  At Dodge, kids learn to scramble over the fallen tree, to dig a grave for a classroom pet or to reach for a ripe apple.  Nature provides curriculum and we teachers simply help implement that curriculum.

Most of the time, challenges in Nature are manageable, but teachers do often think about how to avoid the toughest realities presented by the world around us.  We realize that our curriculum should be challenging, and also age-appropriate.  By and large, we agree that the hard reality of harvesting animals for food is best left as an abstraction when children are young:  "hamburgers come from cows."  That's Dodge Nature Preschool culture.  Now, young Inuit children might be happy to find the head of a narwhal on their kitchen floor, and certainly other rural Americans also have a closer relationship to their food.  My husband grew up slaughtering chickens.  At Dodge, we walk a finer line with our youngest charges, leaving it to families to sort out the hardest questions as they see fit.  Generally though, we adults and teachers feel that we can sort of control these kinds of questions or challenges.  But what happens when we feel like we can't control challenges?

Teachers try to keep at the front of our minds the notion that our students are developing and changing every day.  We accept change as a definition of childhood and actually celebrate it.  Sometimes life presents us with change that is unwelcome, and not so positive:  illness, dissolution or disaster.  Sometimes just a glancing blow from any of these vagaries brings home the notion that we are not in control.  A window opens on the human condition and we see the world through different eyes.   Days ago, my family's summer property was damaged by a tornado.  While severe weather is no stranger to us in Minnesota, the storm and its wreckage still came as a surprise, if not a shock.  I felt a little like I did when my little brother was diagnosed with a lifetime disease; I felt really vulnerable, like I could sympathize with that ant on the sidewalk, the one we urge preschoolers not to step on.

After spending a weekend collecting and moving debris, calling insurance people and trying, in vain, to get a tarp on a roof, we returned to our home in Lakeville to find that a dear, giant, old willow had succumbed to a second round of storms; the tremendous tree lay uprooted and smashed across two back yards.  I am not proud to relate my reaction to this new development:  a torrent of unpleasant vocabulary threatened to "blue" the air, but my wise husband appeared at my elbow.  "Be careful," he warned, "we're teaching them how to cope with change."  He was speaking of our nine-year-old twins who were indeed all eyes and ears.  Days later, when our car broke down in the extreme heat  (after surveying tornado damage with insurance assessors!), I still wanted to scream, throw my hands in the air or run and hide from forces beyond my control, but I recalled my husband's advice and literally bit my tongue.  While we may not be able to stop bad things from happening, we can try to control our response to them.  I can't blame my parents for my low coping skills, but I really do believe that it is in our best interest, as care takers, to try to teach the next generation to face adversity with patience, and flexibility.

I do not feel that it is age-appropriate to discuss the vagaries of climate change with young children, but I think that helping them develop coping skills now will give them the ability to tackle what may be the biggest challenge in their collective future.  It takes resilience to solve the problems and mitigate the results of rising temperatures, increasingly severe weather, loss of habitat and threatened air and water quality.  Behind all of our fabulous adventures here at Dodge Nature Center, is a love of the world we share and a conviction to promote stewardship and respect for the planet.  The next time you see a kid try to say, "good-bye," to pee on the potty, to leap the widest part of the stream, to lift the heaviest rock, battle thorns for the best berry or struggle to climb even higher, think,  "I'm seeing the future."

In Our Nature

 "...the splendid things of life are few, after all, and so very easy to miss."

These words are from, "The Song of the Lark."  They are Willa Cather's words in a book that may be the best of all American writing about a really American story:  the making of something out of almost nothing; the making of an artist.  Cather's heroine is Thea Kronborg, daughter of a Swedish minister in late 1880's fictional Moonstone, Nebraska.  Thea's people are pioneers in a frontier town built up out of the dust at the foot of the great Nebraska sand hills.  Moonstone exists, tenuously, because the railroad exists.  But the shining hills of sand, the moon and the arid plain have a much longer claim on existence, one that Cather is constantly reminding the reader of.  Indeed, when Thea boards the train for Chicago, off to make make her way in the world of music, she does not cry until she watches the sand hills disappear from her sight.  The shimmering hills are hard to miss.

Ever notice how much of our best art is directly inspired by nature?  How literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, books and music are so much about what the naysayers call "atmospherics?"  Even in the great cities, as artists make their way, they have been inspired by the nature of the city.  When O'Keefe came in off the Texas plains to New York, she painted the new skyscrapers against the night sky.  The skyscrapers themselves don't exist without that sky. Falling Water is considered Frank Lloyd Wright's greatest achievement and what is it but a human interpretation of an element?  Brancusi's most beautiful polished metal and wood sculptures combine and then transcend their medium to evoke the exultant mystery of birds in flight.  In her own writings about her writing, Cather has said that the title of her book is not really an allusion to the sound of a lark (a forgivable assumption, seeing how the book charts the rise of an opera star), but rather "The Song of the Lark," is a reference to Jules Breton's painting of the same name.  In his work, a young peasant woman, sickle in hand, walks through a field at dusk, her face and posture registering the sudden sound of the bird she surprises.  I think that what Cather meant is that her book is about the mystery of creativity and creation in general.  It takes people, and perhaps more than people, place to create the artist Thea Kronborg.  It is her memory and love of the place where she grew up that sustains her, and propels her forward.  Such an American idea!  Manifest Destiny, really.

What does this have to do with a nature preschool and children?  Well, I'll tell you.  I had to read my favorite book again to understand this:


"the splendid things of life are few, after all, and so very easy to miss." 

We spend our days here at Dodge trying to get kids to "stop and smell the roses."  Our whole enterprise is about connecting with the world around us, realizing, if only for a moment, that we are part of a bigger system.  Cather, like her heroine, was created by her environment.  And so are these kids we spend our days with on the trail.  The preschoolers leave Dodge at such a tender age, and most, if not all, will not actively remember their time here in the way that we adults like to think of the past.  But their bodies were there in the woods, looking, listening, touching, smelling, tasting and as they did so, their brains were actually growing, their grey matter forming new kinks of intelligence.  Today, for these children, the worms are wriggling in their palms and the apple blossoms are tickling their noses.  This afternoon, or tomorrow, or next week, all the kids that visit Dodge, will leave Dodge.  They'll be on the bus, graduating to kindergarten or leaving camp.  But somewhere, back there, in their nature, is the wriggling worm, the tiny green apple, the stinky barn, the shimmering pond and the sound of the wind in the trees.

Don't blink.














More to Explore:
www.willacather.org
www.okeefemuseum.org

The Song of the Lark Cather
O Pioneers! Cather
Pioneers, O Pioneers!  Whitman
My Name is Georgia by Jeanette Winter (great kid's book about O'Keefe)
The Divide by Michael Bedard and Emily Arnold McCully (terrific children's book about Cather)