Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
-Fred Rogers
I lied during a job interview. It took becoming a parent myself for me to fully realize the lie, to comprehend the untruth that so easily spilled from my lips.
Like any lie, it was driven by motive. I really wanted this teaching job. I needed to sound impressive, competent, dazzling....even if it meant not owning up to who I really was and speaking the truth that burned deep in my core.
"Describe a lesson that went well," was the question that floated over the large rectangular table, "Walk us through it. Why do you think it went well."
The tangy smell of Elmer's glue and powdery sweet handsoap permeated the air...the smell of school...one I had come to love.
I took a deep breath and glanced at my notes.
Impress them. Sell yourself. Dazzle them.
I cleared my throat and forced my shaky voice to be still...strong...confident, "I actually taught a math lesson last week to my Kindergartners about telling time, " I started, "And to begin with I made sure to outline the learning target with them."
I continued to babble on and on, making sure to drop all of the right educational "catch-phrases" and buzz-words...watching as my interviewers nodded and furiously scribbled notes, recording my verbal fluff on paper.
The genius in this particular lesson was highly ego-centric on my part. As if scripted right out of a trendy teacher workshop, I had 'Told them what they were going to learn, taught the lesson" and then, of course, wrapped it up with a golden bow by, "Reminding them what they learned." Sure it provided some hands-on experience (manipulating tiny card-board clocks), sure it included a literary integration (reading The Very Grouchy Lady Bug), sure it ensured guided practice ("Everybody turn your short hour hand to the eight, just like me) but to this day, the fallacy in categorizing this as one of my 'best' lessons makes me wish I could rewind the hands of that giant preverbial card-board clock myself and speak the truth in that interview.
The truth.
The honest truth is that when I take my pretentious 'teaching abilities' out of the equation and focus on a time when I could look into the eyes of every single student in my classroom and see that spark...that almost tangible burning desire to learn....when the classroom climate seemed to transform into something magical...one word emerges:
Play.
It was a boringly ordinary afternoon during my first year of teaching, and the prescribed math lesson for the day called for 'story problems.' Mentioning the very word elicited a communal moan among the 6 and 7 year old children in my class. I sat on my stool in the dark room, sidled up to the glaringly bright overhead projector. I read the first 'story' aloud and began diagramming, drawing, and asking for puppetted responses to my pointed questions.
It was then that I saw it. The blank stares, the drooped postures...I could see that I had clearly succeeded in draining every last drop of joy out of their little bodies.
This wasn't ok.
This was not how children were meant to learn.
The words rung clear as a bell in my head.
Pushing back from my stool, I dropped the pen abruptly and sputtered, "You know what? Forget this!"
My sudden proclamation awakened my half-dead class and they now stared at me with puzzled looks.
I smiled...
A hint of surprise hung in the air....an invitation.
"Come on everyone!" I cheered, "Stand up, let's go on an adventure! Let's pretend..."
No sooner had the words left my lips when I saw it. The flame had ignited. The light was on.
I was no longer trying to force a square peg into a round hole....to command winter to be spring....to impose my adult logic and thought processes on such fresh and flexible minds.
No, I had entered their world.
Taking suggestions from each of my unique students, we huddled our imaginations together and boarded a pretend flight to Disneyland. Excited little bodies worked together to push back and rearrange chairs, buckle pretend seatbelts, and assign roles.
Soon we found ourselves counting and combining pretend money (the learning target of the original story problem) to buy pretend tickets, food, and souvenirs in our fantasy land.
I looked around the room at each beaming face...collaborating, learning...playing.
A sense of 'rightness' rushed through me, down to the tips of my toes.
Joy, exploration, spontaneity, inquisitiveness, creativity....play.
THIS is real learning.
It can't be bottled up and branded, packaged and sold. It can't be mass produced, methodized, stripped down to an impersonal standardized skeleton.
No.
Real learning lives in the soul of every one of us. It lives in that feeling of unconditional love...that "I believe in you" that is often the strongest memory that students have of their favorite teacher. It lives in the repeated, "But why?" that we parents so tragically often brush off.
Real learning is mashed up and tossed around, passed down, built upon, re-invented. Real learning dreams and pushes boundaries. It is richly intimate and relational. Real learning, by it's very nature, refuses to be boxed in.
"The great rule is: Play on they surface, and the work takes place underneath."
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
And so, here I find myself years down the road, thinking about the "school years" that are just an eye-blink away for my sweet Landon. I have so many wishes for him as I see the spark of wonder already ignited in this curious young learner. I am saddened at the thought of adult-contrived competition and high-stakes assessment being the fabric of his young school years...of time and space for spontaneity and questioning being seen as a luxury rather than the life saving oxygen they are to early learning.
But, it is Landon himself that inspires hope in me. As I watch his small fingers work tirelessly on his latest imagined project, a vibration of passion floats through the air. I see this same passion reflected in so many of the heroic teachers whose lives have touched mine.
This energy, this love, this human spirit....it always finds a way to burst through that which tangles it up.
We just have to get out of our own way long enough to listen.
To observe.
To understand.
"Children often try to tell us what we in our blindness and deafness have so seriously failed to tell them."
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
Life is a classroom, and 'real learning' never, ever ends.
As I kiss Landon goodnight and he yawns out his hundredth "Why?" for the day, I hug him tight and whisper through the sleepy stardust, "Never stop asking, why, darling. Never."
The genius in this particular lesson was highly ego-centric on my part. As if scripted right out of a trendy teacher workshop, I had 'Told them what they were going to learn, taught the lesson" and then, of course, wrapped it up with a golden bow by, "Reminding them what they learned." Sure it provided some hands-on experience (manipulating tiny card-board clocks), sure it included a literary integration (reading The Very Grouchy Lady Bug), sure it ensured guided practice ("Everybody turn your short hour hand to the eight, just like me) but to this day, the fallacy in categorizing this as one of my 'best' lessons makes me wish I could rewind the hands of that giant preverbial card-board clock myself and speak the truth in that interview.
The truth.
The honest truth is that when I take my pretentious 'teaching abilities' out of the equation and focus on a time when I could look into the eyes of every single student in my classroom and see that spark...that almost tangible burning desire to learn....when the classroom climate seemed to transform into something magical...one word emerges:
Play.
It was a boringly ordinary afternoon during my first year of teaching, and the prescribed math lesson for the day called for 'story problems.' Mentioning the very word elicited a communal moan among the 6 and 7 year old children in my class. I sat on my stool in the dark room, sidled up to the glaringly bright overhead projector. I read the first 'story' aloud and began diagramming, drawing, and asking for puppetted responses to my pointed questions.
It was then that I saw it. The blank stares, the drooped postures...I could see that I had clearly succeeded in draining every last drop of joy out of their little bodies.
This wasn't ok.
This was not how children were meant to learn.
The words rung clear as a bell in my head.
Pushing back from my stool, I dropped the pen abruptly and sputtered, "You know what? Forget this!"
My sudden proclamation awakened my half-dead class and they now stared at me with puzzled looks.
I smiled...
A hint of surprise hung in the air....an invitation.
"Come on everyone!" I cheered, "Stand up, let's go on an adventure! Let's pretend..."
No sooner had the words left my lips when I saw it. The flame had ignited. The light was on.
I was no longer trying to force a square peg into a round hole....to command winter to be spring....to impose my adult logic and thought processes on such fresh and flexible minds.
No, I had entered their world.
Taking suggestions from each of my unique students, we huddled our imaginations together and boarded a pretend flight to Disneyland. Excited little bodies worked together to push back and rearrange chairs, buckle pretend seatbelts, and assign roles.
Soon we found ourselves counting and combining pretend money (the learning target of the original story problem) to buy pretend tickets, food, and souvenirs in our fantasy land.
I looked around the room at each beaming face...collaborating, learning...playing.
A sense of 'rightness' rushed through me, down to the tips of my toes.
Joy, exploration, spontaneity, inquisitiveness, creativity....play.
THIS is real learning.
It can't be bottled up and branded, packaged and sold. It can't be mass produced, methodized, stripped down to an impersonal standardized skeleton.
No.
Real learning lives in the soul of every one of us. It lives in that feeling of unconditional love...that "I believe in you" that is often the strongest memory that students have of their favorite teacher. It lives in the repeated, "But why?" that we parents so tragically often brush off.
Real learning is mashed up and tossed around, passed down, built upon, re-invented. Real learning dreams and pushes boundaries. It is richly intimate and relational. Real learning, by it's very nature, refuses to be boxed in.
"The great rule is: Play on they surface, and the work takes place underneath."
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
And so, here I find myself years down the road, thinking about the "school years" that are just an eye-blink away for my sweet Landon. I have so many wishes for him as I see the spark of wonder already ignited in this curious young learner. I am saddened at the thought of adult-contrived competition and high-stakes assessment being the fabric of his young school years...of time and space for spontaneity and questioning being seen as a luxury rather than the life saving oxygen they are to early learning.
But, it is Landon himself that inspires hope in me. As I watch his small fingers work tirelessly on his latest imagined project, a vibration of passion floats through the air. I see this same passion reflected in so many of the heroic teachers whose lives have touched mine.
This energy, this love, this human spirit....it always finds a way to burst through that which tangles it up.
We just have to get out of our own way long enough to listen.
To observe.
To understand.
"Children often try to tell us what we in our blindness and deafness have so seriously failed to tell them."
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
Life is a classroom, and 'real learning' never, ever ends.
As I kiss Landon goodnight and he yawns out his hundredth "Why?" for the day, I hug him tight and whisper through the sleepy stardust, "Never stop asking, why, darling. Never."
