Otter Class: What Better Time Than Now?

 

I’ve mentioned often that much of the first weeks of school is focused on community-building.  As a class, 

students create and test agreements about how we will treat ourselves, each other, and our things.  Often, students propose rules when I offer prompts like, “when markers are not in their caps, they dry out and we can’t use them.  I wonder how we can solve that.”  But I find that students create the most powerful agreements or rules out of necessity, such as after students observe a student grabbing playdough from another.

So far this year, the students have come up only a few agreements.  It’s not for a lack of creativity — we have seen rather some detailed pretend play scenes being played out.  There simply haven’t been enough disagreements yet to warrant creating many boundaries.  

I suppose that if everyone in the world was always kind and thoughtful we wouldn’t need laws at all.  But we are human and we don’t always see the 

effects of what we do, and we don’t always grow up in circumstances that nurture kindness, and sometimes we’re just plain selfish.  So, we make laws with the hope that we’ll reduce suffering and increase happiness.  Therefore, I expect that in time, our current students will find the need to explicitly agree to some boundaries.

At school, I want our students to have experiences that lead them to discover that kindness and thoughtfulness are mutually beneficial.  So far, we have observed amazing acts of altruism and generosity.  Children have helped each other pick wood chips off of each others’ socks, put each others’ shoes back on, zip each others’ jackets, and put away things other people had been using.  One student gave an object of personal importance to another child — not to borrow, to keep forever.

“Do you mean your friend can keep it forever and never give it back?” I asked

“Yes!  I don’t want to keep it, I want to give [it] to [my friend].” the child said.

(If anyone asks me, “what did you learn today?” I’ll tell them that story.)

It’s incredibly fortunate to work with a group of children who recognize the joy in each others’ faces when they do kind things.  It’s also unlikely that every group they’ll be in for the rest of their lives will be like this.  So it is actually fortunate that on Friday, a couple of students began experimenting with exclusion.  

In the play house outside, “L” said to “J”, “let’s play here just us.”  

J said, “yes, no boys allowed.”  Then J shouted out the playhouse window, “no boys allowed!”  

I happened to be nearby and I said, “Hmmm, that’s an interesting rule.  At our school, everyone can play.”  

“Yeah, everyone can play,” J said to me.  Then, calling out the window again, “No boys allowed!”

I said, “Hmm, that sounds different than everyone can play.  At our school, everyone can play.”

J said, “Oh, yes.  OK.  No people with curly hair can come in.”  Then, again announcing out the window, “no curly hair in here.”

I said, “J, you have curly hair.  If that’s your rule, you have to come out now.”

J said, “my mother said this hair isn’t curly.”

“Your hair is curly.  So is mine.  If “no curly hair in the house” is the rule then I can’t come in, and you have to come out.”

J came out.

 

J then turned to me and said, “will you please fix my pony tail?”

“Yes, I will be happy to fix your pony tail.  If I fix your pony tail, your hair will still be curly.”

“Umm…”  

I let J sit with the silence for a moment before I said, “If you want to make a no boys rule or a no curly hair rule we can talk about it when we meet in our classroom.  Do you want to do that?”

“Yeah.  I’ll tell them.”

When we all came in, we laid down to listen to Bach’s Cello Suite #1, Prelude.  Afterward, the children were clearly itching to get into center time and didn’t have the collective mind to discuss a challenging topic, so I wrote J’s ideas on the agenda for the next class meeting.  

When J and L began excluding people from the playhouse I could have said, “J, the house is for everyone.”  It really is that simple; the playhouse is actually for everyone.  In fact, in years past, I have done exactly that.  Everyone can play, end of story.  

But in more recent years, I’ve discovered that this accidentally kills a great deal of the learning.  The children who experiment with exclusion don’t learn anything about why the house is for everyone.  My imposition of the rule tends to put the child’s focus on me, the authority figure.  It deprives the experimenters of seeing how their actions affect their peers.  The experience of seeing the disappointment, or sadness, or anger, on the faces of their peers is vital to the 

learning process.

For the students in the excluded group, my imposition of “everyone can play” would probably serve as protection.  But it would also likely rob them of the chance to practice standing up and say, “we all have the right to…”  At school, we create a safe environment for them to practice this skill so that when they are older and are in a less facilitated situation, they will have their experience to rely upon.

The onlookers also learn more when they are engaged in the process, as opposed to having me enforce my rule.  My goal is that that children observing such a scene will discover that they have a voice too.  Similarly, they need to learn that a knowing silence speaks as loudly as speaking up.  

Our class meetings are a psychologically and physically safe place for all opinions to be heard and discussed and decided upon.  Excluders, excludees, and onlookers see each other, speak their opinions, and everyone works together to create an agreement everyone can live with.

It feels strange to wish for discord.  After all, peace is what we’re going for in the end.  Yet discord is real throughout the lifespan and what better time than now, in preschool, to start practicing moving one’s own community from conflict to peace?