There are some who say that if there are humans in the distant future, we'll have to exist without our cute little pinky toes. The rest of our toes still play a role in balance and movement, but the one that goes "wee wee wee all the way home" isn't a significant part of that. Combine this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is making balance and movement less and less important to survival, and it's so long little toe. Not every evolutionary scientist predicts this, but it makes sense because that's the way Darwinism works: those aspects of a species that help it survi ..read more

Nothing is certain It could always go wrong. Come in when it's raining Go on out when it's gone.                       ~The Greatful Dead "Oh brother, not again!" It had become one of our classroom jokes. I have no idea where it came from, but it's a common enough expression that it's not surprising that it cropped up in a preschool classroom.  I say it was a joke, and the kids meant it humorously, but there were no belly laughs. They were using it the way adults use expressions like this, as a way to respond when li ..read more

A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me and started to move past her. As I did, she stopped me, "May I ask you a question? Don't you worry about riding your bike out there in all this traffic? I know I worry about you all." This is far from the first time someone has expressed this to me, going back decades. I've spent my entire life, from the time ..read more

A parent pointed out that her son was eating raw kale that he had picked from the playground garden. "He won't touch it at home, but here, he devours it!" This isn't the first we've heard of this phenomenon at Woodland Park. In fact, we see it almost every day. One spring, I mentioned to a parent-teachers that we needed to polish off the kale and lettuce growing in one of our raised beds in order to make way for different crops. I wanted her to urge the kids in that direction, but instead, she harvested the leaves herself, then took them to the snack table where she arranged them a ..read more

Some time ago, we took the children on a field trip to the local post office. We were a group of some 20 children and eight adults. The woman giving us our tour introduced herself as Ms. Lui, before insisting that the children get in a line. It was an inauspicious start. The kids had no idea what to do. Even we adults were at a loss. Queueing up isn't part of what we do at Woodland Park. I could see Ms. Lui was irritated with us. She tried to remain cheerful, but it was through gritted teeth. When I explained that we didn't know how to line up, I reckon she thought me the worst teach ..read more

"Teacher Tom, it's really quiet here." I was sitting with the three-year-old at a table. There were puzzle pieces in front of us, but we were just goofing around, making no effort to assemble them. Objectively, it wasn't quiet. There were children squealing, laughing, and low-key bickering all around us. If an adult had said this, I'd have likely sought clarification, "What do you mean, it's really quiet here?" But when I listen to young children, especially when they say something confounding, I try to give myself a moment to let their words sink in, to contemplate what it is they ..read more

We didn't have a huge set of big wooden blocks, which was okay because we didn't really have enough space for more and besides, if the kids are going to play with them, they generally needed to find a way to play with them together, which is what our school was all about. The kids in our 4-5's class had been playing a lot of "super heroes." It was mostly boys, but they hadn't been particularly exclusionary, with several of the girls regularly joining them, often making up their own hero names like "Super Cat" due to the lack of female characters of the type in our popular culture. Th ..read more

Mark Toby Prisoners placed in isolation, even for a relatively short period of time, experience anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, cognitive impairment, and an increased risk of self-harm and suicide. These conditions often persist even after they are released.  Babies who are not held and touched enough experience similar mental health effects that can last a lifetime. Some have even been known to simply roll over and die. These are not findings derived from studies of rats (which would be bad enough), but rather things we've learned through human cruelty ..read more

"The center of the universe is everywhere," writes Rebecca Solnit in her retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Waking Beauty (or Eleven Times Upon a Time), "and of course it always seems to be right where you are, so there are more centers than there are drops of rain in a rainstorm or stars in the sky when the rainclouds blow away . . ." When we're on our knees, wiping the nose of a child who probably should have stayed home sick today, we are with them at the center of the universe. When we take a small hand to support a nervous child through their uncertainty, when we sooth ..read more

Last night, I attended a community "open mic" event in which our neighbors took turns showing off their talents. I was there at the invitation of my friend Bill, an older man who lost his wife a little over three years ago. In fact, the first words I ever spoke to him were in consolation for his loss. He was going to read some poetry he had written during the intervening interval, although he appended that information by saying, "I think you'll be surprised." We show up for our friends, even if they're going to read their mournful poetry of loss. And besides, I told myself, he had bee ..read more