“The purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding.” ~Valarie Kaur
The Bundle of Sticks is a perpetually useful fable passed down to us by Aesop. If you don’t remember it, here’s a quick retelling.
A father was distressed that his many sons were forever quarreling among themselves. No words he could say did the least good, even when he was nearing his final days. He cast about in his mind for an example that could show them the folly of their discord, until finally he happened upon an idea.
He presented his sons with a bundle of sticks. Handing the bundle to each in turn, he asked them to break it. Although each one tried his best, none was able to do so.
Then the father untied the bundle and gave individual sticks to his sons. They broke them easily.
“My sons,” said the father, “do you see if you agree with each other and help each other, it will be impossible for your enemies to injure you? But if you are divided among yourselves, you will be no stronger than a single stick in that bundle.”
I thought about that fable today when I read a Facebook post by Kris Bordessa. She was a colleague of mine back when we both were senior editors for a Wired blog called GeekMom. Kris is smart, funny, resourceful, and deeply committed to practical solutions. She wrote a fantastic handbook called Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living. (I’ve given quite a few copies as gifts.) Kris also offers a popular website and social media presence under the same name, both packed with entirely useful information. Here’s what she posted:
Let’s talk. I presume if you’re following me here, you’re interested in the idea of stepping with a lighter footprint on this earth. Making a difference, somehow, some way in how you eat or acquire things or spend your time.
Can we acknowledge that this will look different for each of us? We are all at different stages, each taking baby steps to improve our self-reliance. My goal is to introduce you all to different possibilities.
The man who called me “pathetic” for sharing a recipe with all-purpose flour? He didn’t get that. (Oh, I get messages, friends!
You might think some of the recipes I share have too much sugar. That I shouldn’t share recipes with meat. Or dairy. Or that they are not “healthy enough.”
But think for a minute. If a family is used to buying, say, store-bought cookies (in a plastic clamshell container and filled with preservatives), making cookies at home – even if there is more sugar than you think is reasonable – is an improvement. Maybe their *next step will be to make cookies with less sugar and whole wheat flour. If a family regularly dines out, counting on fast food or restaurants to fill their bellies, learning to cook meals at home is an improvement, even if the ingredients included might not pass muster in *your household. Others aren’t there yet, you know?
Once upon a time, I relied on some of those “instant” boxes of rice. They were cheap, I was busy. Over the years, I decided that wasn’t for me. Because I’ve learned how to make my own, I won’t ever need to rely on those boxes again. One successful, small change.
The beauty of this page is that you can take what you need, learn from it, improve yourself. Good, better, best.
What’s one small change YOU’VE made in how you do things at home?
I get a lot of criticism on social media sites I manage too, especially the FB page I started back in 2010 when my bookFree Range Learning came out. Most of the time it’s a supportive group, but whew, sometimes people turn on each other over things like how babies are raised (breast or bottle, responsive parenting or cry-it-out, full-time parent or employed parent), over how kids learn (public school, charter, homeschool, unschool, Montessori, Waldorf), over how they’re raised (screens or no screens, supervised activities vs free play). Lately there’s been significant pushback on my (admittedly regular) posts about the danger of book bans. I get very angry DMs accusing me of advocating for books that damage children. Really?
I get angry denunciations in response to articles I write too. Of course I’ve got a poem about this….
“Raising Children Tenderly” Article’s Online Comments
You’re a spare-the-rod moron writes blessedamny82. How to raise whiney assholes christernanplumbingsupply posts three times in a row. This crap makes me sick complains finsterseventeen.
Knee deep in affection’s sacrifices, I simply hold up a creased map of my own wrong turns. Got lost here. Crashed there.
We’re all souls packed by glory into cells for this short sojourn. I don’t mean to offend but chances are I’ll do it again tomorrow.
Angry accusations and finger-pointing takes place on a much larger scale. Those with the most money and the most power must delight in fomenting divisions between people who need each other. How can we head in regenerative environmental directions when advocates are pitted against each other about the wisest solutions? How can we bring forth the next generation of political leaders when they may have said or done something that doesn’t fit in the narrow definition of a movement’s ideology? Such “purity tests” are not helpful.
It’s disheartening to look at each day’s news. Worse, many of us are experiencing its effects— in the weather, on our health, in the collapse of once-trusted systems, and through injustices perpetrated on us or on people we love. We need each other. We need to listen, to care, to consider our planet’s fellow inhabitants in our decisions.
I particularly appreciate the way Kris gently told folks that they don’t need to be cast apart by a culture of individualism grown toxic, but can support each other. I love that her last line drew people back in, asking them to share a small change they’ve made that might inspire others. This is how we bundle ourselves back together. This is the way forward.
“The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right.” ~Donella H. Meadows, environmental scientist and systems thinking educator
I always enjoyed a friendly chat with the nice people at our library check-out desk. Depending on who was doing the checking out, I knew to ask one person about her garden, to exchange sarcastic asides with another, and to alert a third about a novel I was sure she’d like. But a few years ago our library system installed self-checkout stations. At first they didn’t work all that well, often refusing to deal with books I’d put on order, so I’d have to go to the counter anyway. When I did, the people I’d long considered part of my life seemed impatient at having to check out the one or two books that wouldn’t go through. They’d repeat a sentence that was probably assigned to them—“Can I direct you to our self-checkout stations?”—even though I used those stations week after week. I’m sure they were assigned many more tasks to fill the time they used to spend dealing with patrons’ checkouts too. I don’t know if this change took away some of their workday variety. I do know I still miss our brief but lively conversations.
This sort of change happens so quickly that we can’t help but notice. But many changes – huge ones – are so incremental that we don’t readily see their significance. That’s true for individuals as well as entire societies.
We think we’re attuned to change, but even a silent minute-long scene can confound our noticing skills.
Did anything change? (I thought I was paying attention but didn’t do too well on this.)
Even close observers find it hard to discern changes around them when those changes are gradual. In the real world our attention is far more distracted. We miss subtle differences, even though noticing something “ordinary” as the sky impacts (and reflects) our mood and attitude.
Consider most people in human history. Chances are they were good at noticing. When a person spends time gathering food, hunting for game, weaving baskets, or engaged in myriad other hands-on tasks their minds have plenty of time to wander, wonder, and notice. It’s likely they were tuned to sights and sounds and changing seasons, connected to (and sometimes buffeted by) history’s encroachments. It would have been the same for those living 10 generations before them as it would continue to be for 10 generations after them.
In contrast, we’re tuned to a far more frenetic pace, so much so that with each screen scroll and each multitask we wire our brains to expect more distraction. To need more distraction. How do we use our in-between moments, those times when we might wonder and notice? We distract ourselves. People get out phones when standing in line, put a movie on for kids in the car, go for a walk or run with earbuds in, scroll social media while hanging out with friends or family. These behaviors are ubiquitous yet also significant changes to the norm from just a generation ago.
Talk about a norm change—those of us who are Gen Y or older remember how slow dial-up connections could be.
Now a few seconds’ delay in loading a site is exasperating, as if we’ve forgotten how mind-blowing it is we’re online at all.
There are consequential norm changes everywhere we look.
Farmers from the beginning of pastoral times followed time-honored, mostly regenerative ways. They saved seed from the harvest’s best to replant the next year, rotated and interplanted crops, left wild places like hedgerows and creeks, pastured animals where trees offered shelter, let fields go fallow. When my great-grandfather farmed they shared equipment and helped one another with harvest. They stood up for one another against bankers. They couldn’t have imagined today’s monoculture crops, intensive livestock practices, agricultural monopolies, and prosecutions for seed saving. Each change was considered progress until the baseline norms shifted so far that they were largely forgotten.
Working-class people of the 1960’s could commonly count on healthcare, pension plans, and paid vacations. They could typically buy a home and car while raising a family on one salary whether they were postal carriers, factory workers, airport employees, retail assistant managers, or worked in other fields. Their children could attend state colleges on what they’d saved from a teen’s summer job. This doesn’t account for significant limiting factors like racism or sexism, but it’s notable how much the norm has shifted. Many families rely on overtime or multiple jobs burdened by student loans, healthcare, and housing expenses without an assured path to retirement. One reason for this difference is the ratio of CEO to typical worker compensation. In 1965 that ratio was 20 to 1. In 2021 the ratio exploded with a ratio of 399 to 1. That has become our norm.
Children’s play was, until the last generation or so, largely generated by children themselves with minimal or no supervision. Children’s make-believe, for example, flourishes when kids have the time and freedom for self-directed play. Pretending develops creativity and fosters the sort of what-if thinking that helps kids mature into good decision-makers. Self-directed play includes sports of all kinds, which were mostly kid-run and unsupervised instead of of adult-run until young people reached their teen years. And children were typically free to play outside –in the neighborhood, at local parks, and in nature areas. This started young. A checklist taken from the 1979 book Your Six-Year-Old by child development expert Louise Bates Ames was meant to help parents determine if a child is ready for first grade. It includes a dozen questions including the following: Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home? The norm has shifted significantly. Many parents feel trapped by expectations that they monitor children’s play, enroll them in sports and enrichment programs from their earliest years, and keep them in sight for safety reasons. The range children are allowed to travel, on their own, has shrunk from six blocks to barely out the front door— although crime against children (and US crime in general) is far lower than it was in the 1970s and 80s. Children, on average, spend four to seven minutes outdoors in unstructured play, with one in five playing outside once a week or less. This too has become a norm.
(These are quick, nuance-free examples. They aren’t meant, for a moment, to cast earlier decades as good old days. Many aspects of these eras were oppressive and unjust. Many norms that have changed since are for the better including rights, access, information sharing, transparency, and other progressive improvements.)
In science, norm changes are sometimes called shifting baselines. That’s because we tend to measure a system against our own reference points. The term was popularized by fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly who noticed experts in his own field failed to identify how abundant fish species were (baseline population size) before human exploitation. Instead, they considered what fish population norms were at the beginning of their careers. They unconsciously shifted the baseline.
We do too. It may have been expected for our parents’ generation to settle in neighborhoods made lively by children playing outdoors from dawn to dusk during summers when birdsong was loud. That baseline shifted as adults worked longer hours, children stayed indoors, and the bird population dropped by 30 percent.
The term appears most often in conservation fields. Here’s how writer Jeremy Hance explains it in a Mongabyarticle. “If legendary conservationist John Muir returned to Northern California today there is no doubt that he would believe much of the wilderness he loved to be terribly, hopelessly altered: dams, roads, suburbs, etc. However, a native Californian may see parts of their landscape as perfectly natural: National Parks are often view by Americans as the emblem of nature—even with roads running through them clogged with traffic. This type of altered perception of nature occurs with each succeeding generation.”
Shifting baselines are both individual and generational. They happen to us all, often below our awareness. Small gradual changes around us happen all the time. Added work responsibilities without additional pay, the friend who seems withdrawn, more extreme weather.
I saw the video opening this post thanks to Rob Walker, author of a marvelous book: The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday. He writes, “Small change, and the ability to spot it, matters. These small changes, over time, often turn out to be a lot more important than today’s flashy distraction. What’s the smallest change you can notice this week?”
“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.” ~e.e. cummings
One street over in the neighborhood where I grew up was a small pond where ducks congregated. The ducks lifted from the water with reluctant quacks when we showed up. Despite summer’s heat, the pond was always cool. Aquatic plants waved their greenish fronds just below the surface and the bottom was lined with a thick layer of muck. My sister, a budding naturalist, speculated that the muck was made up of decayed plant matter. When we waded in, our feet sunk into that thick layer of soft goo, a squishy delight for our toes.
It might occur to you that we were standing in duck poo. You would be right.
It smelled a bit when the water was stirred up, but that didn’t bother us. My sister and I would crouch near the edge watching insects. Water striders scurried on the surface. Each of their steps made a faint impression in the water as if they walked on gel. Beetles, ants, and the creatures my sister called by the fairytale name nymphs scampered through pondside plants. She liked to let insects climb up her arms. I was impressed, but too squeamish to copy her. Most magical of all were the dragonflies, their huge eyes looking back at us as they hovered on iridescent wings. This seemed like a separate world.
Eventually we had to return home. Our mother, a registered nurse who strictly adhered to standards like rigorous hand washing and early bedtimes, didn’t miss what we’d been up to. We came home spattered and stinky. But her only rule was that we strip off our clothes and scrub ourselves. She’d call from somewhere in the house, “be sure to use the nail brush!” She didn’t seem to mind that we’d walked a block away to play in a bacteria-infested pond as long as we scrubbed away all traces afterwards.
My mother was on to something.
In her book Balanced And Barefoot, pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom writes about teachers, parents, and medical professionals who are alarmed by ever-growing numbers of children who can’t sit still or pay attention; who have trouble with coordination, balance, or sensory processing; who are fearful, easily frustrated, or act aggressively. She explains that these problems can be connected to an overly contained childhood, one that has become the norm. Restrictions begin in the earliest months, when babies spend hours each day strapped into strollers, car seats, and baby seats. As they get older their movements are curbed by passive indoor activities. Even outdoors, kids are often limited to low-challenge play areas or to prescribed movement in adult-structured programs.
The push for academics, often starting in preschool, strips even more time from active free play, while elementary schools are increasingly limiting or eliminating recess. This is profoundly counterproductive. Reading readiness is strongly influenced by physical movement. So is grasping and using mathematical concepts.
It helps to understand just how closely movement and sensory input is related to development. In the first year of a baby’s life, her brain doubles in size. It reaches 80 percent of its adult volume by age three. Babies are born with vast numbers of neuronal links in their brains and spines, primed to be shaped by what they encounter. Unused networks are not activated and disappear. This is what neuroscientists call “experience-dependent plasticity.” Early experiences rich in movement (plus the nurturance and emotional warmth that set the foundation for learning) activate a wider range of neural connections. This is nature’s wisdom at work, shaping a child’s brain through experience so they develop what they’ll need for the world they’re born into.
Your baby squirms and cries after a few minutes in the high chair. He can be placated with a new food or a spoon to bang on the tray, but only for a few minutes. He wants to get to work on crawling. Your toddler resists being put in her car seat and sometimes cries until she exhausts herself. She wants to run, climb, and play. They’re both responding to an inborn need to learn through movement.
Gill Connell and Cheryl McCarthy, authors ofA Moving Child is a Learning Child, clarify. They write that neural pathways developed in the first years of life,
“determine how a child thinks and learns, but more importantly, they will shape who she becomes… her passions and pursuits, triumphs and challenges, inner reflections, outer reactions, and outlook on life…all flowing through the neural network built by her earliest physical and sensory experiences.
With breathtaking simplicity, nature has created this move-to-learn process to be both dynamic and self-perpetuating, building the body and brain simultaneously. As such, the more a child moves, the more she stimulates her brain. The more the brain is stimulated, the more movement is required to go get more stimulation. In this way, nature gently coaxes the child to explore beyond her current boundaries toward her own curiosity to acquire new capabilities.”
Overall, today’s kids show decreasing core strength and flexibility compared to averages in the 1980’s.”The more we restrict children’s movement and separate children from nature,” Angela Hanscom explains, “the more sensory disorganization we see.” That’s why she advocates sensory-rich, movement-based outdoor free play. Chasing, rolling down slopes, climbing trees, playing with nature’s play-perfect loose parts like leaves and sticks — these and other experiences build spatial awareness, balance, fine motor skills, and bodily control.
Let’s hone in on one sensory-rich experience; going barefoot. Madeline Avci, an Australian pediatric occupational therapist, explains that walking on grass, stones, and sand develops body awareness, called proprioception. Nerve endings in the feet and toes promote the development of sensory pathways, building functional movement patterns while helping children move with a sense of their body in space. When we wear shoes, the quality of sensory information is diminished. A paper published in Podiatry Management details all sorts of ways shoes, including those with flexible soles, interfere with a child’s gait, development, and posture. Walking barefoot also promotes better biomechanics, a more natural gait, and less pressure on our feet. Bones in the feet are not fully ossified until the late teen years, so the more barefoot time possible, the more naturally the foot’s shape can develop. Of course few of us are raising our families in a beachside hut where walking barefoot makes sense year-round. But Katy Bowman, author of Move Your DNA, suggests that all of us try to walk on natural surfaces like sand, rocks, grass, or wood for 10 to 20 minutes a day whenever possible, and to go barefoot at home.
Neurobiologist Gerald Hüther notes that “the most important learning experiences come to us, essentially, by way of our bodies — which means that learning is always an experience of the whole body. At the same time, every learning experience involves emotions. We are only able to learn when the so-called emotional centers in the brain are activated. These centers release neuroplastic messenger substances enabling what has been learned to become anchored in the brain ….[via] emotional activation. The most enjoyable activation we know of is ‘enthusiasm.'”
It’s ridiculous that we need science to confirm the value of enthusiasm. This is the energy each child brings fresh to the world. What they’re able to explore and experience with the whole of themselves, magnified by the capacity for awe, remains with them.
Dr. Hüther gives an example,
“Children living in the Amazon forests learn 120 different shades of green and can name them all, using 120 different terms. Potential of that kind is either used in practice or is little used. Children here can at best distinguish light green, green, and dark green. How far a potential is actually used depends on how important it is .. in a given culture…The result is that what was once a possibility, this potential, …if not used, will just wither away.”
Enthusiasm goes a long way toward explaining why children and nature go together so well. Children are themselves magic — able to shape shift into a toad or hawk, to feel what it’s like to hop nearly hidden under leaves or to glide on the air’s invisible currents. While imagination is alive everywhere, it can’t help but flourish when surrounded by aliveness. The more natural an area, the more kids have a chance to have meaningful encounters with the life around them. In fact, kids play differently in a park with play structures compared to more natural areas like an overgrown field, a row of trees, or a small creek.
As Richard Louv details inLast Child in the Woods, kids confined to structured play areas have poorer balance and agility than those who play in unpaved areas. The social dynamic changes too. Older and physically larger kids dominate on playgrounds but in more natural areas, it’s the creative kids who act as leaders. In wild places, even an overgrown lot, kids are more likely to incorporate each other’s ideas into expressive make-believe scenarios using their dynamic surroundings—tall grasses become a savannah, tree roots become elf houses, pine cones become treasure. The essence of the child comes alive. Outdoor play in natural areas is more likely to include peers of differing ages and abilities. Regular outdoor experiences not only boost emotional health, memory, and problem solving, they also help children learn how to get along with each other.
Outdoor free play also inspires kids to challenge themselves. They are things to climb on and places to explore. In pursuit of fun, kids ignore minor annoyances like cold fingers, sharp briars, stumbles. Kids face and overcome fears. Such play is linked to greater social skill, resilience, and creativity.
And if you’re interested in academic test results, time outdoors has an impact there too. Here are a few encouraging studies.
Kids exposed to more nature had higher scores of working memory than kids who did not.
Simply going for a walk in a nature area, in any weather, can significantly improve memory and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature.
If pre-college test results perk up your interest, the children most connected to nature are also most likely to score well in tests including the SAT.
We also know exposure to bacteria can be a good thing. Certain bacteria found in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, have been found to boost the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked to positive mood and enhanced learning.
Dirt may improve our health too. For example, children who grow up exposed to a greater range of soil microorganisms have been found, in some studies, to have a lower incidence of asthma. Heck, even common bacteria on our skin have been shown to cut down on rashes and reduce inflammation when we’re cut or bruised. A child’s exposure to dirt is part of the body’s education, microbiologist Mary Ruebush explains inWhy Dirt Is Good, “allowing his immune system to explore his environment.” (She adds a caveat, saying that the soil in some urban areas may be contaminated with heavy metals such as lead. That is indeed a wakeup cry. Soil is the structure we need to feed ourselves. When it’s poisoned, so is life.)
The importance of outdoor free play is getting a lot of attention these days. Playground designers, schools, and daycare programs are far more open to the benefits of outdoor free play with natural materials. It’s no surprise that children do better with natural sensory play, places for solitude, and opportunities for self-chosen challenge. This is a step in the right direction. A few steps farther and we’ll let kids back in nature herself to play in woodlands, fields, and beaches as well as back lots, mud puddles, and all the nature around us. It’s a step in the direction of wonder and delight, maybe even in the muck of a duck pond.
Our driveway is crazed with cracks. I can’t help but appreciate plants springing up through these narrow possibilities. These are native plants, many with health-enhancing properties as human food, but also exquisitely cued to the lifecycles of crawling, flying, hopping creatures reliant on them. All these lifeforms follow nature’s essential precepts of diversity, adaptability, balance, and interdependence. Although our driveway does not, it’s heartening to see how easily life takes over.
I used to wonder about the soil under the sidewalk where I trudged to school each day. What happened when graders and rollers and cement trucks imprisoned it? Did all the life in that soil perish without sunlight and oxygen? How could any living thing survive so much pressure and heat? What would happen if we paved over too much of Earth’s surface? I was a child who Worried About Things.
These plants springing from cracked pavement remind me of nature’s beautiful impulse for life. It restores my hope everywhere I find it. A handful of dry lentils taken from my cupboard, after a few days of soaking and draining, grow into cheery little sprouts I can use in salads, or feed to the chickens, or plant to grow into another generation of lentils. Seeds brought from Cyprus decades ago, shared by a friend, grow each year into giant hardy winter squash that keeps well until late winter –providing nourishing meals along with more seeds to save and share. Organic potatoes in my pantry wrinkle around tiny rosettes and from them, pale tendrils fragile with new life reach out in search of sunlight. I plant these eyes two or three times each season, from late March to late August, for fresh harvests of tender heirloom potatoes.
Life’s impulse can’t always survive what we humans are doing to this planet. As a direct result of human activity, the rate of species extinction is up to 10,000 times higher than the natural, historical rate. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows ocean heating is equivalent to between three and six 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. The UN says “climate change is out of control” and experts in Earth’s climate history are convinced this current decade of warming is more extreme than any time since the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago. It’s exhausting to think about, let alone act on, this spiraling disaster.
We need new stories that reawaken us to the lived wisdom of this planet’s First Peoples and lead us to the most ethical, scientifically grounded regenerative lifeways going forward. It helps when we recognize nature isn’t just what sprouts from cracked pavement. It isn’t confined to wild places we long to visit. We are nature, right down to the life processes of every cell. It helps when our new stories speak to our descendants. It helps when they answer our ancestors.
I’m standing in line at my usual Ohio-owned grocery. There are so many people in each register line that we’ve threaded ourselves into the aisles, people saying “I’m behind you” as they jockey their carts into place, with everyone leaving the center lane clear for shoppers still trying to finish shopping. Among people who don’t have their phones out, brief conversations pop up here and there over little things like the weather or an interesting item found in the clearance section. And then That Guy enters the line. Actually, cuts in the line until it’s pointed out to him that the line starts (hands waving) back there.
He’s an older man, maybe early 70s, hearty-sized in body and voice. He says a small aside to the woman he finds himself waiting behind, something about the long lines, and she briefly commiserates. That’s all it takes to get him started.
“Looks like nobody wants to work anymore,” he announces to everyone in the front of the store. “Bunch of losers these days,” he says, then looks around with pride as if his opinion sparkles.
I’m nearly to the register. The person waiting in front of me is a 20-something guy I’d insisted go ahead because he had only two items – a bouquet of flowers and a package of hot dog buns. He turned around at the commotion and we rolled our eyes at each other.
“Maybe he should apply to work here,” the younger guy says quietly.
While we two are snarking, I realize the people now in line behind him as well as the woman in front of him are not snarking. “I worked 35 years. I earned my retirement,” he says. “I shouldn’t have to stand here like this.”
“The lines are moving pretty fast,” says the woman who had previously commiserated.
“What the hell is taking so long?” His voice goes up in volume. “Pardon my French, but all we’re trying to do is give this store our hard-earned money.” I think about all the checkout clerks whose difficult jobs are made worse by loud-mouths like him. About record-setting corporate profits driving inflation. About divisiveness stoked by pundits.
“I’m old,” he says. “I could die right here in line.”
A woman, probably about his age, is trying to get her cart past his to head down the cereal aisle. “I’m a retired EMT, one of the first females to qualify in the state,” she says. “You won’t die as long as I’m here.”
I want to cheer at her take-no-crap kindness.
A couple sporting Cleveland Guardians hats are blocked as they try to pass. They stop for a moment, their round generous faces giving him the attention he so clearly needs. “I’m going to be retiring in a few years,” says the man. “Any advice?”
That Guy pauses in his general announcement-style monologue to give it a thought. “Yeah,” he says gruffly. “Don’t let your wife die before you do.”
Everyone seems to be listening now. The baseball fan woman rattles a jar in her cart. “Vitamins. I plan to stick around for a while.”
That Guy wishes them luck as they move on. His sadness briefly revealed, he gets back to his protective covering of bluster.
I just witnessed a lot more kindness than the zero kindness my thoughts showed this man. I know kindness is contagious. I know simply reflecting on our own gratitude can help others through the magic of heartbeat entrainment. It’s just not easy.
As I leave I see he is parked one car over from me. He shoves his cart over to the side, as if he isn’t planning to push it over to the cart carrel. “Want me to take that back for you?” I ask, fully expecting a snarl for an answer. “Naw, I got it, he says. “Here, let me take yours.”
“Thanks,” I tell him. “That’s really nice of you.”
He smiles, actually smiles back at me.
I’m going to try harder to see beyond behavior that rankles. And I’m going to keep fighting against every single thing his hateful bumper stickers proclaim.
This is Cocoa Bean. He’s approaching his 17th birthday.
He detests having his picture taken almost as much as I do. He loathes car rides (even to the park) and shrunkles into a shadow of himself at the vet’s office. When I go out to the barn my family reports that he lifts his chin and howls. If I leave, he positions himself on the top of the couch to watch the driveway for hours. Let me hasten to add, his life truly isn’t stressful. He’s treated with warm affection and, because I mostly work from home, has near-constant companionship. While I work he sleeps in his chosen lair under my desk. His favorite thing, which he delights in more than he does eating, is playing outside. He’s especially joyous when I’m gardening, which gives him plenty of time to investigate scents and bark at ducks on the pond.
Cocoa Bean came to us in a complicated way, involving his person’s deportation with all the accompanying injustices and miseries. We were, at the time, German shepherd people. We’d had a few mixed-breed dogs as well, but were on our fourth German shepherd—a noble creature named Jedi Moon who also answered to a half-dozen other names of endearment.
We’d never had a small dog. Cocoa Bean, a toy poodle, joined our family when he was around five months old. He was what my mother called “a nervous wreck” – barking at the slightest thing and only able to sleep if one of our two younger children let him stay in their bedrooms, which they did every night. I wasn’t all that interested in having another dog. My mother’s health was failing, I was working whatever writing gigs I could get. And we were engaged in homeschooling that seemed to involve more away than home.
Jedi Moon wasn’t all that interested in having another dog either. He managed to avoid looking directly at the puppy for the first few months, although he did tolerate the little dog snuggling against him for naps, and eventually tolerated his antics with an elder statesman’s patience. I learned to manage two dogs for daily walks on our sidewalk-free 55 mph rural road. Jedi Moon would stroll along with dignity while Cocoa Bean zigzagged like exuberant golden rickrack against green grass. His enthusiasm for every sight and smell eased my weary heart. Not long after my mother died, my husband lost his job. When my husband came along for dog walks I tried to impose be-here-now conversation about what we saw around us, but he inevitably got back to grim topics like politics or our finances. Here’s an account of one such walk.
Why We Walk the Dogs
Yawning, you say you’re too tired yet we can’t refuse brown-eyed pleading at the door.
Away from these walls we more easily silence sorrow, hardship, loss by looking, only looking.
Cows in the lower pasture raise their heads as we pass. A Baltimore oriole alights on a hickory fencepost twined with yellow flowers. The sun stretches generous arms of light cloud to cloud.
The old dog walks alongside, as the puppy bounds through ditches up hillsides, joyously muddy collecting scents for his dreams.
When grief or fear catches in my throat I remember to look at the sky letting higher possibilities hover over our steps.
Then through evening brightness dozens of blue and green dragonflies swoop around us in some unknown ritual. We wonder which of nature’s perfect gestures— migration, mating, defense—this may be. Standing in the middle of our complicated lives, we feel a lift of hope requiring no effort and turn toward home, wide awake.
Soon, Cocoa Bean’s life changed.
He’d been the only small dog in the family. He had the run of the house and commanded the farm. He chatted up chickens, faced down cows, and scared away invisible badgers.
He and his friend Jedi Moon went on great adventures. Afterwards they took long naps. In the evenings Jedi Moon snoozed while Cocoa Bean snuggled with the people, played in blankets, and bounded from couch to couch.
Until a small fluffy creature was adopted. It snuggled with people, played in blankets and bounded on couches. They named this interloper Winston and discussed his sad backstory: injured and abandoned as a small puppy.
When the interloper poohed on the floor the people just cleaned it up. Cocoa Bean had some plotting to do. Stealthily, he snuck his own poo on the floor just where this creature had gone. Success, the creature was blamed! Cocoa Bean did it again, and again, and again. Such joy.
Until the day Cocoa Bean was discovered in an incriminating crouch. His plot was foiled. He tried to hold his head up while all around him people were laughing. He was seen plotting with the cat, but nothing came of it. The interloper was here to stay.
Eventually they became fast friends.
Jedi Moon and Winston both lived long, high personality, much loved lives before they left us. Cocoa Bean is still here.
I started writing poetry not long after he came to live with us. Here’s one he inspired.
Calling the Dog
Following messages left in leaves soil air he wanders too far. When I call he pauses quickening to hurl fullness and glory ahead of the self like whales breach tigers lunge hawks soar. There’s nothing but an arc between hearing his name and springing toward the one who named him.
I want this completeness. I want to feel 100 trillion cells spark from this body in answer to what we call spirit. I want to taste the shimmering voltage course from every rock tree star.
A moment before reaching me he unsprings back to golden fur and brown eyes arriving tongue first.
I don’t just write the occasional dog-inspired poem. I also have, well, powers. My family calls me a canine “butt psychic” for the way I know when they need to go out and for the occasional opinions dogs like to share via telepathy. If I translate for the humans around me, 100% of the time those humans make fun of me. Here’s an example. Years ago Cocoa Bean suffered a grand mal seizure. It was horrifying. Then he had one a few hours later, also horrifying. This happened on a Sunday evening, no vet available, so I went to bed planning to make an appointment first thing in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. A while later I heard scrabbling in the carpet by our bedroom door. I was sure the poodle was having another seizure. He wasn’t, but I couldn’t go back to bed. I sat on the floor holding him and crying quiet tears, unable to imagine going on without this friend of mine. Then Cocoa Bean’s thoughts came through. He said he was upset by how upset I was. He had no way of understanding I was upset on his behalf. He was completely right. I calmed down, breathed deeply, and concentrated on sending love from my being to his being. When I finally went to bed I told my husband what the dog had said. My husband informed me I was completely nuts. But I told him Cocoa’s perspective hadn’t occurred to me until he shared it with me.
Both are exuberant, uniquely engaging creatures who have helped soften our days even while the world’s crises rage around us. It seems we are now, officially, People With Small Dogs. I’m grateful for many aspects of having animal companions in my life. One is the way they get me outside at all hours and in all weather where I remember to breathe and be present.
Thursday Morning At Dawn
Darkness frees me to stand nightgowned on the porch, watch the dogs merge into shadow, snuffle, pee, reappear.
I stretch, inhale summer’s warm weight, imagine staying in this spot while what has to be done swirls by undone.
I imagine a taproot growing down my spine, out my feet, through the porch floor and deep underground, rootlets reaching all directions.
Imagine remaining here so long I fade from sight, although everyone crossing this portal pauses as they pass through my arms.
“What time is it on the clock of the world?” ~Grace Lee Boggs
I am cleaning out a closet to make more space for kids’ art supplies when I come across a length of thick rope tied at intervals with colorful string.
I recognize it instantly.
Each time I taught the final session of Peace Grows workshops, we talked about how the practice of nonviolence applies on the global scale — between ethnic groups, religions, entire countries. We reviewed the many little-known ways nonviolence has impacted, even turned around national and international problems. No matter how eager participants might have been in earlier sessions as we learned about applying active nonviolence principles in our personal lives, people said they felt hopeless when it came to national and worldwide issues. That’s when I got out this rope.
I would ask for two volunteers to stand on either side of the room, each holding one end of the rope. One side represented the emergence of the first modern humans in Africa, sometime between 280,000 to 200,000 BCE. That end of the rope had nothing tied to it until around 62,000 BCE when bow and arrow were first used. By 18,000 the beginning of clay pottery was noted. Around 10,000 BCE the Neolithic revolution began, when some hunter-gatherers took up agriculture, although it wasn’t until 4,500 BCE that people begin to use the plow. At 4,000 BCE the wheel was invented. Writing was developed around 2,600 BCE. The strings got closer and closer together, entering A.D. centuries, and ever more thickly marked by discovery, scientific progress, and war. Lots of war. The farthest end, less than a hair’s width from the invention of the printing press, represented our current era. (The exact years marked on the rope may not be current with what we now know, but the distance between these advances is likely similar.)
Of course, if we look at earth’s entire timeline, the presence of modern humans is far punier.
Dinosaurs ruled the world for 165 million years. Homo sapiens showed up 200 to 300 thousand years ago. We humans are truly, in Earth time, a newly arrived species. As Tim Urban shows, over at Wait But Why, recorded history itself is a tiny blip of our time here.
By any measure, we are still engaged in the ongoing experiment of living differently than our hunter-gatherer roots. The hunter-gatherer era made up between 90 to 99 percent of our species’ time on earth and continues among some groups today. This way of life was and is much more interdependent, typically shaped as gift economies, and centered around craft, ritual, story, and arts with intimate knowledge of the land and its beings
We lived in small bands of nomadic people until the advent of agriculture, when communities grew to hundreds or thousands of people. Only then did our relationship to place and possessions change to one of ownership, gradually cleaving people into haves and have-nots. Not coincidentally, before this massive change there’s no convincing archeological evidence that we engaged in war.
About five thousand years ago we humans developed written language, currencies, and empires.
Around four to five hundred years ago we began more forcefully shaping our lives thanks to the printing press, industry, and the passionate pursuit of science. Modern capitalism emerged in the early nineteenth century, commodifying time in ways unknown until then.
We are now in the Anthropocene, when human activities are having a massively detrimental impact on Earth’s ecosystems and climate.
Yet biologically and emotionally, we are still hunter-gatherers. We evolved to be a compassionate and collaborative species. We are still learning how to live in populous cities rather than nomadic tribes of around 60 people. Our technological advancements and our weapons have developed more quickly than our ethics around their use. We have yet to grasp just how dangerous rigid economic and political systems can be, particularly when war, crisis, and division benefit the powerful.
The rope timeline I used in nonviolence workshops put our place here in a larger planetary frame of reference. Even from that distance, it seems both astonishing that we’re here at all and obvious we need to get some perspective, but it’s hard to put this into words, especially standing in front of a class. So I read a poem instead, this one by Denise Levertov.
BEGINNERS
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla “From too much love of living, Hope and desire set free, Even the weariest river Winds somewhere to the sea—“
But we have only begun To love the earth.
We have only begun To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope? — so much is in bud.
How can desire fail? — we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy, only begun to envision
how it might be to live as siblings with beast and flower, not as oppressors.
Surely our river cannot already be hastening into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot drag, in the silt, all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet— there is too much broken that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know the power that is in us if we would join our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must complete its gesture,
“The truth is like poetry. And most people f**king hate poetry.” The Big Short
An entirely minor political poem of mine from almost five years ago is beginning to sound more predictive than sarcastic. Any sort of “Final Economy-Boosting Solution” is not the future I want to see.
And yet…we are living in a time when influential people suggest, for real, that elders should sacrifice themselves–should die– for the sake of the economy. Those voices are getting louder and much more alarming.
Yusuke Narita, an economics professor at Yale, has repeatedly advocated for mass suicide of older people. Today the New York Times offered this evidence.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.
It may seem like one professor isn’t likely to have an impact, but Dr. Narita has over 569 thousand followers on his mostly Japanese-language Twitter account. He is also a popular guest on television, and friendly with several wealthy young Japanese entrepreneurs.
Japan’s economic problems have been blamed on low birth rates and longer-lived adults, a situation increasingly common across the industrialized world. Kill-the-elderly opinions may boost shock-based ratings, but rapacious capitalism has increasingly burdened young people with untenable work hours, low pay, exploding housing costs, and unaffordable childcare.
Dr. Narita’s fantasy of matricide may go back to his mother’s brain injury when he was 19, which left him with the unwelcome financial burden of contributing to her care. Maybe counseling would be a better outlet for his bitterness. Or actually working toward sustainable solutions to invigorate a country’s workforce by advocating for paid training and education, workplace policies friendly to parents, and welcoming immigrants.
Instead, on a recent show, he answered a schoolboy’s question about forced elder suicide by saying “If you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.” He has also speculated about making euthanasia mandatory.
How close are some in the U.S. to these views?
In the pandemic’s early days of March 2020, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested the demographic most endangered by Covid-19 should be willing to lose their lives for the sake of the economy. “Let’s get back to living,” he said in a Fox News interview, “…those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country.” Conservative pundits agreed, including Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Brit Hume. Lt. Gov. Patrick doubled down in April, saying “I’m sorry to say that I was right on this.” At that time, 495 had lost their lives. As of today, 93,699 people have died in Texas from Covid. Across the U.S., the vast majority of Covid deaths have been among those 50 and up, with mortality increasing by age.
This doesn’t include those suffering with long Covid. The CDC says one out of every five people who tested positive for Covid experienced or continue to experience symptoms such as cognitive problems, dizziness, depression, heart palpitations, heart attacks, fatigue, pain, digestive issues, blood clots, strokes, shortness of breath, unexplained fevers, and more. As many as four million people are currently unable to work due to long Covid. The mean age of long Covid sufferers is 40.5 years old with the largest demographic hit aged 36 to 50. Sacrificing for the economy, at any age, doesn’t work here on a planet where all of us are inextricably interconnected.
Our privatized Congress really is making America great again. Who’d have thought the Productive Adult Initiative, complete with elder joycamps, would work so well? Consumer confidence is volcanic. Health care costs, barely a budget blip. For the first time trickle down works, a fricking waterfall, old to young.
No more elderly folks shuffling through store aisles, clogging the roads, saving for a rainy day. No feel-good stories about some couple married 70 years. And all those pricey assisted living complexes, now the place to be for young creatives. I mean come on, studio rent and chef-driven meals with services galore. What’s not to like?
Plus, you don’t have to go home for the holidays or write thank you notes to your Great Aunt Irena. Though you do miss her pastries, warm from the oven. And your children can’t remember her accent, or the handkerchief she used to wipe tears from her soft crinkled face. Sometimes you think answers to questions you forgot to ask might be the greatest wealth. But hey, nothing’s better than consumer spending power, am I right?
Nearly every night I put a bookmark in whatever library book I’ve been reading before turning off my bedside lamp. Some nights when I can’t sleep I sit back up, turn on my light, and read another hour or two. Maybe that’s why libraries sometimes seep into my dreams.
The other night in that delicious not-completely-asleep state called hypnagogia, I found myself walking up the long front steps of my childhood library. I felt happy anticipation as I carried a stack of books to return, knowing I could bring home a freshly enticing stack. I set the books on the returns side of the tall circulation desk, which was as high as my shoulders, so in this make-believe state I was a child again.
I asked the clerk at the desk what story I needed. (I never did this as a kid, I simply found my own books.) She silently lifted a finger and pointed me in the direction of my home away from home — the children’s section. I don’t remember, in real life, ever talking to the children’s librarian or even if there was one. But in my dream the children’s librarian indicated I should sit in one of the miniature chairs at a miniature table. She sat across from me. She wore a white blouse, tucked in, and half-glasses that slid partway down her nose. (Sorry for that stereotype. Or was it more archetype?)
I asked her what story I needed. She didn’t speak either. Instead she reached up to the crown of her head and unzipped. Inside her human costume she flickered through a series of curiously aware creatures, morphing right there in front of me into wildly colorful birds, softly furred mammals, mysterious deep sea beings, until everything settled into one living body. I could see she was showing me herself as a glossy gray seal with large inquisitive eyes. This seal being was beautifully and perfectly who she was, really.
I woke, as much as one wakes from this state, wondering what the heck this meant. What does a seal mean, symbolically? Do I identify with seals –adept in the water, awkward on shore? Maybe there’s some medium in which I’m more adept than my awkward shore self. Was this a reference to the Scottish folktale, The Selkie Bride? Are there animals hidden in me, in all of us? Why was I asking for a story?
“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.” –John Holt
Miss Gribbon set up a new teaching prop at the front of our first grade classroom — three stick figures made of metal with round blank faces and oversized magnetic hands. Each figure was about the size of a toddler, although she referred to them as “men.” She said the first figure’s name was Ones. The next, to our right, she named Tens. The last in the row she named Hundreds. She added two bright red magnetic fingers to each figures’ hands. Then she announced that One’s fingers were worth two, Ten’s were worth 20, and Hundred’s were worth 200.
I could NOT understand how identical magnetic people could have fingers worth different amounts. The hundreds man wasn’t taller than the tens man or the ones man. Their fingers were the same size. So I watched carefully as she stood them up the next day, hoping to figure out what distinguished them. Nothing. The Ones man from yesterday might be today’s Hundreds man. Their value wasn’t intrinsic to who they were. I struggled mightily to understand how one man could be worth more than another. (Story of my political confusion, even now.)
Each time Miss Gribbon rearranged the characters’ fingers she asked a different student, “What number do you see?” If they got it wrong, she asked again in a louder voice before reluctantly providing the answer. To me, math lessons seemed very similar to playing an unfamiliar game with kids who owned the game. They’d always say, “You’ll figure out the rules as we play.” By the time I did, they always won.
We continue to advance in our comprehension almost entirely through hands-on experience. Math is implicit in play, music, art, dancing, make-believe, building and taking apart, cooking, and other everyday activities. Only after a child has a strong storehouse of direct experience, which includes the ability to visualize, can he or she readily grasp more abstract mathematical concepts. As Einstein said, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”
Yet right around the time formal instruction starts, children increasingly report that they worry about and fear math. Math anxiety, even in first and second graders, disproportionally affects children who have the most working memory. These are the very children most likely to show the highest achievement in math. But stress can disrupt working memory and undermine performance. Otherwise successful children with high degrees of math anxiety fall about half a school year behind less anxious students. In a study of 154 young students, about half had medium to high math anxiety.
Early math anxiety can intensify, leading to increased math avoidance and lowered competence. Over 60 years of research show that positive attitudes toward math tend to deteriorate as students move through school. More than half the adult population in the U.S. is said to suffer from math anxiety, some with math avoidance so extreme that it has the potential to damage financial decisions and careers.
Is math instruction to blame?
Innovative math educator Maria Droujkova says, in an Atlantic article titled “5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus,” that math instruction typically follows a hierarchical progression starting with counting, then addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division, onward to fractions, algebra, and so on. Unfortunately, she says, this approach has “… nothing to do with how people think, how children grow and learn, or how mathematics is built.” She and other math educators around the world say the standard curriculum that begins with arithmetic is actually more difficult for children than play-based activities related to more advanced fields of mathematics. As Dr.Droujkova writes, “Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture.”
That torture is compounded by the way math is taught. Extensive research demonstrates that kids readily understand math when they develop the ability to use numbers flexibly, what’s called a “number sense.” Number sense is fundamental to all higher-level mathematics. This does not develop through memorization but instead from relaxed, enjoyable exploratory work with math concepts. In fact, math experts repeatedly point out that math education standbys — flash cards, repetitive worksheets, and timed tests — are not only unhelpful but actually damaging. These common methods discourage number sense, setting young people off in the wrong direction. In fact doing math under pressure impairs the working memory students need to access what they already know. Pressure also leads to math anxiety. There’s no educational reason to use these tactics in the classroom or at home. Greater math ability has nothing to do with working quickly nor does quick recall of math facts relate to fluency with numbers.
Add to this the burden of grades and test scores. Students today deal with a heavy load of standardized tests across all major subjects, plus tests in math class as often as every few days. They quickly learn math has to do with performance, not with usefulness and certainly not with beauty or mystery.
As mathematics educator Jo Boaler writes in Mathematical Mindsets, it’s well known that grades and test scores damage motivation and result in limiting self-labels in high, middle, and low-achieving students. Research consistently shows that alternatives to grading are far more beneficial. One study compared the way teachers responded to math homework in sixth grade. Half the students were graded, the other half were given diagnostic comments without a grade. Students who got only comments learned twice as fast as the graded group, attitudes improved, and any achievement gap between male and female students disappeared.
Dr. Boaler writes about another study in which fifth and sixth grade students were assessed three different ways. Some students received only grades, some only comments, and some both grades and comments. The students who achieved at significantly higher levels were those who were given comments only. Those who got any grade at all, with or without comments, did poorly. This was true for students across the spectrum of ability. Further research found that students only needed to believe they were being graded to lose motivation and achieve less.
Studies continue to show that students given positive feedback and no grades are more successful as they continue through school. There’s a strong relationship between teachers’ assessment practices and students’ attitude about their own potential. Unfortunately teachers give less constructive feedback as students get older and students’ belief in their own chance of improving also declines steadily from upper elementary grades through high school and beyond. Even at the university level, teaching and testing has a tendency to undermine sense-making. Students are likely to limit themselves to rigid sets of rules and procedures while lacking the relational understanding to correctly apply or adapt those algorithms to the problem at hand.
What happens when students aren’t assessed?
Dr. Boaler followed teenagers in England who worked on open-ended math projects for three years. These students were not graded or tested, and only given information about their own learning, even though they faced national standardized tests at the end of that period. A few weeks before the test they were given practice exams to work through. Although they were largely unfamiliar with exam questions or timed conditions, when tested these students scored at a significantly higher level than students who had gone through standard math classes with frequent tests similar to the national exam questions.
What happens when math instruction is even more limited?
Back in 1929, pioneering educator Louis P. Benezet, superintendent of the Manchester, New Hampshire schools, wrote, “The whole subject of arithmetic could be postponed until the seventh year of school, and it could be mastered in two years’ study by any normal child.” He began an experiment. In five classrooms, children were exposed only to naturally occurring math like telling time and playing games, while in other classrooms children received typical math lessons.
At the end of the first year differences were already apparent between students exposed to these two different approaches. When children were asked the same mathematical story problem, the traditionally taught students grabbed at numbers but came up with few correct results, while the experimental students reasoned out correct answers eagerly, despite having minimal exposure to formal math. Based on these successes, the experiment expanded. By 1932, half of the third- to fifth-grade classes in the city operated under the experimental program. After several years, the experiment ended due to pressure from some principals. Children in the experimental classrooms went back to learning from a math book in the second half of sixth grade. All sixth-grade children in the district were tested and in the spring of that year all the classes tested equally. When the final tests were given at the end of the school year, one of the experimental groups led the city. In other words, those children exposed to traditional math curricula for only part of the sixth-grade year had mastered the same skills as those who had spent years on drills, times tables, and exams. Even more remarkably, the students in the experimental classrooms were from the most poverty-stricken neighborhoods where poor school performance was common. The Journal of the National Education Association published the last of Mr.Benezet’s articles in 1936, calling on educators to replace formal math instruction with naturally occurring math.
What happens when there’s no math instruction by trained educators?
Homeschooling and unschooling families around the world devote much less, if any, time to formal mathematics instruction. There are significant limitations to research of homeschooled and unschooled youth for a variety of reasons, including a self-selecting population, so findings are interesting but inconclusive.
Multiple studies indicate homeschooling offers significant academic advantages, regardless of the parent’s educational attainment. Those tested in the last two years of homeschooling, what would be a schooled student’s junior and senior years, statistically score in the 86th to 92nd percentile. The percentage of homeschooled students who complete college far exceeds the rate of public school students.
Studies show homeschoolers taking the SAT tend to score significantly above average in all areas except math where their scores are still above average. The most recent College Board stats show mean scores for all college-bound seniors were 497 in critical reading, 487 in writing, and 513 in mathematics. For the 13,549 homeschooled seniors who took the test that year, means scores were 567 in critical reading, 535 in writing, and 521 in mathematics.
It’s hard to wade through research comparing math achievement of homeschooled versus conventionally schooled young people because much of the research includes as “homeschooled” those students who are educated using district or state sponsored programs which provide conventional-style math instruction to be done at home, which largely replicates the problems of conventional classroom instruction.
Still, several informal surveys show disproportionate number of homeschool and unschool adults working in STEM careers. And it seems that a significant number of today’s high-achievers in technology, science, and math have emerged from the homeschooling community. Their numbers include:
Erik Demain — professor of theoretical computer science at MIT and named “one of the most brilliant scientists in America” by Popular Science
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Naimark — researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology,
Francis Collins — geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, Samuel Chao Chung Ting — physicist and Nobel Prize recipient,
Phillip Streich — holder of numerous patents and co-founder of nanotechnology company making him a multimillionaire by the time he entered Harvard,
Arran Fernandez — youngest mathematician with sequences published in Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences,
Willard Boyle — physicist, co-inventor of charge-coupled device and Nobel Prize winner.
Alison Beth Miller — first American woman to win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
What happens when there’s no math instruction other than what young people request?
Democratic schools exist at the opposite end of the spectrum from conventional schooling. Students are not segregated by age and each student has one vote, just as staff members do, to democratically run the community. All young people are trusted to choose their own activities and no classes are mandatory, making these schools a collectively managed and open setting for self-directed learning.
Psychologist Peter Gray surveyed graduates of one such school, Sudbury Valley School (SVS) in Framingham Massachusetts. He found that young people who were not mandated to follow curricula, take tests, and receive grades “…have gone on to good colleges and good jobs…They are taking responsible positions in business, music and art, science and technology, social services, skilled crafts, and academia.” Dr. Gray notes that employers are rarely concerned about a prospective employee’s grades in algebra. Instead the traits for career success are those that graduates say were fostered by their time at SVS, such as “…a strong sense of responsibility, an ability to take initiative and solve problems, a desire and ability to learn on the job, an ability to communicate effectively, and perhaps most of all, a high interest in and commitment to the field..”
And there’s this anecdote, shared by teacher Daniel Greenberg in his book Free At Last. A group of students at the Sudbury Valley School approached him saying they wanted to learn arithmetic. He tried to dissuade them, explaining that they’d need to meet regularly and do homework. The students agreed to do so. In the school library, Greenberg found a math book written in 1898 that was perfect in its simplicity. Memorization, exercises, and quizzes were not ordinarily part of the school day for these students, but they arrived on time, did their homework, and took part eagerly. Greenberg reflects, “In twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. Six year’s worth. Every one of them knew the material cold.” A week later he described what he regarded as a miracle to a friend, Alan White, who worked as a math specialist in public schools. White wasn’t surprised. He said, “…everyone knows that the subject matter itself isn’t that hard. What’s hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff — well, twenty hours or so makes sense.”
These examples aren’t meant to be anti-teaching, they are meant to broaden our understanding about when instruction is most useful and effective. That happens less often than we’d think — when the learner seeks guidance, demonstration, resources, or help. Learning that’s sought out sticks with the learner. It promotes curiosity, persistence, passion, and deep inquiry — exactly what’s needed to dig into the fathomless depths of mathematics or any other pursuit.
Math as it’s used by the vast majority of people around the world is actually applied math. It’s directly related to how we work and play in our everyday lives. In other words it’s useful, captivating, and often fun.
Interestingly, people who rely on mental computation every day demonstrate the sort of adroitness that doesn’t fit into conventional models of math competence. In a New York Times article titled “Why Do Americans Stink at Math,” author Elizabeth Green (who defines the term “unschooled” as people who have little formal education) writes,
Observing workers at a Baltimore dairy factory in the ’80s, the psychologist Sylvia Scribner noted that even basic tasks required an extensive amount of math. For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.” Throughout these mental calculations, errors were “virtually nonexistent.” And yet when these workers were out sick and the dairy’s better-educated office workers filled in for them, productivity declined.
The unschooled may have been more capable of complex math than people who were specifically taught it, but in the context of school, they were stymied by math they already knew. Studies of children in Brazil, who helped support their families by roaming the streets selling roasted peanuts and coconuts, showed that the children routinely solved complex problems in their heads to calculate a bill or make change. When cognitive scientists presented the children with the very same problem, however, this time with pen and paper, they stumbled. A 12-year-old boy who accurately computed the price of four coconuts at 35 cruzeiros each was later given the problem on paper. Incorrectly using the multiplication method he was taught in school, he came up with the wrong answer. Similarly, when Scribner gave her dairy workers tests using the language of math class, their scores averaged around 64 percent. The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.
And Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin explains in The Math Gene that we’re schooled to express math in formal terms, but that’s not necessary for most of us — no matter what careers we choose. People who rely on mental math in their everyday lives are shown to have an accuracy rate around 98 percent, yet when they’re challenged to do the same math symbolically (as in standardized tests) their performance is closer to 37 percent.
One of the most widely held misconceptions about mathematics is that a math problem has a unique correct answer…
Having earned my living as a mathematician for over 40 years, I can assure you that the belief is false. In addition to my university research, I have done mathematical work for the U. S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Army, private defense contractors, and a number of for-profit companies. In not one of those projects was I paid to find ‘the right answer.’ No one thought for one moment that there could be such a thing.
So what is the origin of those false beliefs? It’s hardly a mystery. People form that misconception because of their experience at school. In school mathematics, students are only exposed to problems that
are well defined,
have a unique correct answer, and
whose answer can be obtained with a few lines of calculation.
How can we translate all these findings into math education?
We not only need to drop flashcards, timed tests, and rote worksheets. We need to emphasize math as meaningful, useful, and connected.
A. The most statistically significant predictors of long-term math achievement, according to a study that tracked children from age three to age 10, had very little to do with instruction. Instead the top factors were the mother’s own educational achievements and a high quality home learning environment. That sort of home environment included activities like being read to, going to the library, playing with numbers, painting and drawing, learning letters and numbers, singing and chanting rhymes. These positive effects were as significant for low-income children as they were for high income children. Children who attended highly effective preschools (but not moderately effective programs) also benefited. Understanding numbers as meaningful and fun is important from the earliest years.
B. Technology innovator Conrad Wolfram says we need to go beyond computation. He suggests these four steps:
Pose the right question about an issue
Change that real world scenario into a math formulation
Compute
Turn the math formulation back into a real world scenario to verify it
C. Barnard College president Sian Beilock president says math is best learned as storytelling and done so by incorporating the body, the way children naturally absorb real world math. As neuroscientists map the brain, they find humanity evolved skills that overlaid onto areas of the brain that control the body. Math doesn’t sink in when confined to the intellect. It is drawn in through the body. We see this in studies showing babies who are able to move and explore more freely learn more quickly. “Math, Dr. Beilock says, “is a very recent cultural invention.” The part of the brain used for numerical representation is related to finger motion, demonstrating exactly why children best learn by counting on their fingers. Hand movement all the way up to full body engagement, such as walking while thinking, are actually more valuable than speech in comprehending everything from early computation to abstract concepts in physics. Dr. Beilock also emphasizes the benefits of time in nature to refresh one’s attention, leading to greater focus and comprehension.
D. Dr. Droujkova adds to this by emphasizing richly social math experiences that are both complex (able to go in a variety of directions) and simple (open to immediate play). She says any branch of mathematics offers both complex and simple ways in. It is best, she explains, to keep from chaining kids into formal equations early on. There’s an informal level where kids play with ideas and notice patterns. Then comes a more formal level where kids can use abstract words, graphs, and formulas. But it’s best if a playful attitude is kept alive, because what mathematicians do at the highest level is play with abstract ideas.
Dr. Droujkova notes that the community she founded called Natural Math is essentially a “freedom movement.” She explains: “We work toward freedom at many levels — the free play of little kids, the agency of families and local groups in organizing math activities, the autonomy of artists and makers, and even liberty for us curriculum designers…. No single piece of mathematics is right for everyone. People are different, and people need to approach mathematics differently.” Although we’ve been schooled to believe that math must be taught in a structured way by professionals, Dr. Droujkova continues to establish lively and engaging community-based, open-learning math circles that can be led by any adult. She and her colleagues make their materials open under Creative Commons license and offer online hubs with courses and resources for parents, teachers and teenagers who want to lead local groups. (See naturalmath.com) As Dr. Droujkova says in a recent interview, “math circles are magic circles.”
School-like instruction has been around less than a fraction of one percent of the time we humans have been on earth. Yet humanity has thrived. That’s because we evolved as free range learners gaining mastery as we explore, play, emulate role models, challenge ourselves, make mistakes and try again. That’s how everyone learns to walk and talk. That’s how young people have become capable adults throughout history. And that’s how innovation happens in the arts, sciences, and technology. In the long view, school is the experiment.
For many it’s hard to see beyond the school mindset because most of us went to school. So when we think of education, we view school as the standard even if we simultaneously realize that many parts of that model (also found in daycare, preschool, kids’ clubs, sports, and enrichment programs) aren’t necessarily beneficial. Narrowing the innate way we learn can unintentionally narrow enthusiasm, creativity, persistence, and the desire to dive deeply into any pursuit. It can interfere with the full development of our abilities.
My first grade math lessons taught me to equate math with fear. I went on to get good grades in the subject, but by high school my math anxiety led me to give up hopes of working in a science field. Math misery doesn’t have to be imposed on the next generation.
It’s time to free ourselves from the assumption that math instruction is a painful necessity. Approaching math in ways that are disconnected from a child’s life subtracts the meaning and the joy. It multiplies fear. Data shows and experience proves that real learning flows from the learner’s consent and the learner’s interest. We can offer math as an enlivening, beautiful tool to the next generation as soon as we free ourselves from the limitations of the school mindset.
Laura Grace Weldon 