If It Isn't Purposeless, It Isn't Play25 April 2024 | 2:15 pm
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"Octograbbers" was a game that the children played for months on end. It involved possessing two shovels, one for each hand, then using them like pincers to dig, pick things up, and occasionally, in the spirit of fun, menace one another.
We'll never know who invented the game of "octograbbers," but we can be pretty certain that it didn't emerge from Darwinian evolution. Or rather, not directly. It's not one of those things like walking or talking for which most human's are born with the biological programming. Octograbbers was what could be called a cultural phenomenon, one that was conceived by children at play. It then spread from child to child to the point that any newcomer, within a few hours of involvement with us, would be fully versed.
Everyone in our community knew about octograbbers. Someone might ask, "Where's the dump truck?" and someone would answer, "Over there by the octograbbers." This would have communicated nothing to an outsider, but within our community, everyone, child or adult, understood instantly. A parent would ask their child at the end of the day, "What did you do today?" And the answer, "Octograbbers" made perfect sense.
Scientists who study animal behavior in the wild, ethologists, generally define play as behavior that is purposeless (nonfunctional), voluntary, obviously unlike the animals' typical behavior, involves movements that are repeated with modifications and variations, and that is undertaken by animals that are well-fed, safe, and healthy. I might quibble with this definition, for instance, I would add that play is always open-ended, but for most purposes it's workable. And the game of Octograbbers fits this definition in all its particulars.
We've taken it upon ourselves to point to learning that takes place as children play, even going so far as to assert that learning is the purpose of play. And these children were certainly learning, or at least practicing, skills that would serve them in the future, most notably cooperation and teamwork. By self-handicapping -- replacing their arms and hands with shovels -- they were forced to consider the physical properties of the world from another perspective. And, of course, given that we didn't have enough shovels for everyone to play the game at any given moment, there were likely lessons in supply-and-demand economics to be found in the game. But the game itself had nothing to do with learning. It was just play. And while the game itself did not emerge from Darwinian evolution, the urge to play most certainly did.
Many believe that one of the most human activities of all, making music, is the product of play. There was no obvious purpose for early humans to begin singing or tapping out rhythms. It was most certainly voluntary, it was behavior unlike the usual functional behaviors like hunting and hiding, and, of course, being music, variation and modification is essential. And, naturally, no one makes music when they are sick, hungry, or under threat. It was not inevitable that humans would make music. In the beginning it was, like octograbbers, a cultural phenomenon that spreads from person to person, and continues to spread from generation to generation.
Unlike octograbbers, music has obvious adaptive advantages. It clearly facilitates the bond between caregivers and infants. It unifies us as members of cultures, clubs, and religions. It enhances our sexual attractiveness. All of which promotes the survival of the species. But it is not behavior that would logically emerge from the imperatives of survival, although, in the same way that octograbbers most certainly spurred learning, our invention of music has enabled, over eons, the proper neural circuitry needed to make and process music.
The children playing the game of octograbbers, like those humans who first made music, were doing it simply because it was fun or pleasurable. The learning and the unifying, however valuable, is a side-effect of our urge to play.
"Organic evolution" is the term scientists use to describe this phenomenon. There is regular Darwinian evolution, in which our biology causes us to do things like breath, eat, procreate, fight, fly, fawn and freeze. And then there is organic evolution which is how we effectively direct our own evolution through play.
The game of octograbbers disappeared at the end of the school year. I imagine some of the more avid players sought to recreate it in new settings, and maybe the game is still bubbling away somewhere under the surface of society, but it's unlikely that it will be as universally impactful as the playful invention of music. Still, the two are of a type -- music and octograbbers.
Critics of play almost always base their arguments on the premise that it is purposeless or nonfunctional. "It's a waste of time," they insist, but that's exactly the point.
"Natural selection," writes science journalist David Toomey in his new book Kingdom of Play, "possesses a number of specific and well-defined characteristics. It is, for instance, purposeless. It has no intention, and no objective, and as Darwin averred, it "includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development." It is provisional. The evolution of any organism is a response to whatever conditions are present at a given place and moment. It is open-ended. The evolution of an organism has no moment of arrival and no end point -- a fact highlighted in the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species, a slow building crescendo whose final note hangs in the air and never quite resolves: the forms of life, in concludes, are even now "being evolved." In all these ways, natural selection is like play . . . (I)f you could distill the process of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play. Alternatively, if you were to choose an evolutionary theory or view of nature for which play might seem to be a model, it would be natural selection . . . Life itself, in the most fundamental sense, is playful."
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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.
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Littlewood's Law24 April 2024 | 2:01 pm
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I know the secret to making your dreams come true.
In an essay written for New Philosopher magazine (content not available online), Oliver Burkman discusses what's called Littlewood's Law, named for a British mathematician by the name of John Edensor Littlewood:
Let's suppose . . . that you're awake and active in the world -- as opposed to sleeping or resting -- for a mere eight hours a day. Suppose furthermore that a tiny 'event' of some sort occurs at the rate of once per second during those hours: you see someone in the street, you read or hear a sentence, or have a thought, and so on . . . Crunch the numbers on that basis, and it turns out you can expect to experience a one-in-a-million occurrence -- the kind of odds most of us would call miraculous -- roughly every 35 days.
So, simply from a mathematical perspective, each of us experiences a very lucky moment on roughly a monthly basis; unbelievably lucky, astronomically lucky, a miracle. The thing is, we don't get to choose what that specific lucky moment is going to be and because most of us are intent upon chasing a specific kind of luck, which we often label our "goal" or our "dream," we don't recognize those one-in-a-million occurrences.
When I graduated from college, my first employer was so impressed with my ability to write "proposals" that my unpaid internship turned into a paid one within months. I had been taught in school to write clear, unequivocal mission statements, followed by goals and objectives, supported by strategies and tactics, all in the service of that original mission statement, the idea being that if we just followed our plan our business dream would come true. Those plans helped us secure business, they helped us get going, but I soon came to realize, first with despair and then with a shrug, that our beautiful plans were almost immediately relegated to the file drawer in light of real events and real people. I realize now that those plans, far from helping us achieve our goal (which in business is always to make money), were really just blinders that pretty much guaranteed failure -- or at least a success far beneath the one postulated in the mission statement. The more seasoned businesspeople around me knew this already, at least in part, which is why my beautiful plans wound up by the wayside as we took the more certain path of making it up as we went along with varying degrees of success.
When I was young, before the pressures of "getting real" were upon me, I dreamt of being a superhero and a saint, of a life of hedonism and of adventure, of building things and tearing things down. I saw myself by turns a spelunker, baseball coach, architect, firefighter, daddy, hobo, titan, jewel thief, politician, archeologist, tinker, tailor, solder, and spy. I imagined myself living a life of ease and great striving, both poor and rich, complicated and simple. I toyed with all of those ideas for myself, each holding special charms, then, as I approached that arbitrary point we call adulthood, I pretended to focus on one of them. I was going to, one day, be the creative director of a Madison Avenue advertising agency. I know, pathetic, right? Even I didn't fully believe in it, although I had a "plan" for making it happen.
I really beat myself up about it, but by the time I had graduated from university, I was certain that I didn't want to be one of those Mad Men, so it was without enthusiasm that I continued to work that damned plan, which landed me with that first employer who was impressed by my ability to write plans: that employer, by a one-in-a-million chance, turned out to be the woman to whom I've now been married for the past 35 years. I don't know if I even recognized it at the time, but my dream had come true: I was and still am the luckiest man alive.
And I don't mean that in the usual sniveling, husbandly way, even though I know how it sounds. I don't care. It's true. I'd always dreamt of finding a true life partner.
One of my thousands of dreams was to follow in my own mother's footsteps, to be a parent and homemaker, something that had seemed an impossibility given the gender of my birth, yet, as luck would have it, I found myself in exactly that role when our daughter was young, just as I'd dreamt.
At some point, in my infinite list of youthful dreams, I'd fantasized about being a teacher and by the unpredictable turnings of fate, via a one-in-a-million long shot, someone asked me at just the right moment, "What are you going to do with your life?" And when I didn't have an answer, she replied, "You should be a preschool teacher." And that's what I did. What incredible luck! My dream came true!
In pre-Covid times I found myself traveling to places around the globe, self-indulgently "suffering" the toils and uncertainty of travel, speaking to audiences of colleagues who seemed to find me both entertaining and informative. This was another of my dreams coming true. I'd often romanticized the life of a traveling minstrel, roaming from town-to-town with nothing but a rucksack and a song. I was living the dream.
For a long time I dreamed of being a writer, and now here I sit, writing every day and people actually read it. My dream is reality.
It's all been pure luck. And please don't try to spoil it by insisting that it was luck made by hard work, diligence, and putting my nose-the-grindstone because despite popular mythology, that has had absolutely nothing to do with it. I've not worked hard: I've been lucky because I have dreamed a million dreams.
And so that's my secret to making your dreams come true. Dream a lot. Dream often. Dream like a child, every day, passionately, then hold onto that dream even as you dream the next one. Because for every new dream you dream, you increase the odds that your monthly allotment of one-in-a-million long shots will be the one for which you've been waiting. It's this lesson, not the one about grindstones that I want to teach the children in my life.
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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.
I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!
"The Mind at Three Miles Per Hour"23 April 2024 | 2:08 pm
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| "The Thinker," Auguste Rodin (The worst possible way to think?) |
"(S)it as little as possible," writes German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement."
Nietzsche was notorious walker and hiker, a man seemingly always on the go, yet he's known as a thinker, one of the most influential of the 19th century, a mustachioed ponderer of the big questions about life and the universe.
He's not the only one of our great "brainiacs" to credit their bodies with their best thinking.
Essayist Rebecca Solnit, one of today's prominent thinker-walkers, writes in her book about walking, Wanderlust, under the inspired chapter title, The Mind at Three Miles Per Hour, "Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden."
"Exploring the world," she writes, "is one of the best ways of exploring the mind."
There are exceptions, of course, but humans, from Socrates to Virgina Woolf to Richard Feynman, have understood that brains work best while bodies are in motion. That is until our current era of schooling in which our children, despite their Devine urge to move, are trained from an early age that their thinking is best done while seated, assembly-line style, quietly, listening passively, and moving only when told, and then, only in approved ways. It defies everything we know about how human minds work, and an hour of PE is not going to fix what's wrong, although more recess -- a lot more recess -- might.
Neuroscientist Patrick House asserts that "the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of these efforts."
We must be taught to sit quietly because it goes against the very nature of life itself. Our brains are a part of our bodies and bodies are meant to move, preferably at three miles per hour. It's even better when that movement happens outdoors.
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Hi, I'm Teacher Tom and this is my podcast! If you're an early childhood educator, parent of preschoolers, or otherwise have young children in your life, I think you'll find my conversations with early childhood experts and thought-leaders useful, inspiring, and eye-opening. You might even come away transformed by the ideas and perspectives we share. Please give us a listen. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you download your podcasts.
I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!