Research Supports Setting Kids Free, Interview with Teacher Tom

Ginny: Welcome to the One Thousand Hours outside podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, the founder of the 1000 Hours Outside Movement. We are kicking off season three today with the Red Cape teacher, Teacher Tom. Welcome Teacher Tom. Look, I got a picture of the red cape right her

Teacher Tom: Hi Ginny, it's nice to be here.

Ginny: I have been a huge fan of yours for a very, very long time. I love your books and I love your blog. You're so consistent with writing and have been for so many years. I know you've impacted so many families, so thank you for taking time to be here.

Teacher Tom: Oh, no worries. This is a lot of fun. I'm glad I'm here.

Ginny: I'm just so thrilled to be sitting across the screen from you. What a delight. Let me read your bio here real quick. Your actual name is Tom Hobson. Everybody refers to you as teacher Tom, which is super cool. Teacher Tom is an early childhood educator, international speaker, education consultant, teacher of teachers, parent, educator and author. He is best known, however, for his namesake blog Teacher Tom's Blog, where he has posted daily for over a decade. What a commitment chronicling the life and times of his little preschool in the rain soaked Pacific Northwest corner of the USA. And you talk about your sort of journey here in your bio about how your daughter was enrolled in the cooperative preschool and then she moved on, but you stayed behind and you have play based pedagogy, online courses and an online early childhood conference that's usually in the fall, right?

Teacher Tom: I was actually in summertime,

Ginny: OK, you consult with organizations all around the globe and you have two fantastic books Teacher Tom's first book. I was so tickled by these, really, you know, because you make a book and it's everything's about the title in the cover. But if you have good content, all you have to do is call it teacher Tom's first book, It's Fabulous and Teacher, Tom's second book. I mean, this is just the best. They're fantastic books. They really and they made me really reminisce on my own kids when they were small, and it is delightful to meet people who delight in children. So. And real quick before we move on, you have a new course coming out mid-January. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Teacher Tom: Yeah, no. I hope I've, you know, I've been I think like you mentioned, I started writing that blog back in 2009, and I've been, you know, I've been promoting play based education, right? Self-Directed learning for young children, and I'm putting children back in charge of asking and answering their own questions. You know, giving them a childhood really kind of work you're doing, actually. And I've been doing it for a long time and talking about this, you know, and I would get on a regular basis I get people asking me, Oh man, I wish you would come and just, you know, hang out at my school for a while so I could learn to do what you do or I'd like to have my school be more like yours and all that. And you know, and the blog is part of how I try to help people with that, but I realize that people are asking for more. So we're in this. You know, my wife and I, my wife is my business partner, so I say we that's it's not like operation or anything. It's just the two of us.

Ginny: We're the same over here

Teacher Tom: We decided that what we would do was have an e-course called Teacher Tom's Introduction to Play Based Learning and really provide people, you know, this is nice, you know, six plus hours of content, the chance for them to really think about the things that I think about. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not a directive teacher. I'm not with young children. I wouldn't be that way with adults, but I hope to create a, you know, try to create an environment which people can think about their own practice as early childhood educators and as parents. And how they can create a world in which their children are thriving and succeeding through their own self-directed activities. So that's what that course is going to be all about. And if anybody wants to, we don't even have a web page for it yet, but we should have it done in the next couple of weeks here. Anybody who's interested can just email. TeacherTomHobson@TeacherTom'sWorld.Com and just put the eCourse wait list. The subject line, and we'll make sure you get all the information you need.

Ginny: Perfect. And then when you actually have the site up, I'll make sure to share that with people as well. I love that. I love that it's for teachers and parents. I think one of the things you talk about in your book is that, you know that even the after school time, you know, if we don't fill it quite so much and you know, it's like everyone has some time, you know, we all have a different amounts in different amount of margin and just very different life situations. But you know, we all have some time that we get to pick and choose what we do with. And so what a perfect opportunity for parents and for teachers. So I'm excited about that. I definitely like I said, share that.

Teacher Tom: I'm excited that, you know, it's the same, the same story with the book, right? I didn't write that book. I wrote the book. I don't know what, not too many years ago that first book and I really, honestly was never going to write a book. You just read to me, when are you going to write a book and say, I'm giving away my best writing online for free every day? But finally, I was persuaded to do it, and I feel like this course is sort of like that to people have been asking for it for a long time. So yeah, I'm excited.

Ginny: That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. And the books really are fantastic, Tom, because, you know, it's just, you know, I'm a writer so I can take your book, you know, and I can flip through and make my notes and and, you know, earmark the pages. So these are fantastic books. Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book. OK. These books are filled with I mean, I've got so many topics here to talk about, but the thing I'm most interested about and I'm not finding it here much is how did you end up here? How did you end up as the Red Cape Teacher Tom? You know, I read a little bit about how you went to a cooperative preschool. You were there as a parent. And then you stayed. And I read a little bit about going to play Iceland and different things. But I think a lot of times it takes a really long time to get to these places where we're comfortable with kids being in charge of their own education. So what was that path like for you?

Teacher Tom: Well, it's it's an evolutionary process for everybody. And it's true that, you know, I say this a lot. I like I said, I've been writing the blog since 2009, and I can go back and I haven't deleted a single thing. I've left everything on there. I've written and I've been writing almost every single day. And there are many, especially in 2009 2010, that I am humiliated. I'm embarrassed. I was wrong. I have evolved beyond, but that's OK. I've just I thought about deleting them or editing or change. You know, I want people to see the journey because, you know, we live in a world right now where we really most people, not you, not me, not people listening to this right.

But most of the people in the world kind of consider children to be sort of these little idiots who if we aren't on top of them, helping them every second of every day, they're just, you know, they're going to kill themselves or they're going to maim themselves. They're going to become video zombies or video game zombies or something like that. And I think so it takes us a long time to unlearn that. I think one of the biggest challenges we have is that, you know, the way we've set up modern society is that most of us, you know, after we are no longer a child, we don't spend time with children again until we're parents, right? There's this whole gap, often 20 years or more where we don't spend any, children aren't in our lives, or if they are there to the annoying pests in the restaurant or that kick in the back of your seat in the airplane. And you know, you don't really, you know, there's some of us who are better than that.

But I think really one of the things that's happened over the course of the last century or so is that we adults have become separated from children. And if you look at the way society is set up where you know, we end up with, you know, we put all the kids over here in the preschools, you know, and even, you know, they have them their own thing. And this is, you know, God love the un-schoolers and the homeschoolers and the people who are considered to have children at the center of their lives. But most of us, you know, are sending the kids off to preschools. The adults go to this place called work, which is completely separate, never the two get to meet. And then we've even gone so far as we've got all the senior citizens living halfway across the country, the grandparents from these grandkids, and they're over here and their senior centers or wherever they are, you know, can't wait counting the days till they get to see their grandkids. And what we've done is we've removed children from the center of society. And so what happened to me and to get long winded way of answering your question is I was lucky. I was one of the most lucky men on Earth is that when our daughter was born, my wife was was a breadwinner. We had we had enough money to live on with one income.

So I I just stopped my career. I was I was a freelance writer, that's what I was doing and just said, You know what? All I'm going to do is I'm going to be a stay at home parent and take care of the kid. And and part of it was totally selfish. I loved the idea of just cozying in with her all day long and then played little games and reading stories and all that kind of stuff. And then she, you know, and I'm basically an introvert, right? So that's the introverts dream, right? To putter around the house all day with your baby and just kind of, you know, she was like, Our daughter is much more like my wife. She's much more of an extrovert. She gets her energy from being with other people. And before she was even a year and a half, I mean, she was maybe a year old, she would say to me, today, let's go somewhere - let's do something. You know, we're playing outside and everything we're doing all the time. So, you know, like, all right, you know, so I started going to playgrounds the stuff that wasn't quite right now. OK, well, maybe she needs preschool right now. Maybe that's what she's asking me for. I made it seemed too young, she's not even two, we didn't need the childcare. And then when I asked my wife, Jennifer, I asked, You know, I said, I think she needs preschool. She said, no way. She's she's got a Stay-At-Home parent. We don't need to go warehouse her somewhere, which is, of course, what a lot of us think about preschool. And then and then I went behind my wife's back and talked to my mom. She said the same thing that I whipped behind both of their backs and talked to my mother in law and she said the same thing, you know, in in a person's life, those three important women say something, you have to do it. You don't really have a choice. So it was like, OK, well, I'm a stay at home parent. I don't know what to do. So I started trying to cobble together this social life being at playgrounds or museums or whatever.

And at one point, I met a woman who was there at the playground with her son, our kids were playing and I told her my story, probably exactly the same story I just told you. And she said, Well, she said, You know, we're in a preschool where the parents go to school with the kids. It's called a cooperative school. And I thought, that sounds like a pretty good idea. That sounds like a good deal. And that passed the mother, mother in law, wife test. And so I. And so that's really how I got started is I started going to school and I suddenly realized the children at the center of my life. I had not just my own, but I had this group of 20 or so children whose parents were also there, who I got to know, and we had this community that was based on children and I begin to see, I felt like there were a lot of powerful things in me. I mean, there's all I can talk about all the things I did with kids. But in me, what happened, suddenly, I found myself more attentive. I found myself more present. I found myself more creative, hanging around with these creative geniuses all day long. And I also I just suddenly I and the way I like to the story, the way I like to say it is that I rediscovered the underside of tables. Right, because as a kid, you knew what the underside of every table in your house looked like. And you had stories about it.

And suddenly I was down there with the children doing this and I realized that, you know, this is where I want to be. This is where real life is happening. And so, you know, and by the time our daughter, so I went to school with her for three years as as a cooperative parent. And then her teacher, one of my great mentors, a woman, Chris David, just said, Hey, you know what? To be a teacher? I think you should be a teacher. And I said, OK, that sounds good. What do I need to do? And so I did a little coursework, but even before I was done with it Woodland Park had hired me. And you know, the rest is history.

Ginny: Wow. I'm really thrilled to learn that story. Really thrilled. I wondered. I wondered, and you were there for three years with your daughter. So that makes sense because you had that three years to really acclimate to that sort of child directed lifestyle.

Teacher Tom: Exactly. Well, I got learn from a master. She was a master early childhood educator, and she was committed, play based educator.

Ginny: Yeah. And you know what Tom do you know sometimes you think about like, what if that woman wouldn't have been at the park that day? But do you ever think about stuff like that? So that's how the course of our life is changed by such small things. Someti mes, you

Teacher Tom: And I'd be wearing a three piece suit right now.

Ginny: Wow, wow, what a story. So, OK, so for families who don't know tell us about Woodland Park. Tell us about tell us about the preschool cooperative thing.

Teacher Tom: So a cooperative school is a school, it's an entity, i t's a model in which the parents who enroll the children are the legal owners of the school. This is legal. This is registered with secretary of State or not not for profit corporation. And you know, the parents own and operate the school, they make all the decisions, but they do all the they do all the financial work, they do all the janitorial work they do that they do the enrollment, they do everything that goes into making the school happen. And the only thing I'm the only paid employee.

So the teacher is the only paid employee and the teacher's responsibility is the curriculum in the classroom. But everything else that goes into making the school operate is done by the parents. So this is a way to have a very inexpensive preschool model. It's wonderful for parents who want to have a lot of say in their child if your child's early childhood experience and don't want to be separated from them, I mean, that's the beauty part of it is we're enrolling families, not children . And as a teacher and as a parent and a teacher, for me, the most important part was that as an obligation of ownership, you put in at least one day a week in the classroom as the assistant, as an assistant teacher. And so this means that, you know, as an educator, I'm in there and I might be there. I might have 20 kids, but oftentimes if it's younger kids, sometimes I'll have 11 adults in the room. So we get a two to one ratio kind of thing. So we have this in a real sense of community because grandparents show up and aunts and uncles show up and older siblings come. And so what we're doing is, is it's, you know, people who come to visit our school have always been sort of, gosh i t looks just like from the blog. It sounds like really like, except there's a lot of grown-ups around here. I wasn't expecting that.

And part of my job is to teach the Grown-Ups to educate them. And I do that through role modeling. We do that through monthly parent education. So the parents are required, again part of their ownership Obligation is to show up for parent education meetings once a month, and we contract with the North Seattle College for parent educators. So they're not always just hearing from me and to some of my my again. Some of my greatest mentors have been those parent educators who have been teaching me every month for the last 20 years. So it's a great experience for these parents and so they come in and so we educate them on what play based education is all about, what child directed learning is all about. We help them deal with things like conflict resolution and, you know, and children who are hitting and kicking and, you know, those kind of things. It's all the kind of problematic things we get to do with it in a community.

What I love really about this is that suddenly, like a parent who's struggling with their child hitting, for example, they can step back and watch another parent work on it and they suddenly get this idea because then there's not that emotion. Oh, there's a sudden you're saying, Wait a minute, I'm just like that how she's not all upset about it. She's you know and or, you know, they see me do it or somebody else in the classroom. So it's it's like a parenting cooperative in a way. We call it a preschool. But really, it's a chance to get together in a community. And to me, that's the only thing that we need in life, especially in this community.

Ginny: Yeah, you talk about that a lot in your book, but this is an interesting component of it. Like you talk about how well, really like with nature, you know, it benefits any age, right? You talk about if the grandma is 100 and the babies one month, this community benefits every age and we're so separated from each other that it would be hard to know what to do with your child, you know, in this sort of situation. But then if you're there and you get to see it. Wow, and I and I loved in your book, can you talk about families, you enroll families, you would say, like such and such child has been here since in utero. You know, like this child's been coming, you know? So what a lasting impact on these families

Teacher Tom: Most kids would stay for at least three years, some of them for four years.

Ginny: And then siblings sometimes

Teacher Tom: Yeah, if I knew them, yeah, if I knew them in in utero that I met, you know, I already know how the first five years of their lives before they set out into the world so I'm a part of the family.

Ginny: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. OK, so so let's talk about. Let's talk about play. I think that's it, that's an easy one to start with. You talk a lot about policymakers, and I used to be actually, I was a former public school teacher. I taught math, so I'm aware of the policymakers that these decisions seem to come from the heavens. You don't know where they come from. I think that parents probably think that they come from teachers, but they don't. So you talk in your book a lot about policymakers, that they're deciding, you know what, we should learn and when we should learn it and out of the infinite amount of things this is what you should do and do it now, you know? But you have a totally different approach that kids through their own play figure out what they're going to learn. So that's that's a broad based topic to jump off of, but for parents who are leery let's talk about how kids learn through play.

Teacher Tom: Oh, well, the first thing I would do is say the other thing that I think most of us and I was right with all parents in this when my child was starting school was I assumed that school and curriculum was based on research and data best practices. That is emphatically not true. The overwhelming amount of research done on the way children learn points to play based education. This increasing emphasis that we have and the policymakers that I talk about, you know, first of all, whenever they talk about education, they always talk about it as job training. Even in preschool, they're always talking about getting the kids ready for those jobs of tomorrow. We’ve got out-educate the Chinese, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, and this could be anybody from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, they're all wrong about it. Right? Every one of these politicians, when they talk about it and very often administrators, they'll talk about, you know, we got to get them career and college ready. And that, of course, is not the purpose of education in a democratic society.

The purpose of an education is to create critical thinkers, people who could take part in the project of self-governance. And it's the reason education is so important in our society. And if you think about it, the the skills required to do well in a job are very often the exact opposite of the skills required to do well as a citizen. And you know, the first one that comes to mind and this is one that I'm answering your question. The one that comes to me is obedience, right? Because if you are insubordinate in your corporate job, you're out of there, right? If you just don't do what the CEO says to do they don't have any need for you. They get you out of there. So if you if you do that, but in a democracy, in a self-governing society, we need people who challenge authority, who question authority, who say, Wait a minute, that doesn't sound like what I already know about the world. Tell me more. Give me more information and challenging and questioning these things, thinking for themselves and asking a lot of questions and standing up for their beliefs. Another thing you don't really get to do in your corporate job are, you know, your normal job. So the skills are completely different. And so often when our schools are doing so that so to me, that's not based on research that's based on the economy, that's based on economics

Ginny: And convenience, I think - like so when I took my educator courses, we learned about best practices. But the best practices were about how to shuttle 30 kids through your curriculum. And that's it. You know, how do you manage a classroom of 30 people who don't want to do?

Teacher Tom: Yeah, less free management and getting them to do what they don't want to do. And so, you know, it's a win. And then the research and I mentioned the research and you know, there's two different kinds of research. First of all, Carol Black is the one who I found out about this from, and she and her was she wrote this incredible essays. I have to give you the title later. But in this, she talks about, she goes, you know, like most of the research that policymakers use to to to create schools, to create curricula and everything else, they use research that is done on children in school. And she says that is the equivalent of going to Sea World to study orca whales. Yes, if you really wanted to stay in orca whales, right, you study them in the wild. So the research done on children at play, which is the natural habitat of children and specifically outdoors at play. When we do the research there, we find that, you know, for certain that this academic type training is actually damaging their future, their future abilities, like reading, for example.

The research done on reading overwhelmingly shows that children who received early literacy instruction so before the age of five get a tiny head start on the other kids by the time they're eight years old, that has vanished by the time they're 15 the children who received the instruction read less for pleasure and with lower comprehension than the children who are allowed to wait till at least seven, eight, nine years old. And the truth is, is what most unschoolers and homeschoolers who have the courage to do this or have discovered is that most, most children reading is like walking. Reading is like talking. It is something that they will learn. It's really hard, right? Right now, I can already imagine some of your listeners or viewers sitting there going, I don't have the courage for that. OK, come on. Of course, it doesn't make sense. They know how to read or something like that. But I guarantee that if we started children teaching children how to walk in school, it would take less than a generation before we would all believe the only way kids learn how to walk is in school. Yeah, because walking that's a really complicated thing. It's a common with the human brain can do incredibly complex things, and literacy is one of the foundational things that the modern human brain. So and we're motivated to that. And when we watch children learn to do that, and this is the other interesting thing about that. I won't stick to literacy, but no,

Ginny: I want to. I want to camp out on literacy. I put a lot of notes here. I think it's good

Teacher Tom: One of the most interesting things about this is that usually when children are also the natural window for learning to read seems to be between about seven and 11 years old. Right. And you know, even you and I are going to freak out if for kids not reading by the time they're nine or 10, probably. But the truth is, is that people who have the courage to let the child's reading emerge naturally. We're not talking about kids with dyslexia and other kinds of learning differences. We're talking about neurotypical children who a lot of the kids can go from, not reading at all to reading Harry Potter in about two weeks.

Ginny: This was our experience Tom. We did it and I was freaked out. I was freaked out. But all the research said to wait, and so for our oldest were a homeschooling family. And so for our oldest, we waited until he was seven and and I maybe would have even waited longer, but I didn't want him to be embarrassed out in certain situations. And so we did. This is pretty boring, but it's teach your child to read and 100 lessons or something, you know, just takes 10 minutes a day. And so we hit lesson maybe 70. So we spent, you know, 700 minutes or hours, hardly any time. And we went from like, you know, the fat cat rides the bird, you know, and then all of a sudden the next day he's like in in Thanksgiving, November to he's reading everything. It was, you know, I didn't do it. No. And so with our subsequent kids, if you have that one time under your belt now with the subsequent kids, I don't even know how some of them learned how to read, but they did, you know? So I think it's so important for parents to hear that seven to 11 I am next week, I think, is a podcast with Carla Hannaford. Do you know her, Smart Moves?

Teacher Tom: I know who she is, I don't know her

Ginny: Ph.D., right? Smart Moves. She's written all these books, and she didn't read until she was 11.

Teacher Tom: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. There are a lot of the smartest people in my life. I did not, but some of them didn't even talk till they were, like four years old. I mean, this is the thing right now. We'd have so many interviews. So anyway, so what we learned about children is that it's that most educational institutions, right? You talked about the curriculum you have to deliver and all this, it's all about adults deciding what questions to ask the kids, what areas they need to explore and understand. And then marching them through it, right? One way or another. Yeah. Some of you. I'm sure you were a genius. Did you cajole, or trick them or write?nBut how dishonest is that, right? Because you're, you know, you're not just what we do in play-based education is we understand the most important thing is for children to be self-motivated. And that's the most important thing in life is self-motivation - is not having to have others out there cracking the whip over you or holding the carrot in front of you. We need children. We need a world of people who are self-motivated. And what better way to be self-motivated than to spend your childhood, at least asking and answering your own questions? And the adults shop.

Our job is to support them as they go through their process of how to ask and answer their own questions so that in a nutshell, a nd the other piece I just want to add for what play is and why play. So important is play and because I'm getting so frustrated right now, because you and I are actually having some success. Yes, people are increasingly starting to talk about, you know, with the children need to play in the play. Yeah, but they they always they can't help. They can't just say play. They say play with a purpose. And that's when they suddenly start adding again, that adult thing and it suddenly becomes not self-directed. It doesn't. It quits being about the children's questions. A classic example is a PE class, right? Because people look around and they're playing the playing soccer well. But the adults, you know, are saying play by these rules. There's an out of bounds line to certain ways you have to play. And what if this kid wants to put their hands? What if this kid wants to try to balance on top of the ball? That's not part of the game. And so suddenly their questions have to be considered secondary. And so, of course, they lose their motivation. I'll never forget one time I went to observe a teacher and she was a play based kindergarten teacher, actually. And, you know, she was wonderful. And I, you know, I hope if she identifies herself in this, I don't want her to be ashamed because it's I've been there before. But she had she had gone out with the children, it was a fall day and they had gathered leaves.

And, you know, all children, at least to a certain extent, like to it that they had, you know, some had just brought home one special leaf , some big bag full of leaves. It had all these leaves and then she was going to extend the. This is always where we get in trouble is like. And so she had a game. She was going to get game. They were going to play with the leaves. What she did was she took different types of leaves and take them on pieces of paper at one end and then each kid in the line had another one and they were going to have a relay race. And you had to run down and then match a leaf and then run back and tag your friends, your next friend down and naturally. And you know, so first it started off. It was a ton of fun, right after you get to run and scream, you know, do the step, you know, pretty soon those are kids. Like, I had a friend. One time he went over and sat on the ground. She was up there. Come on, come on over. Come on over. And you know, you wanted to sit on the end. Then other kids start crumbling his leaf up and exploring what that was all about crumbling up in the little powder. And then there were some other kids who decided they just wanted to run in circles around the room. And she spent her whole time, like you said, trying to get the kids back into the game. Like, Come on, no, we're playing a game. And there was like two or three still running the relay race, but they were doing it on their own right. They didn't need her there anymore. None of those kids needed her there. She had set up a perfect play opportunity for the children to explore this environment. The running, the leaves, the community, the physical activity to combine it all together in unique and special ways, ways that allowed them to really perceive the world and answer their own questions about that moment.

Ginny: Well, I think the point is that in those situations, you don't know what they're learning. And I think that that is the biggest piece that that you have to embrace is being OK with you. You say in your book and John Holt talked about it, too. I don't need to know what it means. I simply need to understand that the children are engaged in experiments that they have designed to answer their unique social, emotional questions. It's not my job to know what it means. That's for them.

Teacher Tom: Yeah, and I agree and plus, I mean, I think so many teachers and you know this, they spend so much of their days, you know, assessing what did the children learn today? And you have to write these reports and I don't even know what they're I'm glad I've never had to do it. They write all these reports about what these children learning. You have to do. The report card. What incredible hubris - nobody can ever possibly know what another person is learning. Even if I ask you, what did you learn in the last five minutes? You don't you might not even know. I mean, you might cop out, you're going to answer, right, just like kids do on a test, they're going to give you some kind of answer. But the truth is is that sometimes we don't know what we're learning and it doesn't matter what they're learning. The fact is, I know that they're learning because they are engaged in their own self-selected activity in a beautiful, safe environment.

Ginny: Yeah, you know what I really love? I guess one of the things that really struck me about your book is so our situation is we live this way. But same as you. I fell into it. It wasn't because I knew anything ahead of time. We fell into it. I was struggling. We had a lot of little kids in a row and I was limited in what I could do for them. And so I probably would have been the mom that had all the content standards with the check, the box. That was kind of my plan. I just couldn't do it. And so by happenstance, by grace, you know, I've been led down this path toward play. And so we've done it. And so I trust it. You know, I've done it and I believe it and I trust it. And so what I love from your book is for someone who was scared about it you just have story after story about what it looks like. So I'm thinking of the one story about the little girl that wanted to make a tree fort. So in your book, you talk about you talk about how she built a ladder and the kids were learning about how to put the ladder up. And it was cockeyed and they, you know, so and they were trying to glue and tape and all these different things. So, you know, still, could you give a story, maybe even that one or another one, whatever one you you are interested in, but that sort of showcases what does this actually look like when we sort of step back and let kids play?

Teacher Tom: And that story about Charlotte is a classic one because that was, you know, in Charlotte, she's a memorable kid. I think she's now probably in fourth or fifth grade, maybe even beyond that. So it's been a while since I've had her in my life. But boy, I'll never forget that kid. This is the girl who one day who. Anyway, I won't tell that part, but she's a bold kid. One day she'll be your boss and we'll all, she says. But she she was standing in the playground one day and she said to me, You know, Teacher Tom, we should have a treehouse on this playground. And, you know, and she was looking up at these big cedar trees that are on the playground and and cedars, the branches go the wrong way for tree houses, so they're not tree house trees, but that's OK. That wasn't my job to tell her that I just said, All right, all right.

So so we should have a tree house. So what do we need to do? And she said, Well, we're going to have to get up there. And I said, All right. I said, So you know, we've got some ladders around the playground and we do. We have a number of different ladders we have. I believe very strongly that one of the worst things we do to kids and we're not one of the worst, but one of the things we do to kids on playgrounds is we build these play structures with these fixed ladders that they can scamper up and down because in the real world, the ladder is not a safe thing. In the real world falls from ladders is a really high, you know, it's one of the from construction sites that's like one of the number one reasons people end up in the emergency rooms fis alling off ladders. Because you got to make sure they're stable, you've got to make sure somebody holds it for you don't want to get too high or it's top heavy. So our playground never had fixed ladders. We had this like stepladder steps, stools, all kinds. It's sort of a kid wants to get it high they've got to go get a ladder, make it secure and get up there. So I said to Charlotte, All right, well, we have ladders once you try those out. Oh, good idea. Teacher Tom. She got her friends and they raced around and they got different ladders and they tried them all. But none of them got up to the branches because somebody before my time had pruned all the branches up out of kids reach because they don't want to climb in the tree, which is just argh.

But anyway, I thought as a play based, educator under the way that orientation I have is that that's what she's going to learn. The fact that she didn't get a tree house, she didn't get up in the tree. That's not the important part. The important part is what she learned, is getting up there is hard. It's pretty high. I might not have a way to get up there, and so I'm just letting her learn what she's going to learn. But this is Charlotte. So she got done trying all the ladders and she said, well, teacher Tom, we don't have a big enough ladder, so we're going to have to make a ladder.

Ginny: I mean, and you're talking about a preschooler. So, you know, when it's, you know, like it's not tall enough, you know, you talk so much in your book about they're using ordinal as in first and second. This is what it looks like is that they're they're learning height and they're learning so many things just through, you know, their explorations.

Teacher Tom: Exactly. So all of this, I mean, so if I wanted to tease out the idea of learning to that, there's a ton of stuff she's doing. But you know, the very fact that she knew, OK, well, the next step is to build one. And part of that is because we introduced woodworking at our school, you know, decades ago. And we have a workbench and the kids, you know, as young as two years old, were putting hammers in their hands for teaching. And we're having them use saws and drills. And also they have they have these tools and humans of the tool using animal, right? So, you know, every time we give them a tool to teach, let them use a tool that suddenly opens the world up even more to them. And so, you know, she knew we have that workbench and I said, All right, well, you know, there's the workbench.. So she she she got her buddies together and they found these these two by fours, these nice long two by fours because they knew that, you know, a ladder would have to have a side part. You mentioned what they're learning. They're also learning a lot of social skills and a lot of work.

Ginny: Well, right? You said she got her buddies together. I mean, what a what a skill to be able to enlist your friends in your community to help you with the project. I mean, that's a life skill.

Teacher Tom: Well, that's what the kids learned to play based environment is the first step to doing anything is to start promoting your idea to everybody else. Hey, come on, let's go be Batman, come on, let's you know, whatever it is. So she got them together. She got one of them was, you know, about a foot longer than the other one or something that was OK. They put him on the workbench and we do have eye protection. So that is one of the requirements of the work bench because, you know, you lose an eye. That's it. That's one of the few things that won't heal, right? So we put, but they put on their eye protection and they started hammering away, and they're doing the same measuring thing.

You were talking about that once one of the nails would stick out the back right, the pointy part would stick out and they they they knew they couldn't leave that right because as they said, these were four and five year olds, the little kids might get hurt. So they were they were risk assessing, not for themselves because they're big, their rules assessing. They knew that two year olds sometimes play their three year olds, so they would pry those out and start measuring them. And, you know, they had different kinds of rungs. It was a great shoot because they were just finding pieces of wood, dowels, pieces of bamboo, just whatever would reach across. And each one was a challenge to nail. They weren't done at the end of the day. And Charlotte said to me, she said, she said, Just leave it down there, Teacher Tom. I'll finish it tomorrow. So I was like, All right, fair enough. And so they went home. And, you know, first thing in they got the ladder and they're down there at the workbench hammering away and it didn't get finished that day, either. You know, there was there was a lot going on right because there was a whole bunch of kids.

Ginny: This is perseverance to stick with an idea.

Teacher Tom: And they did this for a whole week. I mean, they were coming down that it was right. It would mix and match like some kids who participate for half an hour and then another group would come in and some would leave and sometimes itd be just old Charlotte down there hammering away, but there was always. And but we knew it was finished when suddenly they just kind of spontaneously picked It up over their head and started walking around the playground, right, marching along with their ladder, just like they're parading this thing they'd accomplished and then they took it all on the side of the playground there's this long concrete slope and that was poured there generations ago for erosion control. There's a parking lot up above and it was holding the parking lot up. But the kids call it the concrete slide and they go over the top of that. They slide down. You know, the little girls get to wear their tights one time cause concretes kind of hard on it.

One mom, she started every day, her kids would show up and they wore rain pants with new duct tape on the seat. So the kids took it over the slope and they laid the ladder on the slope and they queued up. They started going up the ladder and sliding down the slide. And suddenly I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, All right now, this is my ego, right? So I'm talking about my ego, which has no place in this, but it's always there, right? We're human beings. And so I was thinking, wait a minute -there's a couple of big lilacs at the top of that slope. They're almost for the kids, they're definitely trees. And there's a ladder that gets up there. Charlotte got her tree house. And I'm thinking this little girl, you know, did something I thought was impossible, right? Because I didn't think there was any way she would get it done and I'm feeling like I'm feeling, You know what? Look at me right now like a play based on, you know, you know, emergent curriculum. All these are the terms we have, and I'm thinking about that. And then, you know, this was Charlotte. And so at some point she goes the tree house and she pulled the team together and they dragged that ladder over to the tree she picked out, leaned it up against the tree, and they started with the uneven side right on the ground. So it obviously wasn't safe. So they're sitting there trying to figure out what to do, and they got another piece of wood and tried to stick it on there and they got some hammers they tried to nail that and they didn't work.

That's what you were talking about before then, Teacher Tom, we need glue. And so actually, this is what I think the highest, the highest function of the adult in these in these situations are after safety, right? Because you you still have to because we do know more about safety. But after safety is to just run to the storage room to get the stuff they need, right? Or if you're at home to run to the kitchen cabinets or wherever it is, kids should know what supplies are available. And so, you know, Charlotte knew she knew we had glue. So Teacher Tom, we need some good. So I ran into the storage room and left another adult there to keep an eye on him. And I came out with a gallon full gallon of the white glue, right, because I just wanted to be dramatic. I wanted to see that was really following through for her. And she started dumping the glue on there like it's not going to stick. And so then she said, Teacher Tom, I think we're going to need some tape. So I ran back inside and it came out with a roll of masking tape. And she just looked at me with such pity and said No Teacher Tom, it has to be duct tape. And so I went back in and got the duct tape and their wrapping and the tape and the glue is oozing, there's nails all over the ground. And then at one point, one of the kids had the idea to turn the ladder over. So the even end was on the ground, so now they had their ladder. They leaned it against the tree and they just stood there. And then Charlotte looked at me and said, teacher Tom, you climb it. I said, I'm not going to climb this, I'm not going to climb that ladder because, you know, she obviously was a little nervous now because this is this is this latter was probably at least eight to 10 feet high. And so

Ginny: You climb it

Teacher Tom: This is bold, Charlotte. This is the girl just like she's, you know, like I said, she's going to run the world someday. And she went over that ladder and she touched the first rung and she tested it right because she knew who built this thing. She tested it. And then she got on that when she tested the next which she tests carefully tested each one all the way up to the top. And she got all the way up there, this is bold Charlotte, and she's up there, she got one arm around the trunk of the tree and the other hands free, and she could see that the ship canal down below the school, and she could see the ships and the drawbridge and all kinds of stuff. And she's telling us what she sees because we didn't have any other place in the playground that high. So suddenly, all the other kids had to have their turn. And what was fascinating about this is Charlotte came back down. Each one of those kids, they didn't take her word for it. Each one of them also tested right because they're doing this constant risk assessment. Like I said, we think as a society that these these little idiots out to kill themselves. No way.

Ginny: No. They don't want to get hurt

Teacher Tom: They might, you know, as adults, we can contribute things like, you know, there's a nail sticking out at eye level that might hurt if it pokes you, right? We can do that kind of thing, you know, pointing out hazards or removing hazards, which is really the preferred thing to do. But when they when they decide to take on a risk, they're going to do the risk assessment unless we unless we start forbidding it. Right. Do the mental experiment, right? Say to a kid, don't climb on this wall and then turn your back. Well, they're all going to. I mean, all of them are going to go over the wall. It might not all climb higher, but they're going to go to it. So they take care of themselves that way. And they. And it just all that learning that goes into that. And the reason I like to share that story is, first of all, about the risk assessment. So I think that's one of the things people worry about a lot is their kids getting hurt. And the truth is, is that I have 100 percent assurance your child will get hurt and everybody will get hurt. You will get hurt. And probably your worst injuries are not going to be the physical ones. They're going to be the social and emotional ones that come up through your play. And injuries are part of learning. It's a big part of it, and it's a huge part of play. Yeah.

Ginny: Well, and the risk I had heard, this is a calculation that risk assessment is like this, you know, you'd make it in such a small amount of time, but it's this like ratio of how how much will I get hurt? In combination with how likely is it that I will get hurt so and so and so what I have learned for from our own children is that they're so sure footed now they're so sure footed. So in the long run it's safer for them to have had those, you know, risky experiences when they were younger because now they know what their body can and can't do.

Teacher Tom: You know, the only way to learn it really is to assess your own risk, right? Because and I think that's I think we've had a generation of kids who maybe got raised with that opportunity. And I think that that now they're raising their own children. And I think very often that that that needs that now they're worried because they didn't learn it. So my kid can't learn. And so I think it's really it's it's really important for us to give, Gever Tulley - maybe you're familiar with him. You wrote the book 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do.

Ginny: No, I haven't read that one. I love new book ideas

Teacher Tom: I t really is a how to book. There's 50 ideas for things. Okay. Dangerous things you should let your kids do in our school we we tried to do all 50. There's a few we couldn't do like let your kid drive your car and that one, I couldn't get away with that. But breaking glass, we broke glass. We broke glass on purpose. And it's a fascinating thing for children. It's a fun thing. It's a scientific experiment. We know we made it safe, right? We talked about it. Right. Talking is such an important part of this. Like, OK, here's you know what will happen if I drop this jar on the ground? Will it break? And what happens? A sharp glass and they all know it. Then we talk about the sharp glass. We talk about what to do . So we prepare ourselves and then we wrap it up in a towel and hit it with a mallet. And you hear it and feel it break. And then you open it up and study. You know what happened when it happened? So there are ways to do it, and that's what that book is.

Ginny: That sounds like a great one for parents. You know, I guess in total from your books, from both books, I think that for parents that are scared you know, it's like you have one kid, you have a couple kids. You feel like maybe you're experimenting with them. You don't want to do the wrong thing. You know, we all have good intentions, right? That your book showcases it. What does it really look like? And so you read one, and it's there's so many stories in there, but you read the one story about Charlotte and you're like, Oh, I get it. You know, you have this, you have this paragraph in there. You say, when we allow children to explore their world through play, we see that they are already scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians.

We don't create them, but rather allow the time and space in which those natural drives can flourish. And then you say, and that's how we ultimately ensure that our children not only have the narrow skills they may or that may or may not be necessary for those jobs of tomorrow, but also for the broader purpose of living a good life. And so for parents who and teachers who have not been able to see it, I think that sort of the key you allow them to see it and is like, Oh, well, yeah, of course they're learning. And of course, I can't find the content standard that matches those things, but you actually see that they're learning and growing and that that doesn't stop after preschool.

Teacher Tom: Well, adults tend to reverse engineer. When we think about learning we used to, we start from the results we think we want and then we work backwards and children are doing that. They're not starting with the end result they want. That's why we will never quite match the standards, right? Because I mean, what was so great about what you just said there is, you know, they'll learn the science of the part you read. The thing I love about that is the science, the technology, the engineering, the mathematics. That's the STEM education we keep hearing about.

Ginny: Yeah, I mean, they do it on their own.

Teacher Tom: Every preschoolers. I know loves math. And they love it. Now we don't call it math, because what mathematics is all the way to the highest level and I have talked to mathematicians and ask them this question. All math ever is is finding increasingly complex and beautiful ways to organize, to pattern and to sequence and at the end of the day when I walk around the playground. I see evidence of math play everywhere, children get all the red things together and all the blue things together. Or they they've organized something in the AB pattern like blue, red, blue, red or something like that. Or they've or they've sequenced something or they've, you know, and you watch that they've done this. And then the way we teach math. I mean, this is I can't remember who came up with this metaphor, so somebody will I'm admitting this isn't my own. But they said if we taught art the way we teach mathematics, the first thing we would do is the children would have to spend their first year learning how to draw a straight line. No, no, no, no. No vertical lines yet only horizontal lines until you've mastered the horizontal. Then you can work on the vertical. Then you can start using red, then blue. And by the time you get to graduate school, you get to paint a painting.

And that's kind of with mathematics, because what we do is we take it. Mathematics is a real world thing, right? It's a real world. It happens in the real world. And what we do is immediately try to put it on the paper and abstract it into symbols and to into our operators into simplifying. I mean, the stuff you do on paper is really ciphering. I mean, we call it mathematics, but the mathematics is a real world thing that happens inside of the head and happens with your interactions with the real world. And and so and so I'm not saying I know how to teach it at higher levels, but I do know that it works on its own in the early years

Ginny: Like angles, right angles would have been a thing with the ladder if your things cockeyed, right? You know, so.

Teacher Tom: And then when they get around to learning, deciphering they understand what they're doing and then it makes it more engaging. Was that why they need to learn it rather than just learn this? And later you'll get to use it

Ginny: We're running out of time here. I think it's so cool that you have a six hour course coming because it's needed. There's, you know, there's so much to explore. And if we could squeeze in this, this theme that runs through both books is this this theme of there is no life without conflict? And that one of the key things that we're doing with our kids is we're helping them learn how to get along with other people. And one of the really interesting things that you talked about that I hadn't heard I haven't heard people talk about yet is that the shortening of recess kind of pairs with this not wanting to deal with conflict. And I I'd heard that it was just about litigation, kids getting hurt. But then you talked about how, you know, 15 minutes and then once that 15 minutes is up, there tends to be a lot of conflict. You know, kids are starting to fight over resources, but if they could only get to that next 15 minutes, that's sort of where the magic happens. So what I talk to too much, you know, can you talk about, can you talk a little bit about sort of that trend towards shortening recess and why we're avoiding conflict among kids and sort of how that would hinder, I think a child for, you know,

Teacher Tom: Well, conflict is, I mean if you look at play. I mean, you look at children play, there's a lot of characteristics is going to make true play. It's it's it's self-selected. It's open ended. It's children aren't answering asking and it's science. It's you know, it's it's how we learn about the connection between perseverance, as you mentioned before, perseverance and success, failure, perseverance and success. There's a lot of things that go into play, but one of the aspects of play people don't talk about a lot is that bickering. Yes, bickering is an essential part of play. And whenever you hear children playing at any given moment at our school or in any play environment, you get kids who are going to be bickering over things.

As adults, we tend to hear that as as a problem that we need to solve. They need us now, right, because because we in our catastrophic imaginations, we imagine what our next step is. They're going to start hitting each other. The next is they're going to start calling names or do something harmful to one another. And sometimes it does go there. So that's what you know what you were saying is in any given play situation, and I've observed this time and time again and I'm not going to again, I didn't do the actual research. This is anecdotal, but I've watched it too many times to distrust it in any given play situation.

The first new situation where children walk into it the first 15 minutes is almost always very peaceful. I mean, you know, there might be some separation anxiety stuff like that, but around the play, it's peaceful, but children come in and they start exploring the different materials that are available, the space that's available to them, that other children then that tend to be kind of then after, like you said, after about 15 minutes, that's when they start bumping up against each other. That's when they start, you know, when they start, Hey, I was using that or you knocked my building down or you've got all of them or I want more or something like that and they start, you start hearing it. So as adults, we hear the voices going up, we hear the ramping up. And I think what we should do or at least what I do, I shouldn't say this is what I do is I move closer, but I don't say anything at that point because to me, what they're doing is exactly what adults do right now, doing what all of us do when we have a conflict. Wait a minute. You know, we have this conversation and you know, I would say 70 percent of the time if all you have to do is move a little closer and you give them a couple of minutes, let it go slightly beyond your comfort level. Right? I mean, if there's hitting you, stop that. But if it's just like, No, I want it, fine, it's fine. It's fine. If they're yelling at like that, that's OK to me because they're talking to each other, right? They're having an interaction with each other, and there's a lot of other techniques you can use in there. But for the most part, you stay out of it, give them a chance to suddenly realize well, and then and it's after that 15 minutes when they start, they negotiate.

That's called negotiation, right? Yeah, we feel a conflicted preschool with children, but in business we call it negotiation. Those guys are negotiating with each other. And so they negotiate. And they and then that's when you start seeing say, Hey, why don't we build our buildings together? You know, why don't you have all the red ones or all the blue ones or let's, you know, and they come up, they use the phrase the best sentence in a play based environment. You know what's working when the children are starting their sentences with let's let's pretend, let's go over here. Let's do this. Let's because that is a statement of invitation. And like you said, that is the most important thing. So they begin to work together. And so that's why you need to get through that conflict. So you get to that beautiful part and why in any play situation, children need a minimum of 45 minutes to an hour in order to become fully engaged. And I prefer at least a sweep of two to three hours because then you're going to see a cycle of that right, the conflict to come back to the bickering and all this stuff. Because at the end of the day and I talked about self-motivation successful people in the world, and I'm not talking about this kind of success. I'm talking about people who have satisfying relationships who, well, have, you know, spend their days doing things that they find personally satisfying, who have or are healthy, who lived longer too. So to me, that's what success is.

Successful people have three common characteristics and they can be found across the board. One is being self-motivated. And so that's what we do in play. We give children a chance to become self-motivated about their own intelligence, their own learning, their own bodies, everything. The second one is getting is getting along with others, working well with others. I don't care. You know how often we talk about these Elon Musk or some, you know, big wig, you know, big name person who's like, you didn't do it by himself. In fact, he started with quite a bit of money from his family. Same with Bill Gates. Same with, you know, Jeff Bezos. Same with Zuckerberg. All of that. They weren't poor people. They didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They had help. They had a community. I'm not criticizing them for this. We all need help. We all need support of others. None of us are so anyway working with others and the third one and the one we forget about the most, I think is being personable. And that one. And it strikes people a lot of times. But you know what, if I'm like if I'm hiring somebody and I've got two people to choose from and they're equally qualified, I think to myself, which one do I wanna hang out with? Right? I mean, whether I can do that. You know, we're going to do that. And when you're somebody people like to hang out with, when you work with others and you're self-motivated, you are going to have a great life. And that's exactly what you get out of having a childhood, a real childhood based on play, preferably in as much as possible outdoors.

Ginny: Well, Tom, you know, I think the best interviews are the ones where we barely scratched the surface of what's in your books. We barely did. There are so much in there if people- they were delightful to me and really, I was immediately going back and looking at old videos and pictures of my own kids when they were preschoolers. These are fabulous books, teacher. They're easy titles to remember teacher Tom's First book Teacher Tom's Second book - Tom if people want to find you and tell him where to go.

Teacher Tom: Well, if you want one of the books we we haven't gone into business with Amazon, and I'll tell you it's because, yeah, we

Ginny: ordered off your website.

Teacher Tom: Exactly. So my website is if you if you want the books is teachertomsfirstbook.com and that'll take you to the arms that'll take you to the page. You can go to TeacherTom'sWorld.Com and that takes you to my website, which will also link you to any courses because we have other previous courses you might be interested in on the waiting list for those. And then for the summit, we have our summit in June that will be taking place in that. If know, that's it's a big deal with those twenty thousand people at it last year and some people from all over the world now are really great people in which we work. I just want to point out we we strive very much one of the things that I'm very clear about as a white American middle aged middle class male is I need more perspective in my life. So that's what we are.

So very selfishly, I'm out there searching out people who have perspectives that you don't always hear for this summit. Beautiful in terms of neurodiversity, in terms of indigenous perspectives, in terms of racial and ethnic and gender diversity. We try to emphasize a lot more women than men because there's a lot more women in this field than men. But that's what we're trying to do is make it an inclusive place where people can really talk about early childhood, both for parents and for and for education, and then allow the place that you can find me every day is teacher Tom's Blog. Yeah, just Google that and you'll find it.

Ginny: Yep. And on Facebook to you and Instagram. So I'll make sure I share all the links. I mean, I'll share all those things as they're coming so people can make sure that they're aware of them. Can we wrap it up with a favorite play memory of yours and preferably outdoors? Do you have one from your childhood?

Teacher Tom: OK, you told me we could go a little over time. This is a good start. OK. This was OK. So my family, this I was a little older. I was in preschool. At this age, I was probably 10 years old and we lived in Greece. So after my dad had got a job in Athens, Greece, and he was, we were there for three years. And one of the things we love to do is go to the beach, a Mediterranean beach, a nice sand, little tiny waves. You know, my sister's a lot younger and those little waves, and we're only about this big right. And she just she loved that.

But, you know, 10 years old, my brother and I were little old. That was kind of boring. After a while, we get tired of being there. There were a couple other kids with us and we decided we said, well, we decided to go climb on the cliffs. That was a big cliff. So it was like this bay with these cliffs along us, which are climbing up the rocks. Pretty soon started looking down and we realized that we're really high and we were way above this, you know? And you know, we could see our parents down on the beach and they were just sunning, you know, this was this was this was the 70s, right? Parents were a little less alert about things all the time. So we climbed up, but we got way up there and we got to this landing. And there was a tree growing there, and we knew it was a fig tree. It's right in the middle of all these rocks because they were just ripe figs all over the ground and in the branches, just the juiciest. And I didn't even think I liked figs, but we just massively ate these figs, it was like this dream come true. And we're looking out over the mediterranean at the Aegean Sea and the blue water, and we're up on this cliff and it's like, this is perfect. I mean, any adult would say, Oh my God, I just found paradise. You know, we're kids, right?

So, you know, after we'd had our fill of figs, we saw what looked like a cave. And so we said, OK, well, let's go look in there, we kind of look, we called it a cave that was really just like a big boulder leaned against another and we kind of went back in there. It was dark and then we saw lights. We knew we could get out there besides all of our way through and we got out on the other side and then we're out looking at this massive sweep. And by now we were. At least 100 feet above the ocean, so at least 100 feet and just almost straight down. And we saw there was a trail that continued on we go, All right. Well, you know, we didn't have a time limit. We had to be back. I'm sure the little kids and the parents are having fun on the beach. So we just said, OK, let's keep going. And so at one point we came to a ledge and it was no more than an inch wide and we all crossed that little ledge, you know, holding on like this. And I remember and this is the strongest memory of this this day for me, looking down at that moment, I stepped on that little edge and thought to myself, If I fall, I will die and then moved on beyond. And I couldn't go back at that point because of kids behind me, kids in front of me, so went on through. We got through and we all looked at each other and we just we we were in awe of ourselves of what we had done.

And going back, does it because now we were scared, so we kept following the path, we thought, Oh, if we follow it up, we're going to get up to the road. Right. So we got up and there was this big. It was this road up there and it was the road we'd come in unless we said, OK, if we head back down, that should take us to the beach. You know, here we are, you know, in the world and a foreign country on our own. And this was like a highway. And I remember at the time thinking and we had all already agreed the Greek drivers were crazy and they so they were people bombing along. There's no shoulder, this no sidewalk, but here we are. No, you know, eight to 10 year olds walking along the side of the road with the cars bombing past us making our way back down there. We finally, you know, we got down to the beach and our parents hadn't even noticed we were missing.

Ginny: Wow, what a transformative experience.

Teacher Tom: My parents have never heard that story. They didn't drill me on what we did done. They just didn't assumed we were climbint on the rocks. And so for me, this is this is what childhood should be about. And you know, I'm sure there are people going, Oh, no, I'm not letting my kid climb on a cliff like that. But the truth is, someday you're going to have to turn your back and the kids, and no one has ever stopped anybody from doing something they really want to do, ever. You might stop today or tomorrow, but if it's something they really want to do, they're going to do it. I mean, as they get older, you forbid them to go to those parties, they're going to sneak out, they're going to find and what to me.

What I've always said is that what our goal should be is to have our children to understand our children will take risks. Our children will engage in activities that are self-selected that we might not approve of. Much better to have it happen in front of us, where we can give them our best advice and our coaching and counsel and love and care when they do get hurt because inevitably everybody gets hurt at some point, better than to have them sneak around and do it behind their back and make it incredibly dangerous.

Ginny: What a what a story. The amazing figs. I mean, you know, and it's crazy how those just they settle into our soul stories like that. You know that forever. I mean, that's a long time ago. You know

Teacher Tom: Everybody listening to this. If you're nervous about play based education, the best way to connect yourself with this is to really reflect on your own childhood. And what I found is most people, when you think about a beautiful, great moment in your child something that's really important to you, almost always your you were outside, almost always doesn't involve toys. It almost never involves school. Yeah, it almost never involves adults.

Ginny: Right, right.

Teacher Tom: Usually a sweep of time when you are in a moment when there was no schedule and there was nobody telling you what to do. Yeah. And those are those moments that are beautiful and cherished. And I would assert those are the moments that we learned the most about ourselves in our world as those moments that are still with us today.

Ginny: Well, Teacher Tom, you are just a delight and you have put so much amazing things into the world. And I know I am just honored that you took this time to spend with us. And so I know people will love your books and love your blog and love your courses. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

Teacher Tom: Oh, thank you, Ginny. What a pleasure to meet you, too. You're doing incredible work in the world, and I'm really proud to get to know you.