When I got the email asking preschool parents to lead an activity with their kids, I started preparing a poetry writing exercise. I could tell the teachers were dubious as to how this would go down given that the class members wouldn’t have much familiarity with either poetry or writing. I assured them I would go around transcribing what the children composed, helping them write some little words that would add up to that great big thing—a poem.
This belief that young children can write poetry has been central to my life thanks to my parents’ and middle school poetry teacher’s belief that creative writing is the province of both young and old. My mother patiently transcribed my early “writing,” just as my poetry teacher wrote down our thoughts until we were old enough to write them down ourselves. The upshot was we felt like writers before we could even write. I grew up believing we were all capable of finding beautiful words only to discover they were our own. I try to bring this audacious proposition into every classroom whether it be my son’s preschool, my daughter’s daycare, or the college where I teach.
I believe something equally audacious—not only that preschoolers and daycare kids can compose poetry but also that college students can play. I have found that college kids need to be more like preschoolers and preschoolers more like college kids. What I mean is young learners desperately need to be taken seriously and to feel that they’re stretching above their normal learning limits while older learners need so badly to play. This applies in particular to college students, who are poised precariously between childhood and a new adulthood that seems to involve giving up so much fun without any clearly rewarding substitute.
What this all boils down to is (ideally) the precise balance of play and intellectual rigor—really, when done right they’re the same thing—in the classroom whether the students be potty-trained or not. The preschoolers in my son’s class loved “writing” poetry. First I read them a poem and then I had them come up with their own. They composed these strange, haunting, comical haiku-like snippets of insight. They dictated their works to me and, when they wanted to, I guided their hands so they could write the letters themselves. It was a form of visual art for them—they referred to it as “drawing poems.” I got chills as this astute definition of hybrid art just came shooting out of the mouths of babes.
When my now-kindergarten-age son saw my syllabus for a class, and I explained to him what it was, he wanted to make a syllabus for his life. He penned quite the seriocomic masterpiece. I regularly use the tricks I’ve learned in college teaching at home with him. When he gets argumentative, I show him how a quarrelsome attitude can shine in the context of a formal debate—and lo and behold he starts to see the other side of the matter. Before I knew it, he was cranking out a five-year-old’s version of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis without even knowing it, and I was in pedagogical and parental heaven. The next time he tells me I’m “the worst mommy in the world” for not letting him eat all the Halloween candy in one night, I’m going to say, “I’ll need to see a compare and contrast paper on that one by Monday.”
Then I decided to export what had worked with my son back into the college classroom, with a kindergarten touch. That is to say we had the debate, but we didn’t really have the debate—the puppet versions of ourselves we had made did the arguing for us. It really took home the idea of performativity and how quickly we can all become talking heads. It also made us laugh, which I believe to be a crucial way into cognitively adventurous territory. In order to be brilliant, you have to do away with caring what other people think. And, let me tell you, making an ugly puppet version of yourself really helps with that.
And what happened in the college classroom after my educational epiphany? I found that play pushed my students to a place of greater analytical complexity. After I became a parent, I started importing more wonder into my college courses. We started playing and we never went back. We played grammar Jeopardy, complete with the dorky, enormous buzzers I brought in. We did Mad Libs to learn about the power one little word has to change the whole ecology of the page. We acted out short stories, complete with absurd costumes. We wrote up our own comic strips, copiously illustrated with stick-figures. We took famous writing, cut it up with children’s scissors, and put it back together into new forms. We talked about what it felt like to take literary creation into our own hands like that. We reflected on how the text could be so easily taken apart and remade, and what this said about the act of creation itself.
One day in a college class we made art objects in response to texts, and I’ll be darned if they didn’t look so much like the artwork my preschooler brought home—a mishmash of un-policed creativity. The students blushed but seemed to relish turning abstract concepts into concrete things they could hold in their hands. When we talked about this, one sharp student suggested we do the inverse: take something concrete and turn it into something abstract. We wondered if this might be another definition of writing.
This is the second essay in a series on teaching, Adventures in Pedagogy. You can read the first essay here.