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This is brilliant (ignore the beer part). Here is a great reflective piece:

Use this video as a reflective prompt -- what are the assumptions in my classroom and how do they affect us?

The cohorts just watched Brene Brown’s “The Power of Vulnerability.” This video is tremendously powerful and I did not see any teachers unmoved by it. Our task was to write a personal reflective piece about the video. Personally, this video was extremely powerful to me, as it explained so much of my emotional state whenever I am confronted with a new experience or a new challenge. The worst for me is when I have to enter a situation in which I am the only outsider. I was so fascinated by Dr. Brown’s work that I went out and got her book, The Gift of Imperfection. As expected, it’s brilliant! What I love about this work is that it is not a series of platitudes or a pep talk; it is well grounded in research and study. I plan on spending much more time investigating Dr. Brown’s work, but this is a deviation from the purpose of this post.

This week one of my cohorts watched “Stuart Brown says play is more than fun”

Brown’s work is fascinating. He proposes that play is essential to live a healthy life and that our cultural understanding is quite flawed. We are culturally programmed to think, “live (or work) to play,” but Brown makes it clear from his research that we really must “play to live.”

Our assignment was to complete a table that compared what we used to know about play, what we now know about play, and what it means for our practice.

By doing so, teachers are forced to consider Brown’s research in light of what it means for education and, ultimately, what must be done in their practice. Teachers are really forced to do one of two things, either refute (or disprove) Brown, or examine their practice to align it with Brown’s findings. Of course a third way of “take no action” is also a possibility. For under “the new understanding of play, I wrote:

"Play Stuart Brown

-Murderers often do not have sufficient play in their backgrounds

-hand in search of a brain, brain in search of a hand -- play is the medium

-JPL/NASA RD will not hire someone unless they have worked with their hands.

-what does play do for the brain?

-rats denied play will run from a cat, but they will never return, they will die there.

-denying play results in abnormal brain development

-the opposite of play is depression

-the basis of human trust is made through play signals

-neoteny: the retention of youthful qualities into adulthood. Humans have the most compared to other mammals

-go back to joyous time in your life and compare that to how your life is now.

-your life becomes infused with play not the work-play differential

-cats are just as good as predators if they never play, play is more than a practice for adulthood -- it is a separate biological entity."

This was the modeling portion of the activity. Teachers were now supposed to apply the same filter to the other “skills” of New Literacies (See Jenkins’ White Paper).

We never got there! Teachers were so blown away by the implications for their practice; we had a full on dialog! And this is where this blog post begins!

There were some great points made and some brilliant insights. This is an exceptional group of teachers and I am lucky to be able to work with them. One of the points that was brilliantly made was the fact that North American (and perhaps Western) culture has such a narrow and unhealthy definition about “play” and “fun.” We seem to think that play is for children and fun is a special time that must be planned well in advance. The negative connotations of play are well established in our vocabulary: “stop playing around and get to work!” They are also well formed in the protestant work ethic that is the foundation of American culture. To go one step further, we are to the point that fun for adults must consist of alcohol and a tropical destination. We are actually embarrassed to admit some of the ways that we have fun – we use other words to describe them or we do not describe them at all. This cultural message is not lost on our youth. Every teacher has overheard that #wishineverknew statement from a student conversation, something like: “it was so fun, we were so wasted!” Some examples of this limited cultural scope of play in our culture are here:

Kid Rock

Katy Perry

The Hangover

So as a culture, we can’t even talk about play unless we are under the age of 8, wealthy enough to have “earned” the right to play, or it involves being inebriated. We see play as the opposite of work and we sometimes associate it with doing nothing that is challenging at all. I could never capture the irony of adult (and perhaps some teen) “fun” better than Bill Cosby.

Enter Stuart Brown. Dr. Brown’s research blows a hole in our conventional wisdom about play. Play is necessary and it takes many forms, and we simply must engage in it at all stages of life or face dire mental (and one would assume physical) consequences. Dr. Brene Brown takes this a bit further in her book, in which she states that play is an essential aspect of Wholehearted living. She adds that a mid-life crisis is actually the universe telling you that you are living an inauthentic life. From that one can extrapolate, a life without sufficient play. Csikszentmihayli’s Flow Theory is all about play. The state of flow is a state of play. Because our cultural view of play is so narrow, we miss the connection every time. Video games may be seen as the exception to this. They are certainly engaging flow and they are certainly engaging play, but there is still quite a controversy about the value of video game play to a productive life -- once again, a cultural intolerance to certain versions of play.

As I was running today, pushing my child in front of me in a stroller, so many connections came to my mind about how the humanities may have been hinting about play all along, yet, as a culture, we are not receptive to hear it (it may now be almost like a foreign language to us). H.D. Thoreau wrote, “most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”  Is the “song” play? I have usually seen the context of this Thoreau quote being that of unfulfilled dreams or a yearning, but aren’t all of those things actually versions of play – something fulfilling that you love to do?

Thomas Gray, a person apparently quite depressed himself, wrote in the Elegy, “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid/ Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;/ Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,/ Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.” That “celestial fire” and “ecstacy” were forms of play. Those who have captured the moods and identity of our culture, i.e., the artists, have used “the unfulfilled life” or “deep longing” as major themes in their work – clearly, these are related to play, or the lack thereof.

For myself, I am trying to redefine the things that I enjoy doing as play. I am also trying to acknowledge the things I do that are play, in its widest form, without shame or embarrassment. I really enjoy building learning communities with students, being part of the discovery that goes with a good focus question, and engaging in dialogs with other teachers about our profession and practice. Sometimes people will tell me that I am very dedicated or that I seem to really work a lot. I’ve always shrugged off these statements because so much of my work is play. When I’m talking with teachers or writing a blog or checking out a new technology, I am in flow. Suddenly it is midnight and I must stop. I’m lucky, most of my work is part of my play – I must start to say that proudly and acknowledge it openly.

As I young teacher, play was the opposite if work and it had no place in my classroom. Learning was not pleasurable and its rewards came later. How wrong I was to subject those young people to such a philosophy. Of course, it held dire consequences for me too. I had a rule, and I often told colleagues of this rule when they were getting a bit “wild in the eyes:” “don’t sign or agree to anything during May or June.” Those were the bewitching months and those were the times that we as teachers would do anything to not continue what we were doing (“you’re offering me a job as a lion-tamer for next fall? I’ll take it! So long, suckers!). I used to bet with another colleague about which staff member would “lose it” on a kid, another staff member, or an administrator during those last remaining weeks. I barred myself from buying plane tickets to Paris in springtime. My secret plan was always to find a Gendarme and exclaim, “Je veux la Légion étrangère” in my atrocious French. That plan ended after reading A Mouthful of Rocks, but the intention was there.

What I know now is that we were all badly needing to play, but we had equated play with small children and the shiftless. The need to play had manifested itself in our surly relationships with each other and our students – we just held on! That was many years ago. Now, almost all of my teaching is play for me, but I need to make that play ubiquitous and feel safe proudly proclaiming it.

My other play is running. I have a love for running that cannot be described in words. I ran in my late 20s, even a marathon and some triathlons, but it seemed my knees conspired against me. By 28, I could not run for 20 minutes without limping to a halt. I was fortunate enough to be watching the Daily Show one day a few years ago when Christopher McDougall was a guest. His work with our innate need to run and how shoes disrupt our evolutionary birthright amazed me and I prayed he was real – he was and is! A great love of my life was returned.

I especially love McDougall because his entire work centers around one focus question: why does my foot hurt? I now run for one-hour easily and would love to go on and on, except for time constraints.  I have no pain and when I finish, I am ready to start again. Here is a great example about McDougall, running, and fun.

This is what I used to completely realign my gait so I could run again.

As teachers, we need to acknowledge a larger scope of play and fun as a necessity to life. We need to consider the work of Brown and others like Papert as guiding principles. We must bring Papert’s “Hard Fun” and meaningful fun, like the kind expressed by Jenkins, into our classrooms and our lives as a legitimate part of sustaining those lives.

My child is quite young, and he is starting to understand and say “Daddy work” when I pack up and head out the door. He also knows “play,” but that is something that he does or something that someone does with him. If I change my thinking, maybe he can grow up seeing his father pack up his computer, lunch, and car keys and be able to say, “Daddy play!”