Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays

Fantasy Play at Four

Vivian Gussin Paley

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226076133
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bad guys are not allowed to have birthdays, pick blueberries, or disturb the baby. So say the four-year-olds who announce life's risks and dangers as they play out the school year in Vivian Paley's classroom.Their play is filled with warnings. They invent chaos in order to show that everything is under control. They portray fear to prove that it can be conquered. No theme is too large or too small for their intense scrutiny. Fantasy play is their ever dependable pathway to knowledge and certainty." It... takes a special teacher to value the young child's communications sufficiently, enter into a meaningful dialogue with the youngster, and thereby stimulate more productivity without overwhelming the child with her own ideas. Vivian Paley is such a teacher."—Maria W. Piers, in the American Journal of Education "[Mrs. Paley's books] should be required reading wherever children are growing. Mrs. Paley does not presume to understand preschool children, or to theorize. Her strength lies equally in knowing that she does not know and in trying to learn. When she cannot help children—because she can neither anticipate nor follow their thinking—she strives not to hinder them. She avoids the arrogance of adult to small child; of teacher to student; or writer to reader."—Penelope Leach, author of Your Baby & Child in the New York Times Book Review "[Paley's] stories and interpretation argue for a new type of early childhood education... a form of teaching that builds upon the considerable knowledge children already have and grapple with daily in fantasy play."—Alex Raskin, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Through the 'intuitive language' of fantasy play, Paley believes, children express their deepest concerns. They act out different roles and invent imaginative scenarios to better understand the real world. Fantasy play helps them cope with uncomfortable feelings.... In fantasy, any device may be used to draw safe boundaries."—Ruth J. Moss, Psychology Today

1

“My mother doesn’t have no more birthdays,” Fredrick tells me in school one day.

“Do you mean she doesn’t have a birthday party?”

“No. She really doesn’t have a birthday. How I know is no one comes to her birthday and also she doesn’t make the cake.”

Fredrick is four and his ideas often take me by surprise. This is his second year in a classroom and my twenty-eighth.

“Do you think she still gets older every year?”

“You know how much she is old? Twenty-two.”

His mother is older than that but Fredrick likes the sound of twenty-two. And Mollie’s favorite is twelve-teen. “That’s the olderest,” she says. “My daddy is already a twelve-teener on his birthday.”

I accept twelve-teeners and mothers who don’t have birthdays as gifts. Each time a child invents one of these unique arrangements of image and phrase, I sense anew the natural order that gives young children this awesome talent for explaining life’s mysteries. The thrill no longer comes from hearing my own answers repeated; I hunger for those I cannot imagine to problems unmentioned in the curriculum guides. Nearly every lesson I want to pursue arises out of the children’s consciousness. Birthday is high on the list.

“Maybe you and daddy can make mother a birthday party,” I suggest.

“But they never remember her birthday and when it’s her birthday they forget when her birthday comes and when her birthday comes they forget how old she is because they never put any candles. So how can we say how she is old?”

“The candles tell how old someone is?”

“You can’t be old if you don’t have candles.”

“Fredrick, ask your mother to have a cake and candles. She’ll tell you when her birthday is.”

“She can’t because she doesn’t have a mother. See, my grandma borned her once upon a time. Then she told her about her birthday. Then every time she had a birthday my grandma told her. But my grandma died.”

I could tell Fredrick that of course his mother has a birthday, everyone has a birthday, but I know that to do so will merely put a halt to the conversation. He will not be convinced if he does not already believe it is true. Besides, he may have other reasons for depriving his mother of a birthday. She is about to have a baby and Fredrick has not yet acknowledged the fact. When Mollie asked him if his mother was growing a baby, he told her she was buying him a puppy.

Mollie eases in between us at the table. She knows when good conversations are in progress.

“Mollie, Fredrick says his mother doesn’t have any more birthdays.”

“Why not?”

“Because my grandma died and my mother doesn’t know how many candles to be.”

Mollie examines Fredrick’s face. “Did your grandpa died too?”

“Yeah, but he came back alive again.”

“Then your grandma told him. If he whispers it to your mother, maybe it’s already her birthday.”

“Why should he whisper, Mollie?” I ask.

“If it’s a secret.”

They understand each other. The necessary and universal aspect of birthday is not as appealing right now as their own theories, some of which Fredrick puts into stories for me to write down.

Once came He-Man. Baby He-Man. The real He-Man told him it was his birthday. He didn’t see Skeletor because it was a birthday.

“Because it was a birthday?” I ask.

“You don’t see bad guys on your birthday.”

“Hm-m. I wonder if bad guys see other bad guys on their birthdays.”

“Bad guys don’t have birthdays.”

“Aren’t they born on a certain day?”

“Bad guys don’t have names so they can’t have birthdays.”

“You said his name is Skeletor.”

“That’s his pretend name.”

Last year such information came from the older children in the class, but now Fredrick is in the “olderest” group and can invent some of the rules himself. My notebooks have begun to fill with the words of a new group of visionaries who have only recently discovered that they can surround their uncertainties and confusions with enough persuasive commentary to make the worry of the moment appear under control.

Christopher sits next to us, cutting “gold” out of yellow paper. We are at the story table, a large, round structure that is our central talking and listening and manufacturing place. You cannot pass from the blocks to the easels or from the doll corner to the sand table without noticing what is going on among the storytellers, picture makers, and paper shredders.

“Is that your pretend name?” Christopher asks.

“What name?”

“Fredrick. Is that pretend?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“For hideouts?”

“Yeah.”

Once again I am on the outside. “What do you and Christopher mean? Which name is pretend in a hideout? Isn’t Skeletor the pretend name?”

“Not in a hideout.”

I am learning to read their logic. When he is in character, Fredrick is the pretend name. Moments later, entering the doll corner, he assumes another disguise and continues some of his earlier inquiries.

“My baby just now jumped out, Fredrick,” Mollie says. “Are you the daddy? It’s already her tomorrow day’s birthday.”

“I’m the brother. Our daddy died because he sleeped too long in the day. Who is Barney going to be?”

“Barney could be the daddy. We need a dad,” Mollie says.

“Okay, then the dad could come alive again. You want to, Barney?”

“I didn’t come alive,” Barney states firmly. “I was always alive. I just pretended I died because you didn’t see me because I was at work.”

Stuart runs in waving a cone-shaped plastic block. “Bang! Bang! Bad guys in the woods. Everyone get out of the woods!”

“No bad guys, Stuart,” Mollie says. “There can’t be bad guys when the baby is sleeping.”

Whatever else is going on in this network of melodramas, the themes are vast and wondrous. Images of good and evil, birth and death, parent and child, move in and out of the real and the pretend. There is no small talk. The listener is submerged in philosophical position papers, a virtual recapitulation of life’s enigmas.

Can any task be more important than monitoring these unexpected disclosures? Yet it took me half of my teaching career to take them seriously.

2

When I was twenty, I led a Great Books discussion group in the New Orleans Public Library. The participants were older and wiser, but my lists of questions made me brave. Get the people talking, I was told, and connect their ideas to the books; there are no right or wrong answers.

The procedure seemed simple enough. I moved from question to question, and quite often it sounded as if it were a real discussion. Yet most of the time I was pretending. The people and the books were shadowy presences whose connections to one another seemed more real than their connections to me. What I wanted, desperately, was to avoid awkward silences.

Soon after, I became a kindergarten teacher and had curriculum guides instead of printed questions. I still believed it was my job to fill the time quickly with a minimum of distractions, and the appearance of a correct answer gave me the surest feeling that I was teaching. It did not occur to me that the distractions might be the sounds of the children thinking.

Then one year a high school science teacher asked to spend time with my kindergartners. His first grandchild was about to enter nursery school, and he wondered how he would teach such young students. He came once a week with his paper bags full of show and tell, and he and the children talked about a wide range of ordinary phenomena.

As I listened, distant memories stirred. “You have a remarkable way with children, Bill,” I told him. “Their ideas keep coming and you use them all, no matter how far off the mark.”

He laughed. “I guess it’s not far off their mark. You know, the old Socratic idea? I used to be a Great Books leader up in Maine.”

Watching him with the five-year-olds, I saw, finally, how the method worked. He’d ask a question or make a casual observation, then repeat each comment and hang on to it until a link could be established to a previous statement. He and the children were constructing paper chains of ideas, factual and magical, and Bill supplied the glue.

But something was going on more important than method: Bill was truly curious. He had few prior expectations of what kindergartners might think or say, and he listened with the anticipation we bring to the theater. He was not interested in what he knew to be an answer; he wanted to know how the children approached the problem.

“Incredible!” he’d whisper to me. “Their notions of cause and effect are incredible.” And I, their teacher, who thought I knew the children so well, was often equally astonished.

I tried to copy Bill’s open-ended questions, which followed the flow of ideas without demanding closure. But it was not easy. I felt myself always waiting for the right answer—my answer. The children knew I was waiting, and they watched my face for clues.

It was not enough to mimic another person’s style. Real change, I was to discover, comes through the painful recognition of one’s own vulnerability. A move to a new school in another city and an orientation speech by its director opened my eyes to an aspect of teaching I had not considered.

The director described a study done by two psychologists, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (Pygmalion in the Classroom, 1968), in which misleading information was given to several teachers about their students. In random fashion the children were labeled bright or not bright by means of fictitious IQ scores. The teachers, I was shocked to find out, asked more questions, waited longer for answers, and followed up more often with additional comments when they thought they were speaking to a smart child.

My shock was that of recognition: I could easily have been one of those unsuspecting teachers, though certainly I listened more to myself than to any of the children.

My problem went beyond the scope of the study, for even when I listened to the children I did not use their ideas. I paid attention only long enough to adapt their words to my plans. Suddenly, I wanted my role in the classroom exposed, but there were no Rosenthals or Jacobsons around eager to set up a privately incriminating study.

Then, miraculously, I discovered the tape recorder and knew I could become my own best witness. To begin with, it revealed why my discussions seldom had the ring of truth: I had not yet figured out which truths the children wanted to pursue.

3

Fredrick is at the playdough table when I refer again to his mother’s birthday. In nursery school, no subject is ever finished.

“Maybe your mother doesn’t have a birthday cake because she thinks cakes and candles are for children.”

Fredrick shakes his head. “Uh-uh. She makes daddy a cake with candles.”

“Can your father bake her a cake?”

“Fathers don’t make cakes. They make popcorn.”

“And blueberry pancakes on Sunday,” Mollie adds.

Fredrick accepts Mollie’s information with a nod and pauses to draw a large unsmiling face. Then he resumes the original topic.

“She thinked grandma will do it before she died.” He stares at a spot on the table as he struggles with the shape of the coming sentences. “See, my grandma is her grandma’s mother. My mother is the mother of the grandmother is the mother when she was little.”

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
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• 24
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• 29
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