Making the world beautiful is messy

Let's do it together.

Good Bones

By Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways 
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Hello friends. It’s been a while.

Six years ago we published Kids First, but really it feels like it’s been about thirty. Kristi moved across the country with her family; Christine got married and had two children. We weathered a pandemic, texting bagel recipes and bingey TV recommendations back and forth. We’re navigating a world that one moment feels like a dumpster fire and the next takes our breath away with awe. Both things can be true. And one more than the other at the moment.

So why are we back?

As Maggie Smith writes, This place could be beautiful, right?

But here’s the thing, we don’t want to sell children on this world. We are not realtors asking them to trust in the good bones and fix the problems. That’s not their responsibility, it’s ours. We want to make this world worthy of our children. This place could be beautiful. 

So what’s our small part in doing that?

The more we’ve worked with teachers and children across the country, the more we return to our roots, the more we feel the imperative to bring back conversations about the whole child and bring forward innovative, holistic, and grounded educational practices.

We believe children are capable, curious, and also growing in a world and a context that is different. Different from our experiences as children, and maybe different from the world of children we have taught in the past. It creates new and interesting challenges for teachers and caregivers, especially in a school system that changes at the speed of … well, never. 

We also believe that growth and learning happens best in an ecosystem that nurtures children’s unique strengths, joys, and challenges, and we know that this ecosystem is fragile, and often interrupted by factors beyond our control.

The gardening metaphors are no accident here. Our beliefs have been strongly influenced by Alison Gopnik’s book The Gardener and the Carpenter. Gopnik proposes that rather than trying to construct a perfect product as a carpenter might, we think of ourselves and our work with children as a gardener might: “The good gardener works to create fertile soil that can sustain a whole ecosystem of different plants with different strengths and beauties and with different weaknesses and difficulties too.”  

We feel an imperative to puzzle alongside you what it means to hold these beliefs within a system that often values data over dignity, product over process, compliance over innovation. What does it mean to be kids first in an outcomes first system?

So what’s next?

After years of sending book ideas back and forth and drafting at least four sample chapters and tables of contents, we’ve turned to Substack for something new. We want the next iteration of our work to be just as responsive as your work in your classroom. And just as we do in the classroom, we want to create a community with a strong sense of belonging where resources can be shared, problems can be tackled, and joys can be celebrated. We wanted to work in a medium that centered a process, a conversation, and innovation.

Why Taproots?

Taproots are the main, central root of plants. From there, secondary and tertiary roots grow. For us, the image of the child as capable and curious and making meaning in an ever changing world is our taproot. It’s from there that our beliefs about classrooms, teaching, and learning all come. When we feel we have drifted too far astray (into the weeds?!) then we return to our taproots and ground ourselves. We’d like to invite you to join us here.  

What is a Substack?

Substack is an online platform that is both a newsletter and a community.  You can sign up for our newsletter and it’ll come right to your email inbox. And you join our online community so share stories, ideas, photos, and links with your fellow educators. 

Our newsletter will feature:

• Deep dives into the environment, playful learning and explorations, and documentation. 

• A focus on creating emergent curriculum through playful learning. 

• Practical strategies for integrating play and joy into your day

• Ample connections to the research and thinking that drives the work

• Interviews with teachers and the chance to follow along with what’s happening in their classrooms. (including the frustrating, challenging, cry-at-the end- of -the-day stuff)

• Ask us anything, questions and responses.

• Book lists, materials recommendations, and links to favorite pens. 

This first month is free for all, but after that we’re going to offer two weeks free and two weeks paid. Joining as a paid subscriber allows you access to all four weeks of our newsletter and the online community. We’d love to offer it all for free, of course, but paying for a subscription allows us to support ourselves and compensate the teachers who will contribute to this newsletter.  

So join WITH us

And by us, we don’t mean Christine and Kristi, we mean a community of educators and stakeholders who seek to sit shoulder to shoulder with children as they bring us into new worlds of possibility. We are not for profit, we are for children, we are for teachers, we are for hope. 

What will you get this month?

• A guide to the classroom environment and setting up different areas of the room. 

• A look inside a few classrooms and how messy it really is to make this world beautiful. 

• A list of our favorite resources for the classroom environment and your questions answered in our first Ask Us Anything. Here’s the form!

Let’s make this place beautiful.