Many years ago we did something similar at my playcentre: a ‘Competition between 4 companies within British Steel’ to see which could build a tower and be the 1 outfit that wasn’t shut down: not that the kids gave a shit about that, they were playing in teams, play!! Not indoctrination.
Tag Archives for play
This is not just play, this is Summerhill play…
I stole this from their Summerhill Facepuke page
🤩 PLAY 🤩
At Summerhill, play belongs to the child. We do not dress up learning situations so that the play will be “productive”, we do not look on and evaluate what they might learn form this or that game. Our children just play — and they can do it pretty well all day if they want to.
Of course sometimes things go wrong during play. Sometimes people get into conflict. This is part of being a child. There are structures in place that protect the rights of each of us and there are big kids or adults who can help you out if needed. You are also encouraged to deal with a lot of it yourself. You cannot always have a ‘nanny’ to look after you and solve your problems in life.
Sometimes play can lead to other interests. You might start off by making a sword in the woodwork and then decide you want to make something more… you may mess around on the old school piano and then find that you want to make music… you might help out with the class 1 shop and find that you want to learn more Maths, or make a big bang in Science and then sign up for Biology. There are so many areas for inspiration and enjoyment.
That enjoyment will last you a lifetime — if you have never had bad experiences of learning, then you will become a life long learner and take joy in what you do.
Whichever way you look at it – at Summerhill, play means play and belongs entirely to you.
#asneillsummerhill #asneill #play #freeplay #freerangekidsuk #school #summerhill #summerhillschool
Playworker nudges #1
GBS, clever bloke. Easily the rival of Oscar Wilde or GK Chesterton (who we’re told to cancel coz he was racist, or rather he lived in racist times, eh Wendy Russell).
So anyway he said this….
Now, we are told that children have a right to play and we’re told that they need play, blublah, but consider this…
I noticed in my playwork that some kids want to help. They want to do jobs. You must’ve seen that.
Children like work!
I’ll never forget a little shit called Sean, aged 6 manfully (oo sexist) helping his dad ( who just turned up one day to help the ‘Vencha’) do hard physical work, specifically digging foundations and mixing concrete by hand for our new hut. Then he got bored and defaulted to throwing stones at things, mainly humans, big and small. His dad’s suggestion that I box his ears was not helpful. Whereas his older brother, aged 8, was like a pack horse, carrying huge concrete brick thingies all day, and genuinely assisting the building (Where is Channel 4’s Kevin Wossname when you need him?We shudov been featured on Grand Designs. I digress.)
Children like work!
They like achieving things. Sometimes gluing macaroni to sugar paper isn’t enough, FFS.
Comments please!
What to Know About the Corecore Aesthetic Taking Over TikTok | Time
Corecore, which has racked up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, is a form of visual poetry that is meant to evoke certain emotions.
— Read on time.com/6248637/corecore-tiktok-aesthetic/
That’s some weird-ass fecked-up shit right there, blud
Reification and Thingification: the primitive ravens.
Those other ravens were Thought and Memory. No, they weren’t in the Marvel movies, they’d end up being Hekyll and Jekyll in Song O’ the South, shudder, racist bickering disney sidekicks…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn
Anyway, we’re all familiar with reification, it means making into a thing. It’s what they did to Murphy in Robocop, I do love my cheesy movie references, as a colleague once said, sourly.
Here’s the outlaw Jimmy Wales to explain…
Reification
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
 | Look up reification or reifyin Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Reification may refer to:
Science and technology[edit]
- Reification (computer science), the creation of a data model
- Reification (knowledge representation), the representation of facts and/or assertions
- Reification (statistics), the use of an idealized model to make inferences linking results from a model with experimental observations
Other uses[edit]
- Reification (fallacy), the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
- Reification (Gestalt psychology), the perception of an object as having more spatial information than is present
- Reification (linguistics), the transformation of a natural-language statement such that actions and events represented by it become quantifiable variables
- Reification (Marxism), the consideration of an abstraction of an object as if it had living existence and abilities
See also[edit]
- Concretization
- Objectification, the treatment of an entity (such as a human or animal) as an object
2 and 3 and especially 4, and a dash of 5, and a pinch of 6, and a big, carefully disinfected chunk of 7 and plenty of 9.
So what is thingification? I’m getting there, hold on. So and from that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete link, I give you this handy table
| Abstract | Concrete |
|---|---|
| Tennis | A tennis match |
| Redness | Red light reflected off of an apple and hitting one’s eyes |
| Five | Five cars |
| Justice | A just action |
| Humanity (the property of being human) | Human population (the set of all humans) |
Iwould add on the left learning organisationand on the right…? Later, lets crack on…
This has a lot in common with Carse’s magnificent Occamick distinctions in his glorious prose-poem of Jesuitical logic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
Back then, though, I was revisiting all the marvellous 80s learning organisation malarkey. Having been handed its ass on a plate by the wily orientals of the co-opetioning clans (Co-opetition? ugh. Great idea, vile wordle curdle) gathered under the stern gaze of grandma MITI, American carmakers were licking their wounds when a nice young man in a periwinkle blue jumper wandered in from Harvard with a book wot he wrote… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-opetition_(book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_International_Trade_and_Industry
I soon realised the learning organisation was a dumbass reification, a pellet of baby food regurgitated for the fluffy pinstriped baby birdies in the boardroom to swallow. The issue is how do organisations learn, ffs, not have they got a ‘stificate in PRINCE Charming sick Stigma. Possibly helped by the fact that I was picking up on the learning organisation fad as it fell out of the top twenty and had therefore been dropped as a work area by m’colleauges in the spanish Inquisition, sorry MPD, management practice and development, when I worked at LGMB, formerly LGTB, not to be confused with LGBT.
Shapiro, Eileen C., Fad Surfing in theBoardroom: Managing in the Age of Instant Answers, Basic Books (1996), ISBN 0-2014419-5-0
organisational learning isn’tmuch better becauseit is, wordsaladalert a neologism portmanteau of reificatio… fuqsayk, just say it man – because its a POS made up of 2 horrible reifications, because organisations don’texist as a thing and neither does learning. Iwill stab you if Ihear you say ‘learning point’s or key learning points, and swear to god I will shoot you dead if you pluralise the verb learning.
What were really getting at is this, punchline alert, thingification is a process for an individual or ideally a small group who care, to deploy when they try to bring forth a new, erm, thing. That’s why Icalled it thingification. It is the yin to the enormous yang of thingification. Loved by Etonians because it hides the pain of thinking and feeling.
So, our pinstriped Waitroseian strides forth into his Cotswoldian landscape to inspect his (his! Lol) tradition country garden, the wife is really into Beth Chatto you know [look, you can use google, ffs, I’m getting tired now] these are hollyhocks from John Clares [googlit] garden near Stamford, and, its been a cold winter, not that he noticed, and the daffodills aren’t out yet, they’re the original ones you know, the pale small native flower not the horrid Dutch cultivars, like swaggering drag queens in SF, ugh, and he is suddenly apoplectic with rage, the pure Etonian rage of cousin Eustace in Dawn Treader, (twas on telly yesterday,) the Bunter-roid rage of the thwarted ten year old nanny’s boy, becuase Charles, and Bex, and tommo and Katerina and Binky and Daisy are up from the smoke for the weekend and the fucking daffodills aren’tout, and Iknow m’wife Madelaine will be so dissapointed, because bloody women letting me down again, and suddenly— a boy wrenched from home aged 7, and therefore locked into a grief gestalt trauma beneath saville row body armour—- and he will beat Maddy after his not-friends from the Bank have failed to gaze upon his Ozymandelsonian fucking flowers that Ibuy every year from by the till in me Nisa.
And do you know what he shouts? This Proustian wail he bellows across the hollyhocks, they aren’t out either, bastards, across the pinstripy lawn, we have this marvellous little man, George, still uses an absolutely ancient Dennis mower, must be in his 80s, Idigress, so he stands, our brittle etonian, at the top of his fitness peak, his arse getting stabbed by the ointy peak of his fitness, his perfect adaptation as bastardi di tutti bastadi, bigdog, and he shouts at the flowers, or rather the vibrant pale acidy-green spears of life stabbing up through the dirt and John Innes, and he shouts:
GROW, DAMN YOU, GROW ! ITOLD YOU TO GROWW!!!
IT’S ok, I’m calm now, gather, gather, deep breath.
A leaning organisation is a garden in a shitty patch of suburbia. Choked with bramble and knotweed, rose-bay willowheb, old mans beard, n shopping trolleys, ford anglia gearboxes and Pampers and hedgepr0n, prone to flooding when the river, etcetera, overhung by senile sycamores and seedy silver birch and I need this bombsite to look like this…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_clock
well, sucks teeth, says the lad from Green Quadrangle, we can do it, but it won’t be cheap…
Oops, nearly forgot, Thingification and
plink is the sound of new language being formed in the space between a small group of people who care.
Plink is an anti-reification place holder, a means of resisiting the misnomery of early and innacurate reification. As in yes! So what we need is BPR or TQM or no Gary, sit down , please. What we need is to find a PlainPhrase©, a form of plain english [plain, good Amish word, plain] a sentence ,not a TLA, a fucking sentence Gary, Cap at the front, full stop at the end, Gary, a sentence that even Marjorie in the typing pool, oh you don’tknow any marjorie, that because she left and she’s working at your rivals now, as AD, a sentence that even Marjorie can nod her head to.
We need a group quietly nods it head sentence gary.
Heres mine for learning organisation
“how, can we, (and by we I mean everybody, not just us, the staff and children of the small primary school in worcestershire, but the village and the cleaners and, and ,and, and and — where’s the boundary Gary, of the fishtank in the dentist waiting room, Gary)
I’ll start again:
HOW CAN WE ALL WORK TOGETHER BETTER ?
PlainPhrased © sentences are not clever or sharp or elegant. But you’ll know them by their quiet head-nodding in a circle of people who care.
I have an actual CaseStory©, but I’m, tired and need bacon, call me if ya wanna hear it.
Use the Phrase Luke, use. The. Phrase…
Fucking wordpress has hidden categories, so Ican add them, fuqitt.
Watch “Why You Need A Good Internal BS Meter” on YouTube
Rick Beato is a musician and educator.
This is the best statement on the need for Bullshit Detector since Postman and Weingartner wrote Teaching As A Subversive Activity, the whole text of which is around on the web, and is a must read.
BTW, I hate videos. Just give me the feckin’ words and the odd diagram. But there’s always an exception to every rule.
Message found in a bottle of snake oil, in the Sargasso sea…
A friend of mine said, in a lovely,erudite presentation to some very smart folk:
“a weakness of my current thinking is a lack of explicitly encompassing the group, the social.”
Totally agree, we all lack this.
Re-examine page 49 of ‘Navigating Complexity: the essential guide to complexity theory in business and management’, written by myself.
Then think about that botanical nostrum – Early Years textbooks teach that there are three kinds of play in young humans and many mammals:
- individual play
- parallel play
- social play
Know that this is botany – classifying plants by the shape of their leaves. We observe the spots of a leopard, but what is the mechanism that creates them?
What are the primitives, the atomic irreducible processes that underly the phenomena?
We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups. I suspect they are incommensurable, like weather prediction after Lorenz.
We do not have a language to describe phenomena in groups.
This has hamstrung playwork, education, professional football, orchestral performance, NASA budgetary oversight inquiries, Air Accident Investigation, Corporate Fraud Investigation, etcetera etcetera.
There are clues in the Miles Davis approach to group play.
There are clues in Taoism, and Zen.
But as Sapir, Whof and Wittgenstein, and probably Gibson (JJ not W) would tell you, language shapes thought and we do not have the language.
Try explaining how to put oil into a car without using any car-related, or engine-related words. Go on, try it. Write it down, now go through it and strike out any car-related and engine-related words that crept in. We don’t have a big enough RAM, our short-term memory, to hold even one sentence of the resulting tedious arm-waving stuttering verbiage.
Why doesn’t the world move when I shake my head?
~~~~~~
M’learned friend also said:
“This has many implications, but that main one is that we should judge education by the value created for stakeholders (laudate Tom) – this is fittingly complex and circular.
NO NO NO, NO!
Very pleased that you rate teecha Tom.
Not stakeholders, feck stakeholders. Leave that to the Tory Goovey Gradgrindians.
I think you might mean participants? If so then I‘ll semi-agree.
How would you judge a Beth Chatto garden? Answer that and you’ll know how to judge education .
~~~
Read Seedstock by Frank Herbert… full text here… https://momentoftime.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/seed-stock-frank-herbert/
I cannot link to that story without rereading it, and when I reread it, I cannot help but be moved to tears.
~~~
Koan for you: “how can we value things without judging them?” asked the abbot.
Answers on a postcard to my fastness by Ruabon mountain, please, or via ‘e-mail’.
~~~
Test-weary second-grader asks school board: ‘Is that all that matters to grown-ups?’ – The Washington Post
7 year-old girl to School Board:
“Have you ever been in a kids’ lunch room at lunch time? If you go to many of these cafeterias, you will see there is hardly enough time to even eat. Many kids end up throwing their food away. Some of the teachers often ask us if we are sure we want to throw the food away but many do anyway because we want to play for the few minutes we have.”
What else do we need to say about the importance of play?
__________________________________________
And by the way, this is also why Maslow was an idiot.
__________________________________________
And, also by the way, this is why 7 year-old girls should rule the world.
The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders | Psychology Today
The rise of materialism, the decline of personal agency.
Probably the best article on children’s play this decade.
The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns – The Washington Post
“…Digital technology professor Laura Pinto — the Elf on the Shelf is “a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and” [deep breath] “reify hegemonic power.”
She writes:
“Elf on the Shelf presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between play time and real life. Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination, moving dolls and determining interactions with other people and other dolls. Rather, the hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf’s watchful eye. The Elf on the Shelf controls all parameters of play, who can do and touch what, and ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play.
“The whole thing with panopticonism under the Jeremy Bentham structure,” Pinto said, “is that you never quite knew if you were being watched or not and that forced you into behaving in a certain way. The elf is the same way.”
EMERALD
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S1537-466120140000018001
Fascinating. Astonishingly bad translation into English though. Not blaming the author who is probably not a native English speaker. Am blaming the publisher. Besides taking the weird file slinging it on the web and charging me 25 quid to read it, what exactly do you people do to, as they say, add value. A suggestion: hit some editors, good ones and pay them well. It is difficult enough understanding new research and thinking without having to also simultaneously translate from gobbledygook into English. Again no blame to the author. You, air or madam, have been done a huge disservice by Emerald.
But despite all that,
Fascinating…
Massive strategic failures of Playwork #4, an occasional series:
http://www.naeyc.org/conference/sessions-for-faculty-and-trainers
Promoted by this posting on Facebook, nothing to do with this conference. Yesterday I visited the Children’s Day website, which had remarkably similar aims and draws on similar sources as the beloved Playday.
The two together provoked this thought:
Failure #4 is the failure to promote the key distinction between play for older children, over 5s, (and, to a lesser extent, from youth) and play in the early years.
They are different. The play we talk about is different. We weeble on about all children need play or all humans need play, but we miss the point about all this.
Which is this, to use an inflammatory metaphor:
The play we are about is after the apron strings have been cut.
It’s pavement play near your house, it’s playing out, is exploring, it’s hanging out with your peers, it’s that ‘when I look back I realise that most of my favourite play memories were of play with no adults around’ play.
I can unpack this, this is just the provocation, dear reader.
KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD: an elegy for Perry Else
KIND THINKER OUT IN THE WORLD
Kind thinker, out in
the world, away
from the white towers;
down by the riv’r.
Forthright, flexible and firm —
the three frees.
Living, in the realm
of the possible:
not ‘they should’, only
‘well, maybe we can…’
Else we forget, the
value of play
and the value of
his playful life.
Arthur Battram
10:26 AM, Thursday, June 12, 2014, revised 2:02 PM Friday, September 5, 2014 , and again so the scansion is better Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 2:04 PM.
A fitting obituary is here:
Media coverage of play/child-related issues: David Spencer Ramsey’s ongoing (and therefore partial) list
David has kindly given me permission to share his list of media coverage of what I have labelled ‘play/child-related issues’.
The list is a partial one, as he explains below. He says:
“Interesting research fact: There have been more than 50 articles, news reports, and radio pieces in mainstream media (New York Times, Slate.com, Washington Post, NPR, KQED, ABC News, etc.) in the United States on children’s play since the beginning of 2014.”
“So right now I’ve collected data on the 50+ media references since start of 2014. I’m in the process of going back year-by-year over the past 5 years to see if 2014 does indeed stand out as having a significantly higher number of ‘mainstream media’ (broadcast, print, web) discussions of play. I can easily provide you the 50+ references for 2014 with date, publication, url, title, etc., it’s all in a Microsoft Word doc.”
“I am … interested in looking at things from a different perspective, ie., is there a potentially larger social-cultural shift occurring in America that is either allowing or actively encouraging this sort of mainstream media coverage to happen? In other words, why now? Why these particular stories? What does this say, if anything, about American society in 2014?”
My own cynical view is that this media kerfuffle does not, of itself, signal a change in US (or UK) society. I wish it did. Nevertheless, if nothing else the covering is cheering, and may inspire. Feel free to use the list anyway you wish.
Please contact David directly if you have any questions or requests. For my part I will update this item whenever I can (not guaranteeing!).
davidramsey1234@yahoo.com
——————————————————————–
DAVID’S LIST ( as of MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 2014)
——————————————————————–
The Overprotected Kid
The Atlantic, March 19, 2014
Why Free Play is the Best Summer School
The Atlantic, June 20, 2014
Recess Without Rules
The Atlantic, January 28, 2014
Inside a European Adventure Playground
The Atlantic, March 19, 2014
How Finland Keeps Kids Focused Through Free Play
The Atlantic, June 30, 2014
Kids These Days: Growing Up Too Fast or Never At All?
National Public Radio, March 20, 2014
Where the Wild Things Play
National Public Radio, August 4, 2014
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/08/04/334896321/where-the-wild-things-play
Play Doesn’t End With Childhood: Why Adults Need Recess Too
National Public Radio, August 6, 2014
Scientists Say Child’s Play Helps Build a Better Brain
National Public Radio, August 6, 2014
When Kids Start Playing to Win
National Public Radio, August 5, 2014
What Kids Can Learn From a Water Balloon Fight
National Public Radio, June 25, 2014
For Kids With Special Needs, More Places to Play
National Public Radio, August 27, 2013
Kids Need More Structured Play Time, Not Less
New York Times, May 1, 2014
All Children Should be Delinquents
New York Times, July 12, 2014
Mom Faces Felony Charge for Letting Girl Play in Park
ABC News, July 28, 2014
Play for Children: Form and Freedom
Huffington Post, July 11, 2014
If Children are Learning, Then Let Them Play
Huffington Post, November 1, 2013
Dad Charged With Endangerment After Son Skips Church to Go Play
Huffington Post, June 30, 2014
Stressed Out in America: Five Reason to Let Your Kids Play
Huffington Post, February 28, 2014
Banish the Playdate
Huffington Post, July 24, 2014
Best Type of Play? Let Kids do What They Want
NBC News, 9News Colorado, August 6, 2014
http://www.9news.com/story/news/health/2014/08/06/free-play-kids/13694309/
How Play Wires Kids’ Brains for Social and Academic Success
KQED California, August 7, 2014
Let ‘Em Out! The Many Benefits of Outdoor Play in Kindergarten
KQED California, July 23, 2014
A Land Where Kids Roam Free
KQED California, July 18, 2014
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/07/audio-file-wont-embed/
Can Free Play Prevent Depression and Anxiety in Kids?
KQED California, June 29, 2014
Cities Want Young Families to Play and Stay
Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2014
Playing Children, Out of Sight and Mind
New York Daily News, August 4, 2014
Visiting Lecturer Says Play is Effective Learning Tool
Iowa City Press-Citizen, August 1, 2014
In This Era of Helicopter Parenting, Letting Your Child Play is a Crime
Charleston City Paper, July 23, 2014
Play: The Work of a Child
Green Bay Press Gazette, July 12, 2014
The Best Toy for a Kid on a Plane is Not an iPad
ABC News, July 23, 2014
http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/best-toy-kid-plane-ipad/story?id=24588355
Send the Kids Outside to Play: Study
Chicago Tribune, July 17, 2014
Even Playing Dress-Up Teaches Children How to Handle Emotions
Springfield News Leader, July 11, 2014
Letting Imagination Win
Washington Post, August 8, 2014
Ten Ways to Fix the Mess That is Kindergarten
Washington Post, August 7, 2014
Why So Many Kids Can’t Sit Still in School Today
Washington Post, July 8, 2014
Are We Overprotecting Our Kids?
Katie Couric Show, July 9, 2014
http://katiecouric.com/2014/07/09/are-we-overprotecting-our-kids/
Should Parents Let Their Kids Take More Risks?
PBS NewsHour, May 9, 2014
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/parents-let-kids-take-risks/
Does Overprotecting Children Put Them at Risk?
CBS News, March 20, 2014
Let Kids Run Wild in the Woods
Slate.com, May 2014
What Playfulness Can Do For You
Boston Globe, July 20, 2014
How the American Playground was Born in Boston
Boston Globe, March 28, 2014
A Parklet Rises in Boston
Boston Globe, July 14, 2014
Help Kids’ Imaginations Soar
Miami Herald, July 13, 2014
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/11/4231708/help-kids-imaginations-soar.html
For July, Let Kids be Kids
Columbia Daily Tribune, July 13, 2014
The Cognitive Benefits of Play: Effects on the Learning Brain
ParentingScience.com, 2014
http://www.parentingscience.com/benefits-of-play.html
7 Crippling Parenting Behaviors That Keep Children From Growing Into Leaders
Forbes.com, January 16, 2014
Too Much Too Soon: Why Children Should Spend More Time Playing and Start School Later
Forbes.com, January 30, 2014
Why Playful Learning is the Key to Prosperity
Forbes.com, April 10, 2014
Mom Arrested After Letting 7-Year-Old Son Walk to Park by Himself
KTLA News, July 31, 2014
REGENERATING THE PUBLIC REALM: Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out
“For my street – and the others who have shared their experiences – new and rich connections have grown from sharing time and fun on the street during playing out sessions. And they have changed the way I feel about living here for the better.”
We know more about regenerating a rainforest or a prairie than we do about regenerating the public realm.
We really need to get out more.
And we really need to study more.
PlayingOut, is one neccesary, but—of course—of itself, insufficient condition for this regeneration of the public realm to take place. Pun placed intentionally!
Read and follow their excellent bloggery.
via Blenders, babysitters and burglars! – connecting neighbours in unexpected ways – Playing Out.
arthur~battram… 