49

School Days and Preschool Days, Too:
A treasury of anecdotes culled from my work and play as a preschool worker and an elementary school after- school activities supervisor
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IT TAKES A CHILD TO RAISE A VILLAGE
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     Furthermore, it was natural for a close-knit group of architect friends to make decisions together. The structure they built would then bear the stamp of that group's uniqueness. The arrogance some of these exclusive tribes developed, though, began to tarnish the whole project. Our little experiment was starting to re-creating history as much as improving on it. Cory's act of pulling down the smaller hut, for example, may have been a creative stroke, but there were workers he hadn't consulted, and some of them weren't happy.
     In stick-hunting trips up the hill now, as soon as I'd break a branch off a dead tree, I'd hear competing voices clamoring, "That's mine!" Back down in the valley I heard stories of people being kicked off of work teams or kicked out of huts.
      As the project gathered energy, the difficulties of supervision multiplied exponentially. Keeping everyone safe while climbing the hill became more and more of a challenge. Equal to participants' desire for more building materials was a restless, generalized desire that wanted to keep expanding the scope of everything—exploring new areas, getting bigger sticks, staying out longer.

      For awhile, helping to channel the group's energies in safe ways had been a powerful learning experience for me. Now it began to verge on being more than I could handle.
      At the same time, like any village in finite space, the Global Village included, we began to find our resources growing scarcer. Our cornucopia of dead sticks and logs was gone in three days. To forage for long grass, children now had to go halfway up the hill. I started taking parties of group representatives on the expeditions, instead of whole groups. An inadvertent creative result of this change was that the groups had to decide which members would go. Though I feared the "strongman" of each group would simply overrule everyone else, in almost all cases children chose their representatives fairly—by playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors"!
      Soon though, there were not enough sticks in safe places to support even the smaller groups. While I worked mentally to concoct a plan for taking a few "scouts" out to explore new areas without causing jealousy, a fresh piece of input appeared on our meadow, like a Trojan Horse.

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