On Pretending

Maybe I'm just in a pensive and nostalgic mood because I finished reading J.M. Barrie's original and unabridged Peter Pan. Or maybe it's because I'm a teacher. Either way, I get the tragic sense that children are losing their ability to pretend.

Kids these days have cell phones at 10, they have video games and Wiis, and not many of them have a lovely forest at the back of their house to play in. It's crushing their imagination.

I think sometimes that I have forgotten how to pretend (the good way). There is the way that children pretend, and there is the way that adults pretend. Children make up games and believe that their stuffed animals come to life. They believe in Santa and can make cookies out of mud. The way that they can pretend takes a lot of work, but if you do it right, it is effortless. Real Pretending comes naturally; you don't have to think about it. Everything links together and makes sense.

Adults pretend another way. They pretend they are not married. They pretend their relationship will work. They pretend they have more money in the bank than they actually do. They pretend they are not addicted. They pretend that the harsh realities of this world have nothing to do with them.

I'm afraid kids today aren't getting enough good pretending in before they grow up. I ask my students to make up a story for writing, and it seems so impossible to them. They try to pass off some TV show they've seen as their original idea. I tell them to pretend, to make something up in their mind and just write it down. It's not the writing that is difficult. It's the thinking. They don't know how.

I know I am supposed to be teaching them academic things, but I think I need to start teaching some lessons on how to pretend.

If you are a parent, do your kids a favor. Give them toys that don't do much of anything. Like, I'm talking a cardboard box, some markers, and a pair of scissors. I'm talking you send them out into the woods. I'm talking about making up games with no props.

Some of the games children make up today are quite inventive, yet scary. Like, for  a while at recess, a group of children really liked to get together and play CSI. They decided upon the relationships, like, who's whose mother, who are the kids, etc. And then somebody would die or get injured. You'd know this because you'd see a kid laying out in the grass field, and then the kids playing the investigators would come and drag off the body. The injured child would recuperate, and then the whole slew of them would chase each other around some more. Once the teachers finally figured out what they were doing, they told them to stop. At my first observation, I was fascinated. I made sure not to prod. I'd ask a kid "what are you playing?" And then the next day I'd ask a third-grader "so how do you play?"

Pretending. It's almost a lost art.