July/August 2001  

Under Deadman’s Skin

JANE KATCH

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites educators, researchers, community activists, and policymakers from across the country to talk about key issues in schools and school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these forums. Below is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Tuesday, February 13, 2001.

For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Welcome by Dorothea Engler, director of public affairs, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Remarks by Jane Katch
Questions and Comments from the Audience

You can also scroll right through the transcript without clicking on the above links.  

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WELCOME AND REMARKS BY DOROTHEA ENGLER

I’m Dottie Engler, director of public affairs at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and on behalf of our community I’d like to welcome you tonight to hear Jane Katch, who has written this wonderful book called Under Deadman’s Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children’s Violent Play.

Jane is that most wonderful of things: she’s a teacher. As part of her professional experience, she counseled emotionally disturbed children with Bruno Bettelheim at the Orthogenic School, and she taught kindergarten with Vivian Paley at the University of Chicago Lab School.

Throughout Jane’s book you cannot help but be struck by her own intense interest in and attention to everything that children are doing, thinking, and feeling. This is a gutsy book and a gutsy topic. As a nation, I’m not sure that we’re prepared to deal constructively with violence, [but] that's what Jane would have us do.

I’ve recently been cleaning the attic. Some squirrels got into our eaves and started scattering papers everywhere, so I decided it was time to go up and try to put things in big storage bins. And it was really a walk through the past, through my children’s past. Twenty-five years of hoarding watercolors and papers and all sorts of things can give you quite a collection.

It was wonderful to go through my youngest son’s papers and see his beautiful drawings, his wonderful stories, and his Haiku poetry—his ability to do the most wonderful narrative, so many gentle and kind things. And I came across a story that I hadn’t seen since he’d written it. It was a story of a young man—he wrote it in high school, long before the Columbine killings—a young, disaffected man walking into high school. Lots of things happen with lots of characters, but the final thing is that in an assembly he takes out a gun and shoots lots of people.

It’s really well written and really horrifying. I was very interested to read his teacher’s comments at the time and to recollect our conversations when he wrote it. I was all the more horrified and struck by this story because it was not unlike a story that was written not long ago by another student in another high school, only this time the student was sent to the court system, not to a counselor or a teacher.

For more and more of our children, when they use violent or threatening language, the solution seems to be punishment rather than counseling. I remember after the Columbine shooting and the subsequent rash of violent acts committed by children all over the country that while the public was trying to figure out where they could place the blame—whether it was the parents, the schools, or the media—I don’t recall any school systems rushing to increase the number of counselors in their high schools or rushing to reduce class size so that teachers could be more in touch with the students they teach.

As I read Jane’s book, it brought up lots of things, but a couple of them were prevalent. One is how wonderful it is to have a teacher like Jane, who is willing to take so many risks in a classroom and who is so analytical, not only about the children but also about herself as a person—about the way she teaches, her biases, her prejudices, her anger, her emotions. That’s extraordinary and a model for other teachers.

The other thing that struck me is that Jane raises a lot of issues that we need to discuss a lot more. Some of them we talk about, but I’m not sure constructively. We talk about the media, we talk sometimes about gender differences and violence. We don’t talk a lot about language and its ability to be violent, and we don’t talk very much about exclusion and how that fits into the pattern of violence.

These are all issues that Jane raises in her book. It’s a terrific book. It’s a quick read, and I think it’s the kind of book that, when you buy it, you’ll read it and pass it on and want to discuss it.

I’m delighted to welcome Jane here tonight, and I hope she gets a terrific response to her book around the country.
 

REMARKS BY JANE KATCH

Thank you so much, Dottie, for that thought-provoking and lovely introduction. Giving a talk about my book at an esteemed institution like Harvard is quite a change from my usual daily fare of negotiating with five and six year olds. The environment that I teach in is a privileged one, in terms of both the latitude that I’m allowed to create my own curriculum and the class size, which is small enough for me to really get to know every child in the room. And this has provided me with the unique opportunity to listen and to reflect that led to this book.

Today I want to tell you about a time when I felt discouraged and the important part that the children played in helping me understand what was happening in my own classroom, as well as with my own feelings. This understanding enabled me to rediscover my own role in teaching these children.

I had been teaching young children for over twenty years. I’d counseled emotionally disturbed children with Bruno Bettelheim, I’d been the director of a nursery school, I’d taught kindergarten with Vivian Paley, but the first time I heard the children in my classroom talk about "The Suicide Game," "Deadman," and "Bloodman," I felt like a beginning teacher all over again. What I thought I knew about teaching was not working for this group of five and six year olds. I needed to take a fresh look at violence in children’s play and find new ways to teach and understand the children that were in my care.

My first introduction to "Deadman" and "Bloodman" came through my tape recorder. I had decided that I might write about ways to connect young children’s play with their early reading experience, and I thought I might begin by making reading books that were based on their fantasy play. When I first began to transcribe my tapes of their play, this is what I heard:

"Anybody knows he’s dead, right?" I heard Seth’s six-year-old voice. "He goes over a lumpy forcefield. I’ve seen Part Two of it. Part Two is awesome. Deadman says, ‘Give me that money.’ The guy says, ‘Alright, butthead,’ and the other one says, ‘Who are you calling that?’ And he says, ‘Ooh, ooh,’ and he sticks out his hand and he grabs his heart and he rips it out."

Daniel answers more softly, "Yeah, but ghosts don’t have hearts." Seth doesn’t miss a beat as he continues his narrative. "Yeah, but

Deadman did that to another guy. Know what’s under Deadman’s skin? Know what’s under his skin? It’s bones and blood. He’s got people’s everything. Daniel, have you seen the movie Deadman?"

"No," Daniel admits.

"Good," Seth continues. "It’s gory, and it’s rated R, right? You can’t even see rated R’s, can you? Can you see rated R’s, Kayla? You don't even want see rated R. You don’t want to see Deadman. It’s totally gore-ee, right?"

"I know why it’s rated R," Kayla says. "He ripped off a hand. Who cares?" she adds. Kayla has two big brothers, and she knows how to talk to boys.

"No he didn’t," Seth tells her. "You’ve never seen Deadman!"

But Kayla holds her ground, "Yeah, I heard you guys talking about it."

"Yeah," Seth answers, "but that was a part I made up, right Daniel? All it is is a murderer says, ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.’ You don’t want to see Deadman. It’s just talking."

"Yeah," Daniel agrees, "It only has a few violence in it, like two or three."

I decided right then that I would not use their fantasy play for early reading books. I wanted to avoid listening to it, or thinking about what these boys had said. But instead I found I was haunted by their voices. I had several questions. Why did the children love these very images of explicit violence that I so strongly hated? What could I, as their teacher, do to help them put aside this preoccupation they had so they could concentrate on other activities?

Telling the children to stop their fantasies was ineffective. Worse yet, I saw they would either play their games where I could not hear them, or when I asked about their games, they tried to convince me their imaginary guns were only fire hoses. I seemed to be teaching them to be deceitful.

The main purpose of my writing was for myself; writing about a problem forces me to clarify my thoughts. I also know that audio tapes of the play and discussions in my classroom are a good way for me to learn more about what’s going on and to help me be a more effective teacher. When I began to write, I had not heard other teachers talk about this problem. This was before the school shootings and children’s violence had hit the news.

Yet I guessed that I was probably not the only teacher struggling with these issues. And, as I began to talk with other teachers, I discovered that many shared my concerns about the problem. I decided I would work in three ways: The first would consist of discussions with the children in my class. The second would be conversations with older children, who I hoped would be better able to explain to me why they loved violence. The third would be to understand why I hated it so much, with the hope that this would allow me to be more empathic with the children in my class.

I began a series of discussions with the five and six year olds about their play. I hoped we would learn what kinds of play made them upset when they came in from recess unsettled, argumentative, and unable to listen to others or focus on a group task. I wanted to look for ways that I could help them establish rules for their recess games that would enable them to have satisfying play, but also to be able to come inside calm and ready to learn.

I expected to find that when [their play involved] explicitly gory, violent fantasies, they would come in upset, while if [it involved] more peaceful fantasies, they would come in calm. This theory turned out to be mostly wrong. Gory content did upset some children, and we made rules to limit the explicit violence in their play. Of course, I made rules to protect both the physical and emotional safety of the children. But when I listened to what the children told me, I discovered that when they agreed on the rules of a game, when no one was excluded, and when the game was not overly competitive, they could play games that had violent fantasy content in a cooperative and peaceful way. Violent fantasy content was not the same as aggressive play.

For example, they played a game called "The Shooting Game." One child pointed a finger and said, "Bang," and the second player was supposed to fall down and pretend to be dead. Instead, the second player would shout, "You missed me," and the first player would call back, "You’re cheating." You know how it goes from there.

We made rules for this game. The children decided that the shooter had to stay over an arm’s length away from the person being shot, and the person who was shot had to fall down when the shooter said, "I got you," but that he could get up after counting to ten. Once the shooter knew that the person shot at would fall down without an argument, and the person shot knew he could get up and continue playing after counting to ten, the game became a cooperative and peaceful version, with no real anger or aggression.

Another surprise was the connection that I found between real violence and exclusion. As I began to transcribe my audio tapes of our discussions and of the interviews with the older children, I found that I was often writing about exclusion. I decided to put those discussions aside for a different project, because I wanted to stick to the subject of violence. But after a while, I realized that the issue of exclusion insisted on coming in, and that I needed to find out why.

What I saw was that there seemed to be two ways violence and exclusion were linked. First, the child who felt excluded was so hurt he seemed to feel justified in using violence toward those who had caused him pain. The second and more startling to me was that after a group had excluded a child by calling him a name like "mama’s little baby" or calling a boy a girl or a sissy, the excluding children seemed to feel justified in acting violently toward that other child, for no other reason than that he was no longer considered one of them.

My interviews with older children helped me to understand some of the reasons why my young children might be so fascinated by the very violence that I found repulsive. One of these, a ten-year-old boy I called Jason, said that he had been obsessed with violence since he was five and had discovered Batman. At the same time, he was clearly a very caring boy who could look at both sides of many situations.

I told him that when I watched violent images, I identified so strongly with the person receiving the violence that I couldn’t watch it, and I wondered how he felt when he watched it. Here’s what he told me:

"It’s sort of like you must get trained," he said. "It’s like in the military. When they saw that not very many people were shooting their guns, they started training them to think that it was okay to shoot, you know? And like, when you play a violent game, you play it enough, you almost start getting trained to kill, and not thinking about who you’re killing." He loved violent video games particularly.

"I think that’s what happens. As a kid sees enough violent stuff, he doesn’t think about the pain that the other person would go through; he thinks about the good things, like the bad guys being dead. Partly it’s like, if you think about it enough, it starts not being scary anymore. Like, I saw this movie at my friend’s house, and I thought it was really very scary. And I went over to his house again and we saw it again and it wasn’t that scary that time. But it was still pretty scary. And we watched it again and again, and little by little it started getting less scary, until it wasn’t scary at all. It’s like the same thing with fear," he continued.

"I remember when I was a little kid, I used to be afraid to put my head out of the blanket at night, and then eventually over the years I got less and less afraid, and I would peek out sometimes. And then when I got to be, like, nine years old, I would go to sleep with my head out, as long as I kept my eyes shut. And when I got to be ten I could lie in bed with my eyes open.

"And then I went over to my friend’s house and we saw this really scary movie, and it sort of brought the whole thing back. It sort of, like, hit the reset button. I’d get these images in my head at night. I’d stick my head out, and I’d imagine a disgusting image, like, popping up from over the side of my bed and it’s really scary, something from The Exorcist—that’s what the movie was.

"And when my friend told me about a movie where someone has the power to make people stab themselves with pitchforks, well, before I had seen The Exorcist, that wouldn’t have been really scary to me. But it adds on, it builds up. I think it’s the same thing with violence. Once you get used to it, it’s really hard to reset the button unless you experience something really violent."

Seeing violent movies as a way to master fears was a new and surprising idea to me, and one that I could understand. It [was similar to my own efforts to] face my anxieties about the children’s fascination with violence by letting myself look at it more carefully.

The third part of my book dealt with my increasing understanding of my antipathy towards violence. I had learned in my work with Bettelheim that if I wanted to understand someone who seemed very different from myself, I first had to understand my own feelings. I could see that the intensity of my dislike of violence made it hard for me to be empathic with the boys in my class who loved it.

As I began to understand that the intensity of my antipathy for violence was rooted in my identification with the great-aunt I was named for, who had died in a concentration camp, I began to accept that having fantasies containing some violent content is normal for children, and that they can have these fantasies without becoming killers.

Young children, however, are not able consistently to know the difference between fantasy and reality. Several older children told me that when they were younger, imagining they were a character from a movie or from television had led them to do things they otherwise would have known were dangerous. One boy, for instance, was pretending to be Kevin in Home Alone. He was standing at the top of a long marble staircase in a hotel, and he heard his father’s footsteps coming up the stairs. He decided that his father was a robber, and this boy slid down the long banister and fell off. Fortunately, his mother was standing at the bottom and caught him. He told me that he knew afterward that it was dangerous, but at that moment he was Kevin.

I decided it was important that these young children not be exposed to the very violent images they were saying they saw on television and in the movies. I sent a letter home to their parents asking them to be more aware of what their children were seeing, and to limit it appropriately. This letter got more positive feedback from parents than any parent letter I’ve ever sent home.

As I became less afraid to hear about their games, as I saw the children were able to make their own rules about their play that helped them to be more cooperative, I became more confident in the group process that we were evolving together. I continued to set the rules for physical and emotional safety such as "no touching" when you pretend to fight and "you can’t say ‘you can’t play’" from Vivian Paley’s book by that name. But I found that the more I allowed the children to formulate their own rules, the more they were learning to listen to each other, to see issues from more than one viewpoint, and to make compromises that satisfied the needs of each member of the group.

In the beginning, it was difficult for me to trust this process of allowing the children to formulate their own rules. Even though I was setting the rules that I thought most important, I was afraid the children’s rules might not be good enough. As I saw how much they learned from this constructivist process and realized that if their rules did not work out well we could go back and revise them, I came to increasingly value our new process.

A critical moment in this change came after some parents complained to me that their children had told them the recess play was too violent. I decided to talk with the children about the problem, and I’m going to read you a piece of a longer chapter in the book called, "The Rules of Violence."

When I tell the children what the parents had said, Gregory speaks immediately. "I know," he says. "I told my mom, because I didn’t like the game where people took eyeballs out." I’m relieved that Gregory spoke up first. If Seth had begun with a defense of violence, it might have been hard for the others to admit their feelings, but Gregory is a leader, a frequent team captain in soccer. Once they’ve heard him speak, most of the children will feel they can speak honestly.

"When we play Super Mario Brothers," Travis says, "the princesses turn to guck. I don’t like that." "I think taking eyeballs out and slime are both gross," Allison agrees. "And I don't like it when people chop you in half and get you all bloody." I’m startled by the image that her pronoun implies. I did not imagine one of the children being chopped and bloody; I had pictured only an invisible enemy.

"But that’s probably everything that’s in violent stories," Seth complains. "No," I tell him. "You can still have good guys and bad guys getting killed without chopping them up and having them get all bloody." Nina speaks for the first time. "I don’t think people should say I’m going to chop you up in my story if you don’t do this part," she explains.

Threats are another aspect of the game I had not thought about. I’m glad to have Nina on my side. "Nothing’s too gross for me," Seth boasts. "Taking off your socks and smelling them," Gregory says, "that’s too gross." "I don't want people to take a sword and stick it through someone’s tummy and bones fall out," Kathy adds.

Gregory looks at the growing list I’ve been writing on the board as the children talk. "Erase the socks," he tells me. "I want the socks." "These gross and scary things all fit into the rules we made earlier in the year," I point out, "the rules about the violence in the stories you tell me." I wrote those rules down too. No excessive blood, no chopping off of body parts, no guts or other things that are inside the body can come out.

"We could use the same rules out at recess that we use for our storytelling in the classroom," I explain. "But that’s probably half the stuff that’s in violence," Seth protests again. "How about us? That’s no fair." "Children have to be in school," I tell him. "They need a safe place where they don’t feel grossed out. If your parents let you, you can play what you want to at your own house."

"Fine," Seth answers defiantly. "I’ll do it at my house all day, with no one to tell me to stop." "Why can’t we do it at recess," Nina suggests, "where, if anybody says ‘I don't like that,’ we just move to a different place where people don’t mind?" Gregory adds to her proposal, "One recess we play no violence, and the next one we play violence."

I feel discouraged to see our near-agreement slipping away. But Nina explains the rule that she and Gregory are developing. "That way," she says, "the people who don't like violence, but they do want to play with the people who like gross stuff, can play with them at the next recess." This seems so reasonable I find it hard to disagree. "V-O-A-T, V-O-A-T," Aaron spells. "Let’s vote!" He has recently learned that when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.

I summarize the new proposal: Children can play games involving violent language at alternate recesses, so that children who do not like violence have a chance to play with their friends who do like it. If anyone objects to the violence, the players must find a new location. Of course, there’s never any real hitting or pushing in the game. When they pretend to fight, they can never touch one another.

The children adopt the new rule. I feel as though I’ve lost. Maybe I should have made the rule myself. We came so close to a nearly unanimous banning of most explicit verbal violence at recess, before Nina and Gregory turned the tide against it. Why did they do that when they so courageously spoke out against the excessive violence at the beginning of the discussion?

Surely they are not afraid of Seth’s anger. I’ve seen them disagree with him publicly many times. Could it be that they want to protect children from hearing the violence they don’t like, but they also want Seth to be allowed to play the games that he loves? Their recess rules have ingeniously protected everyone, in a complex agreement I would never have imagined. They require that children playing together listen to each other, respect one another’s needs, and be inclusive, exactly the values that I’ve stressed all year. My respect for the children and for the group process goes up the more I think about what has taken place; we have an agreement that’s better than any rule I could have imposed.

As the year went on, the children were able to come to agreements by consensus, with increasing independence, so that eventually they could even at times solve problems at recess and come in and report to me when they came inside.

Many authors write a book to tell others about an idea that the author has already decided is true. I think of myself first and foremost as a teacher. I wrote Under Deadman’s Skin about what I did not know and about what, at first, I would have preferred to avoid. In the process of understanding why these children loved violence, and what I, as their teacher, could do about it, I discovered that their violent play actually had an important purpose, and that any plan to deal with it had to take that meaning into account.

By listening carefully to the children, especially when it seemed most difficult to do so, I could, like Jason, keep my head out of the covers and my eyes open.

[Applause]
 

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS FROM THE AUDIENCE

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m a freshman at Harvard. I wonder whether you found a difference between the way the boys and the girls in your class dealt with violence, and whether the older kids you talked to ever had any regrets about how they’d played?

JANE KATCH: There were differences between the boys and the girls in this class and their reactions to violence. It was predominantly boys who were playing those violent games, although not exclusively. Nina was enjoying them also.

But one difference between them was that the girls in this group were more likely to want to think about what the meaning of what was happening might be. For instance, a girl would sit at the lunch table watching some boys talk about their popsicle-stick battleship and say, "Why do boys like violence so much?" So that was one difference.

The girls had a much quieter way in this group of being involved in violence. They would leave someone out quietly. For instance, one girl would compliment everyone in the circle around her except one girl; and they all knew she was going to leave out that girl—they were waiting for her to do it. And then she would look up and see me watching and she’d say, "Oh, and I like your hairband." So, as one older girl told me, "Boys tease, girls spread rumors."

As for the second part of your question: It’s a funny thing. I had a discussion a couple of days ago with one of the children who played "The Suicide Game." He happened to not be feeling well, and he was sitting in the office waiting to be picked up. He said to me, "You know, my dad’s reading your book." And I said, "Oh," and he said, "What’s it about, exactly?"

And I said, "Well, you know that play that teachers don’t usually like that much? It’s about that kind of play." And he said, "You know, I used to play that Suicide Game. What if children don’t stop it?" And I said, "Well, what do you think?" And he said, "I think most of the time they just outgrow it."

I talked to Jason, one of the older children I interviewed, after the Columbine shootings. I asked him if he had changed his mind at all or had any new ideas about his love of violent video games, because that was such an issue in the media coverage of that event.

And he, at that point, said that he had begun to rethink the issue, and that he thought that violent video games were a problem sometimes, not necessarily for children who weren’t worried about things but for children who had built-up anger inside, that he thought it could really be bad for them. And I asked him what he thought his parents should do, because he valued his parents’ opinions even when he disagreed with them. He said that he thought that maybe they shouldn’t let him play them so much.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When I was reading your book, I was struck by how purposeful so much of what you did in your classroom was. You really did take a lot of time to talk with the children, evaluate things, and negotiate. But I think your experience in the classroom may be a little foreign to some teachers whose classrooms are really quite chaotic, and I’m wondering if you’ve been able to figure out how you would advise teachers to bring about a more peaceable kingdom within their classrooms.

Also, I’d love to know how you translated your observations to the other teachers that you work with, what that discussion was like, and how it’s influenced your school, if at all?

JANE KATCH: I’m lucky to be able to plan my own curriculum and to actually make this a part of my curriculum in terms of helping the children learn how to deal more cooperatively with each other. One way that I came to look at how to do that was to take the issues that are troublesome in terms of violent play and divide them into categories. The first category would be issues that have to do with safety, either physical safety or emotional safety, and I make rules to protect the children around those things. I make those rules; those are not up for negotiation.

Another issue that comes up is the kind of play that I might not personally enjoy, but it’s not causing a problem in my classroom. For instance, this year Pokemon is big in my room. I don’t like Pokemon play. It’s linguistically uninteresting, the children don't talk to each other very much, and they make noises that other people who don't watch the movie can’t understand. I don’t think it’s as valuable as some kinds of fantasy play, but I don’t have a problem with it because when Pokemon players do their aggressive acts towards each other, they happen over space. For instance, somebody says, "Pssssh," then something happens to somebody across the way, and then whoever is stronger wins a medal. It’s actually not very bloody. So the fact that it’s not physically aggressive makes it tolerable to me.

So, there are some things that I just decide to let go, because they don't bother me that much; they’re not really causing conflict. The issues that come up in between those two areas are the ones that the children can really learn from and grow from and have discussions about. So for instance, The Shooting Game, where there were conflicts that were really upsetting the children, was a good place to start in letting them make rules for themselves.

If the rule didn’t work, then we’d hear about it because the conflicts would continue, and we could make some different rules the next day. So that’s how I decide what stand to take with any particular conflicts that come up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I teach a course called "Violence and Non-Violence in Theory and Fiction" here, so I’m very intrigued by what you’re saying. My students do a lot of work with stories, short stories. And I guess what I’m wondering about is the whole issue of punishment and silencing or subduing children, or even people who are older.

You talked about how when you have exclusion going on, first of all, the child who excludes others feels justified. The excluded kid also feels so hurt sometimes that he or she feels entitled to use greater violence as a way of sort of getting back—but also those who exclude feel more entitled to increase the ante.

So I was thinking about the nature of punishment and what happens when a child or an older person does something wrong and people remove them; they basically exclude them and they attempt to subdue them. So, in a way, the child or the older person becomes more silenced, more subdued, more detached, which would seem to be more dangerous as a potential site of violence because we have no reading on the feelings.

JANE KATCH: Well, in my class I’m talking about very young children, and I think that most of the time they don't know—they don't really understand the effect that they’re having on each other. They also don't know how to get the effect that they want. And so I think it’s much more valuable to them to be a part of a group that’s exploring those issues than to be separated from it.

Now, there certainly might be times that you need to separate a child for some reason, but I think that in general a lot more growth is going to happen if they are a part of a group that’s exploring what the effects are of what they are doing, and what they might do differently in order to get an effect that’s really what they want.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But how does that translate into a bigger environment, the bigger issues of violence?

JANE KATCH: I really have to stick to the age group that I’m used to working with, although I did read a very interesting book called Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes by James Gilligan that does address that subject in a really unusual and thought-provoking way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am an elementary education teacher in Lexington. I’ve been reading a lot about play within PE class and how they’re stopping games of "Bombardment" or "Kickball" because it’s a lot of competition and children are still left out. And yet, our before- and after-school extensions allow that to take place. How do you feel about allowing that sort of play in PE, or before or after school? Does that have a great bearing upon what happens in a classroom?

JANE KATCH: I certainly think that with the age of children that I work with, the competitive games are really difficult for them. Even when they’re old enough to understand the rules and they seem to be able to play by the rules, they still find it very difficult to lose. They take it very personally. I had a group a few years ago who were spectacular chess players at five, unbelievably good. But when they lost, they’d throw the board across the room, and I had to ban chess from the class for that year. So even though they look as though they can handle it, a lot of times they take it so personally they really can’t do it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wonder what would have happened if you had let some of the exclusive sort of behavior just continue to see how it would have panned out. Maybe the kids would have, for a time, acted as if they were in exclusionary little groups, but then over time they would have come back with all their different, varied interests. The situation would equalize itself over time, so that the kids who were going to end up being big army soldiers could carry on being roughhousers, but the ones who are the smart little kids could take interests in other sorts of things, and their power would come back in that respect.

JANE KATCH: That certainly would be a different way of approaching the problem. But since it’s very important to me that, with these young children, each of them be empowered to feel competent in the classroom, socially and emotionally and in terms of their world, I really place an emphasis on inclusion in the group. So because that’s my philosophy, everything that I do in the classroom builds on those issues.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Were they all playing the same game, or were there different games? Were you only trying to intervene in games that were problematic? Because I just remember when I was in elementary school, we had a huge space and there was very little supervision. There were so many different groups playing so many different games.

JANE KATCH: That’s true in my class too. There are many different groups, and the children who were talking about the "Bloodman" and "Deadman" were a small group in my classroom, while other children were playing puppies and kitties in the block area. I certainly didn’t intervene in play that wasn’t causing anybody a problem. But things have changed since you and I went to school, and now children in kindergarten can be suspended for pointing a finger and saying "bang" in school. People are much more concerned about the fantasy content of what children are playing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m a student in pastoral ministry, and I’m working on a paper on violence and spirituality. It occurs to me that you could do [address this issue] on an individual basis, and that’s very effective. But in a setting like this of a graduate school of education, I wonder if there shouldn’t be some attempt to make this more of a part of a curriculum. It could be brought out either in case study form, even with children as young as [kindergarten] or perhaps a little bit older, when children have had experience with violent situations. They might reflect on cases and consider, "How would you feel if you were Alice in this situation?" Students could go through vicarious experiences of their own feelings as being the victim or the aggressor. I’d like to hear what you have to say about that.

JANE KATCH: I think that’s a good idea. We do a lot of that in my classroom. When a situation comes up that’s problematic, we’ll act out the situation, and I’ll ask the children for suggestions for how it might be resolved. Then the two children who are acting out that problem will decide how they’re going to end their story. One of the values of it is that they see that in any given situation there are a lot of possible ways to deal with the problem, and that they can find one that feels right to them. So, as a group process, as well as an individual process, I think that it can be really helpful.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m chair of the Cambridge Public Health Committee, and we consider violence one of our big public health issues. When I had little boys—and this was before videos and TV—they played violent games and said things such as, "Bang-bang. You’re dead." My pacifist friends all thought that was awful. But I thought it was working out their aggressions in a harmless way. They all grew up to be fine, upstanding citizens, and they don’t go around shooting people. Do you find that some of this violent play is actually useful?

JANE KATCH: I had cap guns, too, and I played Annie Oakley. I had a little fringe vest and a cowgirl skirt. I played the same game with my brother, and we’re both in the helping professions now. I agree with you; I think that it’s very important for children to be allowed to express their fantasies, for a lot of reasons. I think that it’s important for them to know that having those fantasies doesn’t mean that they’re bad, that it’s a normal part of growing up. When they play those games together, they’re discovering that.

An adult who read my book said, "Before I read your book I thought I was the only one who thought those things as a child." She was relieved to find out that wasn’t true. So I think there’s a value that way. There’s another value, though, in that it’s a window to see what our children are thinking about and feeling.

A teacher asked me whether it was all right that she had not intervened when two children were playing a game after the Columbine shootings where one was standing up and the other was pretending to shoot her. Then they would fall down and laugh and get up and play it again. It was clearly a re-enactment of what they had seen on the television. I think that not only is it important that they be allowed to play that, but also it gives the adult a chance to discuss it with them, because children can have many misconceptions and need clarification from adults when they’ve seen something that does disturb them. So, it’s an opportunity to do that and to really listen to the children rather than to silence their concerns.

If, on the day after the Columbine shootings, someone had walked into our staff room at school and said, "Anyone who thinks about the Columbine shootings is going to become a killer," it wouldn’t have been helpful to us. We needed to, first of all, express our feeling for the people we had seen and heard about. What would it have been like to have been those people—the mothers, the children, the teachers? Could this really happen here? Is there anything we can do to make it better?

And what those children are doing when they’re playing this game is exactly the same thing: they’re experiencing the empathy for what those other people had gone through, and then they’re wondering, "Could it happen to me?" And it’s a chance for us to explore that with them.

Thank you very much.