Under Deadman's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play

by Jane Katch

The five-and six-year-olds in my class have invented a new game they call suicide. I have never seen a game I hate so much in which all the children involved are so happy.

So begins Under Deadman's Skin , a deceptively simple-and compellingly readable-teachers' tale. Jane Katch, in the tradition of Vivian Paley and Jonathan Kozol, uses her student's own vocabulary and storytelling to set the scene: a class of five-and six-year-olds obsessed with what is to their teacher hatefully violent fantasy play. Katch asks, 'Can I make a place in school for understanding these fantasies, instead of shutting them out?'

Over the course of the year she holds group discussions to determine what kind of play creates or calms turmoil; she illustrates (or rather the children illustrate) the phenomenon of very young children needing to make sense of exceptionally violent imagery; and she consults with older grade-school boys who remember what it was like to be obsessed by violence and tell Katch what she can do to help. Katch's classroom journey-one that leads her to rules and limits that keep children secure-is an enabling blueprint for any teacher or parent disturbed by violent children's play.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Psychology

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2001

About the author

For the last thirty years, Jane Katch has taught young children, first at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and currently at the Touchstone Community School in Grafton, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Oberlin College and a Master of Science in Teaching from the University of Chicago. She was a counselor at the University of Chicago Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children directed by Bruno Bettelheim.





While working with Bettelheim, she counseled emotionally disturbed adolescent girls. It was an experience that taught her, she says, that it can be less frightening to face one's fears than to run from them. While at the Laboratory Schools, Katch student-taught with Vivian Paley and then taught kindergarten and nursery school for thirteen years, taking a two year leave of absence to have her first child and to be a part-time director of a small nursery school next door to her home.





Katch is the author of Under Deadman's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play (Beacon, 2000) and They Don't Like Me: Lessons on Bullying and Teasing from a Preschool Classroom (Beacon, 2003). She has presented lectures and workshops at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Tufts University, Wheelock College, and Lesley College.





"

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katch is a kindergarten teacher who explores the violent play that is brought into her classroom by children who are exposed to TV/movies at home with violence and sex in them. Through the children's dialog the author describes her own learning process of understanding exclusionary play as related to violence, and the difference between violent play (a means for children to process violence that they see) and violence itself.

[Erin Hearts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this little book that studies violent play of children because I've always wondered about that. I don't have that instinct for using my body for physical violence, so it was hard for me to understand it when I've seen students and my son be enamoured in that way. I really appreciate that the author, a teacher and psychologist, wrote it almost like a play that depicts exactly the way her students talked to each other and how they would try to gain power. It seems we all have this violent instinct and with the right guidance, we can learn to communicate and get our needs met in nonviolent ways. As humans, we might always have that attraction towards the unknown and what our bodies are made of.

[Andrea Cleland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love that the teacher tries to check her own feeling on violent play and researches to find that it isn’t what she/ we are afraid of. I don’t like all the gender stereotyping that abounds in the classroom

[Anna Minayeva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love kid's dialogs, they make me trust kids/ believing that everything will be good no matter what and stress the importance of open dialogue.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting...

[sparklemaia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent and thoughtful book overall. There was one awkward chapter where Katch used disabled African children as inspiration porn for her class of American kindergarteners. Katch's niece had volunteered in Zimbabwe at a school for children with physical disabilities, and Katch sees the photos of two of the smiling, dramatically disfigured kids and brings the photos in to her classroom to teach her American kindergarteners about how African children are impoverished but happy, and then asks her students to "tell stories that African children might tell" full of animals and folktale lessons and definitely no TV-inspired violence. Because according to Katch, kids in Africa live simplistic, impoverished, happy lives without the taint of being exposed to media. This whole chapter was extremely uncomfortable in its handling of race, class, disability, and nationality. This could have been a great opportunity for Katch to explore diversity and difference with her kindergarteners, breaking apart stereotypes to look for complexity, humanizing and personalizing children living in this particular part of Zimbabwe; instead, the children in the photographs are reduced to the trope of "happy, poor, uncivilized, (AND disabled) African children." But the rest of the book was very good, with a few minor bumps here and there.

[Private Account · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another waste of my time. More personal essays where a lady with no information who does almost no research "tries to make sense" of something and then concludes at the end that life is just soooooo complicated. Just like the last book I read there was a ton of transcripts of children's conversations--which made me really glad my son will never be going to public school. (And it's not even what the kids say that is so horrifying, it's how this teacher "helps"!)



Dear Katch,

if you read this review, please read Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto and Guide to Writing Fiction for a better understanding of fiction, then read Montessori's Secret of Childhood and the Science Behind the Genius for a better understanding of fantasy, then read John Holt's How Children Learn. Then listen to the School Sucks Podcasts's first 25 episodes and read Gatto's Underground History of American Education. Then you will have a much better understanding of your subject and could write a much more interesting and enlightening book. This was just... silly. So sorry. You seem like a nice lady.

Roslyn

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saw this woman featured on a PBS special on schools and the education of boys. I'll probably have to face this one day. This was a fascinating read. It is broken into small chapters and easily understood. She mainly uses actual dialog recorded at the special school she worked at. I think this goes well with my other recent read, 'Why Gender Matters' on understanding boys. It is a fairly short book, so I would suggest checking it out from your library.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teacher records conversations in her first grade class and reflects on them in an attempt to understand their violent language and play. She also discusses violence with 9 year olds in another class. Coincidently, the massacre at Columbine occurs during this very school year and is discussed by the first graders.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Follows a teacher and her understanding of why children play contains so much violence and what we can do to help them past it. I thought she could have made more suggestions for other teachers dealing with the same problems. Her descriptions of her classroom and students were excellent, but I could have used a more thorough discussion of her philosophy, background and situation.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into the play of kindergartners - how they use play to process the violent images they see on the screen (television, movies, video games) and, more importantly, how adults can assist children through empathetic conversations about these violent games and obsessions.

[Nephyr · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book changed the way that I veiw violence in children's play. It's fascinating.

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book was not what I had expected. It was not informative but made very basic observations of the play of 5 and 6 yr olds.

[Samantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Man, was this book a waste of 3 precious nights of reading.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jane Katch explores her own avoidance and hatred of violent play in the classroom with discussions from her own kindergarten class and an older 4th grade class.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

We should not shut down children's play, but explore it. Even if it scares us or we don't understand it.