They Don't Like Me:
Lessons on Bullying and Teasing from a Preschool Classroom

School is the arena in which most children first become aware of themselves as part of a social group. It is also the place where they will experience, as nearly all children do, the sting of exclusion. Is there a way, though, that teachers can help children resist the urge to tease and bully and to take a role in stopping this behavior in others? Can children learn to listen carefully to one another, look at a situation from another child's perspective, and form groups in which everyone is treated as a valued member?

In her new book, They Don't Like Me, preschool teacher Jane Katch explores these questions while chronicling the intense dynamics among the young children in her classroom. Bringing to her observations a deep respect for her students, an unending curiosity about what influences the social world of young children, and years of experience forging democratic classrooms, Katch looks at how each member of the group, including the teacher, contributes to exclusion.

Katch's classroom has a rule based on Vivian Paley's work: you can't say you can't play. The rule works fairly well until a new girl named Zoe destabilizes classroom dynamics by insisting on having things her way.

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"In a well-reasoned explanation, Katch weaves the voices of the children with her own perspective to demonstrate that open discussion beats censorship every time." - Boston Herald

"Jane Katch's narrative about children and violenceŠmakes compelling reading." - Rebecca Kesner in Principal

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

by Jane Katch with an introduction by Vivian Paley

"We flood our children with violent images, and then we do no want them to express their reactions through playŠat the same time, they need to learn to articulate their feelings about their play, to listen to each other and to make rules that will help them treat each other with empathy and respect." --Jane Katch in Under Deadmanąs Skin

In Jane Katch's classroom of five- and six-year-olds, there is an art section with brightly colored paints, a dress-up area with outlandish pink boas and long sparkly dresses, and a quiet space for reading and resting. Almost all the students prefer to spend their time in the drama area playing Suicide. One student hands another an apple, calling it a hand grenade. He instructs that student to blow himself up by exploding the grenade while sitting in the special suicide seat. When everyone has committed suicide, the game is over, and the students move on to a discussion of the scary and gory R-rated movie they all want to see, Deadman.

Violence in our nation's classrooms has become all too pervasive, and in the wake of numerous school shootings, Americans are terrified of the dangerous consequences of kindergartners who play Suicide and watch R-rated films. In Under Deadman's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play, Jane Katch takes on this difficult issue. Katch is uniquely qualified to discuss violence in young children given her training under Bruno Bettelheim at the Orthogenic School and with Vivian Paley at the University of Chicago Lab School. Katch has also taught young children for many years at a school in central Massachusetts.

Rather than banning violent images from her classroom, Katch makes her students' fantasies the subject of ongoing discourse.

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Excerpt from Under Deadman's Skin