on death and dying February 4, 2010

At our centers time meeting I was picking clothespins out of the bag, calling children, and asking them where they wanted to work, when Pumpkin raised his hand and waved it around urgently.  I thought he was going to tell me which center he wanted to work at, to which I would have replied, “honey, wait until I pull out the clothespin with your name on it, and then I’ll ask you where you want to work.”

“Yes, Pumpkin?”

“Teacher, I don’t want to die!  I don’t want to die.”  He shook his head and then looked at his lap.  Yikes.  Not what I was expecting.

“Oh, honey, you’re not going to die for a really really really long time.  It’s going to be okay.”  I had to keep pulling out clothespins and calling names, but finally I got to him.  “Pumpkin, where do you want to work?”

“Art.  But I don’t want to die.”

“I know, it’s scary to think about.  Come here, honey.”

He stood in front of me.  “If I die my mom and dad and brother won’t have me around anymore.”  He looked like he was going to cry.

“Do you know someone who died?”  He nodded.  “Who?”

He mumbled.  “Who died?” I asked again.  He pointed.  It was a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Oh, you’re talking about Dr. King?!”  He nodded again, and this time really looked close to tears.

“Do you want to sit on my lap?”  He nodded, then got on my lap and sighed.  “Pumpkin, it was really sad when Dr. King died.  But I don’t usually think about that.  I like to think about his life.  Did you know that he was a daddy?  He used to play with his kids, and read stories to them, and tuck them in at night.  And he did a lot of wonderful things for us.  Remember how we talked about how black people couldn’t go to the same schools with white people?  And they had to sit at the back of the bus, and they had to drink from different water fountains and swim in different pools?  That was terrible, and mean.  Dr. King helped change that.  He made this world a better place, and that’s what I like to think about when I think about him.”

Pumpkin grinned, and hopped off to go to math to make a snowman and count the buttons.  Zoom!  He was all better, and I was overwhelmed, once again, by what a privilege it is to be a preschool teacher some days.

you’ve got mail! February 2, 2010

I picked up some empty cardboard wine boxes when I stocked up on wine last time, and today Miss Slinger and I turned them into mailboxes.  The class went wild.  It was the most high-energy centers time we’ve had in long time.  At the art center and the writing center, lots of children were making valentines and writing notes, and then delivering them.  I got several love notes in my mail box, and so did Miss Slinger.

Valentine’s Day is heaven for preschoolers and their teachers.

legos February 1, 2010

At centers time today a little boy who frequently has to go to the office with me to talk to our Spanish translator, S. (“your teacher says please pee IN the toilet; your teacher wants you to stop talking to your friends at morning meeting; your teacher says don’t forget to wear your boots to school when it is snowing” etc.) built a lego replica of the translator’s desk, complete with a little lego man to represent S., and another little lego guy to represent his adorable little troublemaking self.

I wish I’d had my picture to take a picture of it.  We went to the office and showed it to S., who was delighted.  How often do you get represented in legos?

ice February 1, 2010

The cold isn’t bothering me.  The ice, however, is.  I find it frustrating to drive on icy, rutted roads, and I’m particularly tired of walking gingerly on icy sidewalks.

It occurs to me that walking on the ice is a metaphor for how I’m feeling right now:  like I might fall down at any moment.

On Friday Cherry didn’t come to school for the fourth time that week, so I called Mom.  It turns out Cherry didn’t feel like coming to school, so her mother kept her at the daycare center where they live.  (Cherry goes there before and after she’s in my class.)

I had to tell Cherry’s mother that those are unexcused absences, and too many of those will mean that Cherry has to leave so that a child on the waiting list can get in, and I really don’t want that to happen.  I pointed out how bright Cherry is, and how she’s on the verge of reading and writing for real, and that she won’t get much academic stimulation at her daycare.  Her mother agreed, and said she’d send her on Monday.  I told her that she should put her foot down and put Cherry on the bus, even if she throws a tantrum.  I told her that as a mother, my message to my children is, if we agreed to commit to something, we’re seeing it through.  I’ve taken my son to swimming even though he’s really mad and says he hates swimming, and then seen him relax and have fun once he’s in the pool, time and time again.  After we hung up I questioned myself and wondered if I was pushing Cherry’s mother too hard, and if I had put her on the defensive.

But really, who doesn’t send their child to school for four days because the child says, “I don’t want to go”??

Then at the end of the morning, a girl we’ll call Carrots threw a fit and refused to go outside to the bus.  I came back in with Zucchini, whose bus was late, and saw Carrots lying on the floor in the middle of the hall, and Miss Slinger looking hassled.  I told Miss Slinger to go take her lunch break, told Carrots to get up several times (and was refused several times), so then I picked her up and carried her into the office.  As I was lifting her, I was thinking, I probably shouldn’t be doing this.  But there was no one else to watch her, and I had to take Zucchini back outside for his bus.

Later, when Zucchini was on his way home, and Carrots had run out of the office several times, told me “I hate you” and stuck her tongue out at me, and run to the water fountain to stick her mittened hand in the water, I got a chance to talk to Carrots’ mother, who was running late to a doctor’s appointment, and was looking hassled herself.  Later I thought, did I handle this right?  Poor woman, she comes to pick up her child and her child is throwing a fit and the teacher wants to arrange a conference to talk about her daughter’s behavior….

I went home doubting myself.

Then on Sunday one son had a friend over, and I chatted with the friend’s mother briefly.  Her family is having all sorts of troubles, with depression and social isolation among the issues, and after she left I felt like I was a sponge, and I’d soaked up all her stress.  I went upstairs to check my work email, and found copies of letters that a group of angry parents had written about how poorly things are going for their children, and how they all want to abandon our school (more on this later — these parents actually have reason to be angry), and that really made me tense.  I associate myself and my professionalism with the place I work, and I hate to have our school under attack, even if I have to admit it is deserved.

I spent the rest of Sunday feeling wound-up, anxious, and unhappy.  Now it’s Monday and I think I will try to go in early, fortified with coffee, and try to forge through.  I’m also going to try really hard not to let other people’s problems feel like they are my problems.

well, apple loves me January 28, 2010

Just when you want to get good and grumpy, some preschooler goes and cheers you up.

Apple is a cute, chubby, quiet little girl in my class.  She speaks no English, and isn’t all that coherent in Spanish, either.  (She may be heading for a special ed evaluation, because she hasn’t learned much so far this year in terms of basic skills.  She has, however, learned how to follow classroom routines, and she’s really good at playing with legos.)

Apple fell in love with me over the weekend.  Not sure why, but she did.  She came in Monday morning and threw her arms around me, and said, “Mr. X!” with joy.  (She can’t say “Mrs.” for some reason, so I’m Mr. X.)  Every day since then she has been showering me with love and hugs.

Today she proudly gave me some writing she had done.

“Oh, is this for me?  Thank you, Apple!  Can you read it to me, please?”

Apple stared at her paper.  It was covered with pretend writing.  She thought, then traced her finger along her scribbles, left to right, top to bottom, and read:

“Mr. X, Mr. X, Mr. X, Mr. X.”

How’s that for a love letter?

the winter blues January 25, 2010

I have had some really great weekends lately.  In fact, they have been so nice that I have found myself clinging to them desperately and dreading Monday morning.  And that worries me.

Work is going well — at least, the teaching preschool part of it is.  Mentoring, not so much.  I have two post-observation reports to write, and they are both ridiculously late, so I feel guilty and tense about it.  I just need to sit down and get them done, I know, but it’s hard when you dread doing something so much.

I think the absence of sunshine has something to do with this.  Waking up in the mornings is painful, and I just want to be at home.

Anyone else having the winter doldrums?

counting with Pumpkin January 20, 2010

So, on a lighter note, I tried working with Pumpkin today on the numbers 1-10.  I haven’t written about him much lately, because he is really growing up and is doing so well in school.  He is much less likely to interrupt, much less likely to start to scream because someone took his lego, and unfortunately, much less likely to say really wild and creative things.

However, he is not too firm on the numbers 1-10 yet, so at centers time I pulled him from the sand table, and had him work with me in the empty block corner with big laminated number cards that I made.

First I flipped over one card at a time and asked him, “what number?”  He knew all of them except 9 and 10, and one other small number, I forget which one.

“Great!  Now, let’s put them in a line in order, because they are all mixed up.  Which number comes first?”

He smiled at me.  No clue.

“When you start to count, which number do you say first?”

“Two!”  He crowed.

“We start with two?  Are you sure?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay, how about you count my fingers.  We’ll see which number comes first.”  I held up my hand.

Pumpkin reached out and touched a finger.  “One…”

“That’s it!”  I said.  “We start counting with one!”  Pumpkin laughed delightedly.  “Okay,” I said, “let’s put the one in the first place.”  He was able to find the one card and put it down.

“What number comes after one?”  He had to count my fingers again to figure out that it was two.

“Now what number comes after two?”  Pumpkin grinned at me, but again, no clue.

“Okay, honey, count my fingers again.”  He pointed to my ring finger and said, “One…”

I interrupted him.  “Let’s start with my pinkie finger for one.”

He pointed at my pinkie finger and continued, “Two…”

“Oops, no, honey, start over with one.”

Finally he counted to THREE.  I was practically sweating at this point.

*****

After getting through five, I asked, “What number comes after five?”  He didn’t know, so I held up two hands so he could count.  He counted the fingers on one hand, and then stopped.  When I indicated that he should keep counting, using my other hand, he pointed to the thumb of that hand and said, “One…”

He really had no idea that after five comes six.  So I walked him through the numbers to ten, and finally, finally we had them all on the floor in order.  Then I asked him to step on the number I said.  He thought that would be great.

“Three.”  Pumpkin went and stood on the number eight.  Eight and three do look a lot alike, but Pumpkin wasn’t able to think about the fact that three is a small number, and that it is near the beginning, not too far from one.  I don’t think he has any sense yet of the numbers in relation to each other.

*****

Pumpkin had a wonderful time, and he did get some more, much-needed exposure to the numbers.  I was tickled by his enthusiasm, and a little tired when I thought about how far we have yet to go.

I once had a student named Button January 19, 2010

A long time ago I taught kindergarten in an urban area, at a school with a very high poverty rate.  One year I had a little boy — we’ll call him Button, because he was as cute as one — whose family was in disarray, and who had gotten inadequate parenting in his first years of life.

His academic skills were extremely low, and he could barely talk.  He had difficulty forming lots of sounds, but he also had a very small vocabulary and not much experience speaking in sentences.  Button was very sweet, and caused few problems in class, but I worried because he was so far behind and his communication skills were so poor.  His father, who had recently taken custody from his mother, was a nice man who was doing the best he could, but who admitted he didn’t have much experience raising a child.  His mother I only met at the end of the year, at kindergarten graduation.  She said to me, “My Button is so smart; he is such a smart boy,” and I couldn’t think of anything to say (“well, actually, he is really far behind where he needs to be, going into first grade”?!), so I just smiled at her.  I wished that I could have done more for him.

On Saturday Button was walking down the street when somebody shot him.

Button is dead.  He was sixteen years old.  I was his kindergarten teacher.

teachers and time January 11, 2010

So I’m reading this Atlantic Monthly article about “What Makes a Good Teacher,” and thinking about the finding that good teachers spend a lot of time preparing for their classes.  And each morning lately I have had trouble getting through everything I need to do, so time is on my mind.

I understand why spending a lot of time on preparation helps a teacher be a good teacher, and I feel bad about not spending enough of my own time on preparation these days.  It’s harder for me to be willing to do it now — back when I had little kids at home and little kids at school my whole life and all my time was about little kids needing me.  Now my children are older and more independent, and I’m ready to claim some of my time back.  It’s hard to keep coming in to work early and staying late, and so I just don’t do it as much anymore.  I guard my private time fiercely — I think I’ve earned the right to read some novels, and I know that if I devote all my time to the needs of all the different children in my life, I will become stressed and unhappy, which won’t be good for any of them, whether they be my sons or my students.

Then when I’m at work, time is an issue.  There is so much that I’d like to do — or need to do — each day, that it is hard to get to it all.  Today we watched a clip from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and we visited National Geographic kids to watch videos about fish (we particularly liked the one about the mola), and we visited Starfall to learn about the letter L, and those were just the things we did using the video data projector.  We also had gym class, and centers time (of course), and morning meeting.  In my role as mentor teacher, I am supposed to be assessing my kids for writing workshop (a pre-assessment to gauge their progress as we get into the writer’s workshop process, which is next up on our staff development plan), but I decided to put it off until tomorrow, and do an intro to writer’s workshop instead of reader’s workshop.  Or maybe try to do both, if I shorten centers time.  Argh.

There’s also my internal to-do list.  A person from the early childhood department came this morning to do a letters and sounds assessment with my class, because I’ve been to busy to get it done myself.  (It was great that she came — I know I’m lucky to have that kind of support.)  I remembered to track down the social worker who speaks Spanish to talk to the child I’ve been worrying about as a possible case of neglect.  I forgot to get any portfolio assessment done at centers time.  I almost forgot to write the morning message or teach the class about the letter L.  I ran out of time for story time.  And I have lots of things to do as a mentor — books about teaching writing to kids that I need to read, and observation reports that I need to finish.

At the end of the morning, however, there was extra time.  The bus was late picking up the children.  We huddled inside the door, waiting, and we sang songs, practiced counting in English and Spanish, and then talked about lunch.  I told them I was going to have chicken and rice for my lunch — and then the children helped me remember the phrase arroz con pollo to describe it.  The Latino children’s faces glowed, and they told me, “I eat that, too!”

the spectrum January 7, 2010

There is a child in my class with sort of “off” behaviors.  It just occurred to me today for the first time that this child might be on the autism spectrum.

Sigh.  Now I have to figure out what to do about it.