things I would like to tell my students’ parents (but won’t) May 29, 2012

1. Could you please check your child’s backpack weekly, if you can’t manage daily?  Do you remember back in October when we met at your parent conference and I asked you politely to keep checking your child’s backpack?  It makes me sad when I see your child’s carefully created work getting ripped and wrecked because it’s still in his backpack.  It makes me feel frustrated when I go through your child’s backpack and find notes in there from March.  And it makes me feel like you don’t care what is happening here when you never read my reminders or newsletter or calendar, and you’ve got no clue that we have a field trip or party coming up.
2. I sent home the bus form for next year four times.  Once it was even pinned to your child’s backpack.  So please, don’t tell me you never saw it.  (But could you please send it in tomorrow, for Pete’s sake?!)
3. If your child has asthma, would you please send unexpired medication to school?  September would be a good time to do this.  It makes me sad when your child starts wheezing and there is NOTHING I can do about it because we have no meds here, even though I have reminded you several times.
4. Would you please find out what the weather is going to be before your send your preschooler to school?  You can find out on tv, online, by phone, on the radio, or in the newspaper.  It would prevent your child from coming to school in just shorts and a t-shirt on very cold days, or from coming to school with a wool coat plus hat and mittens on very warm days.
5. Before you pull your child out of school, could you please mention it to me?  We want to be able to say goodbye to your child, and it would be nice to send his journal, art work, memory book, and assessment portfolio along with him.

That is all.  Thank you.

Meeting the new bunch May 22, 2012

One day last week I sent my class to the local library for story time, along with a sub provided by the Princess, my assistant, my Americorps volunteer, and our special ed teacher.  I stayed behind to meet the kids I will have in the fall, who came with their parents for registration.

While the parents filled out forms and talked to interpreters and/or the principal, “the little kids” (as I called them when I explained to my class why I wasn’t coming to the library) came into the room with me.  I had hoped for seven, but actually got thirteen.  That’s great turnout for our school.

I had them sit down in the meeting area, and guess what book I read?  Of course, it was Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!  I read that every spring at registration, and again on the first day of school.  It’s one of those books that just hooks kids, and gets them to love reading right away.  These little guys loved it, but they were surprisingly quiet about telling the pigeon ‘No!’ to all his crazy requests.

I gave them snack, and then put out toys for them to play with.  The group was adorable, and some of them I am really excited about.  One little guy is the younger brother of a student I had last year.  The older brother pretended for months that he couldn’t speak English, until one day when we overheard him, and he gave us an awesome, twinkly grin when we said we knew he could speak English after all.  The younger brother didn’t go for subterfuge; he was speaking great English to me right away, and was really confident and excited.  He wasn’t nervous at all, because he felt like he already knew me.

Another child won my heart at the end, when we cleaned up and I sent them back to their parents, in the hall.  She looked into my room longingly.  ”It’s beautiful,” she said, pointing through the glass window on our door.  ”Your home, it’s beautiful.”

I won’t be living in my classroom, but I will be delighted to welcome “the little kids” in the fall.

I’m in the right place May 19, 2012

One morning, not long ago, one of my brightest little boys made my day.  His bus arrives early, so every morning he peeks in through the window on our door, sometimes jumping up and down with excitement.  If he sees one of us moving around the room, getting it ready, we can hear him crow, “I see Mrs. X!”

Finally, we opened the door.  He flew in, pumped his arms, and said, “Whoo hoo!”

Because he was at school.

I really love this job.

the checklist: what we are supposed to learn May 11, 2012

Yesterday during morning meeting I commented on how well the kids have done with learning the alphabet.  “That was your job this year, and you did it!”

Then a very serious boy raised his hand and said, “did we do all that stuff up there?”

“What stuff, honey?”

He pointed to the list above our bulletin board.  “That stuff.”

I turned, and looked, and said, “well, let’s see.”  I started to read the items on the list.  “Write your name.  Do you know how to do that?”

“Yes!” chorused the class.

“Name body parts?  Name capital letters, and lowercase letters?  Numbers to 10?  Count to 31?  Count to 100?” and so on.  We went through the whole list, and found that we had accomplished all of it.  (Okay, with some exceptions concerning children with special needs.)

A boy who came to my class in September with nothing but enthusiasm and an inability to stop interrupting me called out, “That’s because we are so smart!”

Yes, honey, you are.  You all are so smart.

Maurice Sendak, king of all Wild Things, has died May 8, 2012

The New York Times reported sad news this morning.  Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are and many other children’s classics, died at the age of 83.

I love his books, and have long admired him.  As the Times said,

In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children’s literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow.

In the Night Kitchen was on my little sister’s bookshelf, and I loved the anarchy of it — the naked little boy off on an adventure with no parent-like grownups around.  His illustrations for the Little Bear books by Elsa Holmelund Minarik were wonderful, and his little Nutshell books are perfectly funny and quirky.

I loved, too, his grumpy persona in interviews.  He spoke his mind, and never went anywhere near the cutesy or sentimental.

But it is Where the Wild Things Are that has made the biggest impact on me.  It strikes me as one of the most perfect children’s books ever written.  If you have read it over and over again for years, like I have, his writing becomes more and more beautiful with each reading.  The words to Wild Things hang together as a stunning poem, and every time I read them, I bow down before Sendak’s artistry.

National Teacher Appreciation Week discount at Container Store May 7, 2012

The Container Store is having a 20% off sale for teachers, through May 31.  If you sign up here for their Organized Teacher discount program, you will qualify for the discount.  It’s probably worth doing; the Container Store has great stuff, and most of us need to be better organized.

zip, zoom, hello, goodbye May 4, 2012

Two of my new students are now gone, just like that.  To be honest, my life is easier without them, but still.  ARGH.  Why would you put your child in a preschool class for a month, and then pull him/her out without even saying goodbye?

One family pulled their child out suddenly, saying that he/she was being teased.  They never talked to me, never called the school, just pulled the child.  A social worker called the school to let the school secretary know.  I talked to the Princess, and she sighed.  If parents say there is bullying going on but never contact the school to let them know, then there is nothing we can do to make it better.  She said that sometimes she gets asked, “why didn’t you do anything to address the incident?” but how can she, if she never knew that it happened?!  We asked one of our interpreters to call the family and ask them to come in to talk about what happened, but I haven’t heard if she ever reached them.

The other child was pulled because his family moved.  That is fairly common among low-income families, unfortunately.  They never called me to tell me, though, just pulled him out.

It frustrates me that the parents think so little of school, of me, of their child’s friends, that they wouldn’t even think to let us say goodbye.  And the child’s things at school just go in the garbage, because, you know, the work children do at preschool is so unimportant.

On the bright side, Little One is calmer, the sun is shining, and the class is a more manageable size.

I know how to write the letter Q April 26, 2012

Not too long ago, the letter of the week was Q.  I introduced it, and then demonstrated how to write it on my big chart paper.  First I wrote capital Q correctly, a few times, and then I showed how to write lowercase q.

“Now I’m going to write it the wrong way.”  I made a few ridiculous-looking capital Q’s and the kids giggled happily.  They enjoyed my “bad” q’s as well.

One little boy (who sits right in front of me because he used to be so excited about school he had to interrupt me about it all the time) started looking worried.  It seemed to make him uncomfortable to see me not be able to write a letter properly.

I said, “Shall I fix this?” and the kids chorused, “Yeah!”

I wrote lowercase q the correct way.

The little boy shouted, “Yay, teacher!  You DID it!”

Those are the little moments that keep me going.

the flaw in my brilliant plan April 25, 2012

I believe that I am a very good teacher, and that classroom management (behavior, organization, community-building, routines, etc.) is one of my strengths.  And that is largely true.  I start off the year by teaching the children all of our routines, hold them to high expectations for behavior and academics, and then teach them step-by-step how to meet those expectations.

While the beginning of the year is exhausting, by mid-October the class has settled into school and my room has become a well-oiled, high-functioning machine.  My room is calm, happy, loving, and purposeful.  It works great, and it makes me feel great to have gotten there.

However, I have just discovered the flaw in my way of doing things.  I expect that from October to June, things will mostly go according to plan.  I have failed to accomodate for the possibility of getting new kids in the spring who don’t know any of my rules, routines, or expectations, and who are way behind all the kids I’ve been able to teach since September.

So here I am, completely flummoxed and frustrated, because I have new students who don’t know that they are supposed to listen to me when I say their names, who don’t know that hitting is not reasonable behavior, who don’t know that books are precious and it is not okay to write in them, and who don’t even know how to wash their hands.  I am no longer in beginning-of-school mode, and it is overwhelming sometimes to think of all the things I have to reteach.

Yesterday was another bad day.  I was short-tempered, and felt terrible about it.

April is late, too: musings on my failures April 17, 2012

I haven’t posted much lately.  I think it’s because usually my posts about my year and my class tell a story, and this year, the narrative keeps getting botched up.

Three years in a row I had an awesome class.  Last year’s bunch mostly had two parents at home, even the ones who were in poverty, and it really showed.  This year I have a lot of awesome students, but as a whole, it has been a difficult group.  I guess it was time for me to experience a little adversity.

It’s April, and I am having difficulty seeing the progress my lovelies have made.  That’s been overshadowed by the progress some of my lovelies haven’t made at all.  One of my special ed students has a tentative diagnosis of developmental delay, but I think that it might change to something like developmentally and cognitively disabled.  This child has learned very little all year, no matter how hard we have all tried.  Another one used to show a lot of progress, both in behavior and academics, but things are so bad at home that it doesn’t matter what we do, the rage and fear and stress have taken over.  I am powerless to make things better.  (Yes, we have called Child Protection.  They won’t do anything.)  I’m watching a child suffer and I can’t help.  My third special ed student (that’s another story — I’m only supposed to have two, but somehow just got a third) shows signs of having been allowed to be dependent on adults for too many things, so I’ve got two months to teach this child how to be independent.  A fourth student hasn’t learned much all year in terms of academics or basic skills, so I am trying to have him referred to special ed, but it may be too late in the year.

I’ve gotten three new students recently (plus I had two “old” students return from being overseas for almost two months).  Two of my lovely, charming babies moved to another school, and were replaced by a child who doesn’t speak any English, a child whose parents have not prepared him for school academically (he can’t speak in coherent sentences, can’t recognize or write his name, knows no letters/sounds/numbers/shapes, can’t count past two, etc.), and the third special ed child I mentioned.

April is usually when you start to measure tons of progress and it’s a good feeling, but all I can see right now are the kids I can’t help.  How can I get kids ready for kindergarten when they are only in my room for two months?  Or when their special needs are so overwhelming?  Or their families are so dysfunctional?