Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
PERMISSIONS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - August: Beginning the Year
Opening Up the Room
Names
Taking Time
Chapter 2 - Routines and Rituals: Making the Room Theirs
The Need for Routines
Signs and Labels
Where Does This Go?
Organizing the Day
Protecting Group Life
Dilemmas
The Click Club: Sharing Power
What Rituals Tell Us
Chapter 3 - Collages: Making Art
Painting, and Painting Over
“How Did You Make That?”
Yellow Skin and Orange Hair
Mixing Media
A Path That Doesn’t Go Any Place Special
Art in the Curriculum
Chapter 4 - Finding Curriculum: A Study of Squirrels
Tooth Marks: Children Observe the World Around Them
Investigations
Questions and Answers
A Theory of Curriculum
Moving Back and Forth
A Last Trip to the Park
“What About Standards?”
“I Love Sea Horses!”
More Questions
Chapter 5 - The Uses of Literacy: Constructing Knowledge
Talk: What’s the Point?
The Daddies Turn into a Mountain
Themes in Literature
Literacy Goals
Fish Juice: Talking, Reading, Writing, and Drawing About Real Things
Thinking about Language Acquisition
Chapter 6 - The Uses of Literacy: Reading and Writing
Names and Other Words
Beginning Where They Are
Programmed Instruction
“Let’s Write That Down”
Chapter 7 - Midwinter Doldrums and Quarrels
Starting Over
“She Did It First!”
What Do We Mean by Managing a Class?
Valuing Childhood
Wasting Paper
Chapter 8 - Welcome to the Aquarium: Knowing One Child
Teacher Talk
First Impressions of Henry
Teacher and Parents, I
Henry at Work
Teacher and Parents, II
Henry at the End of the Year
Chapter 9 - June: Meanings and Metaphors at the End of the Year
Paper Casts: Classroom Metaphors
Ambivalent Feelings
Packing Up
Chapter 10 - Postscript: Being a Teacher
Choosing to Teach
Staying in the Classroom
The Teaching Environment
Ourselves as Resources
NOTES
CHILDREN’S BOOKS CITED
INDEX
THE NEW PRESS TITLES OF RELATED INTEREST
Copyright Page
For Eqbal Ahmad and Dohra Ahmad
FOREWORD
Not that I remember, but I bet I had a kindergarten teacher like Julie Diamond. Kindergarten was my one good year in school; after that, it was all downhill. I can recall my mother dragging me off to P.S. 77 in the Bronx, crying, terrified, begging for a reprieve from this alien world to which I was about to be abandoned.
Kindergarten was my introduction to the unanticipated sci-fi elements of life: my first contact with THEM, THE OTHER, the unfamiliar universe of rules, structure, and enforced socialization.
Most of the kids I didn’t know, most of them I didn’t want to know. And what I also didn’t want to know was the internal chaos that came with forced entry into this strange new world. Involuntary servitude in a regimented society where you had to line up here, march there, hang up your coats—all together now!—on the same pegs in the same closet at the same time, sit at the same desk next to the same kid who didn’t seem all that interested in me but was so much quicker at getting it, figuring out the system, playing the game.
But even I, who was bad at games, found that by the end of the first week—or certainly not long thereafter—it was OK. I was no longer scared. I understood. I belonged. THE OTHER had been assimilated. I was going to be fine. I was five years old, too young to have a shrink, so it must have been the teacher.
Julie Diamond is my kind of kindergarten teacher and she has written my kind of book on her years in the public schools of New York City, primarily at P.S. 87, the very school my daughters Halley and Julie attended. And it came to pass that Julie (Diamond) taught Julie (Feiffer) in kindergarten, so how could I not be interested in what she has to say about her life as an educator?
Julie is an innovative survivor in a system that likes to assure us that its heart is in the right place, but what place that would be is hard to know because the language in which the system prefers to express itself is a virtual anti-language and would pull a failing grade if it were a paper your child had turned in.
So what is a teacher to do? We learn from selections from Julie’s journals, her moment-by-moment classroom observations, reflections, doubts, and resolved doubts. Her humanity and her humor: “Long ago, when I was beginning to teach, I had a very hard time bringing a group of children in from the yard one afternoon. As I saw it at the time, they just wouldn’t listen. I was furious, and yelled and threatened—they finally came in. One girl railed back, in full five-year-old disdain, ‘Julie, you know about teaching, but you don’t know about children!’ ”
But she learned. Oy, did she learn, and now she rewards us with a page-turner on how and what she learned, simply and gracefully written, with so much clarity, such focus, such pride, such little intrusion of ego.
“At these moments, which come often enough, I look around the classroom at the work layered on walls and surfaces: loops of patterned necklaces made from dyed and strung pasta shapes . . . little drawstring bags; drawings of sea creatures, a seahorse with its tail wrapped around seaweed; saved Lego constructions. . . .”
She cites and quotes her many exemplars, the community of teachers out there, here and abroad, mentors and role models who form a bond of sanity, reason, determination, and goodwill.
Time and again we encounter the engaged teacher circling around myriad obstacles set up by the pod people who represent the system, but obstacles set up no less by herself. Follow along on the suspenseful odyssey of Henry and his aquarium, where child, parents, and teacher cannot seem to get it right, miscommunicate monumentally, and pull in different directions toward a conclusion you cannot help but be moved by, so rich is its sense of inquiry, observation, mission, and self-examination. It brought tears to this reader’s eyes.
Not all Julie’s self-examination is accurate: “In the school’s hallways, when the first-graders whom I taught the previous year catch sight of me, they jump up and down; they shout to the others who were in my class—‘It’s Julie!’ The second-graders are still excited, they wave and smile, but more sedately. By the end of second grade, I’ve receded into the past; I’m far away, and am undoubtedly smaller.”
No way.
—Jules Feiffer
PERMISSIONS
A version of chapter 4, “Finding Curriculum: A Study of Squirrels,” appeared in the New Educator 3, no. 4 (December 2007).
Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “Keziah” is reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.
Excerpts from Now We Are Six, by A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepard, copyright 1927 by E.P. Dutton, renewed © 1955 by A.A. Milne, used by perm
ission of Dutton Children’s Books, A Division of Penguin Young Readers Group, A Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. All rights reserved.
Lines from “Leaving the Rest Unsaid” by Robert Graves are from Complete Poems in One Volume, published by Carcanet Press Ltd., 2000.
Children’s photographs and drawings are used with the permission of their parents.
The photographs on pages 75, 77, 133, and 208 are used with the permission of David Vitale-Wolff. All other photographs are by the author.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
P.S. 87, where this book is set, mirrors its neighborhood: lively and fast-paced, multihued in population, its culture celebrating creativity and difference as well as accord. (I have changed names and identifying details to preserve privacy.) It is rarely entirely quiet. Jane Hand, the principal who hired me in 1994, seemed to know the names of every one of the school’s almost one thousand children. The teachers work exceptionally hard and help each other out; my kindergarten colleagues and the teachers on my hall could be counted on. The parents, besides donating time and resources, are warmly appreciative of the work teachers do. No school is perfect, but I felt at home at P.S. 87 and could teach according to my beliefs.
My beliefs about teaching were formed at Bank Street College of Education. When I attended, it was still located on Bank Street, and many professors—Barbara Biber, Dorothy Cohen, Lois Wolf, and others—had known an earlier generation of progressive New York City educators. The grounding in child development that Bank Street provided was a base for everything I learned subsequently.
My teaching was a group project. For almost two decades, I was fortunate to be connected with the Teachers College preservice program. Their energetic student teachers, and student teachers and interns from other institutions, added to the classroom in distinctive ways. I benefited, too, from the talented paraprofessionals and assistants with whom I worked over many years—Magda Kamal, Sayma Begum, Aris Puente, Arshea Hall, Henny Matias, Jesenia Zambrano, and Natasha Torres.
I want to give credit, too, to the colleagues who influenced my teaching and to those who—once I’d begun writing—read chapters and commented: Kay Campbell, Ruth Charney, Eleanor Duckworth, Beverly Falk, Hollee Freeman, Mary Frosch, Theresa Furman, David and Jacqui Getz, Betsy Grob, Ginger Hanlon, Naomi Hill, Linda Kasarjian, Gwyn Kellam, Eva Mc-Keon, Deborah Meier, Aisha Ray, Joanna Uhry, Mary Weaver, and Michael Ziemski. Ruth Charney’s generosity, questions, and comments benefited me immensely. Several art educators commented on the chapter about art: Kirsten Cole, Andrea Kantrowitz, Ann Schaumberger, Amy Snider, and Jenny Snider, artist and friend. Librarians at Bank Street College and at Donnell Library were extremely helpful. At P.S. 87, Phil Firsenbaum’s documentation of children’s journal writing informed the section on writing. A visit to the schools of Reggio Emilia as part of a Wheelock College study tour made the approach real, and deepened my thinking about the purposes and context of teaching.
The faith of friends spurred me on. Janet Wolff offered encouragement at the beginning. Other friends also read chapters and offered suggestions or moral support: Emily Abel, Connie Brown, Helen Hopps, Rayna Knobler and Martin Popps, Harriet Luria, Annie O’Neill, Anne Roberts and Peter Boothroyd, David Sperlinger, Zina Steinberg, and Phyllis Trager and Ed Mufson. Hanna Moskin and Ann Sullivan listened through indecisive moments; Roberta Guerette and Elly Shodell offered perfect advice. I gained insights about teaching relationships from Nettie Terestman and was heartened by David Rappaport’s confidence in my writing. I want to thank Jenny Allen and Jules Feiffer for their responses to the chapters on literacy. I found quiet for writing, away from the city, thanks to Hanna and Jeffrey Moskin, Margaret Burnham and Max Stern, Noosha Baqi and Grego Marcano, and Ruth Wald.
My parents, Abraham and Sylvia Diamond, teachers in the New York City school system, bequeathed to me humanistic values. My sister, Cora Diamond, edited and encouraged. I’m grateful to my late husband, Eqbal Ahmad, another teacher, for his insistence that I was a writer, and for his love. To my daughter, Dohra Ahmad, I owe much—for her consistent backing, help, and humor. My son-in-law, Orin Herskowitz, and granddaughters, Eliya and Melina Ahmad, contributed to my welfare in essential ways.
When I first thought about this book, I talked to Ellen Reeves at The New Press. I’d thought of the book as a diary. No, she said, you have to write it! I did, aided by her questions and commitment. My thanks also go to Jennifer Rappaport and Sarah Fan for shepherding the book to completion, to Gary Stimeling for his thorough copyediting, and to The New Press. Finally, I thank the children I taught. My ultimate purpose is to recognize the worlds they created.
INTRODUCTION
When I was growing up, my elementary school was full of older teachers, women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, who had gray or white hair and excellent posture. Since that time, the feminist movement has opened up career choices for women. Of the young women who now become teachers, many of the most energetic and ambitious soon leave the classroom for administrative or supervisory positions. Classroom teaching is something to do for five or ten years; a lifetime in the classroom seems old-fashioned. At age sixty, I was the oldest classroom teacher in my school: I was a dinosaur.
Looking back at almost three decades of teaching, I see a column of years, each one stamped with successes and failures, constraints and possibilities. As fewer and fewer teachers have this perspective, is nothing important lost? Is there anything irreplaceable that veteran teachers offer schools? I believe that veteran teachers’ knowledge is not, most deeply, a matter of accumulated techniques and teaching methods. What I gained, I believe, is an increased ability to know children, to apprehend and appreciate the world they inhabit and are engaged with. I see the work of knowing the children we teach as the teacher’s central task.
This view of teaching isn’t an automatic benefit of longevity. It grows out of a progressive approach to education, the conviction that learning is something a learner does, not something done to the learner. At graduate school, I was exposed to the idea that learning is not imposed from without, that we teach the “whole child,” who is an active agent with an “urge to learn.”1 began teaching in the late 1960s, a period of social activism, when hopes for the schools were tied to dreams of social justice and racial equality. Many of us wanted our classrooms to be informed by the “lives of children.” 2 We wanted school to be a place for children’s thinking and stories, their real selves. We were inspired by reports of educational reforms in England and by new curricula based on children’s exploration.3
Progressive principles remain relevant and exciting for me: the respect for children’s modes of inquiry that characterized the British schools of the 1970s is alive today in the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy; the honoring of human experience and commitment to documenting children’s work that motivated twentieth-century progressive educators motivates many current teacher-writers. But our public schools are increasingly inhospitable to progressive values. Testing rules the schools; and just as progressive education has a history, there’s a history to the idea that subjects should be taught in the same way for all children, without regard to what children bring to school. Our national priorities are those expressed by Dickens’s character Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times: “Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” 4
In contrast, the children in K-104 made an aquarium in their classroom. K-104, the kindergarten class I taught (104 was the room number), was in a public school on New York’s Upper West Side, a school with a racially and economically diverse population. In the course of the year, the twenty-four children became a class, with a unique identity and culture. I played a part in moving them toward this goal, one that’s intangible but consequential. The culture of a classroom provides a context for, and shapes, students’ individual achievements. The children come to see themselves as individually powerful and connected to others. Citizenship in a class is, I believe, es
sential to the children’s future as educated adults. The classroom’s myriad details—its organization, curriculum, and relationships, the teacher’s pondering and decision making—spell out the reality of social ideals.
The Aquarium
Photo by Julie Diamond
The themes of participation and connection are nowhere more visible than in the story of Henry. In the fall, Henry had resolutely kept to himself. By the spring, he was prolific, making signs and works of art for the room. When the class studied undersea animals and made models of sea creatures, the children invited the parents to visit the aquarium they had built in the block-building area. On his own, Henry produced a sign of welcome for the classroom door, WELCOME TO THE AQUARIUM, his words surrounded by sharks, eels, and swirling seaweed. Writing about him, I saw him in the classroom environment, adapting to it. The classroom, like an aquarium and the sea itself, is a common, shared space, as well as a space for differences and individuality. Like an aquarium (but unlike the ocean), the classroom is both real and invented: classrooms are real places, inhabited by real people, but the meanings that children—and adults—find there are meanings they create themselves.