Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning

by Diamond, Julie

  Books with photo portraits

  Photo by David Vitale-Wolff

  How quick I am to blame myself! I kept thinking there was something I should have been doing: I say to myself—what’s wrong, why aren’t you leading here? My job was to ask what was wrong, and when I stepped back, I gained some perspective. I saw where we were in the year, and remembered other years: The history of my teaching is always a low at this time of year, a formlessness, as we lose one student teacher and slowly integrate another. This year there’s a double loss, of the student teacher and of Arshea. Simply getting to know these two new people—what are they good at doing? In the afternoon, the new assistant—who will, I know, be wonderful, and just needs time—leaves after setting up snack, but I haven’t made sure she knows exactly what to do, so we end up without the juice pitchers set out. It’s inevitable; the sense of things being “off” is a necessary consequence of change. We’ve outgrown our old clothes, but the new clothes don’t feel right. Mid-January, and I had to start over, as if it were September again; I had to look at everything differently.

  In most classrooms, one study follows another without gaps. The teacher has it all planned out in advance and knows precisely what will happen every week and month. Everything must fit in—and teachers get upset when they can’t keep to their plans. Yet just as a day has a rhythm, a year has a rhythm, of attention and inattention, purpose and purposelessness. Why should we suppose that children operate at peak capacity all the time? Or that we do. The spaces that are between involvements have a function, difficult as it may be for the teacher, who—at that moment—doesn’t have much of a plan. Yet in the spaces, children can rest, consolidate, and put out feelers. The attentive teacher can gain some knowledge, despite the disquiet of being between: It’s been a slide-y time, before whatever is coming next. I get impatient with myself, yet there always have been these between times, when it’s as if I have to not be focused somehow. Do the kids need it too?

  The ebb and flow of interests is particularly characteristic of classrooms in which teachers aim for intrinsic motivation, for gaining true involvement in classroom activities, for enlisting children’s wholehearted commitment. If I expected children to bring energy and passion to their learning, I had to find topics that mattered to them and find ways to engage them. I had to tolerate this time of year.

  One day in January, Emily came to school with a photo of herself as a baby. The fact that the walls were blank suddenly seemed perfect, ordained. We would study babies. The class had already been talking about Arshea’s pregnancy, and about the baby, due in March. Some of them had information about newborn babies, how tiny they are, their black belly buttons. Victor, a triplet, volunteered a story from when he was first born—about being hungry for his bottle—and we talked about his being inside with two others.

  I’d studied babies with other classes. I usually start by asking the children to bring in baby photos, with their names and ages on the back. It’s always funny seeing these photos, presages of the children to come, baby versions of the personalities we’ve come to know. This year, I made two color photocopies and sent the originals home. One copy would be for a wall display: the children glued the pictures on construction paper and decorated around the photos to make a frame, leaving space at the bottom for dictated text. The children shared their photos with the class and put them up on the conveniently blank walls; eventually I moved the photos to the classroom door, adding, next to each, a small current photo portrait. The other photocopy was used to make a timeline of development. I put brown paper up on the wall outside, in the hall, and a small group of children marked off months and years to make a timeline. I added a new basket for the class library, books about babies and babies’ growth. We looked at the books and talked about what babies can do. The children learned about developmental milestones: when babies start to focus their eyes, hold their heads up, clap, sit up, crawl, walk. The children glued their photos on the timeline, and wrote down or dictated something that they noticed about their baby selves: “I could feed myself!” On index cards, they wrote their names and how old they were. They added drawings. Children from other classes, walking down the hall, stopped to look at our timeline.

  We had baby visits, too, younger siblings who came in with their mothers. These visits were chaotic: the babies lurched around, the children cracked up, trying to get the babies’ attention. We’d talked beforehand about what we wanted to know and prepared interview questions for the mothers. It was always unpredictable. But the children observed, and when we wrote up the visits, they had plenty to say. We made short books: Baby Lili’s Visit, illustrated with drawings and photos. I added baby stuff to the pretend area—bottles, flannel blankets. Soon we began to talk about babies in families, and from there, shifted to talking about families. The children with siblings, younger and older, talked about the things they liked and disliked about being big or little siblings; children who didn’t have siblings talked about the things they liked and didn’t like about not having them. We invited the fifth-grade twins, Ariel and Tara, to come in to talk to us about being twins; we’d already read a photo book about twins, in which these two appeared as cute three-year-olds. The kids now report sightings of either twin. We talked about big families, small families, parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, relatives who live close by and relatives who live far away. Another book basket: books about families. More photos from home—of the children and their families; this time, we made a book with photocopies of the original photos and dictated text.

  Some years, a family study would come first. Some years, I’ve asked parents for their own memories, a story from when the children were babies. I asked the children for their earliest memories. One year, the class produced a book, illustrated by the children, with all these stories. The baby study has evolved over many years, and each year, the structure of the study has become clearer: it is about growth and development. The study places the children at this moment on a timeline that implicitly moves toward further growth. When the baby study is part of a bigger look at children’s families, children also gain explicit understandings about the requirements of growth, and about how families function to fulfill these needs.

  There were also changes, during the post-Christmas period, in the structure of activities and in children’s work modes. I began to let them leave block buildings up for the whole week, so they could work on them over several days. The rules were: loose blocks get put away, and buildings must be labeled with what the building is, and who made it. I noticed more self-initiated projects by children who had previously been followers: Jamie, at the table, working on a book—a project I just discovered, looking through the workbasket. For days and days she’s been taping pages together, after writing on each page. A signal to me of the need to take time to walk around, see what everyone is doing, and write it down. There were more group projects, two to five children working together with table blocks, inch cubes, teddy bears, producing incredibly complex constructions.

  New activities, new projects seemed to arise without warm-up; certain moments stood out because in one way or another they went against the grain of something I thought I knew about the child. These bits—encounters, choices of someone to work with, something that was made—moved away from what had come before, what was already known, and perhaps because of that, they tended to add some new element to the class culture. Sam, always a wild card, began to use the pattern blocks. His designs—wilder, more original than the others’ hexagon and triangle flowers—brought him, at last, some admiration. Looking back, it seemed not entirely unpredictable, but I couldn’t have planned it. It was his accomplishment.

  Short-term projects filled in at moments when we lacked longer, larger goals. We did a lot of measuring. We used yarn to measure things in the room: the children cut a length of yarn to make it “as long as” something else. I wanted them to focus on the idea of “equal to” in length. Then the children used Unifix cubes (plastic cu
bes that fit together). First, they measured the length of their sneakers or shoes: each child, working with a partner, removed one shoe, traced it, and measured it. Another day, they measured parts of their bodies. They chose what they wished to measure—e.g., neck, arm, head, hand—again working with partners. Another day, they measured objects in the room—a book, the rabbit cage, table, chair. Later on, they used different units of measurement—paper clips, crayons, pencils—to measure one thing. These activities and projects led to more surprises. On their own, during one work time, Amina and Henry, unlikely partners, measured the rug with Unifix cubes. Other children had been making long trains of the multicolored cubes on the rug, but on this day, Henry and Amina got to a new level of understanding first making short trains of ten single-color cubes, red, yellow, and so on, and then attaching these to make one long train: perhaps because of Amina’s mathematical sense of the importance of making groups of ten? Her knowledge that it would be mathematically useful to do it that way, rather than to simply join cubes randomly? I helped them count the cubes by tens—the rug was 183 cubes long, and they announced the fact to the rest of the class.

  Using crayons to measure

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  In February, the children used doilies, silver and gold paper, and ribbons to make collaged cards for Valentine’s Day. Since we’d been talking about relatives—aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins—I asked the children to make the valentines with a family member in mind, someone in their family with whom they didn’t live. They wrote messages inside the cards. I sent home a request for the names and addresses of relatives, and for stamps; I purchased manila envelopes and ruled off lines for the address. Addressing the envelopes took a serious amount of time; copying the addresses correctly and legibly was a challenge for most of the children. We stuck the postage stamps on, borrowed the return address stamp from the office, and when everything was complete—the valentines made, the messages written, and the envelopes addressed, return-addressed, stamped, and sealed—we traipsed out, in the rain, to drop the envelopes in the corner mailbox, and the valentines made their way to the Bronx, New Jersey, Michigan, Eritrea.

  Around this same time, we celebrated the one-hundredth day of school. Children brought from home one hundred objects, in labeled plastic bags: one hundred barrettes, one hundred paper clips. They counted out one hundred Unifix cubes, or crayons; they filled in photocopied ten-by-ten squares, making one hundred fingerprints, or Xs, or flowers. The class worked together to make a hundred-heart paper quilt. I ruled off a big ten-by-ten grid on brown paper and cut small squares of white paper on which the children drew hearts using Cray-Pas. The whole process took days: after the children drew the hearts, they cut them out and glued them in the grid squares. Other children filled in around the hearts with contrasting colors, and used watercolors for empty spaces and for the border. When the quilt was finally finished, it was remarkably beautiful. I painted it with gloss medium and hung it up. We handed it over to the parents, who framed it to sell at the Parents Association auction. (Ultimately, the class parents decided to purchase the quilt, as a present for Arshea’s baby.)

  Despite all this, I continued to feel the class lacked focus. I felt ideas weren’t accumulating, that there was no center, no source of energy pulling the class forward together. The children looked at the books about babies and families and looked at each other’s photos, but the topics seemed more mine than theirs; it was my interest propelling us. I found scribbling on a table, and small objects were disappearing, like the little rubber people that were used with the table blocks. What was missing was a deeper commitment to what they were doing: What’s their real physical and intellectual involvement? I feel as if I am waiting, looking for some hint of what’s ahead, what I will learn from this year. Maybe that’s the point. I consoled myself, telling myself that they had been busy. But busyness wasn’t my goal. The truth is that I remain uneasy with the invisibility of change; I’m not tolerant of the unknown. It’s hard for me to be between, waiting for the class to gain purpose and momentum.

  Working on the heart quilt

  Photo by Julie Diamond

  “She Did It First!”

  Tears twice from Hayley, fight between Mark and Jonathan, Max laughing at everyone . . . I’m cranky too.

  Teachers hate fights. There are different kinds of fights: one kind is between two children who continually pick on each other; the teacher learns to put them at opposite ends of the line, and never puts them in the same group for activities. There are fights between friends, when one of them makes a new friend and the other feels left out—that child, usually good-natured, all of a sudden turns possessive and mean. There are fights that are sparked so quickly, both sides drawn in so instantaneously, that the teacher can barely figure out what happened. There are fights that originate during recess and are brought back into the classroom; fights when children have to share some new material; fights when children come to the rug for story or meeting.

  At cleanup, one child ignores the teacher, wanting to complete the house he’s building with little blocks. Another child comes up, forgets to ask (purposely neglects to ask?), “Can I help you clean up?” He reaches down to take some blocks, and his move causes one side of the building to collapse. The builder is instantly furious: the building he’d worked on with such care, which was almost finished, is knocked down, ruined. “Hey!” he exclaims—and he shoves the helping hand. The other child, indignant, shoves back, justified in his countermove: two claims, two injured parties. This is how each child sees it; the teacher sees only a fight that diverts everyone’s attention from cleaning up, a situation that must be dealt with—a situation requiring that the teacher produce, on the spot, a solution everyone will accept. Which is, of course, impossible: one child wins, smirks; the other departs in tears.

  Teachers often fail to think about quarrels. We react, seeing fights as irritants, boulders in the road. We don’t, perhaps we can’t, ask the questions we should: what issues spark confrontations, what are the moments when fights occur? We tend to see quarrels as separate from what’s happening around them, as self-contained episodes rather than events occurring in specific settings.

  In one classroom, fights often occurred as children sat and drew. It turned out that each long table had only one plastic marker box, which of course was always being pulled toward one end of the table or the other, hands grabbing or holding on. Little time was left for drawing; the important issue was gaining control of the box. It was a game, marker soccer. Easy solution—more boxes. Busy, distracted, pulled in opposing directions ourselves, teachers often miss the underlying problems. What we need to do, and to do repeatedly, is to examine the details of the environment—including the physical organization of the classroom, and the schedule—and ask what changes of routine or setup would prevent conflicts from arising. Preparation and forethought count, often crucially: if a group sits at a table while a teacher busily gathers supplies for the group’s activities, trouble ensues. Asking children to sit or stand and wait leads inevitably to problems. Instead, whenever possible, I assign some children to gather supplies and, as far as possible, set up the table for an activity.

  The social as well as the physical environment can create conditions that lead to fights. Teachers may unintentionally create dissension. When teachers pit children against each other, when they seek to motivate through competition, they appeal, essentially, to selfishness rather than cooperation. Teachers who hold out material rewards—stickers, candy, or pizza parties for the table that wins the most points during the week—exploit children’s motives of acquisition and competitiveness for their own purposes.

  Whatever short-term gains in control such systems produce, they breed a resentment-filled atmosphere: twenty children go off to the cafeteria for lunch, while eight children remain in the classroom to share the pizza their table has “earned.” Food, with all its associations, is particularly potent in creating resentment, a feeling that the
n draws together all previous experiences of life’s unfairness and withholdings. I have seen children sobbing because, while their friends left the music teacher’s classroom with stickers, their behavior didn’t merit one. Difficult, defiant, uncooperative as that child may have been during that period, all that he considers as he walks down the hall is that he is once again a victim. Will this aid him in controlling his behavior in the music room next week? And when children do behave “better” in these settings because of bribes or threats, it is with an added quotient of bad feeling—shame, resentment, envy, or fear.

  This is not to say there’s no place for material rewards or competition in classrooms. My argument is against these as a way of motivating “good” behavior. Many kinds of material rewards are appropriate in classrooms: these include all kinds of celebrations, ice cream parties, small gifts (from stickers to pencils and notebooks, to books). What matters is that these are gifts to the class, and bring the class together, rather than exclude anyone. Such gifts, in fact, are motivating, because they indicate the adult’s good feelings toward the children as individuals and build up a bank of trust and identification. Competition may have a role in the classroom, in spelling bees, and similar activities. However, teachers have to consider the age and experience of the particular children when deciding on the role of these kinds of competitions. It’s important for children to feel successful at something, and competitions can, at times, allow children to feel success in the effort they’ve made. Judgment about the place of competitions must be made on the basis of the teacher’s knowledge of children’s experiences.