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

by Diamond, Julie

  Much bad teaching—well-intentioned bad teaching—stems from distrust of children, bad faith, and inattention to the details. Here, David, the student teacher, grapples with the gap between his ideals and reality:

  David said, I think the squirrel study is boring them—and as he’s proceeding, it’s true. He’d insisted on beginning with the old chart of what they knew, asking them, What did we say, right here? The only child who might confidently answer that question was the one who’d drawn that picture. Then he asked, Is there anything you wonder about? No one answered. They didn’t know what to say. That formulation is too abstract; it gives the kids no concrete context. Later, I suggested that he try focusing on one picture or one piece of information, e.g., that squirrels build nests, and then ask, Is there something about squirrel nests you want to know? He tried it, but the children kept making statements, perhaps thinking he again wanted to know what they knew. He turned each of these into a question: Oh, so you want to know . . . He wasn’t honest with them, he didn’t say, No, that’s something you already know, that’s not a question. He doesn’t yet have enough faith in them, in the process through which they become engaged; he doesn’ t yet get what it means to actively look at what they are offering, what they are thinking. Afterward, I said, You can’t pretend a comment is a question. You can’t simply rephrase it. He said, I was trying to trick them.

  David’s idealism, combined with his inexperience, made the children in front of him less visible: It is possible to see last term as a map of David’s growth, as someone learning to learn about children, learning how much he didn’t know, how much humbler he had to be. He had to learn to be less concerned about his own performance, about being a good teacher. Ideals—in this case, a new teacher’s notions of what he might accomplish—can sometimes distract us and make it harder to be attentive to children’s actual functioning.

  Wasting Paper

  It’s impossible to capture the flow of the classroom; it is hard enough to see and think about it as it’s happening. This morning, I used Emily’s name for the secret code word; someone informs me we did her name already, and I apologize and say we’ll check the names off on a class list, on a clipboard, to keep track, so I don’t repeat anyone’s name. I ask, Whose names did we already do? Meanwhile, someone—it’s often Vanessa, which says something about her wish to know what’s going on and to be job person—comes up and asks, Who are the job persons? (This is her usual locution.) I say, Get me the job clipboard. Someone else, passing by, says, I know what letter “job” begins with. Was that Victor? Graham asks, How many days until I’m job person? So we look at the clipboard, and I say, It’s complicated, two or three, because it depends on when Ariel comes back. Then I remind them to cross off the day on their calendars, which they’re supposed to do every morning.

  There are moments, even days, like this: so full of content I don’t know what to do with all of it; ideas and emotions spill over. While these moments require faith, they also require time and a certain kind of tolerance. The challenge of providing these without indulging children is summed up for me in the issue of wasting paper, a perennial problem. I pass the garbage can and notice many pieces of drawing paper tossed in, each with one mark. I stop the class and hold these papers up: “Look at this!” Once again, I’m asking them to take responsibility; yet I can’t do this without being silently aware of the contradictions. Sometimes it’s necessary to waste paper. I think about Amina’s book about caves, which appeared after a long period during which she produced piles of uninspired drawings: Yesterday, on her own, she made this marvelous book, A Book About Caves. She’d cut the pages in the shape of a rock. “Caves have darkness. Caves have spookiness. Caves have water. Caves have moss. Caves have buckets.” It was probably modeled on Denay’s fish book of last week (“Fish have scales,” etc.). It’s a lesson to me: trust their ability to use what’s around them. And another lesson, too: allow them those in-between periods when not much seems to be going on.

  Vito Perrone speaks of the need for children to have time, “time to complete work they can truly honor.” 15 Providing time depends on our recognizing the role of effort as children learn; recognizing the necessity of confusion, meanderings, mistakes—the role of wasted paper. We need time for wrong turns, for paths that double back, for change that may be invisible.

  Yet the taking of time is one more casualty of the quest for “accountability” in education. Pressed for time, teachers are unable to allow children time for anything: time to sustain and develop ideas, time to go further, time for unexpected insight or innovative thought. Everything is sacrificed in pursuit of scores.

  There are other bad consequences of making schools more narrowly academic. Teachers are less and less encouraged to incorporate children’s diverse strengths into planning. There is less and less time for legitimate pursuits, for the actual work of childhood. As academic pressures have mounted, behavioral expectations have become increasingly inappropriate and unrealistic. Work that is formally more advanced is valued above work that is less advanced, although the latter may in fact have more meaning to an individual child, or more curricular significance. Children at younger and younger ages sit for longer periods, take in information orally, are pushed to write and produce representational drawings. I was told of a kindergarten teacher who made a student sit out because he didn’t want to write.

  Behavioral problems are manufactured when classrooms set overly academic demands. Teachers constantly have to suppress children’s energy, which is seen as an impediment to their plans rather than as a resource, something vital to educational purposes. As teachers strive to keep children’s normal liveliness at bay, extrinsic rewards predominate. Teachers issue warnings, they move children’s names to the “sad face” side of a behavior-management chart. Children—boys, particularly—face days in school as failures, by age four and five. At some point in the future, they won’t care any more. Even successful children suffer, becoming increasingly concerned with pleasing adults, and all students are in danger of burning out academically as they move toward the middle years of childhood.

  I think of my management style, sometimes, as “harness and harangue.” I take a stance in relation to their growth; the engine is theirs. Meanwhile, I harangue: “Who left the table like this?” These poles frame what I do, whether I am exasperated with Vanessa for playing with her myriad bracelets, hair decorations, and sunglasses; or suggest Emily look in the dictionary for the picture of an airplane for her journal page; or take the student teacher to task when he dithers leading the class out at 3:00, and we’re late. The students accept my occasionally rough tongue, a mother-of-puppies rough: “Sam! Look at what everyone else is doing!” It’s a question of tone—it’s rare that my roughness is really rough—because I genuinely like them, and they know that. I set the rules and enforce them but seek words that reverberate for children. If they flick the math materials, I tell them, “No pinging!” My concern is that they have confidence as learners: I want to increase what they think they can do. Just as I have faith in them, they have faith in me, and in each other, as they operate in this classroom, a world they have helped create, the world of K -104: loyalty—though not all the time; caring and concern— ditto. Above all, shared knowledge, and knowledge of each other. Maybe I make myself so available to them, within the structures of what is fair and just (waiting their turns), and they, in return, don’t hold back.

  That was written on a good day. There were plenty of days when I concluded my tone was too rough, or my roughness wasn’t justified; or when the children’s roughness just seemed too much for me. There were days that the class lacked energy or focus or equilibrium, days I felt cranky or distracted. I reach, sometimes painfully, for the experimental attitude that I want my students to take. On the bad days—an inevitable part of every teacher’s year—what carries me through is faith, faith in the qualities I value in childhood, faith in my own ability to recognize those qualities and make a place for them in t
he classroom.

  8

  Welcome to the Aquarium: Knowing One Child

  Teacher Talk

  What is the story of Henry—the child who is difficult for the teacher?

  Teachers’ knowledge of children occurs as narrative. “Teachers tell stories,” Karen Gallas says, “about what [they] know about children, learning, and teaching.” 1 Unlike “objective” standardized assessments, narrative accounts represent a process, something ongoing. They are accurate in a way that tests aren’t, because they include the unexpected and allow room for the elements of live, fluid action that we experience as teachers. Our goal, after all, is to describe something that is alive and continually changing. Teachers talk to other teachers or to themselves. They tell stories as a way of looking for meanings, of comparing and drawing conclusions, of figuring out what they know and what they want to know.

  Harriet Cuffaro, another teacher-writer long associated with Bank Street College of Education, notes that teachers’ “anecdotes . . . describe children’s accomplishments, their struggles, and their discoveries.” 2 Their stories also give form to their own struggles: the puzzlement, confusion, distress, even anger. Their most telling anecdotes are about children who seem to frustrate their intentions, the ones with whom they feel locked in battle.

  At the beginning of each new school year, my mother—a teacher herself—would ask me, “Any pests?” I would pretend not to understand her question. I refused to divide the class that way, to label children “good” or “bad” (or “smart” or “slow”). I think part of my job is to like my students—to find something likeable in each of them. Yet for each teacher, some children are harder: harder to like, harder to work with. Out of a classroom of individuals, each with requirements, these children can absorb a teacher’s thoughts and energy. The paradox is that it’s these children who force us to learn something new.

  The stories we tell about these children are also about ourselves, as we come to figure out what to ask of a child, how to ask it, and what to ask of ourselves. We may hope to recast the story, so it is not simply a list of the child’s incapacities, so it is not dictated by the need to protect the image of ourselves as good teachers. The struggle to teach these difficult children not only tests our limits and resources, it exposes the truth of our beliefs, of what we can actually accomplish. The story may have a subplot: the teacher’s engagement with other adults, the child’s parents. This relationship may be difficult, too. Whether or not we were successful with a child, whether we were conciliatory or wrongheaded with parents, we will undoubtedly go over and over events in our own minds and with colleagues.

  As teachers work to form relationships, to figure out what went wrong on any given afternoon, what we let ourselves know depends on what we can tolerate knowing about ourselves. The teacher is both narrator and character in classroom stories. Narrators in novels may be unreliable; in real life, I’m a semi-reliable narrator. When teachers talk, they tell their version, filtered through a lens that’s not transparent, that has flaws.

  But by telling and retelling this or that incident, by remembering these difficult events months or even years afterward, we’re offered again and again the possibility of gaining a more balanced understanding—of who the children were, and who we are as teachers. 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!” It stung, and stayed with me, stating exactly what I needed to learn.

  First Impressions of Henry

  The only one who challenges my ability to like him is Henry, although he is intellectually capable, imaginative, “smart.” But he is “sneaky”—aware when an adult is around and watching. He knocks down others’ buildings—two complaints about this today. He makes himself an outsider, then resents being an outsider. Doesn’t talk or explain . . . doesn’t look at the person he’s talking to, adult or child.

  What did I notice about Henry in the beginning of the year? He was tall, slightly heavy. He moved as if not quite knit together, a marionette with no puppeteer, as if he were putting no muscles into play. Things near him got knocked over. Was it intentional? Working at a table, he would sit with his body draped over a chair, one leg stretched out, foot half out of an untied sneaker. Writing or drawing, he held marker or pencil in a loose idiosyncratic grip, and his drawings and letters were poorly formed.

  But he worked with terrific concentration. It was clear what activities he liked: building with large Legos, construction materials, blocks. He always worked alone. He signed up frequently for the table near the sink, working with markers, paper, scissors, glue, and whatever other materials were offered; as the weeks went by, the collage activities appealed to him more and more. He volunteered to make signs for the room, illustrating “meeting” by drawing a lone child on the blue rug. He did not like assigned activities, especially those involving paper-and-pencil tasks. This could partly be explained by his weakness in this area. When he copied numbers and letters, the lines were shaky; when he wrote his name, the letters marched uphill. Things he didn’t want to do, he just didn’t do: when we went out on the street to collect squirrel-related stuff, he was one of two children who came back empty-handed, and when children drew their finds, he had to borrow an acorn. I’d found scribbling on the tables and floor, and wondered if it was Henry’s doing: I want to know who’s doing it. To me, it’s antisocial, antigroup. Maybe it’s someone more marginal, who’s unable to make the kind of contribution that I make space for—so this becomes a way of being public without having to be public through me, the teacher. So the first question should be not who, but why.

  His physical stance in relation to other people seemed to emphasize his isolation. When others spoke to him, child or adult, he turned his face away, and his eyes cut away, his face blank except for a wisp of a frown. This looking away was not, it’s important to note, something that could be explained as a cultural norm. Henry’s parents were from Europe but spoke English fluently; they looked directly at me when we spoke. Every morning, when he came to the rug for meeting, he would sit next to the bookcase, his body turned 180 degrees away from the others. Every morning, I would say, “Henry, please turn around.” He would comply, but seemed to make a mute point: he would turn his head away, with a tiny, tiny smile. At other times, emotion would just flit over his face—a quicksilver smile, a quicksilver pout—and disappear. His physical separateness paralleled an emotional distance: he didn’t initiate conversations with the teachers or with other children; he came to me only to complain because of something someone had done to him—knocked a building over, or taken something from him; he would talk to me with his head turned away. In October, I noted that, working at a table with others, he seemed “peripheral.” He didn’t show interest in anyone else’s work, as the other children did, never said to someone sitting next to him, “That’s cool!” He never showed his work to other children, asking, “You like this?” He never showed his work to me. But he wasn’t exactly unaware of others. When he thought he wasn’t observed, he would give a little shove to someone else’s building, or make marks on others’ drawings. One day, I caught him scribbling on the floor. He ignored adults’ requests, or would comply very slowly—he would be the last to clean up, the last to get his stuff, the last on line.

  Had I considered whether this description might fit a child with Asperger’s syndrome? This question arises when children are significantly lacking in social skills, because the spectrum is broad and includes a range of behavior. Children with Asperger’s typically are unaware of—don’t observe and internalize—common social protocols that other children pick up without thinking. I remember one child who, when crossing the classroom, would walk smack through the middle of a group of children who were sitting on t
he floor playing a game—much to their extreme consternation; to this child, it made sense as a direct route. He hadn’t learned to walk around a group of people. Henry, while most at ease working alone, showed social awareness: his antisocial behavior—observable when he was carefully watched—was proof that he knew norms but preferred not to follow them.

  In those first weeks of school, Henry’s sneakiness and resistance got to me, brought out an oppositional streak in me. He challenged my authority—a passive resister, a classroom Gandhi—as I was attempting to teach routines and help children get to know each other. So here I was, frustrated, accusing, labeling him sneaky, a word that substituted for thinking on my part. It was not how I wanted to see him. It wasn’t how I wanted to see myself; I didn’t want to take that accusing tone.

  Henry’s behavior puzzled me. It might not have posed a big problem for another teacher, who might have labeled him a loner and moved on to children whose behavior was more disruptive. Henry was not out-and-out defiant, wasn’t aggressive; he didn’t get into fights with others, didn’t interrupt others during discussions. (In fact, in the fall, he didn’t contribute at all during discussions.) But I was concerned about the gaps in behavior, his avoidance of direct emotional engagement with others. His isolation worried me more than it would have if he’d been younger, if this were a nursery-school class. I have a framework of expectations for this age group: five- and six-year-olds normally display some degree of sociability and positive connection to others; most children are engaged with their peers and with adults. When children tune out adults to focus exclusively on their peers, or focus only on adults, seeking approval and attention, ignoring peers, I will wonder about it, and help, if I can, extend their ties to include adults and peers. Henry did not involve himself in an ongoing way with either children or adults. Although he was physically present in the class, he was not socially present, except in the negative ways implied by his small antisocial actions. What troubled me was not so much what he was doing, as what he wasn’t.