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

by Diamond, Julie

  When do we come up with metaphors? Are there circumstances when metaphors are more likely to pop into our minds? I’m not asking about the metaphors that occur to poets or writers of advertising copy, but about the metaphors that occur naturally, spontaneously, to children or adults as part of our lives.

  I had begun talking to the children about the end of the school year in late May. I’d told them they’d be going to different first-grade classes, and that Brooke was going to go to a different school. They’d have different teachers, and I’d have a new class of kindergarten students. In early June, I brought the class to visit Eva’s first-grade class. They wrote their questions beforehand on index cards. “Will we study animals?” “Am me and my friends going to be in the same class?” When we visited, they asked their questions, and Eva’s students answered.

  The class was breaking up; things would change. The year was almost over, and the friendships formed this year might not continue. But whatever changes lay ahead, the names signed on the casts were records of the children’s year together. The year was ending as it had begun, with children reading and writing each other’s names.

  Metaphors arise when people have need of them. They are creative constructions, manufactured by imagination and emotion, and often connected to important events. The meanings they convey may be hard to put into words, or may be things that we don’t want to talk or think about directly, something we wish to escape. Or the meaning may be too beautiful or wonderful, something that would be flattened by plain talk. Thus, metaphors perform a job for us; when they work, they work for us. They can weave different—even opposed—meanings into one dynamic perfect image. Coming up with a metaphor constitutes play; just as the children’s work with shapes was a kind of play, this is play with the meanings of things. Just as the best play—the most purposeful play—is exploratory, and occurs when there is some internal challenge, perhaps metaphors follow a need to explain to ourselves new facts and feelings. Metaphors then, whether or not we’re consciously aware of their role, help by creating a public truth out of private disturbances, out of breaks in continuity.

  Metaphors are clues. They are in plain sight, but we don’t necessarily see them for what they are. Jamie was an especially quiet child. In the fall and winter, she wouldn’t respond verbally. When I called on her, she would simply shake her head, although she was otherwise cooperative and highly responsible. She made books, one after another, page after page, always about her family. I saw her numerous books as a metaphor for the volubility that she didn’t allow herself. It was not only that they communicated the specific thoughts that Jamie might have said aloud, if she’d felt like it. In addition, they were, in their numbers, in the passion with which she worked on them, a stand-in for the loud, communicative Jamie who wasn’t just then present in the classroom but who—as her parents assured me, and as I found out for myself later in the year—did really exist.

  Metaphors are everywhere. Certain everyday classroom activities have a co-existence as metaphors. Lining children up, I’m sometimes aware of the demands that school, as an institution, makes on young children. I feel my role as socializing authority: like a sheepdog, I herd these recalcitrant, straying individuals into a cohesive line. No clumps, no gaps, all heads turned the same way; it’s unnatural. Toward the end of summer vacations, I dream about lining up large numbers of children.

  There is also metaphorical content in the small things that sum up for me aspects of the personalities of specific children. Vanessa’s variety of clothing accoutrements, her barrettes, jewelry, bows and ties, mirrored her bouncy self and the intensity of attachment she brought to her shifting loves and hates. Denay’s “Click Club,” which was the first survey the class produced, was a metaphor for her delight in cataloging and in patrolling the border of right and wrong. Sam’s paper men, who guarded his paper bridges, reminded me of the space around him, the moat of white noise that separated him from his environment and made it hard for him to know what was going on. I saw a metaphor in the collage that Brooke and Hayley had made together, an object they’d created jointly, which perhaps would glue them together as friends.

  The fascination of many of the children with the animals we’d studied seemed to me in part metaphorical. All the drawings of playful and happy dolphins, the drawings by the boys in the octopus-and-squid group of battles between squids and whales: these animals seemed to me to personify the children’s own passions and wild feelings. Thus their drawings gave me information about the topics and themes that mattered to them.

  The children’s relationship to the class pets had elements of metaphor. Years ago, I’d find one boy, for whom controlling impulses was generally a losing battle, following the rabbit around the room; it was frequently impossible for him to focus on anything other than the rabbit, its free movements, twitching ears and nose. Other children loved the imperturbable guinea pig, and would sit for long periods patting it, combing its hair. The different animals represented qualities that, for whatever reasons, had special meaning for particular children.

  Day to day, it’s easy to miss metaphors in the constant motion. What drives certain children to always be the mother or big sister, the kitten or bad dog or robber, in dramatic play? Why do some children always draw dinosaurs or racing cars or rainbows? The point for teachers emphatically is not to search for literal one-to-one meanings in children’s work and play; there is a danger that teachers will oversimplify, attributing meanings that misrepresent children’s actions. We have to know the children if we want to know the meanings to them of their involvements. Our responsibility is to notice, to be open to meanings that may be part of the objects children draw and make, part of dramatic play, part of the attachments they form. Our observations may lead to interesting or important conversations, but the information that teachers may derive is secondary; the primary purpose of these metaphors is their usefulness to the children themselves, in giving form to something inchoate. Teachers need to understand that these activities, for whatever reasons, have special importance and deserve a place in the classroom.

  Teachers can also make use of metaphors in planning, as long as metaphorical meanings are not artificially imposed. In May, the six kindergarten teachers had gotten together to order caterpillars from a biological supply company. The cardboard boxes came in the mail in late May: the caterpillars had arrived. There were enough for all the children to have one. With my help, each child took one caterpillar out of the plastic container they were in, and using a small paintbrush, gingerly placed it in a small plastic vial, with some green mush that was its food. The children wrote their names on the lids, and a few of them named their caterpillars. For the next two weeks, the first thing the children did every morning when they came into the room was to check out the vials as, day by day, the caterpillars got fatter. The children kept caterpillar journals, using magnifying glasses to observe activity and growth, drawing pictures and writing simple descriptions. I read books on caterpillars and butterflies to the class, and the children learned about the stages of the insect’s metamorphosis. By the end of the second week, each caterpillar had crawled to the top of its vial, attached itself to the lid, and pushed off its skin to reveal a shiny opalescent chrysalis, inside of which a fantastic shape change would occur over the next several days. Waiting, the children drew countless caterpillars, chrysalids, and butterflies. They made models of caterpillars and chrysalids, rolling and cutting paper, using pipe cleaners and sticks. They drew many beautiful, symmetrical-winged butterflies.

  As each chrysalis was formed, I attached the lid to the top of a big net bag that I’d hung in the room. There was great excitement one morning when the children came in to find that some butterflies had emerged. They clung to the sides, trying out new wings; they fluttered around the net cage. I’d left a sponge with sugar water on the cardboard bottom of the cage, and had also brought some flowers. The butterflies ate, unrolling their long proboscises like very flexible straws. It took several days for
all the butterflies to come out. A couple of the butterflies had badly crumpled wings and died. By the time all the shell-like chrysalids were empty, only a few days of school were left. The children loved their butterflies and wanted to keep them, but knew we had to set them free. We took the net bag to the school garden. One by one, the butterflies took off as the children watched, cheered, and yelled, “Good-bye, butterflies!” While this event would have been memorable for the children at anytime in the school year, it was loaded with meaning because it occurred in June, as the children themselves were going out the door, leaving behind their lives as kindergarten students.

  In fact, the theme of change and transformation ran through much of what the children did all year. They’d learned about seeds and plants, nuts and trees, babies, families, caterpillar metamorphosis; they’d learned how baby squirrels and whales are cared for; they’d let snow and ice melt, and let water evaporate; they’d watched tadpoles develop. They’d talked about how these changes make a circle.

  The children, too, had changed. With some, progress was limited: Alyssa cried, feeling she has no friends; it is progress of a sort. She had pushed Victor when he tried to get back in line. She came to complain to me because he’d pulled her backpack. I said, Did you let him back in line, or did you push him out of the way? After a while, she admitted she’d pushed him. In general, she ignores others’ requests. I said, If you’re nicer to the other kids, they’ll like you more. She has moments of friendliness, but she can’t sustain it. With others I looked for, and found, significant progress: Victor, first to see the tadpole’s back legs. Harry, struggling to use language to explain himself. Max’s effort to think about someone else’s feelings. Sam, enthusiastic in his knowledge of how fish tails move. Nia’s greater confidence as a writer. Jamie’s ebullience, whereas once she didn’t talk. Caroline’s faith in herself; yesterday she cried about something, and it was the first time in months that she’d cried. I remembered the fall, when she cried all the time.

  Throughout June, I was aware of the children’s competence and confidence. In the middle of the month, a group had worked on the block aquarium. They finally made walls, and separate areas. Denay made a beach where the animals got stranded, then she parked a row of trucks, ready to pick the animals up and bring them to the aquarium tanks. There was a “deep dark” water area. Caroline raised the issue, Can the sharks and the rays go together? I brought a group in at recess to make labels. Caroline and Denay worked together, with lots of discussion of spelling, to write “Welcome Fish!!!” I thought about Caroline and Michael: this year, again and again, they had opportunities to extend themselves, their thinking and abilities. They have built on their existing strengths, developed a greater sense of themselves as competent, interesting, rich people.

  This was my primary goal for them; this was what I wanted them to achieve. I have practical goals for them too: becoming comfortable in this new school, versed in the rituals of school—lining up, cleaning up, raising their hands, balancing impulses with the demands of group life. And I have academic goals for them. But their accomplishments must, for me, encompass a central goal, for them to be more consciously, recognizably themselves. The hope implies that children’s selves count, a moral belief, one that more than anything else anchors my understanding of what this year is for and what teaching is for. It’s the goal of progressive education: to not merely add to a child’s accumulation of knowledge, but add to a child’s ability to be a full human being. More than traditional teachers, progressive teachers concern themselves not only with the mastery of tools, but with the spirit in which children come to gain mastery.

  On some of those last hot June days, everyone seemed out of sorts. The classroom was not air-conditioned, and everyone was sticky and ill tempered: I was snappish—and the children, too. Lots of arguing. The room was messy in the morning—the after-school sewing class had left bits of stuffing all over the rug, needles and pins on the floor. Brooke, who would be changing schools in the fall, was getting into fights. We’d just read the questions we’d be bringing when we visit the first-grade classroom. I said to her, You are having an especially hard time getting along. Could it be that you’re sad about leaving, because you’re going to a different school?

  In addition, there is a concentration of June events and necessities: rehearsals for the dance festival, planning for the end-of-year celebration, projects to finish. I have my reports to write. In my Friday Letter to Parents, I gave the wrong date for an event, and phoned one of the class parents to ask for help in letting the other parents know. She thanked me, and said she was glad someone else had “event overload” and forgot things. I love phrases like “event overload” that help me put things in a frame—give a name to something that I would have blamed myself for.

  In late May, I’d begun reading to the class The BFG, Roald Dahl’s chapter book. The language is hard, but despite not understanding all of it, they listened: As I read, they are attentive—quieter than when I read a picture book, mesmerized by the words. It is a language-rich book, a lot of it over their heads (“Hold your horsefeathers,” says the giant to Sophie), or rather, built on expressions they’re not familiar with, but the content—Sophie’s peril, the growing friendship between the giant and Sophie—is not over their heads, and the images are full of action, the giant galloping along with his great strides, with Sophie in his pocket. The problem was that as mid-June approached, I saw I’d been overambitious: we’d get to the end of the school year before we’d get to the end of the book. Better planning would have helped; in fact, I’d done it once before, years ago, reading Stuart Little. When I told the children that we wouldn’t be able to finish The BFG, no one seemed to mind terribly, perhaps because so much was going on. I sent home a note to the parents, in case they wanted to get the book from the library. But my poor planning bothered me; I asked myself whether it was a result of my wanting to deny the reality of the year’s end.

  In June, this is the subtext for me, reconciling myself to the year being over. Caroline’s cast-making activity said something to me about the double meaning of the end, the loss and gain: gain of vacation, certainly, and of whatever would come next; loss of the shared experience of being a class, a loss for me as well as them. While growth is undeniable and physical for the children, as they try on outgrown summer clothes, the breaks that occur for teachers as classes move on don’t quite heal. These losses remain losses and leave some sadness, a professional hazard that’s rarely discussed. The degree of sadness felt by teachers may have to do with their own experience of losses and separations, their adult knowledge of mortality, their feelings about growth and change.

  Ambivalent Feelings

  Everyone says children grow up so quickly. But really, it’s a comment people make as they look back, when their own children are grown. I’ve always thought that what people are really commenting on is that their children—the children they remember—are irrevocably gone, not recoverable. When Amina was about to turn six, I said to her, You’ll never be five again!

  As children in the class turn six, I teach them the A.A. Milne poem “The End,” and we recite it at each six-year birthday. Part of what I love about the poem is the way that it turns against all the earlier ages (“When I was Three, / I was hardly Me. / When I was Four, / I was not much more.”) and enshrines six: “But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever. / So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.” 1 The poem stops time—for that moment, that year of being six. (And the poem, in unwritten extension, allows the child’s parent to forever enjoy being parent of that six-year-old.)

  Year after year, as each class breaks up, what teachers deal with—after the intensity of a year together—is that cliché, the forward march of time. I see the children’s growth and feel great pride, but in some irrational part of my mind, I want to prevent it, I want to keep these children five years old. I know that they’re ready to move on: they are so much more independent, and thoughtful. But I’m not ready. As t
hey grow up, they move away. 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. I see the older children in the hallway, in their new bulkier bodies, and miss what’s gone, their selves at age five.

  One afternoon in the spring, a boy of fifteen or so appears in the classroom: tall, nice-looking, agreeable, solid, thoroughly teenage. Given a break from his high school, he was visiting his elementary school. Somehow, this being had developed out of the winsome, independent-minded boy of five, with his unnervingly direct gaze, who’d been a marvelous writer and drawer. To see him grown up unnerved me more. How could this boy, almost a man, be the person I’d taught? Where was the other boy? And who are we after all, what’s the intrinsic self that makes us one person? Is there a core that’s not mutable, that stays the same, whatever the role of chance and circumstances? And how do we—teachers and parents—let go of the person we thought we knew?

  It’s a question that occupies me sometimes as the parent of a grown-up. One afternoon, during a teaching break, Arshea and I talked about our own families. The mixed feelings we have—her feelings about her son, who’s fourteen. She wants him to be an adult but also doesn’t want him to be an adult. I talk about my feelings when my daughter is mad at me—about how hard it is for me to admit it when she’s right. We have to, I suppose, accept the ambivalence, the conflict we feel about who we want them to be, about what we want from them. Grow up, but depend on us. Move out, but not too far. Know your own mind, but don’t use it to criticize our behavior. Children grow up, say good-bye; I know it’s a good thing, yet I experience a pang, the price of a changed relationship.