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

by Diamond, Julie

  For a few parents, children’s powerlessness and vulnerability do not lead to protection and thoughtfulness; rather, these qualities of childhood encourage the abuse of power. These are the parents who are most unable, for whatever reasons, to offer children guidance. Children’s classroom behavior and sense of well-being—their ability to manage their emotions, sense of resilience, ability to learn—are directly affected by family life, by how they are treated and how they are expected to treat others, and by particular circumstances like separation and loss. As a result, parent-child relationships are within the realm of our concern as teachers. But while we can express concern about what we see as the impact on a child of parents’ actions, can suggest alternatives to harsh discipline methods, and can recommend books on parenting, our ability to affect parent attitudes may be limited.

  Still, it’s important for us to remember that our knowledge of children’s circumstances is always incomplete. Our understanding of their lives remains informed speculation. This is also true because people contain contradictions. In our desire for simple, direct explanations for behavior, we may not perceive and take into account parents’ strengths. Teachers’ perceptions may also be distorted because of differences between their culture and expectations and those of parents.10

  Adults’ knowledge of children depends, too, on what we—parents and teachers—bring to thinking about them. At any particular moment, our ability to see, question, and reflect varies. Just as circumstances affect children’s responses, circumstances affect our ability to perceive; circumstances affect what we are able to see and hear. Often, it is a matter of facing something more than once, hearing it more than once. For parents—for any of us—being able to take in what’s said may be a question of trust and of how something is said.

  Knowing how difficult it would be for Henry’s parents to hear what I was prepared to say to them about him—that it would be heard as a judgment on his behavior, and on them—and knowing too how difficult it would be for me to say what I wanted to say, I was apprehensive about the conference. Both his parents showed up. We started out in agreement: his academic performance was excellent. Henry was reading and writing by this time, even though the lines he produced when he wrote and drew were shaky. But, I said, I remained deeply concerned about his relationships with other children, and his behavior. I brought up his spitting on the other child’s lunch (which I’d let them know about at the time). Immediately, his father countered: boys will be boys. I should have been prepared for this response, but I wasn’t.

  I went on to describe another incident, something very small. Sitting next to Amina one day, Henry had rolled her pencil off the table when she was looking the other way. I’d happened to catch his deliberate action, and had thought it a curious thing to do. It came out of nowhere: there was no existing antagonism between the two of them that would have explained it. It seemed to me to be something a boy might do to another boy, not something a boy would do to a girl. It was not the sort of teasing that’s commonly observed in this age group, which is not sophisticated, not hidden: the teaser picks openly on someone with whom he has a relationship. So if Henry wasn’t challenging Amina, what was he doing? It was provocative, but at the same time secretive. The act fit the pattern of other things he’d done, but what was the point, what was his motivation? I don’t know how well I said any of this, if I did a good job of explaining why this small act concerned me. In any case, Henry’s father immediately said it was a normal thing to do. I responded that well, no, from my years of experience teaching kindergarten, young children don’t usually provoke other children for no reason. With that statement, both sides were set in hardened opposition.

  To his parents, as I found out afterward, the stories were proof I didn’t like Henry. To me, the stories were news his parents didn’t want to hear, and his father’s rejoinders were as effective in their way as Henry’s behavior when he ignored others in the class. I made the recommendation that they consult a psychologist, but it was obvious it would be rejected. I saw it as their failure; I wanted Henry’s parents to see him as I did. But looking back, I see that I failed to find a way to make my concern about his emotional well-being relevant to them, failed to enlist them.

  During the March conference, as Henry’s father and I sparred, his mother had sat silently. That silence was expressive; her unwillingness to participate seemed to send a message, even though I couldn’t read its meaning. Some days after the conference, when I saw her after school one day, I asked her if we could talk. My intuition was that there might be some opening if I met with her separately. I said, I didn’t know what you thought about Henry’s behavior. I’d managed to find the right way to put it. Sitting with her, I was able to make the case for my genuine concern for Henry. I talked about my values as a teacher, saying that I care about children’s emotional well-being as well as their academic progress. I was worried, I told her, by Henry’s indirect defiance, though it was something many teachers might not care about since he was doing well academically. Was that very different from what I’d already said? Whatever the causes—the different circumstances? the implicit message that I valued her role and her opinion? a difference in my tone? speaking about my own values?—unlike the earlier conference, this meeting produced a feeling of shared involvement rather than judgment. Late in our talk, she told me she’d earlier felt that I didn’t like Henry. She’d felt I was picking on him. She said she saw that wasn’t the case and agreed to have a psychologist do an evaluation.

  Late in the spring, the psychologist observed Henry in the classroom, and I spoke with him briefly. I never learned the results of the evaluation, never saw a write-up, and received no official word. But events in the spring—the March conference, with his father’s quick defense of Henry’s behavior, my subsequent meeting with Henry’s mother, where I’d learned that his parents had seen me as picking on Henry, and his parents’ decision to have him evaluated—somehow changed the picture I’d formed of Henry in his family. I reconsidered the notion that I’d begun the year with, that the cause of Henry’s behavior was his parents’ failure to set limits. Instead, I saw Henry fitting into a family that was characterized by distance on his parents’ part from the emotional world that he and his sister inhabited. In this family, perhaps, a certain disengagement was the norm. My assumptions about the central place of social interactions in childhood were simply not shared by his parents. In drawing this (possible) conclusion, Henry’s scribblings and acts of defiance somehow made sense as reactions to a pattern in which his emotional life perhaps received less direct attention from adults than he needed. Yet whatever the psychologist concluded and recommended, in making the decision to consult a psychologist, Henry’s parents altered the pattern to a degree. I’d played a role in that decision, partly because, in my second meeting with his mother, I’d managed to override my habit of being judgmental when I felt stymied with parents. Whether or not Henry was aware of it, and whatever the impact on his world, the fact was that his parents and I had acted in concert.

  Henry at the End of the Year

  Henry came up to me and said, Do you want to marry the BFG? I said, What do you mean? He said, You said you love the BFG, so that means you want to marry the BFG.

  One afternoon, when the class was getting ready to listen to a chapter of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which I’d been reading to them, Henry teased me because I’d said to the class, “I love the BFG.” His comment showed off the changes in his behavior as the year moved toward its end: He now comes up and offers comments to me, spontaneously, just as the others do—for him it is a huge step. He had begun, more and more, to talk to me, to show me his drawings. One day when two other boys were drawing, continually coming up to ask me to write about their drawings (these were actually like sketchily illustrated stories they were telling, about monsters), Henry did it too.

  It was true that he continued to resist certain imposed group projects, but now he said what he felt. When we made plasticene mode
ls of undersea creatures, Henry complained, “I don’t know how.” Arshea, the assistant teacher, who had by this time returned to the classroom after giving birth, sat with him and talked him through the problems of representation. Where Henry has progressed—and this is where I feel most pleased and proud—is his willingness to take risks in communicating his thoughts and feelings. Yet the changes had limits. He still didn’t look at me when he talked to me, which set him apart from everyone else in the class; he didn’t have any steady friends, although he now often asked Max to be his partner when the class lined up. He was still not fully engaged with others. What seemed different was his knowledge that he could rely on me. I was careful about not letting him get away with things. I insisted he pay attention to me, to the adult; I didn’t ignore things. I wasn’t neutral or blank. I forced him to take me into account, providing a kind of ballast for him, keeping him grounded against whatever emotional winds moved him. I didn’t pry, I wasn’t intrusive; I didn’t ask him about his feelings. But I watched, and I was ready to listen when he had something to say. I steadily ensured that his work was valued, by me and by the other children. All the tiny steps he made—his comments, drawings—were placed in some public context.

  When we undertook our study of undersea life, Henry, in his own off-center way, played a leadership role. It was a public role. This wasn’t the Henry who liked hiding what he was doing. He was clearly attached to the subject, and he drew many careful detailed illustrations of the fish he was studying.

  Because his strength was in making things, Henry’s contributions to the class were things he made. After the class had made mobiles of undersea creatures with Andrea, our Studio in the Schools artist, Henry independently made his own hanging paper jellyfish. He cut a semicircle from construction paper, punched holes along the flat side, and came to me for help in tying on ribbons for tentacles. He even made a paper fish that was caught in the tentacles. It was his idea to hang the jellyfish overhead: we tied a string on it, and I attached the string to the light fixture so that the jellyfish floated above our heads. Henry produced this jellyfish by working in his solitary way, but the solitary nature of his pursuits had been profoundly altered by the group’s activities. Soon, everyone was making paper undersea creatures—sharks, rays, dolphins, giant squid, more jellyfish. One by one, as these went up overhead, the classroom took on an undersea ambience. In the block area, children had begun building an aquarium, others were labeling the displays of plasticene animals; the class aquarium was to be the setting for our last family-invited event of the year, in late June. Henry, again working on his own, made a sign for the classroom door, a page full of sea creatures. On the top he had written, WELCOME TO THE AQUARIUM. While Henry worked alone on these products, they showed his involvement with what was going on around him; they demonstrated how much he had become part of the class.

  Henry’s participation in the making of the aquarium, his visible stamp on this environment, summed up his growth. It was material proof of how far he’d come. “Welcome to the Aquarium,” he’d written; the words had a deeper meaning for me. His message is a metaphor for the world of the classroom, which like the sea provides a home for very individual creatures, a space of both cohesion and immense variety. The steps Henry made, the particular place he made for himself, came about over many months as a consequence of his own strengths and of what was offered in the environment. What contributed to his development was his love of making things, his interest in the animals we’d studied, and the opportunity, within this classroom, for him to pursue his interests, day after day—in the company of others.

  His story is, in large part, the story of the class. It was the class that provided lessons for Henry about a possible role he could play. He began to make things that had meaning for the others; it was a significant development. It was the class that didn’t allow him to stay alone, that valued and copied his creations, giving him reason to create more. The social environment of the class supported his growth and changed the nature of his ties to others. The impact of the other children as a group, in affecting Henry’s growth, is a lesson for me when I look back and draw conclusions from this story.

  Henry’s social environment included, also, the adults: David, our fall-term student teacher, and the assistant teacher, Arshea, whose kindness Henry could count on. I don’t want to underestimate my role: the story of Henry is also the story of one teacher and one child; this account illuminates one teacher’s positive and negative qualities. All year, I sought to steer him toward friendships, toward work and play with others. I struggled to understand him, was persistently interested in him, and engineered a relationship with him that I hoped would help break through his isolation.

  Yet I couldn’t dictate his path: this was another lesson for me from my year with this “difficult” child. The progress he made was his sort of progress: he wrote the script. Although he moved toward engagement, he was engaged with others primarily through the work he did. I would have written a different role for him, one that gave him more lines, more dialogue. The lesson—which I seem to learn over and over—is that children’s stories are their own. Teachers conspire with them, aid and abet, but the plot is theirs. However, while my goal wasn’t realized in the way I’d envisioned—he continued to pursue activities in a solitary way—I believe that the shift in his connectedness to others came about partly as a consequence of conscious effort and commitment on my part and partly as a result of his physical and social environment.

  Henry’s story illustrates one child’s growth over the course of a year. It is only that: one year. What came next in Henry’s life? How have his subsequent teachers seen him? How have they seen their role in relation to him and to his emotional and social development? Seeing Henry’s first-grade teacher from time to time, I’d ask how he was doing. She saw that he needed support in making connections to others, yet I am not certain that she sees children’s social and emotional development as a goal equal to their academic progress.

  My school’s focus is children’s development as students. A conflict resolution program is funded by the Parents Association, and a guidance counselor is available to work with individual students, but as is true for public schools generally, there isn’t a consistent commitment to children’s social and emotional development. The teachers share some values and beliefs but have different management styles and help children handle conflicts in a variety of ways. Children are exposed, in each class, to different expectations, routines, conversations, consequences.

  When schools define their role in a broader way, they put in place a variety of institutional arrangements in relation to children’s emotional and social well-being. When this is the case, teachers’ stories about encounters with children move to the center of school life, rather than being peripheral. They take place at planned meetings, rather than during lunch break. They generate more complex knowledge about the children we teach, and help us plan for them. Most especially, by telling these stories in professional settings, teachers can come to see children differently; the work of describing transforms our understanding of them. Then, our stories are not just things that happened to us; they are critical sources of information about our work with children.

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  June: Meanings and Metaphors at the End of the Year

  Paper Casts: Classroom Metaphors

  The last week: they are making casts out of paper. It started on Monday—they wrap paper around their arms, and tape the papers, making casts for a “broken arm.” They write their names on one another’s casts.

  Toward the end of June, as we were counting down to the last day of school, Caroline made a paper cast for her arm. She said, “I broke my arm!” Soon lots of them were taping paper around their arms, wearing a paper cast or two, asking for autographs. Children are often dramatic about their injuries, knowing they’ll get attention and sympathy. But watching the activity, I decided more was going on. The broken arm was a metaphor: the class was breaking up. It wa
sn’t a conscious metaphor, and I wasn’t about to use the occasion to teach about metaphors. The casts were casts, and the children were very happy making them.

  Looking back at those last days, it made sense to me that the idea had been Caroline’s. She was young—a fall birthday—and her transition to kindergarten hadn’t been smooth: in the fall, she cried easily when things went wrong or when I left the class at lunch; by the winter, she’d begun to show more resilience. Now, her playfulness reigned, and through it, she’d found a way to manage this next change, the end of the year, the end of kindergarten. She was in a sense a conceptual artist, a performance artist. She’d turned her body into an art object, and when she introduced this form of art to the others, they took it up with gusto. It was Caroline’s gift to the class, a product of her imagination, her high spirits, her sense of joy. Perhaps the interpretation says something about me, Caroline’s teacher. In any case, I couldn’t separate the activity from the point in the year when it occurred, a point full of meaning for the class and for me.