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

by Diamond, Julie

  In those days at the end of the year, time seems to stretch out, stop, and then suddenly snap. Memorial Day in one week. June will, as always, whiz by. The contradictory nature of time seems inescapable: the absolute end of things seems to sneak up, unadvertised. On lazy August afternoons, Labor Day feels hazily distant, then it’s suddenly upon us. A more serious example: a friend—a parent—is terminally ill; we know it, but in the period before death, time feels suspended, as if the period might last indefinitely, as if death could be cheated. Folk tales are based on the human desire for continuation, for the prolonging of what we desire, the denial of a necessary end of things. With a magic word or phrase, the rice pot goes on producing rice, and the lucky peasant is never again hungry. Whether our hope is for food or love or life, human minds resist ends.

  Children may feel less ambivalence about the end of the year, which for them, after all, holds not only vacation, but also the next grade, and being older. For kindergarten children, who in September were new to elementary school, June holds a specific promise: in the fall, they’ll be returning—no longer new, no longer the youngest. Yet even for children, feelings are mixed, because this year is ending.

  For teachers, the severing of these ties is complicated. My teacherly ambivalence about the end of the year is fueled by the intensity of the connections I’ve formed with a particular group of students. For ten months, I’ve spent almost five hours a day with these children, and thoughts about them occupy me at other times too. For teachers of young children, the ties are especially strong. We teach through our selves: through the tone in which we ask our questions, through our genuine interest in and responsiveness to the children as individuals. We teach through our ability to listen—an attribute that is both professional and personal. We teach through the relationships we form with students, relationships we’ve fostered, and through our identification with them and theirs with us.

  On those last days, everyone is busy. The children who wish to help are put to work washing dolls and plastic animals. Some children help make piles of work to go home. Some children draw or build with whatever materials are left out. I fold construction paper to make files in which to send their work home, and the children illustrate the covers: “My Writing, June, 2005.” Everything goes home: science drawings, writing, math papers, pages of numeral writing, the patterns they drew, the outlines of their shoes measured in Unifix cubes. The files go into bags, and so do their name cards, the alphabet letters and room signs they’d made in the fall, and the drawings they’d made for their cubbies on the first day of school. I pack up their models of undersea animals. I add a present for everyone—a small magnifying glass. The bags go home two days before the last day.

  I busy myself with packing; the emotions are there, below the surface. The last day is a half day, dismissal is at noon. We walk across the yard, together as a class for the last time, about to not be a class. I hold the envelopes with the report cards, to be handed out to parents. But when I’d gotten the envelopes ready the day before, I’d neglected to organize them: I didn’t put them in alphabetical order, as I usually do, and didn’t make sure they were all facing the same way. I had to keep flipping the envelopes, as I said good-bye to kids and parents, hugging, shaking hands, as if I’d had to distract myself from saying good-bye. When the parents came in the gate, the children started hopping around me, moving like bubbles in boiling water, and the parents were waiting to say their good-byes too, and all the good-byes seemed to happen at once, until kids and parents were gone, except for the after-school kids, whose company I was grateful for as we headed back into the building.

  Packing Up

  The end is my knowing them at this moment, my seeing them produce this classroom (which I then take apart). The end is knowing Henry.

  When school was over—after the hugs, after the rabbit had gone to someone’s home for the summer—I went through the room, taking everything off the walls, putting materials away in bags and crates. I found objects: puzzle pieces, Lego pieces, broken crayons, play coins, old T-shirts, the bag with Sam’s work, left behind; I could interpret the year from these artifacts. Over the next two days, I returned the classroom to what it was before the year began—empty walls, piled up furniture. I knew how I wanted to find the room when I returned in August, and felt satisfaction in the process of packing.

  As I put things away, I thought about things not accomplished, things not done. I remembered an observation I’d intended to add to one of the reports. I made notes for next year. Take out the checkers boards and the geoboards. I thought about new activities and materials. Do more counting of things. It can be a job, they pick a number, and have to count out that many objects—color tiles, pennies, birthday candles. A “number of the day”—numbers in teens, in twenties, and the objects stay in a bowl all day. I wrote about a weak area. Time . . . how to be in control of it . . . I always think I can do more than I have time to do. It’s a failure to be realistic about time, but also—I hate making choices! I had lunch with Michael, another kindergarten teacher, and we talked about working together more next year.

  I also thought about the children’s accomplishments: Sam’s drawing of Graham’s block building of the Lincoln Memorial. His drawing was a great visual comment on Graham’s construction, proof of his drawing ability and of his interest in things around him despite his difficulty with spoken language. I thought about the amazing jet plane Max built in the blocks—huge, incredibly complex—which had been accidentally destroyed twice, and which he’d reconstructed twice. The reward of his perseverance was this object that took up most of the space in the block area, a jet plane, which no one else would even have thought about making, and which everyone admired.

  I thought about an incident with Denay, from early in the year, when she was uncertain of herself and her place in the class: Denay came up and said, Sam called me selfish girl—she was upset. We were on line and leaving the room, it was the end of the day—no time to call him over and talk to them both. I said, Oh, Denay, you know that’s not true, you’re a great kid, you can ignore him, just go like this. And I showed her how to shrug and look disdainful. But she was still upset, so I told her to stay with me, and we walked out of the room together. Then I saw Lizzie and said, Lizzie, Denay’s feeling bad, will you walk with her? And later, I looked back and saw a very happy Denay. My words weren’t enough to remove the sting of Sam’s words, but Lizzie’s generosity and kindness, her immediate and unquestioning acceptance did the trick. This was Denay, all year, her mix of sensitivity and responsiveness; her emotions were visible, whether hurt feelings, or self-possessed pleasure when things went well.

  And Henry, initially so marginal to the business of the class, drawn in finally, to the extent that others copied his work. With him, what had made the difference? If I had to point to a shift in his functioning in the room, it would be when he and Amina had worked together to measure the rug. They weren’t close, weren’t friends, yet on that day, they’d done something together that neither could have done alone.

  Out of these moments and others, the class had taken shape. This metamorphosis, the formation of a group made up of these twenty-four separate individuals, didn’t occur only because of what the children learned from each other—e.g., the way that Amina’s Cave Book appeared a few days after Hayley’s Fish Book, and was clearly inspired by it. Children use what’s around them, love copying, and will take an idea and apply it in different forms for their own purposes. But the growth of the class—its cohesion as a group—came about not simply as a result of specific shared ideas. Through conversation, through the pooling of what each of them knew and what they didn’t know, through the very differences among them, their vulnerabilities and shared uncertainties, and through the process of looking and listening to each other—which depended, sometimes, on my insistence that they look and listen, even when they might have chosen not to—the class came into existence as an entity. The differences and similarities in children’s th
inking produced a mix of insights and perspectives; they became aware both of what made each of them unique and of what they shared with the others. Out of the joint projects and constructions, the mix of ideas and aptitudes, they produced a class, an “us.” Far from representing a loss for the individuals, they created a context in which to be themselves.

  Certain conditions were necessary: relative freedom of action and thinking, a range of acceptable opinions and roles, children’s work being valued and made public, and my attitude both of acceptance and expectation. Because there were various ways of contributing, and contributions were actively valued, the group made use of each child’s singular concerns and powers. The culture of the class, its values, allowed for individual expression and achievements, as well as group expression and achievement. Just as the individuals formed the group, the group permitted them to develop as individuals.

  On the last day, as we sat on the rug for the last time, Francie at one point suddenly got up. Distracted and tense, I overreacted, speaking harshly: “Where are you going?” She said, “Julie!”—her teenage tone and pose exaggerated and exasperated—“I’m getting a tissue!” Jonathan, who had never played much of a public role, who stuck with his particular friends, whose discussion contributions were rambling, self-referential, and quite intellectual, took up an unexpected position as spokesman. “Lighten up!” he said to me, smiling. I had to laugh; he was right. Later, I thought about the exchange and Jonathan’s comment. Jonathan would not have been so outspoken earlier in the year. And because he was a child who was generally shy and sweet-tempered, he could get away with admonishing me, in exactly that joking way. The class had become an organism, with different tasks assigned to different people, an evolving organism, able to protect and defend itself.

  The end of the year is arbitrary, in a sense—ten months of school, then summer vacation. We’d come to the end, and that was that. That afternoon, as I walked along the halls, some classrooms were already dark. A number of teachers, those who’d packed up before the last day, were ready to leave after they’d said good-bye to the last child. They dropped off their keys in the office, said good-bye to the office staff, and were on their way.

  I’m envious of their freedom, but have to do it my own way. In August, I’d taken time to set up the room; now I had to take time for the ritual of putting things away. I stacked plastic bins and containers and put materials away in bags, threw things out and organized. Packing up the room is my metaphor, it’s how I say good-bye to the year, an acknowledgment that I’ve come to the end of my efforts with this group of children. With difficult classes, classes that seemed never to come together in a caring and productive way, the end would bring relief but also a sense of defeat, despite the effort to balance out the year’s successes and failures. With these classes I’m left with a residual awareness of what I couldn’t affect, didn’t manage to set right.

  Things undone, things unaccomplished: The BFG, the book I didn’t finish, is one more metaphor, for unfinished business, lack of closure, endings that don’t end. I can, perhaps, find positive meaning in the metaphor. There’s a benefit to incompleteness; it incorporates possibility. Thus, the unended story is a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of a teaching year. It’s a metaphor for the children themselves, who straddle past and future, becoming who they will be. Who will Michael be, with his quick thinking and sense of discipline, the intentness he brings to figuring things out for himself? I don’t mean his career (computer scientist? physicist?). I mean, what are the possibilities inherent in his thinking, his insistence on understanding? In a poem titled “Leaving the Rest Unsaid,” the British poet Robert Graves writes of “The . . . mystery of my progress.” The last poem in one of his collections, its last line ends “At a careless comma,” 2

  The sense of incompleteness, of actions reaching toward the unknown (and unknowable), is integral to teaching. Karen Gallas describes her task as teacher-researcher as the attempt to “grab onto fragments of the life streaming by me.” 3 Our knowledge is necessarily partial and in flux for another reason, too: because teachers, also are transformed by time. This doesn’t mean simply that I’ll do something differently next year (remember to use the geoboards) but rather that my teaching is by definition never a finished thing. The knowing of children is what I learn to do differently each year, as a result of thinking about these children and their actions.

  At the beginning of each year, not knowing who the children are, my anticipation about the year is mixed with uncertainty. At the end of the year, as I take the room apart, my sense of achievement is mixed with—to borrow Graves’s word—what’s left “unsaid.” The phrase what’s left unsaid captures the contradictory meanings for me of the end of the school year, the challenge of accepting it as both finished and unfinished. Packing up, I envy and appreciate Caroline’s invention of a metaphor that contained, in one image, the children’s conflicting feelings about the end of the year, and the inevitability of change—and perhaps even about the mystery of time itself. Wrapping paper around broken arms, the children concluded and demonstrated that breaks mend; writing names on one another’s casts, they said hello as well as good-bye.

  10

  Postscript: Being a Teacher

  Choosing to Teach

  What would I say I’ve gained from a life in the classroom?

  Before I began teaching, I’d been working in the bureaucracy of the federal poverty program. I sat at a desk, talked on the phone, checked off items on checklists. The pace and formality of the work and the windowless rooms denied something about who I was. Later that year, when I began teaching in rural northern Georgia, whatever loneliness I felt there—as an outsider, a Jew, a Northerner, a city-dweller, a political liberal—was balanced by my feeling for the blue hills and back roads, by the red earth coloring my sneakers, and by my feelings about the people I got to know, adults as well as children. All of that got mixed together with the job of teaching; remembering the school, I picture the field outside, and the sky.

  I loved the physicality of the job: moving around the room, bending to listen, taking the kids outside. I loved the noise, activity, and surprises. I came to care deeply about individual children. My parents had both been teachers, and I thought I’d never teach—but there I was.

  I must admit something else: I liked feeling I was doing something important in the world, and that I mattered in the children’s lives. This was especially true in relation to the children who seemed most troubled, the ones who swung unpredictably back and forth between anger and calm. I saw them as condemned by the region’s poverty to hard lives. The families’ problems were real: the teeth of several of the children were blackened stubs as a consequence of the common practice of quieting babies with bottles of cola. I see, now, some youthful self-indulgence in my sense of guilt for the world’s ills, and some condescension in my attitude toward the families, although condescension was mixed with respect for them and gratitude for their kindness toward me.

  Over the years that I’ve taught, I’ve continued to enjoy the noise and activity of classrooms: I love the seeming chaos as different things go on at the same time; I love the buzz, love listening in on children’s spontaneous talk. I will admit something else: I value being valued. I enjoy knowing that amid all the classroom movement, I’m a constant point of reference.

  I’ve outgrown the idea that I’m responsible for saving the world, but I remain sharply aware of the injuries that social and economic forces inflict on individuals. I have greater respect for the world’s complexity; I see that adversity besets families in different ways and that families cope with adversity in different ways. Yet I continue to be motivated by a desire to do work that has social value, work I believe in; I continue to feel affection and concern for the children I teach.

  The feeling of moral obligation is a characteristic of good teachers. This isn’t—as the chapter on Henry makes clear—an abstraction, a generalized love of humanity. It is made up of varying em
otions, including, sometimes, negative emotions; it includes the ability to be (or appear to be) unmoved at times. When people hear that I teach young children, they frequently say, “You must be so patient!” In fact, patience isn’t my strong suit, but my genuine interest in children and loyalty to their growth usually trumps my natural impatience.

  One essential piece of teaching—of wanting to do it year after year, of sticking with it so that you get better—is the will for connectedness, the determination to find out who these children are, which is not entirely separate from finding out more about oneself. It is in the wish to bend and listen, the meaning to the teacher of that motion. It is in my caring enough to watch two children who’ve just made up after a fight, to notice how they walk away. My interest is rooted in my identification with childhood’s delights, industry, wonder, and fears. Good teachers remember the feelings of vulnerability and power; they honestly share children’s curiosity and amazement; they remember the feelings of disgust (Hayley’s refusal even to look at the fish’s eye). I’m in the classroom as a teacher, but in a vestigial way, as a child.

  My sense of connection with children—with the intensity with which they experience things—is compelling and joyful for me, an aspect of the job that I value. It is also something I bring to the job, the source of my responsiveness. The focus and presence that teachers gain from the act of identifying with children makes us more alert to the immediate reality of children’s experiences. A good teacher has a child’s awareness of detail, an attentiveness that spotlights encounters—what was said, what actually happened. The teacher notices, minute by minute, looks around, listens, doesn’t miss anything.1 That recognition of ourselves in them (or them in us) is not an indulgence as long as it serves an educational purpose, motivating us to plot a path for them toward further development. Further, the empathy that we show children helps them develop empathy for others.