Max time, week one: Reflections

Wow. Here I am at the end of my first full week of being THE teacher in the classroom ... and I'm still here! I was feeling on Friday that I had had "good" days and, perhaps "not as good as the others" days, but the paraprofessional assistant replied with the honest statement "Kindergarten is busy and there's a lot to do." I think she was trying to remind me that just because I feel more tired at the end of certain days doesn't necessarily mean they didn't go as well as other days. It just means I'm tired. Boy, am I ever.

All in all, I feel good about this past week. At the same time, I am aware of my goals for next week (or, you know, for my life in general). In one phrase: Stay the course.

... i.e. no wishy-washy conflict resolution. I've noticed I have a tendency to want to take a step back from conflict, as opposed to addressing it head-on, especially when the conflict is not mine. As a language learner and world traveler, one of my key learning techniques was to remain as in cognito as possible, drawing little attention to myself so that I could observe how interactions played out naturally. Now, as a Kindergarten teacher - that has to change. If I am still observing 100% of what is going on around me, I am, in turn, being observed - and checked! - by 110% of my students, who rely on me for the boundaries, advocacy, and mediation that they have not yet internalized for themselves. Sticking to my guns - as black and white as they must be at the five-year-old stage of human development - is imperative if my students are to one day regulate their behavior on their own. The moral structure (and resolve) I provide externally in the classroom is what will manifest itself and guide them internally as they continue to learn the nature and implications of their behavior.

... i.e. keep the momentum of the task at hand. Again, as a learner myself, I can become captivated by slightly unrelated material and, admittedly, distracted from what I originally set out to do. While this tact has actually introduced me to a wide range of - despite the initial distraction - very relevant learning opportunities for me, it does not serve the needs of five-year-olds, who are still distracted enough at their age by the overwhelming nature of the world they are discovering around them. For the sake of their own developing ability to focus on one task at a time, I must model extreme focus, thinking out loud and directing thoughts to a specific goal. Not to exclude, of course, the observations and comments students offer on their own part - right here is where I've not yet developed the finesse I have observed in my cooperating teacher of validating their comments while, simultaneously, moving forward in the direction of the lesson at hand. This, too, feels unnatural to me, because it feels overly structured and intentioned. However, as I mentioned above, young children seem to need and seek overly structured concepts in order to erect the initial frames of knowledge that they will continue to build onto as they learn and encounter more of life's intricacies and complexities.

Slightly tangential, but you are all a lot older than my five-year-olds, so I'm trusting you'll see the connection I'm going for:

Last spring, in the process of working on a graduate level independent project entitled Storytelling as Pedagogy, I came across the work of psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. In his book, The uses of enchantment, he makes the argument that the reason traditional fairy tales include such extreme characterizations of good and evil is that they separate the concepts of the two extremes in such a way that children recognize them first absolutely. Later in their development, as they experience the "gray" mix of good and evil in the real world, they come to conceive how good and evil co-exist in the world. However, children can only grasp the gray if they've known the black and white - they cannot discern the latter if they have only experienced the former.

And so, I am learning to return to my five-year-old sense of things:
"school is where we come to learn and do our work";
"we are all friends at school: the toys we play with belong to everyone"; and
right and wrong are, well, "that's okay" and "that's not okay".

As extreme as these statements may sound, I'm finding it a meaningful exercise for me to remind myself of these, and other, basic sentiments of living and learning in community. How easy it is to become overwhelmed by the grayness of life, to the point that it is easy to forget the black and white that create it. Kindergarten has proved to be quite the lesson in maintaining a sure internal compass in any situation - not for my sake, the individual, but for the sake of the community, living and learning together.

I think I can stay that course.