Mumbling Madly

I’ve been officially inaugurated into the Kindergarten Teacher profession: I had my first experience with a kid throwing up. June, who has been balancing several romances in the class, showed up to class lethargic and despondent. Her Mother told me she had been ‘touch and go’ all morning, but that she wasn’t buying the ‘I’m sick’ act–which I totally understood, I hardly believe anything that comes out of these kids’ mouths when it comes to illnesses or wounds. (Side note: Imagine my surprise when I taught in a 2-3 classroom where kids actually tell the truth about their physical well-being. One boy leaned on a piece of fabric I was using and yelped, “I cut myself!” I responded in my usual way, “Oh, you’re FINE.” The kid held up his bleeding finger and the staple that had punctured him. I immediately sent him off to the office for an extensive peek and a band-aid). Mom thought June might be sad because a particular baby-sitter is leaving the family. Anyway, June toiled around with her work all morning, her eyes wet and glassy.
I was right in the middle of editing a sentence for a kid when June flew into my lap and frantically mumbled something into my pants. Man, I was such an idiot. I couldn’t hear her so I said, “Hang on, I’m editing a sentence, I’ll be right with you….hang on.” I couldn’t really hear what she was saying until she gasped, “I’m going to throw up RIGHT NOW.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and we ran to our bathroom–which was locked and occupied. So we ran into another classroom where I flung open the closet door thinking it was the bathroom…luckily, I steered her into the correct room just in time: All over the bathroom floor. The poor kid didn’t even make the toilet bowl, but she did nail the seat. Right after it happened she said, “There, OK, now we can clean that up…OK.” She looked deathly pale, the kind of sickly green you only read about, and if you’re unlucky, experience. I brushed her hair away, gave her a cold, wet, paper towel, and asked her if she needed to stay by the toilet a little longer. It was awkward, my heart was pounding, and my own stomach was lurching. Selfishly, I was thinking: I’m concerned about a recent bout of pinworm that’s going around and now I have to add vomiting to the list? June tried to tell me she was fine and she could go back to class. I told her she wasn’t fine and we were calling her Mom. I parked her in the sick room with a book and a garbage can. Another little boy from another classroom showed up with the same glassy look– turns out it was only the beginning of a big stomach flu epidemic.
I felt obligated to inform the mother of one of June’s boyfriends–largely because she spends a lot of time hugging him around the neck, tugging on his hoodie until he chokes, and pouring sand down his shirt. Honestly, it’s only a matter of time before this boy pukes as a result of June’s touchy feely love. Mom responded appropriately, “Not the stomach flu!” She immediately launched into a story about the time both she and her son were sick and they threw up side by side into the toilet all night long. I’m always somewhat appalled when parents tell me these sort of war stories; It makes having children seem really gross and icky, like, who wants to get puked on?

I’m not sure how it happened but I ended up having a talk about conception with a little girl recently. She had assumed I had children and when I told her I didn’t, she informed me that I “needed to get an egg.” She then proceeded to tell me in long winded fashion all about how it “starts in the Mommy’s tummy through the vagina and the Daddy’s vagina–oops, I mean penis,” she corrected herself. She got fuddled up when actually trying to explain what it was the Dad provided and how it got there. Finally she offered this analogy, “Well, it’s like when the Dad makes dinner and he gives the dinner to the Mom.” Nice. I thought that was an excellent example and I could see myself offering this up to my future kid as an explanation–no need to go into the gory details just yet. She wrapped up the whole conversation with her previous suggestion: “So, you just need to find an egg!”

I spent this last week with 2-3 graders. During one of the activities centered on Poetry and descriptive language they were divided into groups of three and asked to rotate around the room. At each table was a colored piece of paper. They were asked to write down words they freely associated with that color. They were only given a minute at each table so they had to come up with ideas fast. When they were done the paper was covered back to front with random color associations. I quickly scrawled down my favorites on a separate sheet:

Ended another busy week with a request on my part to my boss about writing a dance program proposal for the school. You see, in my mind, it just made more sense to try and get hired at the school I’m currently employed at. Sure, I’m only a Resident Teacher signed up for 10 months (Plus a separate contract working at their summer camp). But I had this impossible hope that somehow my skills would be recognized and snatched up right away. The verdict? As high a priority dance education is for the school, their current focus is on raising the salaries of their teachers. The board has spoken: Give the teachers a raise. That’s a tough thing to argue against…what was I suppose to say? C’mon, you need new programs not higher salaries! The school has no real need to further create and develop a dance program; they’re currently the hottest private elementary in town. I braved the rest of my sit-down with my boss and smiled until my mouth hurt. I was so disappointed, I really was. Then, wouldn’t you know, it started to rain on my six block trek to the bus stop. And OK, so I cried on the bus ride home. I lay around feeling useless and sad…why, because I don’t have a career path and I don’t have enough money for extra schooling and I don’t know if I should return to retail or continue the Teacher Crusade of ups and downs and my current school is breaking up with me. After a few days I started reconciling with myself, the way you do when you’re ending a relationship. Before sitting down with my boss I was in complete denial about the inevitable end in three months. After the “Sorry, no room” talk, I went through the anger: Fine, I don’t need you, stupid school, if you can’t realize how great I am then it’s YOUR loss! Then I went through a depression…wait, I’m still kind of there.
You see, everyone wants to live and work in Seattle…especially artists. We flock to the NW because the dark weather fuels our craft. A lot of artists are teachers and a lot of teachers here are young and trying to find work. But the public schools are locked in a hiring freeze and the private sector is swelling with experience. To gain any cred teachers who are starting out are flung into Teaching Assistant positions, part-time tutoring, and special needs classes. This is all fine and good…but, many new teachers are bitter, having been told that the Baby Boomers are retiring soon and we desperately want to fill their shoes. I report this not necessarily as my own but as what I’ve been hearing from the “lifers,” the Residents who are dead set on teaching being their profession. All of them are under 33, recently graduated from Masters programs in teaching (and $20,000 in debt), or at least hold a teaching certification. They are bitter, bitter, bitter right now because none of us, not ONE, were considered for any of the following year’s open teaching positions. This doesn’t really affect me, I made my dance program pitch and failed, but it DOES affect my co-workers who, like me, are temporary. Collectively, we are breaking up with the school, and some of us are taking it hard. Unlike many of them, I do not consider teaching my life’s calling. If I could do anything I wanted and get paid for it I would rather be a playwright, a choreographer, or a performer. Because I can’t get paid a decent wage (or any wage at all) for any of the above, I’ve resorted to teaching (although I did have stints with importing cars, making coffee, office work, waiting tables, and retail). Teaching found me by accident, and now, like a coy mistress it’s playing with me.

I’m sitting in my classroom at 7:45am, the sun is streaming into our room, I’m carefully drawing with oil pastels onto a carefully cut out black square of construction paper. “Neat,” I think to myself, “These pastels look great on dark paper.” At that moment a security woman comes in to perform a routine sweep of the room. We exchange “Good mornings.” She checks the buzzers and devices and checks in with her walkie talkie. Than she looks at what I’m doing and sighs, “I wish I could do that all day.” I realize that she is admiring my colored squares of oil pastel, and instead of being defensive, (”You think I color all day? When? In between separating two fighting kids while dealing with bloody snot? Well, I’ll tell you what, coloring is the last thing I get to do!”), I was reflective. OK, so sometimes I get to hang out and listen to stories and color with markers and talk about how the number one worst sickness is throwing up. This is a good job, a challenging job, one that is different and engaging. Sure, I walked in and immediately longed for the end of the day when I could relax and eat dinner with Josh (while watching Top Model or American Idol). Sometimes it’s give, give, give all day long. But many times it’s just me hanging out while kids talk about books or play with legos or tell me how they’re feeling. There are days when I walk by the security car out in the parking lot and I envy the luxury of being able to sit and listen to transmitters all day. But then I reflect back to my time in retail when my mind would hunger for a challenge, some really interesting work. The thing with teaching is that when it’s good, it’s really fantastic…the great moments may be few between but they are so spectacularly high that it’s hard to forget them when I reflect on leaving this profession. It’s like watching a kid learn to read, and they’re trying and trying and one day they suddenly identify themselves as a reader (”I’m reading! I’m reading!” The Screamer blew out my eardrums the other day.) What else can I say? Witnessing that moment is very, very cool.

Story I overheard in the lunchroom:
Four-year-old Cara approaches Jill on the playground and says, “I have to go home right now.”
Jill asks, “What’s wrong?”
Cara says, “I have strep throat, it really hurts, I need to go lie down.”
Jill inquires a little bit about it, knowing that Cara had strep a few weeks ago but has had a full recovery. Cara finally admits, “Ok, it’s my feelings that really hurt…”
Jill says, “Your feelings? Someone really hurt your feelings?”
Cara agrees, “Yeah…it hurts like strep throat. I have strep throat of hurt feelings.”
Jill informs Cara that even though she understands how bad that must hurt, she has to go back out on the play ground. Cara amicably agrees after realizing that strep throat and having feelings hurt as bad as strep are two very different things to a teacher.

So during Science I spent most of my time guarding a life-size skeleton from being attacked by a large group of Kindergartners. You know the type: Random plastic skeleton man impaled on a metal pole with moveable wire joints that you see in EVERY Science room. I was fielding a lot of questions and trying to keep the skeleton’s arms intact while kids vigorously shook its bony hands. Here’s the amusing thing: Every kid at one point noticed the pubis bone and immediately connected it with something funny and/or dirty. One kid blushed and said that it was a boy skeleton, and I assured him that both girls and boys have pelvis bones, tail bones, etc. We had a discussion about the tail bone and how when you land really hard on your bottom your tail bone hurts super bad, one girl grabbed her crotch and pantomimed, “Ow! I fell on my tail bone!” I corrected her, showing her that the tail bone was in back not in front. I tried to mellow them out by having them feel their own pelvic bones below their waists. Just when I felt like I had cooled everyone off about the whole pelvis situation, Oliver strolled up to the skeleton and cried, “Look at his penis!” I tried to diffuse this immediately, “That’s the PELVIS and besides this is a skeleton, no muscles or skin or anything like that just bones….” Oliver looked at me as if I was a total idiot and said, “But what about the bone inside the penis?” (Whoa, ok…) I said, “I don’t think that part has a bone, does it?” Oliver gave me this patient look as if I obviously had NO idea what I was talking about (being a girl and all), “Yes, it does.” He moved away and I looked at the Science teacher who was laughing. “Do you get questions like that often?” I asked. “Yeah,” she acknowledged, “It’s an interesting thing though, I was trying to think of which animals do have penis bones and all I could come up with was the dog…and maybe the whale.”
It was another classic moment in kindergarten teaching.

Maria: “This is Mara, she’s our teacher.”
Little-Girl-Visiting-Our-Classroom: “Oh.”
Maria: “If you look at Mara’s necklace she made it and the tree is to expire us to draw nature pictures.”
Me: “Inspire…I’m trying to inspire the class to draw pictures about nature.”
Maria: “Yes, that’s what I said, expire.”