Mumbling Madly

Yesterday…
I assisted in helping babies learn the joy of paint. The class was for ages 12-24 months old and you just have to imagine six babies lined up on a plastic tarp with six pieces of gold paper and five tubes of paint. There were brushes…sure…and a few kids actually enjoyed holding the brushes and swirling them around their paper. This is the time when personalities reveal themselves, the intricacies of human preference, the humor that makes up a person. One baby diligently painted swirls on his paper, another refused any tools and used her hands, and one baby ended up using her entire body as a canvas: she sat on top of her paper and smeared paint all over herself. This particular baby comes from a very conservative household, or so I was told by her nanny, “She’s not allowed to make a mess, not ever…I want to do more art with her at home but her parents would freak out…their house is immaculate and not very ‘baby like.’”

One little girl is not interested in the paint. She finds the roll of blue painter’s tape that I used to tape the sheets onto the canvas. She carefully affixes several pieces of tape onto her paper, creating blue curly-q’s and x’s. This child leaves the canvas spotless, ready to move on.

I am in charge of cleaning these babies up…I have a big bucket of warm soapy water and lot’s of rags. One by one each baby is dropped into the bucket, the water coming up to their chubby knees as we carefully avoid getting the diaper wet. I wipe down the multi-colored streaks of paint from their legs as their grown-up holds them diligently–eventually every baby leans over and puts their hands in the water. They splash the water around with their fingers and make bubbles pop. I encourage them to do this because it cleans their hands. One little boy lingers a long time near the water. He trails his finger through the water’s surface, making little paddling gestures with his hands, and splashes around. His mother claims he is obsessed with water: fountains, puddles, wading pools. “Your hands are sparkling!” I proclaim as I dry his fingers off again and again. The baby who has immersed herself in paint is stripped of her onesie and plopped in the tub. She bitterly complains as I scrub off the paint. The paint is everywhere: on her back, in her hair, in her elbows, on her ears. She spends the rest of the time padding around in nothing but a diaper; I notice her masterpiece drying on the rack: one single solitary piece of paper covered completely with several layers of paint. Not a trace of gold, the colors creating a beautiful muddy brown.

In a career where I find myself constantly surrounded by small girls taking dance it is always heartening to have a boy in my class.  This particular boy is a complete sweetheart.  I was away from my campers while they had snack so I could set up the gym for an obstacle course.  He peeked his head into the room and said in a genuinely breathless voice, “OH! Teacher Mara we thought you were a PRINCESS.”  It just about broke my heart.  Sometimes you need that sort of recognition.  The same student kissed my shoulder while we sat in our final closing circle.

I find that without a second teacher teaching a two hour camp with 8 students by myself is difficult.  It is largely due to the 3 year olds, I think.  Their focus is all over the place, whether it’s with specific games with rules or sitting down and reading a story.  I also had three sisters in my last camp (a set of twins and a smaller sibling) who had very little schooling.  I could tell this by the way they constantly interrupted me while I spoke–it might seem like a small thing but kids that have been to school sort of understand the teacher/student dynamic: you don’t interrupt the teacher.  I try to be pretty militant about raised hands being the key to communication.  There is no shouting out in my class: you got something to say you raise your hand.  That’s pretty standard, right?

I am also facing a big decision: should I teach only.  I say this because right now I am program coordinator and pretty miserable.  I don’t have much support for this position.  Outside field work? No time.  Personal calls to parents? No time.  Outreach in nearby pre-schools? When would I ever have that sort of time.  I feel as if I’ve been set up to fail.  Therefore, I haven’t felt successful in my job since I’ve started.  I have turned down multiple teaching jobs in order to fully commit to my 30 hr coordinator job.  I have one foot in the door of another local studio and I taught at another studio in Burien over the summer that begged me to reconsider teaching for them in the fall.  I’m interviewing at a children’s theater in Kirkland this afternoon.  What would you do? Continue trying to make this resume-building position work? Or try to survive off the teaching jobs that keep resurfacing and leave the complicated corporate world…

Wouldn’t you know it that on the second day of Princess Camp I totally hate it?  Is three-years old to young for a two hour camp…YES.  I say this because I just CAN’T seem to shake the two-year-olds that somehow managed to sneak their way into camp.  This fills me with rage that I have to squelch when complimenting their charming fairy ensembles.  (So, when I said, “They have to be three when they walk in the door” over the phone the parent chose to IGNORE this?!) Oh, and this is the day the front desk person called in sick and the baby toilet exploded its watery contents all over the floor.  The press release for promo week was due today but our internet was down…which rendered my job useless.  In fact, if you remove access to my remote desktop my work load screeches to a halt.  So much of what I do is blabbing online to various co-workers about class descriptions, field emails from parents looking for a class for their 2 year old and their four year old, and it just goes on and on.  Our office manager is in Thailand for 6 weeks and bless her heart I felt a hideous sense of betrayal today.

On top of this I am tackling my zine for the Symposium in two weeks…wait, one and a half weeks (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?)  Gina and I will once again representing so if you’re in the Portland area on August 11, c’mon down (Sam’s wedding is the next day so I GUESS we’ll skip Sunday’s tabling).  The zine is called KIN, and yes, it pays tribute to some very special people in my life.

I’m drinking.  Bladder be damned.

I shutter to even write this, but I am about to embark on teaching (shh) PRINCESS CAMP. This goes against a lot of my feminist values, it really does. I understand, however, that this is all part of gender identity, girls exploring the feminine role, etc. An excellent article in the NYT Magazine nails it on the head: this whole ‘princess’ phenomenon is both age/gender appropriate and a big marketing ploy by Disney. Therefore, you can expect me to don a crown tomorrow and encourage the six other little girls to get in their best princess finery. But while we color pictures of our princess selves and travel through the magical obstacle course I will also be reading tough girl books: Princess Smarty-Pants Rules, Cinder-Edna, and Pirate Girl. Sure, sure, we’ll throw in some classics–maybe I’ll have the girls retell them to me and each other. You can’t avoid Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and all the plastic Disney princesses.

It should be noted that while I talk tough I was/am a shameless girly-girl myself. I would have been ALL over the Disney Princess marketing that’s happening these days. Dress-up, ballerinas, dolls, Barbies, you name it, I was INTO it. I remember watching the Little Mermaid and feeling sad that I was just a little too old to get away with buying an Ariel doll–and this is from a gal who played with Barbies until she was 12. I understand that much of this is, again, part of girls identifying themselves. One of my favorite lines in the above article is by Peggy Orenstein is, “According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers.”

Sure, there are parents who roll there eyes when I ASSURE them that there will be an element of Girl Power in my Princess Camp. That we aren’t going to spend two hours falling all over each other and swooning–that we can rescue ourselves! Still, I’m totally nervous. Do we color our crowns today or tomorrow? Do I ask them to give me a princess name or do I come up with my own? I had to come face to face with the inherent sexism of Princess Camp when I had a Mom call about her son possibly taking the camp. As much as I desperately want to try and encourage parents to enroll their little boys in dance classes (COME ON, a creative movement class will NOT turn you son gay), I knew it would be really tough to bring a boy into the camp. I warned Mom: “It’s gonna be REALLY girly.” Wisely, she backed off. Because, well, I’m going to rise up to the challenge: It’s gonna be really pink and obnoxious and that’s just fine…

Stay tuned…

I just got home from the closing night of the high school musical I co-choreographed.  It was amazing, I hardly stayed in my seat.  I hooted and hollered during the whole thing, shouting out, “YAAAY!” whenever the performers executed a lovely tourjete (we worked HARD on those jumps, I tell you they’re not easy).  The kids brought us up on-stage and gave us flowers and I, ah, got to hug the leading man.
The co-choreographer brought up a story I had forgotten to tell:  I inadvertently cast a very inexperienced actress as the Old Lady.  She’s very tall for her age and still trying to figure out what ‘old’ really means.  She was too old…she became decrepit.  I told her that she needed to make her old lady character a little more hip…a little less ‘old’, like The Golden Girls. She looked at me blankly. I repeated loudly, “You know…the Golden Girls?” She had no idea what I was talking about and I was hurled into the depths of old-dom. So then I had to think of a pop culture icon who was feisty and old. Who did I come up with? Grandpa Simpson. She got it.

I’m heading out this weekend for my baby sister’s college graduation.  Stay tuned…

I recently discovered that Tugboat Press reviewed my zine, Kindergarten Underground, in their Best Zine Ever! publication and this is what they wrote:

“Mara does a great job of describing her introduction into the world of elementary school teaching. Through writing, tons of illustrations and a few comics, she tells stories of teaching children and how her job shapes her life. The zine includes the story of a real lockdown at her school which had me in tears. We leave our children with teachers every day and I can only hope half of them are as responsible and awesome as Mara!”

As a result, a tiny zine publishing company in Chicago has expressed interest in distributing my work. Nothing may come of it, however, I’m deeply flattered. This is also motivation to get crackin on Kindergarten Underground Volume 2!

One of the classes that I’m teaching is new to me: Storybook Acting. This is a class that I inherited last Fall. I never thought one could teach acting to 3-5 year olds, but it’s possible if you choose the right book.

I use a standard, creative movement warm-up in a circle–complete with body pats, dancing fingers, and singing the abc’s while touching our toes. In order to mix it up a little bit, I’ve started singing in class. It took a while to brush up on the old hits: “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Row, Row, Your Boat,” and the classic “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. ” The kids usually sing softly while doing the hand gestures and I inevitably end up belting out the tune with all my heart. It’s actually kind of a fun, since I know they don’t really care about my pitch or tone. When I was a kid, we had a cassette player and a whole bunch of tapes from the We Sing Silly Songs series; I listened to these tapes quite a lot and since my sister was much younger then I was, we used to sing along together. Sometimes I’m transported to a much younger time while singing “The Ants Go Marching”, my fingers enthusiastically marching up and down my knees.
It never fails, but I could play the Animal Game for the entire 45 minutes and the kids would be in Hog Heaven. At four, there is nothing better then pretending to be a kitty or a puppy–the two top choices. Sure, I try to throw some rodents in there, maybe a lizard, or the popular snake–but cute animals are really where it’s at. Maybe we should be blaming Disney for the onslaught of cute cartoon protagonists?

Because it’s acting, sometimes I make them act out every emotion in the book–to music of course. The best one is “Bad Mood,” where the kids stomp around and pretend to be pissed. Last week I had them act out the seasons of the year. Sometimes I try to give them real-life characters, like “Mom,” “Fireperson,” or “Shop Keeper.” I’ve also found that giving the kids numbered dots to use has been invaluable. I make them line up in order, sit in a circle in order, and basically command them using their designated number–yeah, I’m a real drill sergeant. Want to split up a pair of particularly aggressive girls? “Sorry, you have the number five dot and your buddy has number three…you can’t sit by each other because then you’d be out of order.” I have some real buttheads, girls that order other, weaker, girls around…telling them that they can’t hold hands with so-and-so because they suck–which I absolutely won’t tolerate in my classroom. This is actually an isolated girl related problem, because the boys I have are oblivious and too focused on tearing it up to get involved with any classroom dramas.

After we do our acting warm-ups, the kids gather around and I read to them. Books I’ve chosen are Superdog, Ferdinand, Corduroy’s Pocket, Petunia, Diary of a Spider, the Dot, and The Day Jimmy’s Boa Constrictor Ate The Wash (yup, straight out of Reading Rainbow). Many are from the library but a large amount of books come from my own personal childhood collection I raided the last time I was at my parent’s house. I get a lot of satisfaction introducing a new crop of kids to books I really loved as a kid. I also spend a lot of time with the voices of each character, really distinguishing each one so the kids understand the power of voice. Sometimes I’ll ask them questions during the book: “What color is her sweater?” “What do you think will happen next?” “What expression does he have on his snout?” “How many starfish are there on the page?” But if I’m not careful the kids will talk through the entire book…

Acting the book out is always really interesting. Sometimes we’ll designate parts, but often this makes the kids feel bad–inevitably everyone wants to be the kitten, even if the kitten is merely a side character. Therefore, they usually ALL play the lead character, while I feed them lines and give them stage directions. There is usually a lot of running that goes on, as kids get caught up in the story. Sure, there’s one girl who often resigns herself to sitting in the corner and picking her toes with her teeth, but for the most part the kids are super involved.

If we’re really on a role, the kids will really start taking the lead. I’m continually amazed by their capacity to perform. One of my best actors is a quiet girl who must come from a family of Amazons because she’s only four but looks at least six. She internalizes every character, downplays the verbal, and really comes through with her emotional rendering of the character. I can tell the class has an impact on her because I’ll hear her telling her Mom, “Today I got to play Petunia…” which is a lot more reflection then most of my students.

I’m currently teaching Story Book Acting to a group of 4 1/2 to 6 year-olds and a group of young 3 year-olds. The younger ones have a much harder time translating the book to the stage. I read my old favorite, Abiyoyo yesterday, and it was the first time the kids were actually audible with their lines and singing. We worked on opposites, big versus small, happy versus sad. These little ones have taken to bringing a book from home–which I love, because it shows their thinking about literature after class–which we read before class starts. At three, they’re still very much enthralled by being read to, where as my older kids are more interested in asking questions about the book, pointing out every little detail in the illustrations, and showing off their stellar knowledge to their peers.

Recently on NPR they had an interview with Nancy Pearl. She’s a Super Librarian, going to schools to get kids jazzed about reading and writing a lengthy book called Book Crush which researches what the hip books are for each generation. I was in awe of her, listening while driving to work. I wanted to call in and shout, “Yes! Yes! I need your booklist, I love getting kids excited about reading!” Which sounds so Sesame Street, I know, (speaking of, I caught an excellent documentary recently about implementing Sesame Street in different countries, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SESAME STREET, which I highly recommend).

After a little searching, I found Nancy Pearl’s website. I’m not sure what I’m going to write to her, perhaps just simply expressing my camaraderie for getting kids involved with literature. Maybe asking her what I should be when I grow up…if it’s possible to read books to kids for a living. Because, when the day is bright and I don’t have a cold, I find reading to kids the easiest part of teaching. The book carries itself, entrancing the kids, keeping them still and engaged. Perhaps this is what it’s all about…oh, sure, the socializing of three-year-olds is important, which is why the Creative Movement curriculum and all the other classes I teach are significant…but just being read to, man, that’s really what it’s all about when you’re young.

A few weeks ago my dear friend Kimberly wrote a really wonderful blog post regarding craigslist postings for free artists-for-hire. Many local companies looking for artists on craigslist more often then not request their services for free. Kimberly wrote: “Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)” I loved this post. I felt like she should publish this piece and get paid for its wisdom: “Graphic artists, illustrators, painters, etc., are skilled tradesmen. As such, to consider them as, or deal with them as, anything less than professionals fully deserving of your respect is both insulting and a bad reflection on you as a sane, reasonable person. In short, it makes you look like a twit.”

I recently thought about her post when receiving a letter back from The Largest Children’s Theatre in Seattle. This theater is world famous for its incredible production values, stellar children’s theater education, and award winning performances. So, it’s the shit, and I realize that everyone and their Mom wants to work there. They had a listing for assistant teaching positions for their summer program. The pay would be a measly ten dollars an hour, and the job description pretty much stated that you wouldn’t really be teaching but sitting with students at lunch time, handing out snacks, and basically corralling the children. However, I figured it might be worth it to be underpaid in order to get my teaching foot in the door.

I put together a nice packet, detailing my ten plus years teaching theater and six years of teaching dance. I included pics of me with small children and big children–expressing the range of ages I’ve taught. Perhaps they would be so impressed with my experience they would consider taking me under their children’s theater wing. A month later I received an email informing me that I did not qualify to be an assistant teacher. However, I had “quite a lot of experience” and would I be interested in being an intern? I quickly scanned the email for the most important part: pay. Really, the teaching internship was written in a very titillating manner–design curriculum! Explore concepts! Set up directing projects!–and yet I skimmed this to read the inevitable: 40 hours a week would be rewarded with a weekly stipend of $120-140. Yes, this breaks down to $3.20 an hour at the most.

I was so close to emailing a sarcastic response, something along the lines of, “I’m so GLAD my ten years of experience qualifies me for a below minimum wage stipend. It EXCITES me to think I could spend forty hours a week making the same wage as an illegal alien picking fruit. Of course, I understand that 20% of your teaching interns go on to work within your non-profit company. Perhaps this glimmer of hope justifies forgoing my mortgage payment for the summer.”

OK…I’m a poor sport.

On the teaching front: I have received great feedback–largely due to the addition of a class I’ve began with 2 1/2 year old students. This includes parents saying they really liked how I handled their child. What I’m finding with this age group (which is greatly avoided at all costs by many teachers due to its challenging nature) is one needs more patience then ever imagined was possible. This involves me saying things over and over: “Please, sit on the purple mat and wait your turn,” “touch your nose if you’re listening to me,” and “no, no, I didn’t ask you to go yet, please sit down.” I say these three sentences probably twelve million times during this painfully long forty-five minute class. I ask an incredible amount from these two-year-olds for the first half an hour. Then the last fifteen minutes is a struggle. This is also the first class I’ve taught with chattering parents in the wings. The moms all come with a baby in tow or a very pregnant belly in addition to their squaking two-year-old. They are thrilled, relieved, exhausted, and stimulated by the company of other mothers. I am happy to provide them with a place to simultaneously talk and watch their burgeoning child. However, this makes the class EXHAUSTING.

What I’ve learned about this age group is that they are on stimulus overload. Their world has blown wide open and their little brains are receiving tons of new signals. For some they respond by running all over the place without a hint of restraint or understanding of the ‘rules.’ Others have many meltdowns which require parental support before ‘getting back out there’ and rejoining the class. (I had one little girl who was so enthusiastic she  peed on the purple mat…which was actually a compliment to me since it indicated her level of commitment overrided going to the toilet).  Some kids will be fine one moment and then a ghost of terror will cross their face and I can tell they are overwhelmed. Touching these kids is fine, and I find that I constantly put a hand gently between their shoulder blades to steady them. Usually I’ll squat next to each kid and say, “See Janey going through the tunnel? We’re going to wait until she goes through before it’s your turn…ready? One…two…three…GO!” And the kid, fully prepared, will roar through the tunnel like the lions we just pretended to be.

I watched a girl do the whole pull-the-stool-out-from-underneath-her-friend manuever at the girl’s school yesterday. Yikes…I haven’t seen that trick done effectively in years…her poor friend was completely oblivious and her face was written with utter shock when she plunged to the floor. How totally embarressing, I thought, even in a private all-girls school seventh grade is still a bitch.

Last week I asked the girls what sort of stereotypes people have about their age, gender, etc. They had so much to say, it was really interesting. One girl said, “People think if you’re thirteen you’re super giggly and girly and that all you care about is boys…” Another girl said, “I’ll tell you the truth, going to an all-girl school, people think we’re all gay.” And yet another girl said, “Sometimes my friends say that going to this school will make me white, you know, make me act like someone I’m not…which is stupid.”