Holding Pattern

This informal essay was originally published in Sendero, a publication of The University of New Mexico. It draws from one of my earliest teaching positions (late 1990’s). I want to add that I have the utmost respect for those who continue to serve at elementary schools that are under funded and understaffed, that are controlled by bureaucracies with competing visions regarding the relationship between curriculum and standardized testing… and the purpose of kindergarten. -KW Holding Pattern 9:10 on a teacher planning day. 20 minutes into a meeting of indeterminate length – still indeterminate though it has been obvious from the start just how nowhere it is going. We have agreed that our school will not be a pilot for the new bilingual program this year; several of my colleagues have requested more information before they will consider it even for the following year. We lack the requested information, yet still we argue. My left foot begins to move in rhythm, not a simple tap-tap, but a triangle: point-1-and-hold, point-2-and-hold, point-3-andkick. Mrs. T., in the folding chair ahead of me, turns around and pretends to throttle me, then smiles. I realize, with some embarrassment, that I have been kicking her chair. Some kindergarten teacher I make! I learned to cut with scissors twenty-odd years ago, but I am still working on the art of sitting still. Steven, one of my five-year-old students, likes to put Legos in his mouth. He crawls around the floor during circle time, pulling on a piece of string and unraveling the rug behind him. He spends time in the sit out corner for the crime of liking to touch things. On some level, I identify with that child. I, too, like to touch things. Right now I am playing with the corner of the fact sheet I have already digested. I turn around and eye the publishers’ displays for the math adoption committee. There are thick teacher’s guides with hundreds and hundreds of pages just waiting to be read, plus all the supplemental materials a teacher could dream up: posters, workbooks, little packets of student manipulatives! One of

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them even has teddy bear counters. (Don’t you just love teddy bear counters? You can sort them into little colored piles while you read: red, yellow, orange, purple, green….) I am unruly by nature. If someone were to step back in time a few years and show me a picture of myself, telling children to sit in the peace position – modeling crossed legs and impeccably folded hands – I wouldn’t have believed them. If a child wanted to play with teddy bear counters at rug time, I declared, what was so wrong with that? Like many college students, I was out to change the educational field. The realities of teaching – the children’s quarrels – reigned me in a bit. Contrary to what some critics like to say, teachers do not squelch children’s impulses because they are training them to be ‘docile little factory workers’. They do so because many children lack safe or appropriate boundaries. Even if – God forbid – I were to start kicking Mrs. T.’s chair again, she would not actually choke me. We would not end up duking it out in the aisle there, between the Addison-Wesley and the Scott-Foresman. Not so, though, with Mark and Raul. If Raul were to crawl over Mark, or to kick him, even inadvertently, they might come to blows. I identify with the rowdy children far more now than I did when I myself was a child. I was never one of the kids in the corner. 50% of me may have fidgeted in rhythm, but the other 50% was compulsively goodie-goodie. I pulled out my hair during class sometimes, but what could they do? (At least I didn’t pull out anybody else’s.) You wake up one day, though, and you’re a grownup -- you can’t even pick at your own self any more without it being a professional liability. Yes, teachers have good reason to teach children to control their impulses. They are preparing them for the demands of adulthood. When there are 25 five- and six-year-olds in a class, that preparation generally involves some

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level of regimentation. In certain idyllic school settings, it may be different. But for now I am here, at this overburdened and understaffed reservation school, in this interminable meeting. I will make the best of it. I will continue to demand of children things I struggle with myself. I will note the hypocrisy, embrace it for a moment and move on. I listen to Mrs. T. pontificate. At grade level meetings, she lectures about standardized testing while the rest of the kindergarten staff drink coffee and eat donuts. (I do wish there were donuts and coffee here. Cof-fee, do-nuts, cof-fee, do-nuts – the words play in my head in a singsong rhythm. I trace circles on my fact sheet, in a frenetic way, over and over and over.) Luckily, we are nearing the point of agreeing to disagree – at least until next Tuesday when we will meet again to reevaluate out respective attitudes toward disagreement. Those curriculum displays are calling to me once more – calling me to dream my way to another place. I will write my own curriculum in the little school I will have someday, the little home school where we will be peaceful, if a tad less orderly. But first I need teaching experience. And first I need kids. First and foremost I need to get out of this endless meeting. Point-1-and-hold. Point-2-and-hold. Point-3-and… hold. My foot traces an orderly triangle that can not quite capture the rhythm in my head.

Note: All names have of course been changed.