I don’t really know what to do with
small children. I didn’t have to acquire much experience in this department
growing up—my brother is only three years younger than I am, all of our cousins
are older than that, and by the time I reached babysitting age it was already
firmly established that I was not the right teenage girl to ask to help out in
the nursery.
Despite having known this fact about
myself since elementary school, I managed to forget it entirely in my senior
year of college. That’s when I encountered the attractive whirlwind of powerful
marketing and well-meaning hubris that is Teach For America.
For anyone unfamiliar with the
organization, Teach For America (TFA) is a program that recruits brand-new,
maximally idealistic college graduates and enlists them to teach for two years
in severely underperforming schools. TFA specifically seeks graduates who did not study education in college, because the
organization prefers a fresh receptacle for its own systems and values without
interference from clutter such as “years of training” or “classroom
experience.”
From Institute (where I learned that
showers are so your roommates can’t hear you cry), I went on to my very own
classroom of first graders in rural southern Louisiana. There it quickly became
clear that those hours of instruction and practice in lesson planning had not
addressed my extreme lack of experience with six-year-olds. My determination to
eliminate educational inequity did not prepare me for the child who brought a
pocketful of playground gravel back to class to throw at me...
... or the child with surprisingly good spelling and penmanship for a first-grader.
I want to be very clear on this
point: These problems sprang from my extreme lack of confidence and ability in
classroom management, and not from any fundamental fault with these children.
They are almost definitely not evil in their cores at all. And they certainly
didn’t ask to be subjected to the authority of that shouty white lady who kind
of sounds like she might cry.
After a couple of months, it was obvious
to everyone that my ability to explain subtraction was no match for my
inability to get anyone to sit still, keep their shoes on, and stop spitting
sunflower seeds at each other long enough to listen. I left the program early
and came home with more than a little psychological baggage.
Fortunately, there have been a few
changes over time. For one thing, it’s been eight and a half years since I left
Teach For America, so I almost never have the nightmares anymore.
For another, I have recently gotten
to know a few little kids who seem not to mean me any physical or emotional
harm! This experience is distinctly preferable, and in fact I have found that
it can even be fun. For instance, several
months ago I had a graduation party at which the first guests to arrive
included friends of mine with their 5-year-old twins, Lucy and Batman. Also in
attendance was a large and delicious-looking cake. I let the kids know that
there were not enough people present yet to cut the cake, and we would have to
wait until some more arrived. Lucy spent the intervening time making sure that
the presence of a cake in the room remained at the front of my mind.
By the middle of the
party (during which Lucy got plenty of frosting on her cake), there were four children under the age of six in my
house. I am proud to report that I did not find this situation even a little
bit harrowing.
Funny how context can
change your experience. It’s almost as though Teach For America has significant
organizational failings that should not be interpreted as a direct indictment
of children’s character or my worth as a person. Huh.
Extra Credit: Sure, it’s satire. But it’s true.
