THANK GOD IT'S BROKE!!!

Chanchang The Mr. Flag Fixer Man

          Some probably say that us early learning teachers are kind of on the wack-side of the spectrum. I couldn’t agree more. It’s an honor well represented by few. If we are doing our job right, half the time we are standing on our heads pretending to be some sort of Olympic Gold Medal gymnast lost in translation from a day journey to Mars and back, while the other half of the time we are having to continuously readdress and improve strange unheard animal noises such as the Impala. You see the probably with the success of getting kids to answer questions such as, “What sound does the cow make?” via sacrilegiously innumerous amounts of repetition, is that the cattle head always comes back to bite you and in twice the infinity of repetitions, “What sound does the Impala make?” Ad infinitum. Oops.

          But there are other neuroses that occur below the finger pointed at layers. Most of these remain known only to the teacher him/herself and in the best of play areas a handful of faithful shoulders to the wheel. One of these that I’m willing to reveal is that nagging-all consuming internal debate of SHOULD I DO IT or LET A KID DO IT. A seasoned-intuitive mentor knows best that if an adult did it, a learning chance was stolen from the heavenly realms that have decided to create the all so hard to see but ever-occurring moment for natural learning.

This week our focus was on the wonderful gift of broken things. You know, first week of school, in an almost siblingless society, everybody’s still kind of getting used to the whole sociability basic principles of share, pass, wait, don’t smash the oversized Montessori Triangle on your classmate’s nose. What it all comes down to is that, things break. Great! Times to fix something!! Woo-hoo!! It’s time to bust out my ancestry chops, pay credit to my lineage that fixed things before me. Yeah well, not so quickly there buckaroo, not in Caillou School you won’t, not without some neurotic counter-balancing out of the pros and cons of teacher intervention first that is.

And so we opted to let the kids do it! Drawer knobs were glued, the slide’s flag was screwed in and then hoisted, the climbing rope was knotted up again and man the morning flew by and we didn’t even have time to execute the lesson plan I hashed out for a good 45 minutes the night before. Oh well, monumental development took place, Thank God for broken things.