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| 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.
