As most of you know, I have returned to college to get credentialed in Early Childhood Education so I can continue teaching Pre-Kindergarten. I have my degree in English and began my MFA in Creative Writing before getting derailed by marriage, family and life - and that's okay. But new regulations in Colorado demand that every lead teacher must now have an education in ECE. We must take two classes initially, building to an associates degree over time. Although I wasn't fired up about it, I now see this is a good thing, albeit slightly inconvenient.
Last night was my first class in Child Guidance Strategies. We started last week but the professor had to miss because she was busy rescuing 32 orphans from Haiti and placing them with adopting families here in Colorado. Needless to say, we accepted her excuse for being absent! Subsequently, last night was our first class discussion - and we went deep.
To understand how to guide a child in our classroom we need to understand where the children are coming from. What is happening at home? What have they been exposed to in their short lives? How are they disciplined? How consistant is their rountine? How much affection are they shown? Who are their primary caregivers? An endless list of questions we can never get all the answers to. And, it turns out, endless variations in answering those questions.
But because we can't ask the children for their answers, the teacher asked us for ours.
We were invited to be frank in sharing our own answers to those questions, to share our own stories. Stories of abuse, of neglect, of rape by a stepfather, of divorce, of punitive discipline, of jailed mothers and taking custody of siblings, of drug and alcohol dependence, of parental mental and physical illness, of special needs and emotional needs, of death, separation and running away.
Out of a class of 16 women only four could claim to come from an intact, healthy family. Merely one quarter of the women had the "nuclear family" we used to see on TV. This tells me that what most of us thought was the norm was really abnormal in our generation. And I would venture to say, even more so in the current genration of preschoolers.
I have 16 kids in my classroom. The same number as the amount women in my college class. Although I live and work in a pretty affluent neighborhood, how many of these children have some of these issues in their homes? Judging by the varied answers of 16 women in my class? Probably more than I would ever guess.
So maybe next time that child that never stops whinning, or the one that always claims he's too tired to try his table work, the biter, or the girl that bursts into tears at the slightest offense start to try my patience, I can remember that I don't know their story and my patient smile might be the only one they see all day.
And that can make all the diffence - right then.
So this is what I learned last night:
Life is hard.
I mean really hard. But people are tougher. We overcome. We are built to bounce back for the most part. We are able to learn, grow stronger, and make different or better choices in the next generation. We don't have to be stuck with what we were dished out. We can dream of making a difference in our own lives and in other people's lives.
We can touch the future - one child at a time.
