Fluid Dynamics

Fluids, mostly body fluids, loomed large in the classroom this week. Fluids – organic and otherwise - loom large every week, actually. Water, for instance, helps us to mark important boundaries – to divide the world of home and family from the world of school. We start each day with hand washing – these ablutions are the real signifier of arrival in the classroom. Children aren’t really, REALLY at school until their hands are washed. Many children resist the ritual, hanging at the classroom door or tucking themselves in at a table that MIGHT be out of teachers’ lines of sight. Refusing flat out when reminded, “Go wash hands, go, go!” Other children simply extend their time at the bathroom sink indefinitely, chasing their clasped hands round and round as thick cuffs of foam develop, rinsing open palms in the running water for minutes on end, and generally postponing their passage into the intensity of the early childhood early morning.

I will give the plot away: urine wore us out this week. But it wasn’t the only body fluid of interest, just the only one produced on the premises. Well, and the only one with a handy alchemical symbol (a square, nothing fancy – I used it in my notes tracking Hanauta’s poop and pee output during her early infancy. Did I make up a symbol for poop or find that there already was one…for dung?) Milk caused problems – or drama, really, as well. We are required by the city agency which oversees our operation, to provide 6 ounces of milk per child per meal each day. We fill 3 pitchers with milk for breakfast, and five for lunch, set them on the tables, caution children not to fill their cups to the brim, not to knock over one another’s cups as they pass the serving dishes, to please get paper towels to sop up their spills. We admonish children as they pour 6 ounces of untouched milk into the slop bucket at the end of the meal. We pour milk down the drain nearly every day, probably 1-3 quarts. If we don’t ‘go through’ enough milk the kitchen staff – in a sort of bureaucratic whisper down the lane, nag me to use more milk, get rid of more milk. Sometimes I give milk away to parents but more often I just tip the jug and let an ivory stem of it disappear into the sink drain. This week I experienced one of my periodic states of rage over this situation, prompted in part by the knowledge that people in Haiti, and in so many places including NYC are suffering terribly for lack of nutrition, while I am required to waste milk each day. I spoke directly with our health and nutrition coordinator and after 20 minutes of a profoundly circular discussion I learned that the Federal Government, through the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) Guidelines, determines the required quantities of milk to be served (Go Dairy Lobby, Go!) It is out of the hands of the city agency which I had wrongly blamed for the idiocy – they are just the police, they don’t make the law, they just mete out the punishment! I was assured that there is no milk-waste quota and I am required to simply waste a modest amount of milk every day – at my own discretion really.

So, from being pissed off, let us return to the topic of pee. This week Nereida’s urine gained more potency as a signifier of emotional meaning. Pee is her primary medium these days. She stands by the cubby bins and pees. She stands by a toilet and pees. She lies on her bed and pees. She sits on the rug and pees. Her urine structures all sorts of activities in the classroom. There are things which we must say in response: “Go to the bathroom, take off your shoes and socks and pants and underpants, sit on the toilet, see if there is more pee pee that wants to come out. I will bring a bag and you can put your clothes in.” Wearing silicone gloves we lay paper towels over the puddle, if any. Wearing these gloves we help her to pack up her sodden gear. Wearing these gloves we wash her bed sheets. We spray our (purportedly non-toxic) classroom sanitizer on surfaces and, wearing gloves we wipe the surfaces dry. We label the bag of wet clothes: “Nereida 1/21/10,” “Nereida 1/22/10” just as we label her drawings, paintings, and dictations. We hang the bag on her hook down the hall, discreetly, under her coat.

Once she has peed Nereida changes out of the clothes that she arrived in. It is as though she begins her day anew, without having to say goodbye to Mommy. She’s just herself, naked, a nymph borne up into the world on nothing but a scallop shell of fluid. And then there she is in strange clothes, and ‘pampers’ – now she’s ours, our baby. Nereida likes to play baby, to play shrieking baby with teachers or peers. Her friends try to console her but she just lies on her back on the ground and cries, rocking her head from side to side. Her friends offer her imaginary bottles full of imaginary milk, but Nereida turns her head aside, signaling her rejection with a disgusted scowl.

We tried, experimentally, letting her wear a pull-up at rest time. I said, “This is just for rest time. Let’s see if this makes rest time easier.” Nereida was exultant, she agreed she’d take it off after rest was over. She wasn’t able settle down, the excitement of directing the actions of grown-ups was too precious and good to dilute and forget in sleep. After rest time she battled valiantly to keep the pull-up on. It took two strong women to subdue and change her back into underpants. After the quilted haven of diapered baby-hood she was damned if she would go back to the flimsy inhospitality of underpants. The battle field was now everywhere. Coat cannot be put on. Milk cannot be poured without a spill, spill cannot be sopped up. Hands cannot be washed. Once commenced, hand washing cannot be stopped. Rest cannot be had: Nereida swims on her back along the classroom floor, drawing her knees up, planting her feet, pushing away to extend her legs and move her body along. Yelling and swimming on the linoleum, past chair legs and blue cots, over grains of sand table sand and bits of lunchtime rice. On she goes, on she goes, a castaway in search of she knows not what.

Rest and Its Many Opponents

From the very beginning, and throughout my time teaching young children, rest time has been - and very pressingly remains - my downfall. My presence in the dimmed classroom, among the children laid low on mats or cots, produces frenzied anomie as children struggle to replace the hubbub of ‘waking’ classroom life with their own, individual, self-soothing, mother-invoking hubbub. From what I can tell, every teacher struggles a bit with rest time and resolves the Problems of Rest Time (“PORT”) in her or his own way. I find that I can resolve the PORT only some of the time – and solutions that work once (telling a suspenseful story that involves each of the students in the class but only if they are lying quietly) or three times (reading a LOT of books at the outset) quickly lose their efficacy. It’s truly dismaying as rest time, along with its precursor and successor conditions, takes up at least 10 hours of each working week. Multiply this by the 11 months of our federally-funded year and rest time is revealed to entail roughly 191 very bad hours. Rest time sometimes turns my heart to ash – it is that bad.

What are the problems of rest time? For the child the problems are: “mommy should be here right now, because I am lying down, the lights are out, and there is nothing going on. This does/does not remind me of going to sleep at night. Either way, mommy should be here right now.” Some children respond by falling asleep. Those who remain awake may select one or more options from this varied palette: (1) Tell themselves stories, play with their fingers, toes, blanket, socks, shoes. This includes children who chew on clothing (typically a shirt) until it is SOAKING wet and then ask for dry clothes. (2) Talk to their cot neighbors – quietly at first but then escalating into increasingly more audible exchanges and sometimes descending into conflict. (3) Jump on/off their cots, whip their blankets over their heads, climb between the sheet and the cot – or under the cot and, generally, court injury. (4) Make a great deal of noise: songs, articulate protests, piercing shouts and hoots, and the raw noise of desolation. (5) Repeatedly ask to use the toilet and/or remain on the cot and urinate there – toilet related responses to rest time are a sure-fire way to get the teacher’s attention.

For the teacher the problems are: keeping everyone safe and reasonably quiet so that the children who might fall asleep have the chance to do that. An additional problem may be staying awake, oneself. Still another problem may be controlling rage when the cot jumpers and toilet-tactitians do something really provocative (read: enraging.) My particular problems at rest time fall into two categories: (1) what to do about the children who harbor bitter resentment towards me for asking them to remain quiet, depriving them of distracting outlets to soothe their (separation) anxiety; and (2) what to do about children who want my attention and the comforting presence of my supine body. Some children belong to both categories.

I used also to have the problem of enduring rest time music but now that I exert total control over the music selection I’m quite happy on this score (no pun…): we listen to Bach’s Prelude Number 1 in C Major over and over again for about 60 minutes every day. In the course of the year, then, that is 191 minutes of Prelude Number 1. No one complains – to me. I tried using a track from the Jon Hassell/Brian Eno album, Possible Musics, but staff and children found it deeply disturbing. I am not sure why, it is my favorite album of all time. But I digress! The worst rest time music, for me, are disks produced for pre-school and day care centers with hokey, saccharine arrangements of familiar tunes (sometimes with ‘natures sounds’ mixed in.) I hate these, they make my skin crawl. Worse still, they encourage children to sing along. “Rest time is NOT for singing.” For a number of years I sat through various Enya tracks (some of them supplied by me) – they are not bad but somewhat maddening with all those limpid, shimmering, incomprehensible layers. So, “Rest time is NOT for Enya” these days.

Now for a few rest time portraits. First from the nursery school where I taught for several years. Our classroom was deep in a basement with one small window flush with the low ceiling. Little light was admitted through the window yet we covered it with construction paper to deepen the rest-time gloom, leaving a small gap with the unintended effect of creating a camera obscura. After children were well-settled I would drowsily sit, listening to Enya’s tuneful rustlings and watching the progress of inverted, dimly gelatinous trucks and cars as they slid along the tops of the walls. Charly, who sometimes brought a toilet plunger to school as a comfort / transitional object, had several proven strategies for getting his saliva on me, and as I sat by his mat on the infrequent occasions that he stayed at school for rest time he whispered, eyes gleaming, that he would burn me in a fire and eat me. Patrick sometimes fell asleep stroking the stubble on my calves – we often fought about his body orientation (he wanted only his arm, shoulders, neck and head on the mat…and I wanted his torso, at least, on the mat as well.) Sometimes he wept with frustration over these positional turf wars but the sobbing quickly ushered in sleep. Tina spent 15-20 minutes flapping her blanket down on her cot, trying to make a surface so smooth that her body, once inserted beneath it, wouldn’t disrupt its perfection. She failed again and again. Sometimes she resolved the problem (for herself) by stripping down to underpants and t-shirt. There was nothing to be done, she was a largely non-verbal child. Silvana screamed for 45-60 minutes each time she stayed for rest. She bit, kicked, and hit me, flung my glasses across the room, spit on me, pulled my hair, scratched and, generally, fought. Sometimes she fell asleep, but only very infrequently. The following year we were in a new building with a very bright rest-time environment. I lay on the floor beside her mat and she quizzed me about her first language, Italian, which she now refused to speak. She would say: “How do you say TAPE in Italian?” “How do you say ICE CREAM in Italian?” I managed to answer her (always in the interrogative voice, repeating her question to me) about 10% of the time: “Come si dice GELATO in Italiano?” Hilla was deeply committed to peeing on her mat…which was about a yard from the bathroom. She was also very interested in demonstrating how her rest time pallet could be transformed from a flat chamber pot into a tumbling mat. She often rolled into the legs of the sand table, producing a solid thump as her head connected with wood. She was impervious to pain, smiling when I approached to intone, for the thousandth time, that somersaults were NOT ok at rest time and that is was my job to keep her safe. She barely spoke to me throughout the entire school year and after the first few months of trying to sustain a conversation with her I gave up. So our verbal communication was exclusively one-way…and consisted partly of rest-time reprimands and partly of acknowledgments, throughout the balance of the day, of things pertaining to her (clothes, lunch, and her interesting work.) She ignored me either way.

In my current school I have encountered many variations on the blanket swingers and toilet enthusiasts, including one child who would ask to use the toilet and then strip from the waist down and dance in the bathroom swinging his pants above his head. He’d fling them down into suspicious puddles (not on purpose?) and demand dry clothes. Try to force a recalcitrant three year old to put on his hip slung skinny jeans and you may find yourself cursing him, his mother who bought said jeans, and the manufacturers of the jeans, as well. Another boy, an indiscriminate flinger of items, once hit me square in the face with his still-warm underpants as he sat on the toilet one rest time. He radiated triumph and satisfaction. When I responded with a firm but ultimately lame, “It is NOT ok to hit me…with your underpants” his eyes blazed. He growled, “This is your LAST CHANCE, I’m TELLING you! YOU don’t talk to me that way!” This year I have Nereida who lies in bed and pees and then calls out to me, “My pants is wet.” She very clearly hopes to receive some babying/mothering from me, she asks for “pampers” and weeps like a frustrated infant no matter how I respond. Receiving nurturance is as painful for her as doing without. As we cope with each episode of enuresis (vocabulary builder: peeing on self) Nereida repeats the following instructions to me: “Tell my mommy not to beat me. Tell her not to hit me, ok?” That is a heart = ash point. We address the situation in a variety of ways, I’m not despairing about the long-term prospects for Nereida (or for me) during rest time and beyond. In the short term, though, I experience a response very much like a panic attack…the fog of this problem extends out over several days, casting a general pall.

I have spoken with many people, over the years, about rest time strategies, and I have certainly grown more skilled and assured during the dark R.T. hours, but I doubt I’ll ever really gain mastery; I will never be the sort of person who can put everyone to sleep. I can’t imagine how I would achieve that point of radiant, universal reassurance. At the heart of the PORT are loneliness, resentment (towards teacher, school, and mommy), and fatigue. It may be that these qualities are so much a part of me that I’m not able to effectively dampen their influence on my students. But when I sing lullabies – especially a version of Good Night Irene that begins “Foxes sleep in forests” – we can all settle down and believe that loneliness has an element of comfort and joy, and is simply a bittersweet emanation of love, itself.

Drawn By Love's Engine?

I’ve been drawing, slowly and doubtfully, for 10 minutes each day, sometimes out-of-doors during my workday lunch hour and sometimes indoors at home. My hand is uncertain. Tracking the fast and greedy path of my eyes I rashly push the pen at silly angles, lapse into reductive approximations of the world’s subtle face. Then, shedding hurry, my mind coils and clings like smoke, enfolding details and obscuring the larger relationships of part to part to whole. As I draw I grieve, a little, for the truth.

My students this year have not yet come into their own as makers of drawings. (I can’t settle on a good word for the makers of drawings – draughtschildren? Drawers is too unruly a homograph.) At least in their classroom work, they have been slow to arrive at schema and only a few have burst, spontaneously, into figuration. I’m impatient on behalf of their work as well as on behalf of my own. Impatient, stubborn, eager, focused.

In my own drawing I am ensnared in the problem of leaving spaces where something is going to be, something important that will lie on top of (or stand ahead of) everything else, preceded by and taking precedence over all. As I draw I worry how to keep the paper clear for the upper, last lines. I draw the curve of a plate and interrupt it, somewhat arbitrarily, where I think a knife should be drawn lying across it. I draw the knife and find the space between its tip and a tilted bowl is now inadequate. One arm of a bicycle’s fork fails to mirror its opposite arm from the other side of the tire, rim, and spokes. Drawing the heavy, squared off links of a chain as they enter and emerge from one another is compelling agony. I make countless distortions which feel, nonetheless, very true to my life: distortion is central to the problem of trying to leave space for interdependent things. For many years I left space in my life to make paintings or, later, to write even though I was not painting or, later, writing. I left space for men who did not occupy it. In my drawing and my life a bold outline (or through-line) does not emerge from my habitual “minutiae-first” approach. I recoil from making an overarching plan – in my efficiency I might exclude or I might fail to see a most precious detail or, worse yet, might miss the turnings of my destined path.

I have one student this year who has a particular fear of drawing, of setting down any line whether bold (capturing) or tentative (meandering.) On Wednesday as I set up a transition from our mid-morning meeting into a small-group drawing activity, Hiroki wilted at the edge of the rug. “I don’t want to do drawing,” he urgently, tearfully informed me. I spoke to the whole group. “Sometimes it feels very hard to do a drawing, sometimes it feels like you can’t draw what you want it to look like. I think drawing sometimes makes Hiroki feel worried. I will help you Hiroki. Come sit with me.” My day is full of these sorts of speeches or scripts: emphatic and containing. There are many times during the day when I tell a child what he is feeling and say that I will help. Sometimes I may be impinging on the experience of the child, sometimes I cast a ray of understanding and relief into their discomfort. With Hiroki, that day, I did a bit of both.

We sat together at a table with other children, all of them happily, busily making drawings about the holidays just passed and a recent visit from one child’s mother. Hiroki sat with arms limp at his sides. “I think I’ll draw a present,” I said. I uncapped a green marker and began making a loosely looping line, piling nested ellipses in a tangled, roughly square mass. “There,” I said, a note of satisfaction in my voice, “Hiroki, you can add a bow if you want to.” He sat, tears trembling on the sills of his eyes. The other children at the table clamored to show me their work and I busily noted their captions in small block letters, penciling names and the date on the drawing’s reverse. I glanced at Hiroki and found he had made a fat blue scrawl on the corner of my ‘present.’ He was happy when I acknowledged his blue bow and went on, straight-away, to get more paper from the basket on a nearby shelf and make a second drawing of two bells (tremulous, barely closed forms...with large looping 'clappers') surrounded by scores of stabbed dots. He had drawn, had broken the spell of worry; he could live again!

Later that day I wished I had just invited him to draw what a sound sounds like, or a flavor tastes like, something no one has seen before; a place to start from which any endpoint could and would be a success. I feel so strongly his anxiety, rooted in apprehension about ill-defined but absolute notions of goodness, badness, and perfection. It is these concerns which urge me to hesitate, to leave spaces for things, to come back later and hesitate still more, to live important parts of my life in discontinuous ribbons of what is, what is not yet, and what is, finally, never going to be.

On Friday, though, Hiroki came without hesitation when I invited him to work with me on a drawing of a train he was playing with, Spencer, from the Thomas the Tank Engine pantheon. “What shape is Spencer?” I asked, knowing Hiroki, in all his cognitive splendor, would feel confident answering, “Rectangle!” “Yes, let’s make a rectangle,” I said. I traced my finger along the paper and Hiroki dragged a line along behind, his hand gripping the middle of the pencil in a uniquely inefficient way. With happy intensity he slid the pencil, with little control, and yet, detail by detail (circles for the wheels, circles for Spencer’s face and eyes) the image of a little toy train car did emerge, did surge forward on the page. “You drew Spencer!” I said. “Can I show it to my mommy?” Hiroki asked. He choked it into the pocket of his classroom mail box and went back to his play and I felt, I feel, a little dawning optimism in him – a little love for himself that will tide him over until mommy arrives to confirm and reflect his goodness.

For the developmental psychologist, at least, children’s symbolic representations are thought to have their origins, first, in relationship, in early positive human attachment, in love. I find it good to believe that representation arises from love, from feeling secure in love…but not entirely secure, needing to create a manifestation of that love, a ‘transitional object’ that represents the beloved (or ‘caregiver’ in the parlance of early childhood educators) in her/his absence. Children who solve the problem of separation symbolically can go on to create an ever more sophisticated range of symbols, whether they are pretend enactments, drawings, constructions.

What if my writing, my teaching, my drawing is fed by, and echoes with, all the sorts of love I have absorbed? Slow and doubtful as I am in my drawings, I could find my way through them, sometimes, to a quiet not-being-worried-and-in-fact-being-loved that is just as true and worthy of my notice as the graceful angles of every thing I have not yet found my way to represent.

Hoping for Loss, Preparing for Gain

I never read How the Grinch Stole Christmas and never watched the movie/s, but I have been thinking about the Grinch in the run-up to Christmas, and now in the runoff, as it were, as the curbs here are flowing with bundles of holiday trash. There are a number of inflatable nylon Grinch figures in our neighborhood and while I find them aggressively ugly, I can relate to the Grinch’s inclination to remove things at Christmas … or nearly any other time. A parent battling entrenched toy-clutter, or stuff-clutter, more generally, can surely appreciate the beauty of a holiday in which selected things disappear. One neighborhood Grinch, displayed eight feet above the sidewalk on a angle bracketed plywood platform, actually looks like he’s leaving a loaded trash bag (full of crappy toys!) curbside as he sinks into the stub of swollen chimney.

We have had an 11 day break from school during which time I spent part of two days in the classroom hanging up loops of paper that represent the exact size (but not shape) of my student’s waistlines. I made a welcome back sign from a very large cooperative painting children worked on before the break. Because we have a new student I made a new How Many Boys, How Many Girls chart (with no ‘how many’ indicated…we’ll do that together later this week.) I washed the rest time bedding, dried and folded the sheets and blankets, replaced them in cubbies. I sorted piles of drawings (attributed, unattributed, worth keeping for end of year portfolios, things I just want to look at some more.) I made a foray into sorting through our treacherous and crowded supply closet, cursing inwardly. “F-ing marionettes, why the F did I let [my assistant teacher] keep these. I F-ing hate marionettes. What the F happened to the small rubber stamps? There’s so much F-ing crap in here! Look! These are brand new and falling apart already! F!” Ironically, I also spent several hours compiling and fretting over a very large classroom materials shopping list. And like the Grinch I entertained a keenly felt desire to remove a variety of items from the classroom. If I could, if I would…why don’t I just go ahead? Rather than grapple with that tough question I reviewed all the materials I’m disappointed with…that I’m storing and not using because they are frustrating and unproductive for children. We are somewhat restricted as to vendors we may order from and the limitations can really nettle…and result in closets partly filled with crappy materials.

Topping the list of crap I store are the terrible chalk boards (lap boards…about the size of a standard sheet of paper) we ordered from Discount School Supply. They are slick and do a fine job of resisting chalk which barely stutters along leaving only faint traces of our efforts to make a mark. I have permanently marred several slippery pale boards, working VERY aggressively to make a substantial, saturated line. Maybe we’ll use them for roofs in the block area, otherwise they are a waste of city and federal money!

More money was wasted on: six bubble tongs which pop apart when used energetically, foam paint rollers which pop apart when used energetically, Discount School Supply washable tempera. The consistency is consistently sloppy thin or cloggy thick…depending on the color and the batch. Low pigment saturation makes it washable. All the colors are somehow untrue and shifty. The blue is lugubrious, indelible, and ferocious: Implacable King Indigo staining counters, paint pots, clothes, and skin. Good luck mixing green, it’s always nearly black because of the blue (and because of the yellow, see below.) The red is anemic, is actually pink. The red’s astounding weakness is revealed by the fact that the white paint winds up blue at the end of free play, instead of pink, which it would be, if the red had any guts. The yellow cowers, semi-translucent; it is more easily tainted, even, than the white paint.

All this vitriol! I am profoundly particular. But I like some of the things I don’t like. The dolls, the small plastic people that are stored in a red bin alongside a variety of small blocks and simple construction toys are NOT a waste of money. The figures represent a narrowly defined range of family ethnicities (African American, Latino, Asian, White), and configurations (we don’t have any very small children in our current family sets…which is problematic both for our classroom and for the future of the doll community.) Some years everyone wants the blonde mom. The Latino girl with pigtails usually goes home in a pocket sooner or later never to be seen again. There are community workers (career choice figures) who enjoy varying degrees of popularity. Some years everyone wants the white firefighter lady (whom they call the fireman.) This year the Black cop is the popular guy. There are differently abled people whom the children don’t really recognize as such, partly because their assistive devices are problematic. The wheel chair breaks and the figure seated in it can no longer play basketball. He sits on the shelf above the cubbies. The blind man’s cane breaks and the children fight viciously, teeth bared, for possession of his seeing eye dog. The doll’s faces lack affect by design, but with use they are ground down, gouged, disfigured, and thus rendered evocative. We have twin Latino grannies - they share one abuelo between them and time has treated one more kindly than the other. They spend a lot of their time in the red bin, these days, but they’re still in the game, potentially. They’re not in the trash bag, yet.



Perhaps this year I will have the courage, in the classroom and at home, to take more things away (like the Grinch) and to throw more things away. I will join with my neighbors in decking the curbs with sacks of bundled loss and gain.