Deciduous Matter

February’s penultimate week is a week without children in the classroom. We sit in staff meetings and professional development workshops; address our paper work back-log; clean, and restore our classrooms – to a certain extent; and visit our students and their families at home (strengthening that home-school connection!) Our workshops, with the splendid Lesley Koplow of The Center for Emotionally Responsive Practice, were, partly, on trauma, on working with traumatized children. We reflect on the way that benign features of the environment (our classrooms...ourselves?) can trigger intrusive, overwhelming memories in the child who has suffered trauma. There’s part of my notebook page quoting L. Koplow: “BODY INTEGRITY: what about me is always going to be here? What about me is incidental?” This is an important question for two-year-olds. Sometimes older children, if traumatized or under stress, will return to (or be re-seized by) this question. Nereida and her pee, for instance? Next to the words there is a drawing of a booted foot belonging to a colleague. My foot is me, my shoe is actually also me, my hands are me, my hair, my tears are me. My classroom is me. What is incidental, what is not always going to be there? The answer is the same - what is actually me is also, eventually, incidental. All of life is deciduous.

Wednesday PM: I am sorting through lists and piles, making new lists and piles, restoring stray buttons, miniature bears, pebbles, rubber bands, and unifix cubes to their proper places, and, generally, preparing to leave the classroom for the evening, when I hear the somewhat familiar sound of rain in our supply closet. We have two trash cans against the back wall there, below two large waste pipes (gray water…not sewage!) which traverse and sometimes irrigate our ceiling. The sight of water pouring down from the clamp on the mighty, blackened u-bend trap is captivating…how would I paint that, the water is just a distortion of the mottled black iron, a distortion in the form of flame, or a hank of hair, with gleaming patches of moving light. But there’s a lot of water coming down fast. I run out to solicit help from the building staff and run back to begin dragging things clear of the splattering, pooling water. I drag a towering baker’s shelf half-way through the closet door and am startled and pained to find that something has hit me hard on the forehead and nose – a tall box on top of the shelf has caught on the door frame and thrown a smaller box down on me. I can’t tell whether I was struck by the box itself, or a large black toy horse that fell from it. For a moment I think about crying, the pain in my face is noteworthy, but by some strange, nonlinguistic – and nonmathematical – calculation, I find my body does not need to cry. It takes me a while to remove the boxes from the top of the shelf without pushing the whole thing back under the splaying strands of water. I’m really angry and tired and then I notice that water is gently pouring down from several other parts of the classroom ceiling, one directly over my unzipped backpack. It is clearly time to go home. The super comes in. Dragging out the last few things that I am going to drag, leaving some green pretend play cash in a puddle without a backwards glance, I say, “It’s a lot of water, right?” It's a lot of casual water, forgotten by someone else, witnessed (and now remembered) by me. "It's more than usual?" I continue, backpedalling. He radios the security guard, “Hey, can you call ____ in 2K and ask her can she check her tub?” “Ok,” I say, “Thank you so much! I’m going to go.” My posture is, by this point, really quite bad. Only my good posture is me.

Friday PM: because I got hit on the head with a horse or box and because I dragged everything out of the closet on Wednesday, my assistant teacher cleans the things that need cleaning following the flood. And because she dealt with the flood fall-out, it fell to me to do the laundry. But, because I did the laundry (rest-time sheets and blankets, pretend play fabric/hats/bags, terry towels for sopping up and waffle weave rags for wiping down) it fell to her to fold it. She pulled a sheet from the mesh laundry bag and shouted, “Wuah!” “What?” I demand to know. “These are disgusting, they’re covered with hair.” She pushed the sheet back into the constricted mouth of the bag, “I’m going to wash them again on Monday.” “No! They’re clean, I just washed them. It’s probably my hair.” “NO! It’s not your hair.” “It’s just some hair from the dryer, then.” She tightens the bag’s drawstring and slides the cord lock down emphatically. “This is disgusting. They’re COVERED with hair. I’m not folding these. I love you, but I’m going home.”

Our school is located in an apartment building. In essence we borrow our plumbing, our ceilings, our laundry room from the tenants of the building. We borrow their tub water, their hair, the blending scents of their meals and after-meal cigarettes. It is an uneasy home-school connection. Alone in the classroom, I pull the sheets out; long, wiry hairs are clinging to them. I spread one sheet at a time over the top of a long shelf and pounce it with loops of masking tape. I remove the hair from 13 sheets. The blankets aren’t so bad.

As I work, I think about all the short stories I have not written about a woman who discovers her husband’s infidelity. Hair makes compelling, but inconclusive evidence that a husband is screwing around. Wife finds a hair, she recognizes a truth, next come grief and stress and wife’s own hair begins falling out. Her hair, is it part of her? Her husband, her marriage, are they incidental? The cell phone which dials by accidental pressure was another favored plot device: wife’s phone rings, she can hear her husband talking but he doesn’t know she is on the line, listening in as he and his girlfriend sit hip to hip in his car, the phone in the narrow space between them, revealing their broken but conclusive conversation. I don’t think I started even one of these stories but they are me. Then, remembering them, my mind skips from HAIR to HERA, Zeus’s much-betrayed wife. She engineered the occasional punishment of Zeus’s lovers (Io, transformed by Zeus into a heifer, was pursued and tormented by a Hera-sent biting fly) but Hera was, herself, never transformed by her misfortunes. “I have been transformed by my misfortunes!” I remark with satisfaction, “I have.” I fold the blankets, the sheets, the pretend play fabric, I put each thing into a good place where it can be readily found. When I’m done there remains a heap of crushed and hair-covered tape loops – like mobius strips that have encountered and been transformed by misfortune. Alas, I throw them all away, and with them all the intrusive, allusive hair, so full of stories, but they are not mine to remember or to tell.

Handsome Black, Delicious Brown.

Luke is trying to figure out what is funny. For weeks, during fill-in-the-blank songs and chants, he fills in with “Oatmeal,” his favorite food.

Blow the Balloon:
“What color was your balloon, Luke?”
“Oatmeal.”

Johnny Get Your Hair Cut:
“Luke, what should Johnny get that is JUST like what you are wearing?”
“Oatmeal.”

What’ll We Do with the Baby:
“Luke, what should we wrap the baby in?”
“Oatmeal.”

Luke deadpans it, though he hasn’t got it perfectly flat – he lets a breath of Caribbean lilt lift its edges. If he knew what a rimshot was, Luke would want one to land just where silence flattens the last of “L” as it narrows through his looped tongue.

Luke has a second area of inquiry – he’s not just interested in what’s funny, but also in perfecting a look of fatigued despair. He has discovered that by releasing all tension in the orbicularis oculi (eyelid muscles) and gazing out into the classroom with eyes unfocused, open but drooping, he can appear as dismal as he probably feels. He performs this look, at drop-off, for his mother who rolls her own eyes in loving, exasperated response. He performs this look for me. I kneel down and take his yielding hand in mine, “Luke, do you look sad? Do you look sleepy?” “Mmm. Sad.” Sad but stoic at the same time. Pent up sad – boarded up sad! Moved away and not returning sad.

We know some things about Luke. He has food allergies, and a vigilantly selective ‘palate’ (brain, tongue, soul.) For months he rejected all school meals and resisted absolutely the notion that he would ever incorporate the food of this place – stuff that represents the absence of Mama – into his own, lonely body. Luke spent the first several months in the classroom doing very little, very quietly. Enervated by hunger and wishing to avoid all distractions from his tenuous inner image of Mama, Luke moved hardly at all. He sometimes sat for 30 minutes jabbing weakly at a heap of play dough – chipping away at the lump, slowly dispersing its bulk as he scattered the minutes of the school day.

We know other things about Luke. He misses his absent father and loves his mother with reserved intensity. We know that Luke’s mother is now working as a nanny for two white children who live close by our school; he is sad that she has sent him to spend his days with us. We don’t know what Luke thinks about all of this – he may just think: Oatmeal. Or he may be thinking home and school, home and school, black and white, black and white.

One day, instead of saying “Oatmeal” for his fill-in-the-blank filler, Luke says, “Black.” When I ask Luke, later, at the drawing table, what color he will begin with, he says, “Black.” It doesn’t matter that he then picks up a purple pencil and guides it loosely around and around the paper. His statement is, “Black,” my response is, “Yes.” I don't crowd it, out loud, at least, with good Black, bold Black, handsome, happy Black.

I don’t know what “Black” means for Luke, could it be the color of receding and advancing at the same time? I remember, in childhood, feeling the power of dark night, receding, advancing and I remember the feeling of hiding, fading back, in order to be found. The less Luke reveals, the more narrow his range of communication, the more I advance to find him. I remember noticing differences in hugs and kisses, and who thought what was funny before I noticed differences in skin color.

Then, Black is over and it’s time for Brown. We are making cookies for Dorothea’s birthday. I call several children at a time to come and add ingredients to the wide steel bowl. Luke tips half a cup of soymilk in. Olenka tilts hers in and glossy molasses threads down. We stir and stir and mix, the dry stuff and the wet. The white salt and powdery soda, buff wheat flour, brown sugar, and blackstrap molasses cling and blend into dough. Luke says, “It’s Brown. Like me.” “Yes,” I say, “beautiful, delicious brown.” I want to acknowledge and affirm Luke and the connection he has made, but am immediately unhappy: Brown is good because I want to eat it? Luke is good because he’s like a cookie? To make matters worse, I later find the cookies are not very good. They are ok. Only two children – and Luke is definitely not one of them – will eat these classroom cookies. But Luke. He’s good, he’s sad, he doesn’t figure out being funny. He doesn't ask me for a hug, he suspends himself, over there, like a shirt on a hanger, waiting for arms to come. I ask him, "Would you like a hug?" "Mmhm." So we do.

Language Inquisition (Not Really)

I’m taking a class called: Language Acquisition and Learning in a Linguistically Diverse Society. Maybe I’m going to get another masters degree and maybe I’m not. The course takes up a lot of time – and space in my active working memory. My mind is crowded with the ideas and voices of authors and classmates. For the intellectually inclined, graduate studies are a terrific antidote for loneliness. For everyone else, there is transgressive behavior.

But before we come to the transgressions, readings and discussion in the Language Acquisition course have engendered a helical disturbance in my mind as two related and opposing ideas chase each other’s tails. First there is the research which shows that, by first grade, children from higher socio-economic status households can have as much as twice the vocabulary as children from lower socio-economic status households (5000 words as compared to 2500.) The gap just widens from there and success in school is directly correlated to language ability. So that is one strand of the problem. The second strand has to do with the ‘privileging’ of Standard American English over other dialects (notably African American dialect/s but including every other form of English spoken by ‘non-dominant’ groups.) In our readings we are asked to consider that Standard American English (“SAE”) is ‘on top’ because it is the language of conquerors and colonizers, the guys who make the rules and write the history. In short: there is nothing inherently superior/preferable in SAE – it’s just got the biggest guns. We read articles by a working-class white woman and a Caribbean woman of African descent, both of whom describe how speaking Standard English is a diminishment of their original selves, demanding a caution and care from which they are free when they speak in their mother tongue. As teachers we are asked to consider how we present SAE to our students who have not (yet) acquired it…so as not to privilege it. I hope that the solution lies in acknowledging that different forms of spoken English confer different degrees of status – but that status is not absolute. (Clearly not a discussion to be had with three or four year olds!) From there it should be possible to simply value the acquisition of languages per se, and pay attention to the context of their acquisition. In the classroom we can read literature in a variety of voices and dialects and invite the authentic communication of our students in all its non-standard glory, without rejecting the opportunity that a rich, precise vocabulary offers us for communication – and pure pleasure. Sorry I don’t have cites for the vocabulary disparity data – I can’t find the article in which I first read about it. The research of Hart & Risley (1995) and Graves & Slater (1987) gets cited in the body of articles I find on the web…but I haven’t found the full cites. Will update when/if I track them down.

Thinking about my language and the language of my students, I must say that there are very few three year olds who have mastered SAE so I don’t feel that bad using my middle-class, white, power-tripping, polysyllabic SAE in the classroom. My students, they’re all in this together for the time being…some just have parent/s with vocabularies that are more whopping than others. But I’m more like some parents than I am others and this surely affects the classroom experience of my students. It seems that the more I remind a child of her/his mom, the less interested s/he is in me. Nereida, for instance, with her very, very young Latina mother (loving but tough and gruff, and still very much an adolescent) seems genuinely fascinated by – and possibly devoted to – me. For Lesley, with his older, carefully articulate white mom, I am largely invisible. Lesley is comfortable and capable generating conversations with peers. For Nereida multiple conversational turns are a rarity. Her communicative style is tough, and gruff – cheerful but sometimes oblivious to cues – she so often answers questions with whatever it is she’s ready to say whether it relates to the conversation and question or not. Lesley is usually busy with friends whenever the opportunity for play arises. Nereida is busy with her modest but pointed transgressions, actions which invite the approach of a teacher. “But, wait,” I say to myself mid-paragraph, here. “how would someone else, with a different background, see the situation? I may be so far off the mark...” I sometimes feel, in the midst of coursework at the estimable temple of progressive education where I have often been a student, that I am a fish being asked to filet myself, bone by slender bone, in order to become more neutral, more transparent, less advantaged.

While we are on the topic of mothers, and being devoured or denatured by language, and the vast imbalances of power we encounter daily, and fish, and bones, and fish without bones, the drawing featured above was made by Rita who explained: “That’s mama. That’s a shark.”

Developmental Poop

Poop is, for me, a subject of great interest. I’m illustrating these paragraphs with the floriform poop of some anonymous dog. I noticed it – off to the side, out of the way, where it still managed to look so eager to please – on a very cold Sunday, as I ‘ran’ slowly through my neighborhood. The radial arrangement of the poop stood out, cheerily, close to the curb, among the empty cars and loaded trash bags. I came back later and took the photograph.

I’m tempted to say that poop wears many hats in the 3’s classroom – but I’m going to say, instead, that there are various contexts and tones for our conversations about poop. Everyone knows that feces makes for excellent meal-time discussion, and by mid-year ‘poopy head’ crops up in the volleys of insulting names which are traded when conversations flag. It is the meal-time job of teachers to foster conversation and discourage poop-talk proliferation. I sometimes feel that I am tending a precious, life-preserving bit of flame…mustn’t let it go out or we’ll be left in the cold, dark wilderness. I try all sorts of tinder: topics relating to popular films: “What do you think Mowgli eats out in the jungle? Do you think Buzz Lightyear has a mom?” To events from the recent past: “Did you slide down the fire pole on the big climber today? Who likes to do that?” Or future: “What will you do on your birthday?” But sometimes poop has got too strong a hold on the imagination and nothing will do but “Poop, you’re a poopy head!” I learned from a former colleague that one can say: “You are talking a lot about poop. I wonder if you need to go sit on the toilet and make a poop?” The children recoil, feeling sorry for me, no doubt – I’m so literal-minded. They sober up for a while, probably dreading the day they will be as mirthless as I. An intriguing scenario presents itself on the day when lunch seems to BE poop, as recently happened when, as lunch approached we passed through the hall by the kitchen. “Smells like poop,” the children pronounced, “ehhww.” The scent was actually a lentil soup with parsnips and cabbage pureed and blended in. Many children did eat the accompanying rolls, a few tasted the soup itself, and some lost their appetites even for the lovely oranges. It was a quiet, brief meal.

Sly children find ways to weave poop into discussions without directly intending insult. Rita and Dorothea chatted over apple quarters at snack time. Dorothea (I call her Dorrie but she corrects me in her sweetly breathless voice, slightly accented, hinting at her German/English bilingualism: “Doruh-TAY-ah, it’s not Dorrie”) tells a long, long, story of her doll’s birthday. “Today is Pupa’s birthday. And she was so naughty! And…” Rita smiles deeply – she has dimples at the tops of her cheeks just below her eyes, and dimples below the corners of her mouth. She shrugs and tilts her head. “Pupa rhymes with POOP,” she observes. Dorothea stops, her smile falls quickly away, first from her eyes, then from her lips. “Noo!” she begins. Florian who gave no previous sign of following Dorothea’s narrative adds his voice, now, to hers. “No, no.” He tells Rita, “It’s PUMBAA, it’s Pumbaa.” He goes back to his own thoughts, working from friendly Pumbaa, the warthog in Disney’s “Lion King” to terrible Scar, the mean, MEAN lion. Florian, quietly sings “Be Prepared,” Scar’s anthem to shittiness. The girls drop the topic of Pupa, Pumbaa, and poop. They drop their snack trash into the slop bucket and sit down at the drawing table to turn apples into ideas, into action, into images, and eventually, into poop.

Some children are, at three, still quite ambivalent about releasing their poop to the larger world. They want to poop in a diaper, or not at all; they are masters in the strategic deployment of poop. Eoghan sometimes poops in a pull-up and sometimes in his underpants and sometimes in the toilet. He’s in love with Sponge Bob. And with Alvin and the Chipmunks The Squeakquel – but he’s got Sponge Bob on his underpants…and Dragon Tales on his pull-up: Eoghan has licensed characters all over his nether regions. At three-and-a-half, Eoghan is not all that interested in toilet training. He doesn’t mind his pull-up and when he’s just in underwear he soaks his velour track suit with urine and goes on with his day. I didn’t notice the damp on the navy blue until late in the afternoon by which time the cloth was cold with wet. I would not have noticed, actually, except he called for help with a poop. It must be acknowledged that pooping at school is a big deal. Eoghan has done it five times. Twice in a pull-up, twice in the toilet, once in underpants. Today the poop is in the toilet and Eoghan seems exhilarated. He said, as he absent-mindedly wiped his bottom: “I made chicken nuggets. With my poop!” He directed me to look in the toilet at the small compact forms, well settled in the depths of the bowl. My assistant is particularly averse to Eoghan’s poops. Their scent suggests something distressingly ancient, formed of animal proteins, fats, and many days of bacterial hoopla. With my limited sense of smell I am the designated poop abatement technician.

Last year Magnus, a broad, tall, and anguished four year old, spent a fair amount of time worrying about which foods are transformed into poop. Ok: broccoli can turn into poop. It DOES turn into poop. But ice cream, it doesn’t turn into poop. I wonder what he did think happened to the ice cream. Hopefully he concluded that ice cream – delicious and cool and acquainted with joy –turns right into your body (with a small, bell-like sound effect representing that instantaneity. Gling!)

Of course, there is the shit that is not poop at all. Take for instance the Daily Health And Safety Checklist devised by the city agency under whose regulatory oversight we operate. “A walk-through of the classroom must occur at the beginning of each day” the checklist begins. There are 10 or 12 items that must be initialed each day. The checklist proves (!) that I haven’t just come in, turned on the lights, hung up my coat and said, “You can God Damn come on in kids!” but that I have, instead, cleared away accumulations of garbage, placed on high shelves all the knives, shivs, and box-cutters that I so often leave strewn about the classroom, repaired broken toys, and ensured that the small hanging thermometer in the fridge is indeed hanging in the fridge. I don’t initial the checklist daily. Once every several months I sit down and spend 20 minutes writing my initials in columns of boxes representing days and weeks. I place the checklists in the mailbox of my boss. He places them in a file. The care I take to ensure that the classroom is safe, engaging, beautiful (enough) is part of me already – metabolized from many nourishing sources. The checklists are shit, the stuff I do not need, the stuff that adds nothing to me.

This past weekend I found and re-read about a dozen shitty poems from my freshman year in college. I had just turned 17; I was melodramatic, isolated by my sobriety, awkwardly verbose, and (inevitably, given all that) a writer of unrestrained awfulness. I seem, also, to have been unable to spell stitch, though I was compelled to use stitch/unstitch again and again, in too many drafts of more than one poem, always to ill effect. I have long thought, and said, that I gave up writing poetry when I realized I didn’t have patience for reading other people’s poems. It just seemed rude, in some way. I now wonder whether I didn’t also grasp, in an unconscious reckoning, that my poems were simply terrible and I should stop writing them. They were shit but shit as an indicator that nourishment has been taken in, metabolized and transformed into life, intelligence, action. The intelligence and action were just somewhat delayed in their emergence. This past weekend, then, I threw the poems away, the whole sheaf of Eaton’s Corrasable Bond typing paper with successive versions of each anoxic heap, showing the occasional emendation, penned in my self-conscious, adolescent hand. I could write on this subject – shit and language – for such along while. I haven’t got all the ideas straightened out, or looped together, yet. For now (until then) to keep my place, I imagine my teaching life as an inversion of the poems: it is the fruit of thought and experience, and not the material shed as a by-product.