We read The Magic Porridge Pot each year, usually in late winter, but this year my copy was missing and was not restored until mid-May when it finally materialized, as things do, as if by magic, out of nothingness and colleagues’ guarded claims of ignorance and innocence. There are many things to like about this story, and the book by Paul Galdone. First: there is magic. Second: there is an incantation. Third: there is the notion that an object can be responsive to our words. Surely if an iron pot can do this for us, we can do this for one another. Fourth: the magic of the pot is very circumscribed, very stable, very matter of fact. Words are said, porridge bubbles up, different words are said, porridge stops. Fifth: the story’s tension arises from the failings of the mother who is not able to remember the simple incantation: “Stop Little Pot, Stop,” but who, instead, uses every synonym for stop that she can recall. This mother reminds me of myself – under duress I can only remember the most complicated, polysyllabic, and obscure vocabulary. Sixth: I feel at home with the predicament of disconnection from simple truth. I feel familiar, too, with the related problem of profusion, the uncontrolled flow of EVERYTHING that can only be tempered, tamed, contained by a return to this distant, longed-for, small and simple, truth. Perhaps it is wrong to say I like this story – more than like it I identify with it.
Every year, twice each year, I write parent teacher conferences. I say I write the conferences, but that seems strange and wrong. The conference is the conversation, not just my report. The report I write is many things, including a means by which I control the terms of that conversation. But my job may actually be to limit and set boundaries for these conversations, writing the conference and reading it aloud to parents and steering the conversation in a direction of my choosing – this may be my rightful role. Before we begin I ask parents to stop me with any questions, comments, concerns. I’m glad when someone does, but I’m also glad when they don’t. I do have the urge to barrel through – conference days are long and require me to sit in a chair built for 3 year olds, reading aloud, imagining how much better my reports could be, but feeling glad too, knowing they will soon be done. I encounter, immobilized at the classroom table, a succession of parents seated opposite, a mingled sense of defeat and relief. In addition, I get very, very hungry.
While I may be successful in barreling through the reading of a conference report, I am never able to barrel through its writing. The smart thing to do, the efficient thing, would be to reflect on and seek a simple truth about each child, and to then write the conferences from this clearing, this place of basic understanding. Instead, I wander widely, poring over my written observations, hoping to proceed from a set of discrete, subjective and somewhat random anecdotes towards a complex, integrated truth about each child. Whether or not this is good practice, it is my way; I fall under the spell of significance each year, reading – in the children’s language samples, habits of play, fleeting gestures – auspices of strengths and weaknesses. Even knowing that I fictionalize aspects of my students’ experience as I fix and confine it within my interpreting text, I imagine, still, as the conference reports begin to take shape, that I am glimpsing some part of each child’s destiny, inscribed in delicate miniature, within her young being.
Writing the conferences is hard, stressful; they must be written within a two week period, give or take, or the material doesn’t seem accurate or fresh. I try writing one each night. I try writing five throughout the course of one weekend day. I try cutting material from the observations I have already typed and pasting this into the conference report document, adding a modest interpretative frame – connecting practice to theory. I use words that are too large, too obscure, and syntactical structures that are somewhat challenging (ungenerous!) In one conference I felt compelled to use: “notwithstanding.”
Writing the conferences can be rewarding, too – the process can lead (as it is surely should) to new understandings or new ways of articulating what I believe I do understand. Writing about Florian’s non-representational drawings (they seem lost and tangled – even lonely) I wrote: “For now, at school, Florian typically makes marks relating to his ideas (as though he is recording the rhythm of his thoughts more than representing visual phenomena.)” I wanted to distinguish Florian’s work from the type of drawing that seems purely about motoric pleasure (exuberant scribbling). Florian draws with controlled intensity, frames his effort with sub-vocalized commentaries about the action he depicts. Symbols, images would emerge, it almost seems, if he could be properly calibrated, something within him realigned like the heads on an ink jet printer. But is any of this important, after all, to Florian as he prepares for a journey through a succession of many classrooms? Our room, this year, will dissolve and be reabsorbed in his memory; well before he’s done with school altogether, Florian will have no recall of the rhythms, pleasures, fears and struggles of this year. Will I remember this year for Florian, his unvoiced stories of rocketry and space exploration, like a stream or dream, bearing him along as he draws?
Late at night, or even in the first hours of the day, when I work on the conferences I dissolve into a semi-conscious state. From this liminal place strange images arise to rouse me to my task. Writing Rita’s conference report I find my eyes closed and a dream emerging of Rita with a pet pig, and the pig’s eight teats and eight piglets. Recording this image I typed "piglings", asleep even as I thought I awoke from a doze.
Another night, working on Frederick’s report, the words seemed to melt away leaving the burning image of a doorway which led into dreaming. The dream was frightening and I didn’t want to scare anyone. In the body of the conference I later found I had typed: “I’m so sorry falling asleep. I could move out?” Children in the dream were practicing voodoo, whooping incantatory spells – but the magic didn’t work!
Dorothea’s conference conjured forth the image of a woman CEO. Hiroki’s conference was interrupted by the bright image – flashing and rearing in my mind - of the upper jaw of a horse whose head, tilted back, revealed a narrow, yellowed loge of teeth. Olenka’s conference presented me with this message: “I tell you the same thing at the same time: I’m not here, I’m not here I’m not here.”
I fall out of my consciousness like seeds from a dried pod, then stretch up both arms, pulling with them my shoulder girdle, anchoring my ischial tuberosities in the chair cushion, opening my spine. I shift my spine, my ribs, side to side and wake up briefly. I rise and walk the warm floor, eat snacks, drink tea. I wonder whether I would write the conferences with more confidence and rigor had I not been born into a family of people who make things, make something from nothing. What if I were, instead, the child of an early childhood educator - trained to make something (a glad, lively student) from something (a child, not otherwise specified)? I have met such women, young women who have seemingly never experienced a frisson of doubt as they approach their work in the classroom. They are born and raised in this world of developmental milestones and fair limits, firmly set. Perhaps Hanauta will become one of them, matter of fact in her knowledge, not too often troubled with doubt (nor given to spells of narcissistic bravura.) She may be the sort of woman who can remember, even in the midst of a crisis, to say, “Stop Little Pot, Stop.”
After a certain number of readings, and ample exploitation of this imperative phrase: “S.L.P.S.!” (an effective means of quieting the busy classroom as each child pauses to join in the chant,) we talk about ‘what if.’ What if you had a magic pot, what would it magically make? What would you like to have plenty of? Only a few children name foods. Aisha says cheeseburgers and pop tarts. Luke and Ken say french fries. Eoghan says chicken. Dorothea says, “Crowns, crowns would come out of my magic porridge pot.” “Diamonds,” says Florian. Everyone else names a small plastic toy, a sphere that unfolds into the shape of a creature…from another dimension! What do they want from the magic pot? Magic, imported from Japan – not something to eat, something to imagine with. I expect my students to answer this question readily but I can’t decide what I would want from my magic pot – clarity, insight, pom-pom socks? After the intensity of preparation and the actual conference conversations are done, I find that our apartment is particularly well-strewn: debris layered on sedimental piles of older detritus. Perhaps I would like a magic pot that would just make things disappear; melting them gently, as if they were no more real than a dream.
