At the end of the day in an unfamiliar classroom Cary is telling a story about something that went wrong. His voice sweetly purls, its cheerful note at gentle odds with the unmet hazel stasis of his gaze. Young children, as they tell their stories, can only sometimes spare attention for their audience: exclusion of the present circumstance helps sustain immersion in the recent past. This immersion is essential to the very formulation of the story which sometimes comes to light all a-scatter, like coins in the pool of a fountain. How discomfiting when the truest moments cannot be reached and meaning remains uncollected. In such cases there is little to do but re-count the pieces at hand, hoping they will add up.
Cary is in an unfamiliar room because my boss, late in June, extended our school calendar by four days – through the end of July, creating uncertainties and low-grade mayhem for teachers. Half the children in our classrooms had places in the extended week, half did not. Not everyone wanted a spot but demand exceeded supply. Teachers and children sorted through many questions. Is it good to stay or good to go? Who will stay and who will go? And how many more days of school DO we have? The countdown to school’s end, normally demonstrated with a ritual of subtraction (using paper chain links, for instance) lost its clear simplicity. Yes, we had nine more, eight more, seven more days in THIS classroom. But then Luke, Ken, Aisha, Lesley, Hiroki, and Rita would go upstairs…for four more days. And then comes ‘summer’ and then back to school in new classrooms…except for Luke, Ken, Aisha, Lesley, Hiroki, and Rita who would go to new classrooms NOW and then return to not-exactly-new classrooms later, in the fall. I was glad to be out of the picture, not officially a teacher any longer, and thus exempted from struggling through the clutter of meaning and doubt. Though surely I minded the confusion more than anyone. Maybe the year’s ragged end made it easier to bear. Maybe children do NOT need all the careful staging and framing and language we provide to illuminate the significance of transitions. Maybe they don’t need us to plot an arc for their experience. This is the first year in my career as a teacher that I didn’t say goodbye to my students formally. I just faded in and out. It was also the first year I didn’t cry and didn’t feel their loss. Maybe ignoring feelings is a better practice, over all, than acknowledging them.
Cary was talking about two big girls, two five-year-old girls, Marina and Belle: the girls made a drawing, with writing, with really nice writing. Marina made a drawing and Marina and Belle were talking. Cary tried to explain what happened. He stood shoulder to hip with his teacher, Manuela, facing the way she faced, unspooling his tale as she spoke with a parent. She put her hand gently on his shoulder and said, “Hold on Cary, I’m talking to Karim’s mommy.” Cary could not hold on, nor did he seem deeply bothered that Manuela wasn’t attending to his tale. He stared at the half empty cubbies several feet away and explained, “Marina and Belle were making a drawing. And they were talking, they were using, they were talking CRUNCHY. And I didn’t like that. And I said I didn’t like that. And the drawing, they were drawing.” I crouched beside him and he glanced at me then focused on something, possibly the photos of Marina and Belle on their cubby bins, and began again, “They were drawing and they were talking CRACK CRUNCHY,” he contracts his face, seems discontent with the words he can reach. My face responds in sympathy, it feels good to rumple my brow. I wonder if he enjoys, as I do, the gentle pressure of muscle on bone as the forehead furrows. Does this action stir our brain?
Crunchy. The girls are talking crunchy. Was there a word Cary sought, a target somewhere, an adjective that was truly right, or did he need a new word, a new usage for ‘crunchy’ meaning: withholding, superior, dismissive, reluctant. When biting into something crunchy, our faces take on a look of aggression? Maybe he meant bitchy but hadn’t heard it enough to remember where the /ch/ digraph falls.
“They were talking crunchy and you didn’t like that?” “No! and I didn’t like that. And they were drawing.” Here he turns to face the table where the two girls are still seated, knees on chairs, leaning elbows on the table, shoulders by their ears, maybe they look at Cary. He turns back, “And they were talking and Marina and Belle were talking and I didn’t like that.” He cannot find the root of the problem, he weaves through each remembered element of the event without finding a name for the insult he feels. He liked the drawing, he wanted it, they crumpled it, they didn’t acknowledge him directly with their speech, he didn’t exist. I thought we had come to a satisfying conclusion as I checked for meaning: you wanted the drawing, the girls didn’t give it to you, they threw it away, you were mad. “Yeah.” I accepted Cary’s “yeah” as a token of his satisfaction, of his having felt known and heard, but he showed no signs of stopping, the story looped. He told on and on.
I couldn’t stay, I had to try to get things done, my to-do list is disfigured with addenda, with clumsy, generalized items requiring their own sub-plans and ancillary lists: I’m as filled as Cary is with an uneasiness I cannot name. An intern sat nearby and I asked Cary if he wanted to tell her the story of what happened. She could write it down and he could make a drawing if he wanted to. “Would you like Lisa to write your story, Cary, do you want to tell her what happened?” “Yeah,” said Cary, his back to Lisa, leaning on a shelf full of puzzles and lego, and quantities of ‘sorting’ sets consisting of small objects in primary and secondary colors. He raised his eyebrows, inhaled steadily, started the story again. Lisa sat in her chair, looking expectantly at him. She may not have felt he was telling a Story - because he was talking but not necessarily to her. I did not see her begin to record his words. I left the room, imagining him telling the story again and again until his mother arrived. I wasn’t sure whether she was his intended audience, though. He may have been trying to work out what the girls had done that bothered him so much. They crunched up a drawing, they made a drawing and wrote on it and Cary said he would like to have it and they crunched it up. And he still wanted it, but they threw it away. They crushed his affinity, his desire and his optimism. That’s what seems to have happened, but maybe not, I may be supplying too much – we all have a deep craving for meaning's arc, the covenant by which we are blessed with significance.
Like Cary, I tell myself parts of stories over and over again, trying to figure them out. That is the purpose of complaint. And of ritual, too. There is a wonderful, inviting emptiness in ritual (and complaint) which allows for meaning to emerge from within. It is the repetition that makes a space for noticing to occur. Ritual is the womb of meaning, or the fountain pool catching and collecting the fleet action as water arcs. Maybe. Maybe you have to want to understand something, repetition may not, in itself, be enough.
At the end of the school year much is thrown away and things long hidden sometimes come to light. Puzzle pieces ‘mailed’ down the HVAC grates, two brace of dead flies behind the failing heap of an aloe, the book of classroom stories I have kept through several years. Here are some tales, as told by children, the story arc, in most cases, really just hinting at a possible trajectory.
A story by Magnus just before his fourth birthday:
Dinosaur. A big, big rainbow came to bump a dinosaur's head and eye. A sun came out and the sun came over an animal, a dog. He went on a choo choo train. A bus came. An airplane.
A story by Rita entitled, The Little Princess:
Once up on a time there was a little princess. And then she saw a big dragon and the dragon put fire on her dress. And then she goed to her house and then she saw a big giant button. And then she saw the big, big, book. She saw bars. She saw a people. And then she saw a big, big, big drawing. The End.
Aisha, Olenka, and Ken collaborated on this ecstatic progression of rootless and unresolved conflicts:
There was a bear and a cat. They got hurt. And then they were fighting. And then they were like wild things. A spider man and a cat, a bird were fighting with the green goblin. The End.
Three boys, years ago and late one day, joined forces to create a story called: Click Clack Turtle No
This is a story about a turtle locked in a treasure chest. His name was Jerran Corey Dev. He was trapped and he got locked. And he stayed in there FOREVER. In the treasure chest there was a really big shark – it was a really BIG treasure chest – and it ate us…it ate us, too. It ate everyone in the whole city. Dev fought the shark. Jerran fought the shark. Corey fought the shark. Corey found a sword with a blue stone. Dev found everything and RINGS. Jerran found a seal. The End.
