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.
