As a general rule, I rarely teach kids to try flushing piss and poop down a sink anymore - skidmarks on the sink can fuck up a room's feng shui IN A HURRY - so you can imagine my shock when I walked into my classroom one morning to find a student of mine doing just that. As she looked up to me from the sink filled with water and her own bodily waste, I knew that this was one of those things just outrageous enough that it'd only be believable specifically BECAUSE I work with preschoolers. This is just one of the many tales to astonish that I have accrued in this line of work, and there's really no embellishment necessary most of the time. You just sit back and wait for the shenanigans to ensue.
This ragtag bunch of miscreants is an eclectic group that'll chew up and spit out anyone who doesn't find their coping mechanism early. For those of us who are not inclined to go home and crack open a cold brew after an exhausting day with the tots, we turn to sundry other vices available to us - writing, meditation, crack cocaine, whatever. But to know them is to lovingly loathe them. You've already heard about some of them - our aforementioned interior decorator from above, the girl rendered catatonic upon suggestion of a phone call being placed to her family pets, etc. The buck, however, hardly stops there.
There's one kid in my class - let's call him Jesse - whose hands themselves are minions of Satan. I swear to you, if he can get his hands on it, IT IS NOT IN A SAFE ENOUGH PLACE. Little Jesse cant help it - he's the most catlike of all the cats I herd, just radiating curiosity from all of his pores. Naturally, this often leads to him getting into trouble. He's seemingly been sent here by God to declare civil war on my sanity, and being he ever so pursuant to that task, there are days when he and I are preparing for our Gettysburg. I mean, the boy just knows how to sap your strength. A few weeks ago, I really had conversations with myself throughout the week about whether or not breaking his hands would be worth the subsequent loss of job, lawsuit, and blackballing (or for my negro amigos out there, just "balling") from the childcare industry. Ultimately, I decided that it wouldn't be worth it, as breaking the hands of a child is, I'm told, considered "assault" or "unprofessional" in many circles. Also, he'd apparently "have a hard time time with finger-painting and writing exercises" (their words, not mine) if he couldn't use his hands. People's values and ideas can be so antiquated, I tell ya.
But I should say, as easy as it is to lose your zest for the day when little Jesse is brought in every morning, there's no denying that he's a lovable little scamp. The trick is to not make much eye contact with him, because if he can catch your gaze and hold it for more than 3 or 4 seconds at a time, you'll find yourself begrudgingly forgiving his most recent misdeed. There's something about the way his little brown eyes lock in with yours that makes you want to soften right up and rethink your whole stance on him. There was one time when I changed a soiled diaper of his, and it must have been a huge physical relief to him, because he immediately leaned in, wrapped his arms around my torso, and finding a way to summon all of the gratitude and romance that both the room and his tiny body could muster, looked into my eyes and said "Kiss me, Marcus." For the record, we did not make out after that - everyone knows that the bathrooms are the least romantic rooms in a preschool - but how could I stay mad at him after that? I just had to laugh and charge that one up to the game. Well-played, Jesse, you precocious little rascal, you.
That's is the thing about these kids - when they are 2 and 3 years old, they're going to be volatile and melodramatic by default, sometimes showing a remarkable sense of one moment that is quickly tempered by an astounding obliviousness to the next. For example, every single day, when they're waking up from their naptime, I have another little girl who insists on turning the subsequent potty break into a long, drawn out minstrel show (She's a young African-American girl so double the metaphor!). Her post-nap thing is to wake up, slog her way into the bathroom, resist the idea of going potty, struggle as I help her undress for it, fuss at me while attempting to go potty, cry when I have to physically peel her off the damn thing, and whine for 5 minutes after the whole ordeal, because she somehow wanted to neither go or stop going potty. But no, she looks at me like I'M the crazy one when I suggest that she "Save the drama for Wilmer Valderrama."
She recognizes that we have daily routines, but because she was seemingly born with lead in her feet, her compliance with said routines is often on a tape delay. She'll do stuff, but she wants to do it on her time. Unfortunately for her, days are only 24 hours long, so I generally have to hustle her little rotund ass through her slow motion lifestyle, lest I miss the next solar eclipse waiting for her to pour herself a cup of milk. "I'm coming!", the little Hershey's nugget often shouts as she waddles her way across the playground to catch up with her classmates....on the other playground. "Yeah, well in theory, SO IS JESUS! And while we're speaking of it, where will YOU be spending YOUR eternity? When you learn to read, I've got some literature I'd like to share with you", I retort, silently high-fiving myself for coming up with a quick comeback AND potentially rescuing her from an afterlife of fiery damnation. I think the Bible says that slower people are the easiest to bring to salvation.
I wish I could tell you that it gets easier as I go along, but that'd be a lie; it's not as much a matter of things getting easier as it is that things get less strange with the more experience you gain. That's not necessarily a slight against them so much as it is me - kids can't help but to be nonsensical and irrational on most days, especially when their limited vocabulary dictates that they use whatever few words they already know instead of the the ones fitting the contextual picture they're trying to paint. It's up to me to find those scattered fragments and piece together what they're trying to say and do as they navigate their way through an increasingly familiar-yet-strange world, and I'll be the first to admit, I'm no master puzzler. But, while it's a life in which frustration most assuredly abounds, it's also one where you get a legitimate feeling of knowing that you're a big part in helping someone find their way.
To illustrate my point, one of my favorite students got an attitude with me just yesterday because I had to get stern with her after a particularly difficult nap time. They get two and a half hours to nap, but she just goofed off and goofed off forever until I left for my break (by which point, we're already an hour and some change into it), and when I came back an hour later, she'd only been asleep for about 30 minutes. Unfortunately for her, it was almost time to get up by then, so when I woke her up, she was less than thrilled. I let her know that I had no pity whatsoever because I'd warned her that this might happen before I left. She cried and laid herself out in the floor, but I wasn't having it. When it came time for her post-nap bathroom break, she still wasn't talking to me, but even I, resident early education idiot, knew this was a teachable moment. I asked if she was upset at me, to which she said she was, and I told her that that was okay, and probably because I had to be a little stern before. I told her that sternness came from my frustration at her not doing her job before I left, and sometimes, that's how teachers will be with students. But then I told her I still loved her and didn't want her to think I was still mad, even if she was. I then watched her tiny, inquisitive, still-red-from-crying face try to process what I'd just said. Being only three years old, she didn't yet know how to reconcile her feelings of shame and anger with her teacher being harsh and loving towards her simultaneously. This reduced her to a tearful, blubbering mess, and when I tried to hug her, she recoiled from me, again laying on the floor in a fetal position. It sounds like it went badly, but this was a humorous and beautiful moment for me, because I didn't see them as the tears of a mad, bitter child; I saw them as tears of a young child, bursting with both gratitude for a teacher that loved her despite her wrongdoing and shame from having done the wrong in the first place. I couldn't help but laugh because I knew she didn't love me any less and wouldn't stay mad forever, but more than that, I knew that I had a hand in helping her not just get to a significant emotional conjunction, but be prepared for all of the ones she'll have from hence forth. This was a tangible sign that for better or worse, I'm helping to stir something in these children that I'm privileged to see every day.
Anyone who's ever met a teacher of any sort knows that those of us doing this certainly can't be doing it for the money; I'm fairly certain "preschool teacher" is loosely translated to mean "allergic to money" in ancient cultures. Hell, it stands to reason that being one, even for a short time, has driven many a person to getting out of the education business for good. I never planned to do this, and I took a long, winding road to get here, but I'm glad I am. Does this mean I'll do it forever? Probably not. Does it mean the occasional day where I think "Maybe this is as good a time in my life as any to start drinking?" Absolutely; childcare will challenge the shit out of your sobriety at times. But I also don't feel like it's a mistake that I'm doing what I am for a living, and at the end of the day, that's a great thing to be able to tell yourself or anyone else, I figure. Besides, at least in childcare, you can have a girl put her feces in a sink and laugh it off with your coworkers after. In most places, you're lucky to get off with just a stigma. Ugh, that was one security deposit I'm most certainly never getting back.
