Memory Vignette: Language of Wild Things & Teaching

Rose’s comment from our Memory Vignettes handout reminds me of a time when I was a novice Early Childhood Education teacher for the two year old room at a chain Early Childhood Learning Center. Rose wrote, “Error marks the place where education begins.” With my vignette, I would like to qualify Rose’s statement by stating, “[Humility] marks the place where education begins.”

Anais Nin wrote in Children of the Albatross (p. 175), “In art, in history, man fights his fears, he wants to live forever, he is afraid of death, he wants to work with other men, he wants to live forever. He is like a child afraid of death. . .” In my vignette, I connect fear with humility. I fear beginning new things for fear of being humiliated, for being a novice. Just now I am realizing how humility transforms into experience, into learning.

September, 2004
Brandon started the mayhem first. He was a two foot terror with the charm of Dennis the Menace. And now he was weaving over and under things--the sensory tub, the science center table, and plowing into tiny towers of blocks. He was doing all this barefoot, mind you. Just when I thought I had him in the Story Time Corner, a pair of his crumpled socks in my left hand, and his elf size Nikes in my right hand, his seven pint size peers loyally followed his folly. Like one domino knocking into another, the shoes and socks were plucked off one by one and were abandoned amidst the rubble of the classroom. The barefoot babes laughed and pranced about, leaving me to play warden to a live reenactment of Where the Wild Things Are, with the veteran teachers of the three and four year old room watching the performance, shaking their heads with pity.

Although these children were in the early stages of learning the alphabet, they could easily sound together the consonants and vowels tattooed to my forehead which formed the word GULLIBLE. And while the shoe and sock fiasco was not a recurring incident for me during my first months of teaching, the incident added to a long list of humiliating learning experiences as new teacher. I felt like an alien to the rules and language of teaching. What words could I use to set boundaries, to make these children who I loved so much and who I wanted acceptance from to listen? My nature was the opposite of the Center’s director and my teaching assistant, who came in late, hung over, and whose bi-polar, burnt out, and contradictory nature barked at the children as if they were West Point cadets and shot down every creative idea I wanted to bring to class.

It was the veteran teacher Miss C, the one I met the first day I interviewed, the one who left the impression on me which made me want to work at the Center in the first place, who alleviated my worries. She said, “You’re doing a great job. Twos are hard to teach. Give yourself time and you’ll get there. I’ve been working in this field for over twenty years and I still have my crazy days.”

I guess if I could learn how to talk at age one, I could learn the language of teaching at age twenty five. And the language wasn't all about me, either. It was about those Wild Things, too.