Dear Laney,
Every Wednesday morning, I volunteer to work in your kindergarten classroom. I adore your teacher and your classmates are a hoot and I really like helping out. Usually, I sit at a table in the back of the classroom and call kids over in groups of 3 or 4 for a little extra practice with language skills. We make up fun spelling and rhyming games and I get to use my drama degree, if only for an hour a week with five year-olds.
This is some of what I have observed by doing this:
Children enter kindergarten with a wide range of abilities. There are kids in your class who don't know their alphabet, and there are kids who can read. A LOT of your teacher's time is taken up by responding to the children's basic needs: some kids come in not having eaten, some kids forget to bring a coat. Ms. Hosman makes sure everyone is fed and warm, and then gets to start her lessons. There are 19 kids in your class, plus two additional special needs students who join the class every morning with their helper. But there is only one Ms. Hosman. I say all of this, because it occurred to me as I was working with a super-sweet kiddo the other day who didn't know how to write his name that there must be well-meaning parents out there who think that simply by putting their kid on the bus, they're doing everything they need to do to guarantee their child learns everything s/he's supposed to know. On a generous day, I would say those parents are naive - maybe that's the way it worked back in the late 70s, but it isn't now. On an average day, though, I am less charitable and go home thinking they're out of their damn minds. 21 children, each with a different skill set, each taught in the same room by the same teacher, who should be making a million dollars a year but is instead making 1/30 of that, while buying her own supplies for the classroom. It's just...ugh.
All of that is kind of a tangent, though, because here's what I wanted to talk about:
Yesterday, I went into school with you as I do every Wednesday morning, and discovered you had a substitute teacher. And she was just so...unpleasant. The way I see it, it's okay to be ill-prepared OR mean, but you can't be both. Don't have a plan, but you're nice about it? Okay! Mean as a snake but organized as a German car factory? Alrighty then! But figuring out how to take attendance for half an hour while the kids sit in a 90 degree room still in their coats and hats and gloves and snow pants? Not okay! The sub, I should note, was missing an arm. Which could totally have been a non-issue, had she not growled, "You've probably noticed I only have one arm. I'm going to wait 'til everyone gets on the rug in a circle so I can tell everybody about it at one time." That's when the morning started to feel like Kindergarten as directed by David Lynch.
The morning was such a hot mess that the special needs helper whispered to me, "If I had a kid in this class, I might think about signing her out and taking her home." So we went up to the office and I signed you out "Reason: Questionable Sub."
Then I moved some meetings around and decided we would play hooky together and see if we could do some independent learning.
We walked downtown, sounding out the names of the streets we passed.
We met your dad for lunch at the sushi place, where we talked about Japan and practiced using chopsticks and you ate a plate of tempura bigger than your head.
We kept walking to the Missoula Museum of Art, where you loved
this sculpture/installation of beams made of millions of squares of newspaper stuck together. (The sign said you could walk on them if you removed your shoes first.)
I asked you to pick your favorite piece of art in the whole museum and tell me why it was your favorite. You picked this portrait...something about it being "bright."
Then we stopped for ice cream on the way home.
It was a perfect Mom and Laney day. Obviously, we're privileged to be able to able to spend this time together and be able to go on these adventures. And I'm super lucky to have a daughter who's so much fun to hang out with - Dad said we seemed like two grown-ups having a day on the town.
We'll just have to make our own guesses on how that lady lost that arm.
Love,
Mom
