It's been over a month since my last post. Where did the time go?
For starters: I now live in Washington DC and am preparing to teach kindergarten. After the craziness of moving to a new city subsided, I jumped into orientation and classroom preparation. Our first day of school is Tuesday, and I can't wait for the kids to arrive. I've written their names on so many folders, name tags, snack orders, and welcome boards that I can recite our class list in alphabetical order. Here goes: Agnes, Aisha, Alex, Asha, Charlie, David, Griffin, Jaden, Kimora, Liza, Luca, Lucas, Luke, Mackenzie, Max, Mia, Nina, Olivia, Phillip, Ryan, Sigrid, Teddy.
One of the things I've studied (at length) over the last week is our kindergarten curriculum. My directing teacher, Mrs. L, is in her 8th year teaching, and she is a veritable curriculum rockstar. She is amazingly organized, to the point of listing books and chants for each lesson on our weekly planning sheets. She also has insight into the huge variation of skills our kids will have mastered when they arrive in our classroom. She explained to me at one dinner that we can expect reading levels ranging from "little to no knowledge of letters" to "5th grade comprehension." We'll have kids who don't know teen numbers and those who understand the concept of a factorial.
"How do we work with that?" I asked, wondering (understandably, I think) how to help each of our 22 students fulfill his goals.
She gave me the answer I've come to expect in education: "It depends on the child."
Is there anything in this business that can be boiled down to pure formula? My experience, and the experience of my infinitely more qualified colleagues, suggests that the answer to this question is, "No." It seems that the only rule for working in a school is that there aren't any hard-and-fast rules.
This leads me to another, larger, question that swirls around my head almost everyday: if we can't simplify the workings of a single classroom, what makes us think that there is a silver bullet to reform the entire system?
This reminds me of a conference I had with the parents of one of my students last week. The conference was a chance for the parents to tell us about the "hopes and dreams" they have for their daughter in kindergarten. It's a fact-finding mission for teachers that helps us understand how the child learns, her strengths and weaknesses, as well as areas where her parents would like to see her improve. This particular student has an older brother who is quite advanced and introverted, and one of his favorite things to do is correct his baby sister. Their dialogue goes something like this:
Baby Sister: "Well, I think it's a little like this..." (Baby Sis demonstrates, explains)
Older Brother: "Not exactly."
According to the student's parents, this near-constant refrain of "not exactly" from her older brother sensitized the younger sister to making mistakes. Because she is a big-picture thinker, she uses broad strokes to understand the situation. Her brother, however, always seeks out nuance and points out moments when she could be more precise.
It strikes me that such a dynamic is not unique to this pair of siblings; we can find examples of it everywhere we look. Because I spend quite a bit of my downtime reading education blogs, they are my most salient form of reference. Every issue in the world of education reform, from "value-added" to charters to the achievement gap, essentially breaks down to one party painting the broad strokes while another reporter approaches just in time to write "not exactly" in his next post.
So where do we go from here? I can only hope that my 5-year-olds have some insight in this matter to share with me.
