Lost in the cracks

NEA Today, Nov 1999 by Danziger, Meryl

What you've been taught may not be what you need to teach.

Did the teacher training courses that some of us remember only dimly prepare us for anything but children sitting at desks, eyes on the teacher?

Do we really know what to make of a student who, after gazing out the window for a good long while, suddenly decides to share his daydreaming in the middle of a spelling lesson?

In real life these interruptions are as familiar as they are exasperating for a teacher trying valiantly to keep a class focused on what school deems most beneficial for the majority.

Yet what each outburst may represent, in the big picture. is a child daring to reveal his quintessential self to an audience unlikely to be appreciative and risking disappproval and even punishment in the process

This morning I walked into the office and there stood Joe, a second grader, waiting to use the telephone. Because Joe's reputation has been firmly established through anecdotes circulated in the tea&hers' room, I assumed that "Absent-minded Joe." had forgotten something (again) and was calling home to have it delivered. Then I happened to look down at his feet.

"Uh, Joe. it looks as though you're wearing two left shoes."

Joe has the look of someone who has just awaken from a trance to find himself in a strange time and place; he seems baffled by his surroundings and appears to be far away in thought.

Preserving his "other-worldly" demeanor. he begins: "Well, I took the wrong shoes from my mother and there was this pile of shoes my mother had and I have a size 9 on this foot and a size 1 0 on this foot! "

"Both left?" I ask.

"Yeah."

Whatever Joe's story lacked in clarity, it made up for in form: the building suspense, a pregnant pause. the climax. By these standards, Joe is a natural storyteller.

"What's the problem?"

The no-nonsense voice of the school secretary brought us back to business. Joe looked at her with some mistrust, not daring to believe that he was going to get another crack at straightening out his story, then plunged eagerly into a considerably less comprehensible version.

An uncle and a neighbor's dog made cryptic appearances as our protagonist improvised with a desperate energy, lest he lose his rapt audience. "So I have to call home so she can bring . . ." and here he paused, unsure of whether he wanted a right size 9 or a right size 10. The monologue sputtered to a halt as Joe looked down at his toes, all curving to the right.

The chance to begin the day with a child like Joe, so predictably unpredictable, is one of the reasons I love the teaching profession. Every day children's natural, impulsive behavior reminds us that life can be interesting. These impulses occur constantly, despite our best efforts to keep children on well-defined, adult-structured paths.

Joe has a talent for "mind-wandering. which will probably not find its niche in the conventional educational framework. It is so much easier to deal with the tangible, and those talents which are hard to label and measure are not encouraged in a school setting. It's too bad, because it is so easy to be misunderstood. Who among us has not felt the frustration of watching people walk away before they "got the idea" of what we were trying to say? It is almost impossible to be a compassionate teacher without having experienced this pain.

Joe's stories tend to ramble, but they represent his perspective on the world, and therefore his essence. If Joe's peculiar gifts are discovered and nurtured by a wise mentor, he will feel respected and be more receptive to learning in general. If not. his teachers will feel frustrated by his determination to be true to himself.

It is heartbreaking to see children who, by the second week of kindergarten, are beginning to believe that forming a straight line is more important than discovering who they are. In our daily subjugation to routine. can we but admire the child whose reveries let him come to school wearing one size 9 shoe and one size 10, both left?

Meryl Danziger is on leave from her position as a music teacher in East Haven, Connecticut. Reach her at mdanzig@javanet.corn.