baby meet

This week I taught four kids' classes. Three of them were inaugural classes with a pre-school. This town is actually world-famous for its early childhood education programs (the Australian contingent are around town this week, but we get thousands of pilgrims a year coming to see the kids be all, you know, progressive) so I wanted to make a good impression. My co-teacher has never taught kids who don't speak English before, and I've never taught kids, so our goals for the first week were pretty much along the lines of 'Nobody falls over and starts crying--yay.' I am pleased to report that nobody fell over or started crying, that a few kids said 'hello,' and one precocious fella was repeating all the elements of 'heads, shoulders, knees and toes' back to us after we said them. They are fabulous kids. They just shine and shine with curiosity. And though I know some of my loyal readers do not share my love for the song Rock Lobster, I have to tell you that three-year-olds go sick for it. That, and Buzz Buzz Buzz by Jonathan Richman and Baby Meet by the Cruel Sea. I aspire to including a gross motor skills session (which is to say, jumping up and down to a selection of rock, blues and punk classics and yelling incoherently) in every lesson. I'm not sure my co-teacher will see my point of view on this one, but we can try.

I also had my second kids' reading group tonight. They were all supposed to read 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar' and Paul Jennings' 'Spaghetti Pig-out', and I had lots of great ideas for things to do with those stories, but they came to the school, ran straight for the puppets and started pitting them in duels to the death. I tried to interest them in the things I'd planned for about five minutes, and then ditched all that and decided to go with the puppets thing. In the two hours before their parents came to collect them they managed to put together a puppet play with backdrops, musical interludes, some striking comic moments, and, naturally, a puppet duel to the death. Plus, we had pizza.



Witch: Tell me again what you're going to do.
Brigand: I'm going to steal the queen and bring her back here.
Witch: And what will I do to you if you don't?
Brigand: You're going to... give me a prize?
Witch: No! I'm going to broke your bones and throw them in the castle lake and the fish will eat them!
Brigand: I will not fail!

On the morning before the first pre-school class I went up onto the school roof to drink my coffee and watch all the horizontal planes turn white. Parking lots, construction sites, the roof of the roller skating rink. The snow was falling all around and settling on my coat in patches. Everything felt clean. I remembered something my mum told me years ago, after she went to see a clairvoyant for fun, and asked about her kids, as mums do. 'She's in white. There's white all around. A lab researcher or something? No, not that. Oh, I've got it--she's going to work with kids.' Quoth I, over a tuna mornay dinner, in the ad breaks of the Jimeoin show, 'yeah right'.