It was an ordinary Thursday in Kindergarten. The five and six year olds assigned to my tutelage bounded in the door at 9:00 a.m. ready to crank out the rigor! I was in good spirits, better than usual, which lead me to believe that it would be a fantastic morning of “shaping” lives.
We soared into the first activity of the morning….Art! (My favorite) The project taught the budding artists about how to show depth in a two-dimensional drawing. So, we were off! The kids were armed with Sharpie ™ markers to draw the outline of their pictures. The hum in the room was remarkable. I stood back for a few seconds and took note of how every one of the twenty-five Kindergarten learners were actively engaged. This rarely happens. Typically you have at least one child who is whoopin’ it up with a peer by trying to antagonize a table-mate or spinning around on their chair. Neither was the case at this moment in time. I marveled at how independent this crew was and smiled. It’s only mid-December and these five and six year olds are whipped into shape. They are independent and can handle multiple step directions, or so it seemed.
I am not sure what time things turned sour. If memory serves me correctly it must have been around 10:13 a.m. It was as if the water color painting God’s had teamed up to pay me back for all of the times I had misbehaved as a child. I looked over to the sink and saw one of my charges holding a bowl of water over his head and pouring it down into the sink. We literally had a waterfall as the water splashed toward the sink, mostly missing the basin and splashing on the counter. Water then proceeded to pour down the front of the cabinets. It may have gone un-noticed by me, the supposed teacher of this group, had the youngster not been howling with laughter. Disappointed doesn’t even begin to express how I felt given that we had just come off of the “please keep the water in the sink when you pour out your bowl” speech. Just as I took a step in the direction of the sink I heard a ruckus from the other side of the room.
I did an about face and looked at the students who sit at the basketball table. (All of the tables in the room are labeled by sport. Basketball, Baseball, Football, Soccer and Refs.) A second Kindergarten child was smashing her paint brush deep into the tray of watercolors and laughing with glee as the paint splattered out with the velocity of your typical projective vomit experience. She had just re-loaded her brush with water and slammed it into the red paint tray. Red paint splattered on the table, the girl’s paper, her shirt and on the paper of those seated nearest to her. This caused a chain reaction of revolt from those who now had red droplets of paint on their projects. “Stop it!” “HEY!” and a host of other reactive statements were being shouted from her tablemates. I managed to get there just in the nick of time before blue was added to the rainbow shower of drops being projected across the basketball table.
It got worse. Just as I am confident that I am losing my touch as I near forty years old I happen to catch a boy out of my peripheral vision. What was he doing? I can’t be for sure, but it seemed he was a Bloodhound. He had his nose to the ground while he was on all fours with his rear high up in the air. He looked to be hot on the trail of some scent. I heard one of his tablemates exclaim, “He’s a dog! He’s a dog!” I was glad that there was at least one other person in the room who had come to the same conclusion about this behavior.
When Kindergarten falls apart like this I find myself taking back control, reeling them in and bringing the circus to a halt to “encourage” folks to step back into line. This is known as a “Come to Jesus” speech. Typically it involves the teacher (me) clearly laying out what went wrong and what I can do to help folks re-align with “how we do things here.” The teacher paints such a clear picture of how unpleasant it will be if you don’t “come to Jesus” that you quickly see that there are no other options but to do just that.
There is never a dull moment…
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