Kids (and parents?!) in Kindergarten

How many times have you been to your kids' Kindy classroom?

My mom recently told me a funny (well, not funny-ha-ha, more like funny-hmmmmm) story about the time she got a peek into my younger brother’s kindergarten classroom. Seems that one day, my brother missed the bus, so my mom drove him.

After leaving him inside the school to be walked to his class by the secretary, she was about to hop in our 1974 Caprice Classic station wagon (with the fake-wood-grain panel outside and green shag rug in the way back) and head home, when she had an idea. What if she snuck around the building and just sorta peeked in the window to see what it all looked like?

See what it looked like?! Snuck around the building?!

These days, not only would she not have to crawl through bushes to peer through glass at her son, she’d probably be in the classroom, distributing snack, reading a book, or helping the kids glue ears on the lion art projects they hadn’t had time to finish yesterday. These days, at least where I live, kindergarten parents are nearly as involved in the day-to-day of their children’s classrooms as, well, their kids are.

Anyway, mom peeked in and what do you think she saw? Kids at their tables, tracing the letter “T” or coloring? Kids in the block corner, stacking and learning math at the same time? Kids on the cheerful carpet, discussing the day’s weather? Nope. She saw a teacher — who just happened to be our across-the-street neighbor — sitting behind her desk and screaming her head off at the unruly gaggle of 5-year-olds running around unfettered. Nice.

Of course, bad teachers (or teachers having a bad day, to be fair) are everywhere, just as good teachers are everywhere. But I can guarantee you that there’s No. Way. On. Earth that this teacher’s classroom style would not be known, down to the last detail, by every parent who’d ever had a child go through that school.

We all know. Some parents know more than others — in fact, there are some parents these days who keep Excel spreadsheets of teachers to track the endless who-had-whom and who was in who’s class and who is best for Their Little Darlings.

We’ve come a looong way from a time when moms like  mine had virtually no idea about their kids’ school days, to now, when parents are partners from day one. I remember remarking to a dad in my son’s first grade class last year — it was either at the butter-making Thanksgiving party, or perhaps the reception after the winter concert — that I’d already been inside this classroom more times than my parents had set foot in my elementary school, ever.

Don’t even get me started on the last-day-of school hoopla. Oh, okay — get me started! In our primary schools, kids find out on their final report card who their next year’s teacher will be. Immediately — like, within the hour — phones and emails are buzzing all over town. One mom in my son’s class (who was both the class mom and the PTA president) emailed asking everyone who their child got. Once she had all the responses she was going to get, she sent out another message with a spreadsheet detailing which kids were in which second-grade classrooms. So you could see who your child’s classroom buddies would be the following year.

As it happens, Daniel was the only kid on that list from his first grade class who didn’t know who else would be in his second-grade class.  I said, “well, you’ll make new friends, and see all your old friends in the cafeteria, right?” Right.

I actually have my own, foxes-in-charge-of-the-hen-house  kindergarten story. When I was in my half-day K, back when what kids did in kindergarten was roughly equivalent to what my boys did in daycare when they were two years old (you know, coloring, playing, eating snacks, napping), I endured the Tommy Smith and the Milk incident. In our school, you had a little container of milk to go with your from-home snack. I was 10 seconds late to the snack table one day, and arrived at my seat to find Tommy Smith sitting there, drinking my milk! I alerted the teacher, who told Tommy to go to his own seat. Which he did. And where he proceeded to start drinking his milk.

Suffice to say I didn’t drink my milk that day.

And my parents never knew. No incident report sent home, no note in the backpack (in fact, no backpack).

I’m not advocating a return to those (dark? more independent? more separation-between-kids-and-parents?) days. If someone takes my kid’s milk today, you can bet I want to hear about it. If one of them gets hurt on the playground or in the cafeteria, I want a call from the nurse (which I got, last year, when Daniel got a “suspicious bruise” when he fell onto a cafeteria bench. Not only did I get a call from the nurse, but she explained how the principal — the principal! — had walked him back to the offending bench to describe how it happened, just to be sure no one had pushed him. No one had. He’s just clumsy).

But do I want to pore over spreadsheets? Spend my summer agonizing over Who They Got  next year? Or if Mrs. So-and-so is a good fit?

As a friend of mine, who is actually an educator in our district and as such has the privilege of actually choosing her daughter’s teachers (she declines), said on this subject: “If she gets a teacher she clashes with, it’s an opportunity for us to teach her how to get along and deal with it.”

Exactly!

And for all the apparent chaos of my brother’s K classroom, he’s turned out okay. But I wonder what ever happened to Tommy Smith?

[photo: everystockphoto.com]