Day One & My Most Ridiculous Fear I Had About the Classroom

            So yesterday was my first official day in the classroom with the children. It was hectic, challenging, tiring, and incredibly fun. It is amazing to me how four hours feels like an eternity at my retail job but was over in the blink of an eye here. The children have an incredible range of personalities which will be really fun to see unfold throughout the semester as they grow and interact. The most embarrassing thing that happened was me having to quietly ask another one of the apprentice teachers the name of the child who asked me to write his name on his drawing so I will consider that an epic success.

            There are a lot of fears you would expect teachers to have starting out – maybe the children won’t like me, maybe the children will get hurt, maybe the children will mutiny, maybe there will be an issue with a parent, or maybe a massive comet will collide with the earth while these children are in my care (hey, it could happen). But today I’m talking about the obvious, rational fears. I want to talk about my silliest fear that while small lingered on my mind as much as, and maybe more, than the more logical, common fears.

            One of my biggest anxieties was about singing in front of the kids and the other teachers. You done laughing yet? I’ll wait. I know realistically 2 and 3 year olds probably don’t care – although at that age the honesty is also pretty brutal. And I’m sure as long as I’m not dropping f-bombs or referencing sexual encounters I’m sure my fellow teachers don’t care either. As long as glass isn’t shattering and the children’s ears aren’t bleeding everyone should be happy. Yet still it makes me nervous. I started going to church again at the beginning of last semester and just know feel mostly comfortable singing in church. Softly.

This is actually still exponentially better than the reaction I image in my mind.

            I was prepared to face this ridiculous fear eventually. Like halfway through the semester when it was required. But I surprised myself and volunteered to sing the kids “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while they were playing in the toy boat outside – and they liked it! I didn’t have to write an injury reports for broken eardrums and no children ran away, dare I say they even enjoyed it and I did too.  The whole thing is a big reassurance to me that the anxieties will fade and the enjoyment will flourish.

            I have to also say I am so, so grateful for my fellow apprentice teacher. She has more experience than me, both in general and with these children, and was a godsend to me yesterday. When the first child who arrived broke a glass container for crayons she immediately said it was okay and took care of it, which seems minor but it really set the tone that things will happen and we don’t worry, we move on and keep going with the day. Many times during the day when I felt anxious, like when the child in my lap burst into tears because she didn’t get to hold the felt duck, I would look to her and she would just give me a reassuring smile and shake her head to say “its no big deal”. Both her and our lead teacher gently reminded me on what I should be doing and it really was a good experience, I do feel really supported and comfortable with these people.

            Which is really nice because I already have to write a language and literacy activity plan to do with the children in the coming week. I also took over a friend’s afternoon shift two days a week so now I will be getting to know a new, older group of children that I will have to do weekly activity plans with. Remember what I said about taking on tasks feeling invincible and then getting anxious later? I did it again. I’m getting somewhat anxious now but already feeling more confident than I was a week ago so I’m getting excited. I’ll update on that experience tomorrow.

The Past Week, and How I've Actually Gained Some Confidence.

            So in my first entry I feel a lot of my anxieties overshadowed my excitement for starting this new journey. This past week has been a crazy one for me, a lot has happened and at the same time we’ve been doing classroom setup and had our open house for the new families. And from my involvement I actually have gained some confidence and got more excited.

            Firstly, I’ve learned I can really trust my team. At first I was intimidated because two people on our team have a lot of experience with these children and had a strong leadership presence. This was especially uneasy for me because I am used to the one being in the leadership position so just not being that part of the team was an adjustment to me. But really, these women are wonderful, they’re patient and very happy to share their knowledge. When we were setting up the classroom they shared ideas and if they thought something was not the best idea they told me why so I felt like I was learning rather than being chastised. They were also happy to show me where everything was which is always a tough part of being in a new place. I’m actually very grateful for the time we had to set up before the children were there because I do feel more comfortable and bonded with the team which makes me feel better overall.

            The biggest confidence builder this week was the open house where our new families came to visit the classroom. Despite all my anxieties about what I don’t know yet, I do know one thing well – I can connect with the children. I was immediately comfortable engaging the children in activities and getting to know them. Talking to parents was actually easier than I thought to, it is amazing how responsive somebody will be to you when they see you are enjoying their child and care about their concerns. Within five minutes of having children in the classroom I had forget all the things in my mind I was worried about and I was having fun. And I was so happy the children were enjoying the materials we had put out, that gave me more confidence in the choices that were made when setting up the classroom.  It also made me a lot more excited. A couple of the children I already felt I really connected with, especially one who clung to my leg when it was time to leave. It was a nice reminder that I’m a good fit for this and if I can connect with the children naturally then the learning specific skills and techniques will come with time and I will be fine.

            Which is wonderful because now that I’m calmer and those anxious emotions are subdued a bit that leaves room for excitement. I’m excited to get to know all the children and their different personalities. I’m excited to try new activities, get messy, and form relationships with these children and their families. I already got plenty messy at open house because we put paints out for the children. It is so fun to see the different personalities – a couple kids shoved their hands into the paint and were happy having paint all over their hands, arms, face, and goodness knows what else. Another children enjoyed the painting with the paintbrush but wanted to wash her hands every time a drop got on her hands. We had a couple children loudly trying to get as much attention as possible and another child who was more timid and didn’t want to participate much. In that short amount of time I learned a lot of this job is reassuring parents that their children are doing normal child things – children will mix paint, spill things, get loud, mix materials, and just generally explore in ways that are meaningful to them. All of this is okay but the parents looked so nervous every time the kids did any of this and need reassurance, which is making me realize just how important it is to build trusting relationships with the parents.  

Mixing paint is actually a great way to learn about how to make different colors

            I feel bad for them too, there is so much pressure to have perfect, quiet children which aren’t really developmentally appropriate expectations. I used to be guilty of this but learning more about developmental stages I became more patient and adjusted my expectations a bit. Don’t get me wrong, there is a balance to achieve between having realistic expectations and teaching children how to behave in certain settings, I’m not saying we should not guide children. But we do need to realize we are often placing children in environments that are difficult for them and then get irritated when the children behave at their developmental level. This comes into play a lot when designing both our environment and our schedule. We try to have a balance of child guided and adult guided activities that have developmentally appropriate expectations of how long children will engage in different types of activities. We structure the environment to give children outlets for their energy and desires to move but in a safe way – for example we have slides and areas for them to bounce but set up the room in a way where they don’t have space to run and be unsafe inside.

            So next week along with working I will also be taking five classes. This sounds like a lot but I’m confident I can handle it, when I was working on my bachelor’s my final semester I had five upper division classes, a job, and an internship. Speaking of internships my schedule this semester was not quite what I was planning. For one class I need to do six intern hours per week and I was hoping to do those hours on Tues/Thurs when I wasn’t working at the center. Unfortunately there wasn’t a placement that worked with my class schedule so we decided that six of my working hours would be unpaid and count for the internship class.

            This is both good and bad. The downside is that I’m losing out on six hours of pay and I could really use the money, and it is always a bit of a bummer when you plan something out and it doesn’t go that way. But there are plenty of positives to this arrangement. The internship expects us to do a certain amount of observing, planning, and implementing activities as well as taking a leadership position in the classroom. I’m lucky because instead of having to do this in a newer place I’m in an environment I know, with a lead teacher and other apprentices I trust, and kids that I do have some experience with (at least some of the class). Also since the center is at the college I’m doing the intern class through they have a clear idea of the expectations of the class and know how to help me complete everything I need. Not to mention this will give me time or study or do other things on Tues/Thurs and not be as busy and stressed. So overall I’m grateful it worked out this way.

            So overall I’m happy and excited for next week. I did just order my books a couple days ago, oops! But I’m sure that will be fine, and I’m sure there will be another entry or two next week as I settle into things. I hope you’re enjoying reading this as much as I’m enjoying writing this.             

Why I Have a Love/Hate Relationship with Pinterest

            In this entry I wanted to talk about Pinterest and why I’m simultaneously learning to love and hate it. For those of you who don’t know, Pinterest is a site where you can collect interesting links into albums, a lot of people use it for recipes, wedding planning, fashion ideas, home design, preparing for babies, etc. If you need to do it, Pinterest probably has plenty of links to make you feel oddly inspired and inadequate at the same time. So it isn’t surprising that Pinterest is full of activity and classroom setup ideas for teachers. Awesome right? Maybe. The problem isn’t Pinterest itself, the problem is how I see it being used.

            Last semester we had to do a group project in which we created sample lesson plans around a common theme and present it to the class. How I feel about that experience and everything that went wrong with my group could be a completely different entry, but for now I will keep us on topic and discuss how Pinterest factored into this. The philosophy at the college I study at, and therefore the center I work at, is to use emergent curriculum. In short, this means we observe the children’s interests and abilities and design curriculum for the near future around that in conjunction with the Preschool Learning Foundations (Which I will call PLF in the rest of this entry). We don’t have a year’s worth of curriculum planned out before the school year starts or specific themes planned for specific months.  This assignment was supposed to be a way to get practice at creating this curriculum. We were supposed to choose a theme (since we didn’t have actual children to observe for this specific class), do a brainstorming web where we consider what subthemes we can get from the topic and think about how these subthemes fit into the key areas of the PLF. Once we did this we were then supposed to form our lesson plans.

            I can’t speak for every group but I know in my group I had a very difficult time getting my group to work through the steps. As soon as we picked a theme they were on Pinterest looking up activities and wanting to copy them for our lesson plans. Now I do understand not everybody agrees with the philosophies of emergent curriculum or Reggio inspired activities – to some people worksheets and planned yearly curriculum is fine. But that wasn’t the assignment and it bothered me that people were so unwilling to think about the lessons, they found something that looked “cool” and just wanted to copy that. They didn’t want to discuss if it was developmentally appropriate, they didn’t want to discuss if it allowed exploration and authentic learning, and they didn’t even consider what aspects of the PLF these activities encompassed. In the end I ended up writing a new web for my group because I couldn’t get them to put the effort in and I was the one who put the effort into going through the PLF and tying that into our activities.

            The easiest explanations for this would be laziness or apathy, but I think there is more to it. For the classroom I’m working in we’ve been given assignments in designing certain aspects of the classroom and I took art and manipulatives/loose parts. I’ll admit I started looking at Pinterest for some inspiration and started to feel really intimidated. Seeing all the creative, amazing looking ideas on that site just makes anything you come up with on your own feel second class, it’s like comparing your average wedding to a celebrity wedding. I feel like all the extravagance on Pinterest has raised people’s standards but most of us don’t have the time, resources, or experience to do projects on the same level as the ones most shared, and therefore seen the most, and since none of our own ideas feel like they measure up we opt to copy the ones that seem better. And when we do decide to take something from Pinterest we desperately want our finished product to look like the finished product in those beautiful blog pictures. In a preschool setting this becomes problematic because we become overly concerned with the product and forget what is really important – the process. When you are painting your house you do it to make your house look nice, the purpose is to have a good finished product. But when preschoolers are painting this isn’t necessarily the case, when they are painting they are practicing fine motor skills, learning about colors, learning about the properties of paint or other materials, learning to express themselves, learning to share materials and space, and so much more. When we design activities for children this is what we need to have in mind, not how the end product compares to that beautiful Pinterest post.

            I want to make it clear that I’m not saying Pinterest is all bad – my own preschool album has a couple hundred pins on it. I just think Pinterest isn’t being used correctly, it should be inspiration but not a strict blueprint. And part of that means letting go of our own pride a bit. I feel like especially for people like me who are new at teaching there is a lot of pressure to prove ourselves with these amazing, original activities. Confidence comes from experience and when you don’t have a lot of experience it is hard to feel confident in your own ideas especially if you’re comparing yourself to these Pinterest activities. I’m guilty of this too, I’m having to stop myself from thinking every art idea I come up with is too simple and remember what matters is how the children benefit from it, not if I look amazingly creative to my fellow teachers. That really ties into my first post, I have to remind myself I’m still mastering the basics and I don’t need to be in expert mode yet.

            It is nice to know that there are teachers out there passionate about their jobs willing to share their experiences and other teachers furiously pinning activities they think will enrich their children’s experience. This exchange of ideas does have teachers trying new projects, experimenting with new materials, and hopefully getting away from doing the same activity over and over. Because of that I am grateful Pinterest exists. I think used as a guide, a starting point, it is incredibly valuable.

Beginnings - Why I'm Not a Fan

            The logical thing to do would be to open with an intro post, but that isn’t really what is inspiring me to write and since one of my reasons for doing this is to get back into writing, I’m going to write about what strikes me right now. So for now I will give a brief intro and then get right down to the nitty gritty. I have an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, yet I felt unsatisfied with my job options and went back to community college to pursue early childhood education. I’m currently enrolled in my second semester, I have 15 ECE units and a semester of service learning under my belt. This semester I’m taking on another 15 units and have an apprentice teaching position at the Child Development Center on campus. For the sake on confidentiality I won’t be using my name, my school name, or any names of children, parents, or other teachers on this blog. Any names I do use for the sake of clarity in writing are pseudonyms. So far we have had one week of training modules, next week we are doing classroom setup, and the week after school starts so we will have children in our classrooms. I’m going to be working in a toddler room that has children between age 2 and 3.

            Don’t get me wrong, I am really excited to have a new job, new skills, and to take a step forward. But I hate beginnings. I hate being new at things and I hate making mistakes. I’m sure nobody likes these things, but I really don’t. I’ve been working in retail since 2008 and many times not been happy. Hours are not given generously, schedules are constantly changing, management changes a lot and there is generally just a lot of irritation involved. Sometimes I’ve got frustrated and tried to change jobs, a couple times I even had some options, yet every time I stay because I haven’t wanted to start over. As annoying as my job is I know it well, I do it quickly and accurately, and everybody knows it. I’m seen as an expert, given responsibility, and overall trusted. In the end despite the irritations my desire to not want to start over has won out and I’ve stayed.

            Ever since I was young in school my teachers would praise my academic abilities. Even when I had behavioral issues in elementary school my teachers would still comment that I was ahead and intelligent. This continued into middle and high school. One day in 8^th grade English we were discussing a poem and the teacher asked me a question about the poem – apparently this poem was satire and I hadn’t picked up on that so I answered the question wrong. I remember my teacher sighing in exasperation and saying, “If you don’t understand this, nobody will.” Throughout the rest of my academic career my teachers acted like me doing well was expected and when I messed up it always seemed to be a bigger deal than when other students did. Part of this was nice – after all, who doesn’t enjoy praise? But the strong negative reactions to my mistakes or misunderstandings impacted me even more than the praise. I feel a lot of pressure to get close to perfection and because of this being new at something terrifies me. If I don’t understand something or mess up my confidence is immediately shot. Because of this until I feel I can do something at least close to perfect I often won’t try. At work I went from not saying much to take the lead in one day because I finally felt I had quietly observed enough to know what I was doing. There is very little middle ground for me, if I’m unsure I will keep quietly watching and not give much indication that I’m even considering trying something.

            Yet here I am, about to start doing something new. Why do this to myself? I don’t know, I’m still figuring that out. I tend to get really excited and believe I can handle anything so I take on challenges and only once I’m starting do I realize how anxious I am. I am lucky in that even though this is a new role for me it isn’t a completely new setting. I will be in the same classroom I was in for service learning hours last semester with many of the same kids, the same lead teacher, and other apprentices I know.  Even with service learning last semester it wasn’t until the last day that I felt confident really speaking up and offering to do things or help with specific tasks. During our meetings with our classroom staff this past week I felt a bit insecure because the other two apprentices were in this classroom before and spent 3-5 days a week with these kids when I spent 2 hours a week with them. I felt completely unequipped to contribute much – though I keep reminding myself that will change as the semester goes on.

            My usual methods of quiet observation aren’t going to work now. Along with being an apprentice, I am also enrolled in a class that requires me to do 6 hours of intern work per week. I am lucky to be able to do those hours in the same classroom but this means I will be required to take on planning and responsibilities beyond just the apprentice job description – in our meetings last week my lead teacher remarked that the interns will be fully running the show at times and my stomach dropped a little bit. She also mentioned that in this field you often learn best by failing and considering what went wrong. So what it all comes down to is learning skills alone won’t get me through this, I’m going to have to constantly push outside my comfort zone and learn in a new way.

            But despite this there is no part of me considering not doing this. I do find comfort in the fact that when I want to get good at something I usually do and I received high marks on my service learning evaluation so perhaps I am being harder on myself than necessary. I also am very lucky to be in a program where I not only am getting paid to learn in the classroom but we have paid training modules as well. During training we were given apprentice portfolios to keep track of training and the staff at the center will meet us individually to go over these, help us get our permits, etc. I feel very lucky to be in an environment that is set up for learners, these people understand we are learning and just want to help us. Having an opportunity to get experience in such a setting is so valuable and I fully intend on taking advantage of it. Lastly but certainty not least, I enjoy this. I am not a morning person so if I’m willing to get up before sunrise 5 days a week for something that says a lot. Being honest with myself I know this is what I’ve wanted for a very long time but I let others discourage me from it. My grandmother was an early childhood teacher and I loved the time I spent in her classroom. I remember in 8^th grade on the first day of sci/tech class we did job aptitude tests and I was not at all surprised when mine said I should be teaching. But somehow in high school I let people guide me away from it, people told me it wouldn’t pay well and I could be successful at anything I wanted. Remember all that praise I mentioned? That came with a lot of pressure to choose a “distinguished” career, which just left me confused. I have no doubt I am where I am supposed to be now.

            The title of this blog is Play, Grow, Learn. I will touch more on the topic of play very often, as well as the Reggio Emilia approach, which resonates with me, and I draw a lot of inspiration with – as does the center I work at now. I see that title as a description of not only what I hope for the children but for myself as well. I hope to play, grow, and learn right along with the children, hopefully becoming both a better teacher and person. And I hope at least a handful of people will read along so they can laugh along with me, cringe along with me, and learn with me as I start this new chapter of my life.