Creating a Monster

To add on to Michael and Andrea’s ideas about causing harm, unintentionally or otherwise, which I think is an excellent topic and one that has actually kept me up at night, I am going to share some of my own experiences in the teaching / childcare world. I have worked in a couple of different teaching environments and to me it is interesting how drastically different my concern or paranoia was about ruining the children and what that would mean. At the Christie School the kids were already really screwed up. They had behavioral and emotional problems and some were just straight psychotic. Over 90% of the kids were medicated. It was a lock-down, residential treatment facility with physical restraints and cement “quiet” rooms, so basically if you could get the kids through the day and have some fun and do some positive role modeling, it was a good day. Our top priority was of course trying to keep the kids from killing themselves, each other, or us, but we also really worked on respect of self, others, and environment.

In the Montessori preschool I was working in things were obviously quite different. The children were very young, wealthy, and healthy and a “good day” was a lot more involved. We were expected to speak almost from a script and if you said “no” to a child people would look at you like you just back-handed him or something. There felt like a sort of competition to “out Montessori” each other, but laughably very few teachers had any formal Montessori training. I didn’t, and I often felt like the administration would come in and look down their noses at us for not handling a situation in the correct “Montessori way”. This added a lot of pressure and I would lie awake at night thinking about how I should have done it to be “more Montessori”. In this environment, it seemed as if I just spoke to a child in a normal way, not from the approved script, I was going to ruin him and he was going to end up with a life-long drug habit and a collection of animal corpses under his bed.

It was odd, coming from an environment where we were working side by side with therapists and social workers helping children who were in a state of real crisis to an environment where we could have half hour long arguments about the differences between a table sponge and a floor sponge with the same amount of importance and gravity put into it. It was mind blowing, but I quickly fell into the trap of thinking that I was ruining Jimmy because I hadn’t gone through all the appropriate steps when I had asked him to put his blocks away.

I guess with all of this I am simply saying that Andrea is right; children are very resilient, and although we should take care in everything we say and do, asking them to switch their shoes once or twice probably won’t throw them over the edge. I think we can only do our best, but when I am 5 hours into the day and I have 30 kids all by myself and I have to get outside or we will miss our turn on the playing field, I’m going to slip up. But I’m thinking (or hoping) they will forgive me.