You heard me. Jude's starting kindergarten. While I'm going mad with emotion, Jude seems fairly indifferent. Tonight at the dinner table my friend asked him if he was excited and/or what he was going to do at KG and he answered, rather flatly, "I don't know." If only she'd fit the word "wizard" into the question, he'd still be talking.
"Oooh... it will be lots of fun," I cheered, not sure to whom exactly I was directing said cheer. I asked my friend if she remembered her first day of kindergarten. She did not. Did I?
Of course. How could I not? And before I could stop them, the words soldiered out of my mouth, landing right smack in front of Jude's tofu.
"What was so scary about it?" Jude asked. And here I thought he wasn't listening. How soon I forget. He's always listening. Silly, Mama. Think quick. Very quick.
"Well...it wasn't scary as in blood scary, but... it's just that Grandma forgot what time school started and I was extremely late and had to walk in front of everyone to my place in the circle on the hot concrete."
"Why Grandma was late? That's not scary!"
Of course I left out the part about the huge circle of strange, unfamiliar faces, eyes like boulders, weighting me into place. Don't even think about starting something. Multiple hands reaching for my long blonde hair. A tall teacher with a whistle. Ma looking smaller and smaller as she walked away from our class, her soft, white, gauzy cotton like the soft white cotton clouds surfing the angel blue sky above. Ma leaving with the clouds. My voice rising above the singing, "Mommy! Mommy!"
Mommy gone.
A friendly stranger. Tight curls. Wire glasses and toothy smile. Not the teacher, but the teacher maybe in eighteen years from now. "It's okay, child. Don't cry for your mama. Why you finna cry for your mama?"
What do you remember from your first day of kindergarten/school?
What do I remember from the first day of school?
ReplyDeleteI started first grade at Spring Road Elementary in Neenah, WI. There was no kindergarten. I don't exactly recall the first day - only bits and pieces of those years. Walking the one mile to school - being told to go with "the big kids" and the day the "big kids" decided it would be shorted to walk on the railroad tracks. Of course, I went with them. How do you decide which "right" to choose when you are told to go with the big kids and yet you know the tracks are not safe. I remember being scared the whole way, expecting the train to come and run us all over,
I remember the smell of crayons and paper and books. The excitement of learning to read. I remember Dick and Jane and Sally. "Look look look Sally look." (Teacher is rear-ended at an intersection. She gets out to view the damage. She says, "oh, oh, look, look, damn, damn!")
I remember the lunches my mom packed - the cupcakes baked in ice cream cones, hot soup in a thermos, I remember the teacher complimenting the dresses I wore, made by my mother. I remember long brown stockings in the winter - we didn't wear pants to school. The garter belt for those socks, going over my shoulders, embroidered flowers on the front so I would know where the front was.
I remember when we first got hot lunch. The silverware felt odd in my hand - I'd never eaten off silverware that was not my mother's.
I remember playing house under the huge old lilacs in the playground, the space between them worn into little enclosures, just right for pretend.
My first day of school - as a teacher,
I got my first teaching position in Fond du Lac, WI, at Jefferson Elementary - a school for "retarded" children in the days before "least restrictive environment." A section was added that year - me. I came to an empty classroom - no desks, no teacher's desk, nothing. I was told not to worry - desks would be there before school started. "And where do I find books, supplies, etc.?" ---- in central discard - the place where teachers discarded what they no longer wanted. I knew better than to ask for a curriculum. There was none.
It was a great way to learn to teach because it stripped everything down to the essence of teaching - What do they already know? What do they need to know? How will I teach it? How will I know they know it? By second semester of that year I had a student teacher - wonder what she learned? It was the start of a successful career. A time in my life when I was still excited about what I was doing, when the future lay ahead with no great tragedies, when I was still young and hopeful.
What happened? —KJ