Quitting

I’ve gotten a lot of emails from friends and readers who are “sorry” I have quit writing. It really made me mad at first because I didn’t quit; I never quit on anything. I was made to look as though I quit to satisfy the newspaper’s credibility. It was just another lie like the one about the thank you for all the years of service.

I thought a lot about quitting and what I think quitting means for me, for those around me, for the children I teach.

I thought about the two little pigs we had born at school with cerebral palsy. I took them to my vet, Dwayne Van Hooten, who said, “Take them home and take care of them.” Guinea pigs have to be fed every two hours for twenty-eight days. I diligently fed those pigs night and day until they died. They were unable to digest food. I cried over them and buried them in a memorable spot in my garden.

“Never give up!”

This year in school we had four children who were tagged learning disabled. There is nothing wrong with special education; it’s a marvelous thing, and the teachers who monitor our children’s work are great, but what a better thing if a child doesn’t need it at all and can blend in with the regular class. Children have enough trouble without thinking they can’t keep up. Kids know when they stand out, and standing out for dumb is something they really hate.

All of our teachers struggled with these kids, teaching, re-teaching, and re-teaching again. All four will go to regular classes next year.

We get a lot of children who the world seems to have given up on. We’re not talking about Guinea pigs, we’re talking about children – people in the small – people who will be running the world someday. It’s a moral evil to give up on any child. It’s a corruption to allow a child to misbehave, to be stupid when he’s not. Every child has a basket of goods to share with the world. To shove him and his basket out a door is a crime against the whole world.

Why does our little Garden School try so hard with what has been quietly labeled by everyone else in town? We’ve found that a peculiar sense of order is more important to early childhood than saving a child. People have a fictionalized idea of what childcare and early education should be, and it’s quiet, clean, and picturesque. Children should somehow be dressed for a party and smiling sweetly at one another. This fiction satisfies the state, visitors, parents who don't understand what early childhood should be like.

Early childhood education is a construction zone. We’re building lives here and there is nothing clean, easy, quiet or picturesque about it. There are lots of people who come to the Garden School who are put off by the noise. Noise means kids are communicating – for better or worse. Communication takes words and actions, and for children that’s never quiet.

Teaching children is sometimes loud. Confronting a child is often dramatic. The point of confrontation is so the child knows that someone cares about what he says. It’s easy to praise, but it’s tough to pin a child down and hold him responsible. “What do you think you’re doing?” It’s a question we ask all day. When they first hear it they really don’t know what to say. They have to sort it out before they really know. It’s hilarious to see the brain supercharge.

By the time a child has been at the GS for a week, he’s no longer shell shocked, he’s right in the action. Boot camp is over, and now it's time to join the action.

We went to the zoo last week. We took 35 children. Every child behaved like a dream child because they know it’s expected. We walked the entire zoo without a single complaint. Every child got to see what he wanted for as long as he wanted.

When we returned, one of the kids who had been tagged learning disabled asked me how to draw a monkey. I don’t draw, but I gave it my best shot. He liked the monkey and drew four more so well they made me laugh and I cut them out and framed them for the art show.

Working with children is different every single day. You get what you get, and that’s what makes it the best job in the world – it’s completely unpredictable. So writing about this and sharing it has been a real delight – one often quits one’s delights.

Here's an older column on writing I see a lot on Internet sites:

People ask sometimes what it’s like to write a column every week, especially one written about children and their care. They want to know if writing about children remains interesting time after time.

Children are wonderful beings, and because I like adjectives and description and funny stories about things kids do, the writing never ceases to be fun. It’s telling a story on paper that people enjoy.

The hard part of column writing for me is managing the gray areas of popular debate. Black and white is a lot easier to write about than gray stuff, which always seems indecisive and therefore pretty dull. My life motto is to be direct and say it out loud.

The important part of writing a children’s column begins with understanding what is true and valuable, important and interesting about children and re-constructing that idea onto paper. It’s called communication.

Communication is the element that makes or breaks an idea. As an auditory learner, writing for me first comes alive by hearing something first. Show me; don’t fling the directions at me in print or I’m likely to light them on fire and fling them back at you.

But at the same time, it’s my job to show the reader the same idea by taking it out of the world and making it fun to read and valuable enough to take something away from reading it, something the reader can use or enjoy.

Writing a good column takes time management. It means putting everything else aside several times a week to paraphrase and re-write, and re-write again something that happened, or something that naturally draws my attention because it’s true.

Some people say meeting a five hundred word deadline of coherent sentences on a would drive them crazy because it would hang over their head like a dentist appointment. Like teaching very young children, column writing kind of invades your life; it’s always there knocking on the mind door.

When I first suggested I do the column on day care or childcare, an office bet was wagered that I wouldn’t last three months because there wasn’t enough to write about regarding children.

Childcare, they said, was boring. Really? Doesn’t the reader remember growing up? Doesn’t the reader have children? Doesn’t the reader have nieces, nephews, cousins, and grandchildren? The point is a column written for and about children will eventually reach everyone, because everyone has, at least, been a child, and childhood is important.