Unfinished Rainbows

Unfinished Rainbows

Being a teacher is often a choice of laughing or crying. You want to cry everytime you see the hurt in the child's eyes when he thinks he's stupid because he couldn't read "said". He's seen it a hundred times, and he read it yesterday, but he can't recognize it today, and one of the other children just called him a "dummy".

It makes the tears sting your eyes when you see little Danielle left out of jump rope because they say she's too fat to play, and besides, she always trips up the rope.

I guess if you harbor too many of the "sads", you lose it as a teacher, so like the TV sitcom, "Mash" you have to look for the funny side and try to remember only that.

Or like one of the Kindergartners said when she saw an incomplete rainbow, "That's not part of a rainbow. That's a rainbow. It's just that God's not finished with it yet." I always try to keep that in mind.

The funny side of children pops out at you just as frequently as the sad side, so it really is easy to laugh a lot. All you have to do is ask a question and hold in the laughter for later. You can never laugh right then when it's the funniest, even though their little faces are telling you about the world with that freckled innocence and their absolute belief that they have all the facts. But little egos are the same size as adult's, only more easily crushed.

A five year old one time explained all about thunder and lightning.

"Lightning is a string," he said. "When the electric goes down, the string booms. An exposure happens then, I think. Sometimes the string falls and the string hits a tree. Then the tree booms, and it makes a fire. 'The string can't fall on my house,' my daddy says, 'Cause it likes trees better.'"

I'm glad I don't live in a tree!

One first grader redefined the Golden Rule when he explained why he hit Tommy. "You know the ruler in church, the Golden one? It said to."

I told him I wasn't sure I understood.

"It says do unto others before they do to you, so I hit Tommy before he hit me. I knew he was going to hit me, so I hit him first, to get even."

(I promise you he wasn't grinning when he explained all this. His eyes were as sincere, I'm sure, as the minister who'd tried to explain it to him on the Sunday before.)

Sometimes you learn a lot from the students. When two little girls from pre-school complained about their friend Sammy having said the "sh" word, I assumed the worst. I called Sammy over. He came, his eyes to the ground. You could tell he was thoroughly ashamed.

I'm sorry," he said with his cute little lisp. "I didn't mean to say it. My brother says 'shut up' all the time, and he never gets in trouble!"

I have to be careful about what I say, too. I must guard my mouth for suspicious words. Two five-year-old girls told me they were going to tell their mothers that I had said a bad word. I had to play reruns in my mind to try to figure how I'd offended, but I still didn't catch on ... until they said I'd yelled out the "a" word.

I'm warning you...it's dangerous to tell kindergartners, "Don't run on the asphalt!"

It's a little awkward when time changes, and the children are unprepared. When it's 5:30 in the evening and the sun is shining, it's perfectly all right to be in the afterschool program. But when 5:30 is suddenly pitch dark, there's a lot of tears. Many of the youngest ones think Mommy is not coming, and we have to reassure them a lot.

One little kindergartner had a different reaction. When I asked her why she was crying, she replied almost hysterically, "It's nighttime, and I never got any dinner. When I wake up it will be breakfast, and I don't like breakfast. I want my dinner. It's not fair!..."

Foggy weather can be scary to little ones because it's gray outside, and they can't see all the playground equipment they know should still be visible. When things look too different, little children become fearful. Thank goodness for the pre-schooler who reassured them. "Rain is just rain, but fog is when it rains heavy soup!"

Clam chowder anyone?

My favorite was the kindergartner who explained pollution to me. "Smog is when the cars can't breathe," she told me.

I guess that's why we have to change car filters so often! Do you suppose cars would run better if we gave them oxygen?