Talking to myself
In
a bid to exercise what’s left of my grey cells I am revising some old posts.
Here is a reworked version of something I wrote 11 years ago, ‘Talking to
myself’.
Until
I retired, I spent a good deal of my life talking to myself. Occasionally I disguised
it as teaching. Usually, I taught older children, who had already learnt to conform
to the conventions of school life (translation:
‘do as they were told’) but sometimes I was called on to work with younger
children.
The
most testing times were when I was with the youngest children, then called ‘Nursery’,
now known as ‘Pre-school’. It could seem that the little children sitting at my
feet were drinking in every word when what they were really doing was wondering
who made the cracks in the ceiling, or why my hair looked young when the lines
on my face clearly indicated that I was extremely old, just like their mums or,
worse yet, their grandmothers. Sometimes
a small child would touch the polished surface of my shoe to see if it really was
shiny or just wet. Once in a while an infant would whisper shyly, ‘I like your
blouse’ or even, touchingly, ‘I like you’.
Children
can be devastatingly honest when young and unhampered by conformity. One day a
little girl of about 4 put up her hand to indicate that she wished to speak and
when acknowledged, said politely, ‘Excuse me, I don’t like you.’ I cannot
remember my response - I may have said something like, ‘Oh, that’s a shame,
because I like you.’ Cringe-worthy, I know.
Often actions spoke more piercingly than
words. Couching instructions in the form of requests – ‘Would you like to . . .
?’ could be answered by the child looking straight through me or shaking his
head vigorously or turning his back and walking away. If the instruction/request
involved three-dimensional items to be sorted, built, placed, the answer could
be an eloquent gesture sweeping the items to the floor, or, if already on the
floor, far and wide across the room. Nothing could be plainer – the child did
not want to cooperate. If the instruction/request was repeated a little more
firmly there were several possible outcomes:-
1:
the child acquiesced and did as he was told asked. Result!
2:
the child burst into noisy sobs and demanded her mummy.
3:
the child repeated ‘NO’ with increasing vehemence until my ear drums were
ringing, he had turned purple with rage and ended up having a full-blown
tantrum, maybe even succeeding in making himself sick.
3:
the child threw the items at the nearest adult (me) and possibly aimed a kick
at my shins.
4:
the child wet herself, indicating at the same time, by the volume of the flow,
that she had not emptied her bladder
since the night before.
5:
the child soiled himself, indicating at the same time that he had consumed far
too much fruit the previous day.
Any
of these outcomes could happen very quickly but fortunately not often, though sometimes
coinciding with a prospective parent/visitor being shown round ‘our
family-friendly school.’
None
of them was quite what was intended at the beginning of the ‘lesson’. As every
parent knows, young children can be exhausting. Twenty or thirty of the same
age can be a small but intimidating army.
I
believed then, and still maintain, that the hardworking teachers of very young
children deserve more generous pay than their colleagues at the other end of
the age range, when students attend lessons (now
known as lectures) voluntarily, can concentrate for more than 5 minutes, (all right, that’s debateable) are
usually articulate and toilet-trained, can dress themselves and use a
handkerchief and know that writing on walls is unacceptable. Pause here, while
I consider this last statement – okay, they know it’s unacceptable but do it
anyway, arguing the right to free expression.