I take care of your kid and that’s how I know that it’s not the school, it’s not the supplies, it’s not the lesson plans or the college degrees or the fancy playground equipment; it’s the teacher and whether she gives a damn that makes a difference to your kid.
Teaching is a labor of love and preschool teaching is literally a labor; as in my back hurts, my knees ache and thirteen kids telling me what they have for snack today at the same time makes my head hurt.
If another kid says “Miss Becky” I might rip my ears off and change my name, and why oh why are they using those blocks as projectile missiles and eating rubber erasers?
I recently taught summer camps at the preschool that I work at during the year. Summer camp involved meeting approximately sixteen new faces every Monday plus the four extra who forgot to sign up, but now MUST get in.
Summer camp involved me being there at least an hour before the bell rang to get ready. Haha, because you are never ready; each kid is so brilliantly horribly uniquely wonderfully different that all those lessons plans you so diligently worked on while not on the clock this past weekend, well you might as well turn those over and use them for finger-painting practice because once you meet the kids all that will change.
You might have more girls then boys, you might have more diapers than training pants, you might have kids who can’t sit still, you might have kids who won’t move once they have sat down and half of them miss their mothers before they have even stopped looking at her familiar face.
You have spent eighteen dollars of your own on an art project that didn’t dry right and no one has labeled their snacks. Once you put them into a basket you have over forty different baggies filled with party food and at least twelve Sippy cups with half a visible name; so after you have finished playing the Wheel of Fortune Game with your snacks and praying that those allergies really aren’t real, well then, you still have two hours and twenty minutes left to go but don’t worry, diapers and bathroom breaks should cover close to an hour because apparently the church I work at encourages the kids to poop, sometimes twice before ten o’clock.
By the end of the week after working your extra hours, the money you’ve spent on gas going back and forth to Michaels and paying your ten year old son three dollars a day to be your assistant, you should make about thirteen dollars and twenty-one cents for five days.
But somehow you wake up the next day and rewrite your lesson plans and you have a smile on your face and it is real because you know if you work your hardest and do your best, then some child will love you, some kid will learn something new, some parent will marvel at how you managed to get their shy Sally into a room full of strangers, you will get someone to act right or care about another, and you will do it all before twelve o’clock when they go home because you give a damn…and your kids know it.
P.S.
I was being sarcastic about the allergies so please no lessons on food safety. I didn’t actually glue the drawer shut, permanently, and if anyone was offended by what I wrote, then too bad because I’ve got bigger things to worry about – like how to get that darn drawer open and what to change my name to.
About Rebecca Suder