the most important thing

During my primary school internship, I remember cutting off pieces off pieces of clay from a large slab with a piece of fishing line, rolling each piece into a rough ball and setting each one evenly spaced across three long tables arranged end to end.

The regular teacher of the class had requested to speak with them after lunch while I set up the art project for the afternoon. When the bell rang, the students came in from the halls in groups, taking off their hats and zipping away their drink bottles.

I kept cutting off pieces of clay, smiling and saying hello and saying "yes, this is for this afternoon". One girl took a long time at her bag. Everyone else had filed inside. I glanced at her, and then into the room where her classmates were sitting on the floor, looking at their teacher. She looked away from me.

"There's a class meeting right now," I said, nodding my head inside.

"I don't want to go in."

I pause in cutting pieces of clay. "Why not?"

"I feel sad."

"What about?"

She looked away from me again.

I pulled out a chair next to me. "You can sit down here, if you like."

She sat down. For a few minutes, I cut clay and she rolled it into balls to put at places around the table.

"I keep thinking about my dad," she said eventually.

I knew her dad had passed away a year or so ago.

"It's very sad when someone we love dies. I was very close to my grandma and I was very sad when she died." And then I told her about how I would think about the good times we spent together before I went to sleep, so that I'd always remember them clearly, and how eventually it does stop hurting so much and you can remember the good times without wanting to cry.

I asked her how she remembered her dad and she shared with me a memory of the two of them. She smiled with tears in her eyes.

We sat there for another few minutes, making the spheres of clay.

"What are we making?" she asked eventually.

"Bird nests."

The rest of the class came out, led by my supervising teacher. She paused when she saw the girl sitting out here with me, obviously non-attendant to the class meeting.

"Is she allowed to be doing that?" the teacher asked of a little girl.

I think we were both a bit worried we'd get into trouble. I gave the little girl a smile and nodded to the supervising teacher. The girl smiled back and we shared a private understanding.

She had shown no signs of grief or anxiety in my three weeks with the class - she was a bright, talkative, funny girl.

If I had told her to go inside, instead of quietly prompting her, giving a chance to respond...
If I hadn't asked "why not?"...
If I hadn't decided that spending this quiet time with her was more important than the class meeting...

Then we might not have reached that private understanding - might not have experienced this fragile moment where, I hope, that this girl felt heard and cared about, rather than herded on to complete what needed to be done during the ever-rushed school day.

The sad thing is, if I hadn't planned art for that afternoon, I might have felt too busy, too frantic, too overwhelmed with trying to push curriculum-mandated knowledge into students, some who I knew weren't ready for it - and I would have missed this moment.

I really do believe that in the curriculum crush, the headlong dash to raising every child, no matter where they started, to level with the standards and grade indicators...

We miss moments like this far too often.

small beginnings: a not so risky situation

This is a story about my developing practice around risky play.

I can see a couple of three year old children are riding on low to the ground, hard plastic trikes. They had found out they could "bang" into the edge of the sandpit. I felt myself becoming very anxious - I remember telling them to stop. I want to believe that I was echoing other staff there - I was, after all, the intern - but might it have been my own anxiety and stress that made me say it?

In retrospect - there was no way they were going to hurt themselves doing this. So why was I anxious? Because the trikes were new and might get damaged? Because allowing the children to "bang" into things would reflect badly on me as a carer? As if my capitalist, money driven, insecure perspective is more important than the child's risk-taking, sensory-seeking one.

I mean, it must be super fun to come to a sudden stop! For the same reason we play on swings - the moment when you're stationary before you fall backward or zip forward again - or ride rollercoasters - the sensation of your body catching up with physics, as what your riding changes direction, speeds up, slows down, and tugs your physical body around. And the whole-body jolt accompanying it is so precious from a developmental perspective, since whole body sensation that often isn't "allowed" or is restricted because it comes from jumping, "falling" or rolling off things, tugging and pulling heavy things and rough-housing.

Small steps towards allowing risky-play.