This is all spurred on by the fact that I very recently returned to Pullman. I arrived on June 8 after finishing up my first year of teaching. I have several different versions of Pullman in my memory. There is my time as a freshman, my time at the Evergreen, and my senior year. I hadn’t realized until I returned that I still think of Pullman as my home base for lack of a better word. I live and work in Oklahoma, but I will never claim Tulsa as my home. It will never be where I belong. I love going to my childhood home and it will always be where I came from, but rather than going home it became visiting home while I was in college.

And now Pullman too is just too different. I feel almost alien here, not being a student, being without a working Cougar Card. I’m always disappointed when faced with the reality that time has moved on in a place without me. I know it happens, but I don’t like being confronted with the reality of it. I don’t belong here anymore even though I think of Pullman fondly. I still have things that pull me back to this place that I did call home, but now it too is a place I only visit.

It was an unexpected realization for me that I am without a home at the moment, without a place to put down roots. The best approximation I have for home would be the Pacific Northwest. This dawning realization that my life is all about transitions and will be for the next few years is intimidating. I feel like I could be blown any which way. I’m in a transient state, waiting to see where my next home will be. I have at least another year of waiting. I am not a patient person with such things.

And yet when my father bought this for me, I couldn’t help but be excited. It’s basically a Mr.Potato Head puppet. It’s better than a potato though because the students might actually want to play with a monster. I was so excited to take it to the classroom. It will be great for talking about feelings and emotions, for practicing counting, building creativity, and helping to make introducing new concepts exciting.

But the monster puppet has sat in the box of school materials I keep in my apartment (along with an awesome hermit crab puppet I got for Christmas that I also have been scared to take into the classroom because I know if it gets ruined I will become genuinely angry.) The monster puppet is risky to take into the classroom. Beyond the constant worry of it getting covered in syrup, milk, drool, or snot this puppet also has pieces to lose. And it’s a cool puppet. I want my students to enjoy and play with it, but not ruin it. That’s asking a lot of four-year-olds.

Back to my dream. I dreamed that I did take the monster puppet into my classroom on a day when I was being observed by my TFA program director. I brought the puppet out to get students excited for a math lesson – comparing more and less. As soon as they saw the puppet they couldn’t care less about more vs. less and just wanted to see and play with the puppet. I got fed up and put it away. CM then runs up, grabs the puppet, and runs to the back of the room with it. I am forced  ignore this and continue teaching the rest of the students. My amazing and wonderful co-teacher is out sick on this day and I have a sub. She tries to retrieve the puppet from CM and he snarls at her.

At the front of the room I give up on my math lesson after BS kicks MS in the back, JK won’t stop crawling around, SM starts sobbing because I won’t let her sit on the teacher block, and HJ punches BB because he was sitting too close. The sub is still in the back of the room with CM. My TFA director just watches as my classroom breaks down. I dismiss the students to go to centers. They like centers and for the most part get themselves back under control. I retrieve the monster puppet from CM and put it in the library hoping against better judgment that the children will play with it appropriately.

It is not to be. First I realize I forgot to take the little packet of silica gel out of the container. I catch GM trying to open the packet with his teeth. I promptly throw it away and address a scuffle I hear at the computer. I return to the library and find that LJ has dumped the puppet and all of its pieces on the floor. Growing bored she leaves them and goes to a new center. BB and HJ move to the library. BB puts the puppet on his arm but HJ wanted to wear the puppet. He shoves BB, steals the puppet, and leaves the library. BB is sobbing. I make HJ return the puppet. He gets mad, picks up puppet parts on the floor and chucks them across the room. I make him sit down at a table until he chooses to be safe again.

I could go on, but this post is already much longer than I intended and straying a bit from the point. The dream continues and everything that I worried would happen if I brought the puppet to class does. There is a tug of war over body parts. One student builds a puppet and another promptly pulls off all the body parts destroying it. Students hid body parts in their pockets. Others put them in their mouth and were chewing/sucking on them (they do this with paper towels too. I don’t understand.) The library and the puppet was a scene of constant conflict and strife. And again, my TFA director saw the utter failure.

I had the dream last night (Saturday). Tomorrow I return to school. And this also illustrates what I’ve been doing for the past six months – even though I had that dream where all my worst fears were realized, even though I’m sure my dream will not be far from reality (though hopefully my co-teacher will be at school to help), even though I’ll be upset when the puppet gets ruined, I’m still taking the puppet to school with me tomorrow. Because with time my students have gotten so much better and every day I go in hoping today will be another one of those good days. And to lose that hope would make going to work impossible. So keep your fingers crossed that my dream was just a  nightmare not a warning for tomorrow.

I still have time with my students and so I’m  not throwing in the towel. If they can’t handle getting a new puppet, then they’re not ready for kindergarten and I have not fulfilled my purpose. So until they leave my class in June I shall keep coming to work, keep hoping today no one gets punched or has an accident. The incidents of both have already decreased significantly.  Maybe in another month they’ll even my ready for the hermit crab puppet.

Take day one, for example. We have a sanitizer dispenser by the door. Despite constant reprimands, we could not keep the children from messing with it. They kept getting entire handfuls of sanitizer which they then dripped and dropped all over the classroom. The blatant disregard to the command “don’t touch that” got to me most of all. So at the end of day one, I did this.

Out of sight, out of mind was one of the most important first lessons I learned. Every shelf is now covered with either butcher paper or fabric with only toys and objects intended for student use visible.

More first week experiences below.

We had less milk spilled on day two, but that was mitigated by the fact that an entire bowl of applesauce was dumped on the carpet.

Milk continued to be spilled every day of the week. During one particularly unfortunate meal time, an entire carton of milk was dumped down my leg and into my shoe. I was wearing flats. I had to dump the milk out. My shoe also squished all day from the remnants of the milk.

After a couple of days of difficult nap time experiences where the kids refused to sleep or even stay on their mats, we instituted a very firm “lights off, voices off” policy. After we turned off the lights, a little girl said, “I love you teacher.” I didn’t hear the words, all I heard was talking. I very swiftly responded with “lights off, voices off” in an unforgiving voice. “But I said I love you teacher,” she said softly. “Oh, I love you too,” I tried to recover. It was a little late.

After work one day, I went to the dollar store to pick up some flashcards to work with the students on shapes, colors, numbers, and the alphabet. Basic pre-school content. At check-out the lady behind me asked if I was teaching home school. “No, I’m a teacher,” I said. “Oh, you look too young to be a teacher,” she replied. I shrugged and let the conversation die. But then I started thinking about it. So I’m too young to be a teacher, but old enough to have a child to home school? I don’t understand.

My digital camera has disappeared into the abyss that is our classroom. It is very upsetting. I hope it didn’t disappear into a four-year-old’s backpack. Almost as upsetting was when a child found my water bottle hidden on our teacher cart and proceeded to drink from/slobber all over it. He had found my co-teacher’s water bottle the day before. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but I was unbelievably mad about it. There are absolutely no boundaries with four-year-olds. Unfortunate as I am a strong believer in boundaries.

• three spilled milk cartons (all were full, one hit the new counting carpet)
• one disappeared plastic tub for blocks (seriously no idea where it went. How would they have hidden it? And it’s not like they could have walked out with it under their jackets or something.)
• a ruined magic board when marker was used on it
• a book with a chewed-up spine (That one hurt. It was a book about vegetables though.)
• lots of hugs (which should count as a plus except that I’m not very touchy and they’re pretty germy.) (I kid, the hugs were pretty adorable, as were the goodbyes and eagerness to return tomorrow.)

It really wasn’t that bad. I don’t really know what a good first day looks like, but I think ours was okay. Could have been better, like I said, but everyone survived. We didn’t lose any kids. Other than the missing blocks tub and the milk smell, the classroom stayed in pretty good shape. Tomorrow is a new day and we’ll try again. With time and practice the hope is they’ll actually stop when we stay stop.

They also seemed to enjoy my reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and though they have not yet grasped the concept of single-file line, they learned to be quiet when walking down the hallway so we don’t disturb learning.

I feel like the next two years will be two years of small triumphs like walking quietly down the hallway. Or a day without milk spills. (Let’s hope that day is tomorrow).

Lucky for me I get to experience preschool all over again, starting tomorrow. Tomorrow is my first day as a preschool teacher with a class. My room isn’t entirely set up, but it is prepared for the first day. First-day lessons include how to walk in line, how to raise our hands, and how to freeze when they hear our transition signal (a bike bell). I’m hoping my students remember more about their experience than the sand/water table but as long as they are kindergarten-ready I’ll consider myself successful.

And if anyone remembers any particularly fun projects they did in preschool, I’m open to suggestions.

We decided to use The Very Hungry Caterpillar for our classroom theme. The goal is to make our students “hungry for knowledge” and for them to act like “curious caterpillars.” We all want to turn into butterflies and be ready for kindergarten. It’s very cutsy, but I’m dealing with four-year-olds so I doubt they’ll mind.

I say we decided on the theme because I am co-teaching with another TFA corps member. She is pictured below. She also made our new welcome sign. Our class is lucky that she has some art craft skills because I do not. I did however inventory and categorize our entire classroom library.

We are having our initial Open House on Monday and Tuesday where we should meet most of our students and their parents. The Monday following, school begins.

It’s a work in progress, but has come quite a ways since the picture below was taken. Open house on Monday so hopefully it will be ready by then.

A lot of the past week has also been learning about who I’m going to be working for. I came to Tulsa through TFA, but I was actually hired by a non-profit called Community Action Project. Through CAP, I’ll be teaching a Head Start pre-K classroom with one other TFA corps member. CAP is my official employer.

Their mission is to “improve the long-term economic prospects for very young low-income children, their families, and the community in which they life.” The hope is to “break the cycle of inter-generational poverty.”

The mission of CAP and TFA align pretty well then, CAP just has an intensive early childhood focus. I’m excited (and nervous) to be working for the organization. CAP does things a little differently than a lot of stereotypical early childhood centers, but in a very good way I think, and hope.

I have more training on Monday and Tuesday where I should get to meet the rest of the staff at my school, and I should also get to see my classroom next week. Stay tuned.

*Clearly I am not yet actually a real grown-up because real grown-ups don’t refer to themselves as grown-ups. I guess I’m still in the process

I spent the summer in Phoenix learning how to be a teacher and teaching summer school in the Roosevelt school district. I taught a class of kindergarteners, soon-to-be first-graders. My entire class was hispanic and they all had dark brown eyes.

I have blue.

During a small group session one of the girls turned to look at me. “You have eyes like my doll,” she told me. Amazed, she looked at my eyes some more and then got the attention of her classmates. “Look at her eyes. They’re blue!” After responding to various “Look at me”s and “I wanna see”s, one boy asked, “How’d you make your eyes blue?”

I told him I was born that way and my whole family has blue eyes. They continued to stare a bit, but we went back to our lesson.

A few days later I was working one-on-one with another student and he too noticed my eyes were blue. (He had missed it the first time round). He asked me the same question. “How’d you make your eyes blue?” I said I was born that way. “And they stayed blue?” he asked, amazed.

I was shocked by how surprised they were about my eyes, but it’s the kind of moment I expect to have a lot of during the next two years. There are so many little things that make up each individual’s life experience, it’s  just not possible to be aware of all your own assumptions,though I’m trying to get better at this.  I had assumed that everyone is exposed to eyes of various colors growing up, but such is not the case.

I guess I am one small bit wiser, but clearly in for many more surprises.

But while I have a few brief moments, I shall share some observations/comments on Oklahoma and TFA in Tulsa so far:

• I don’t understand how no matter which direction I drive, morning or evening, the sun is always in my eyes. Is it somehow brighter in Oklahoma?
• TFA has, in a strange way, renewed the link I feel to journalism. It drives me crazy that we backwards plan and work towards our goals. Backwards and towards are not words, and in a room full of incredibly intelligent people, no one has expressed frustration at this. Also, during our session on how to interact with the media, I felt reporters were being unfairly represented. I took it upon myself to clear that up. In retrospect, not actually the best decision.
• TFA also rivals E-Flo for wanting to be “transparent” with decisions. For those familiar with the aforementioned reference, TFA is about as transparent as E-Flo.
• It is impossible to navigate the freeways in Tulsa. I have to get on a freeway to take an exit to drive through town to get on another freeway. The streets, however, are in a lovely grid so driving through town is easy to navigate.
• Tulsa is at least 10 times prettier than you would imagine.