Education and Work Prep School:
My Continuing Adventures in My Search for the Perfect Career
Part IV
Lynne Fukuda
Instructor of Psychology
Leeward Community College
E-mail: lfukuda@hawaii.edu
For my Aunty Mitzi, who has been an inspiration. Always gentle and patient, firm yet loving, she is the embodiment of a perfect angel of a teacher. May her adoring students always remember her and honor her. And with all my prayers that I can follow in her footsteps.
I am taking yet another deep breath as I ready myself not for student teaching, part-time teaching, or for a position as an educational assistant, but for a position for a permanent sub, which is more like a position which is a crash course in teaching all of a sudden without knowing how one fell into that position at all.
Imagine being a bachelor or a bachelorette for years, living the carefree life, being a part-time parent to a nephew or a niece, and suddenly, being gifted by circumstance with a batch of children, numbering in the tens who appear one day at your doorstep informing you that you have become a parent/guardian to these numerous young children.
“I am what?” I would ask the children.
“You are our mommy from now on,” they would answer in unison.
It is just how I feel right now; the mommy-to-be of twenty-three young children ages four and a half to five years of age. In Hawaii’s multicultural environment, each child is unique. There are no clones here, although once in a while, I would swear that I had seen a certain child just a decade ago as a young part-time teacher. I looked at every face, every size and shape, and every movement and decided that each child was different. Once having watched monkeys, I found it amusing and intriguing to be with young children again. Unlike grownups and teens and even tweens, elementary students, especially kindergarteners, are cuddly humans. Still innocent, still malleable, and still filled with hope and freshness. Like the wild monkeys that I most loved, they too were unformed by the filth of humanity. All at once, I wanted to instill strong values in the children, desiring to protect them as they mature. Safe from aggression, innocent of cruelty, and isolated from the harshness of the outside world, my little students were meant only to be loved and protected. I fell in love with the students that I would watch and teach.
Each day that I observed my beloved new students, I felt that I was in teacher’s heaven. I did not know that many teachers have felt the same way when teaching this age and this grade (kindergarten). It is when students are most eager to learn and most able to take in many things without making a face and spitting it out. It is a time when young children are more malleable so that values, morals, and good behaviors can easily be instilled before bad habits become set into their daily behaviors. It is also a time when it is most magic, the most wonderful of years when young children have developed their motor skills, are able to walk and talk, and are ready to begin to process more information with their developing bodies.
Yet, it is also a time for many conscientious teachers to feel stressed and pressured, knowing that what they teach may come back to haunt them for years. Harsh punishment can damage a child emotionally. The wrong words can scar a child’s self-esteem, and the wrong act can stunt the growth of a student academically and mentally.
I believe that teaching kindergarten is a combination of being a school counselor, loving parent, wise grandparent, role model, minister, and professor—to an extent. A kindergarten teacher, and those at the lower elementary grades, must often reassure young children who suffer from fears and anxieties of a new place, of a new way of learning, that it is okay. Such a teacher must also make certain to always be fair in judgment, be kind and unconditionally loving, and yet give the right dose of discipline to guide a child to develop in the right direction. And like a minister, the kindergarten teacher must teach morals and values of our world, of our society and do it with conviction. And at times, the kindergarten teacher, like a professor of psychology must study the behavior of children and modify it, just as dear Pavlov did to his salivating dog.
I am dressed in the manner of my favorite aunt, Aunt Mitzi, who always dressed very modesty in her Capri or long trousers, short-sleeved collared blouse, and had a large all-purpose purse. Her hair was always short and practical for as an elementary teacher, and for many years as a kindergarten teacher, she was required to run at a moment’s notice to avert danger, be quick of catching misbehaving children, and still look like a million bucks.
It was always a great mystery to me, as I grew up and saw teachers from the US mainland who wore ankle-length skirts and some denim coverall dresses, to see Hawaii teachers wearing granny muumuus and Capri pants. “Why can they not be more fashionable like office ladies?” I always wondered.
When I first began to teach, I also found it convenient and comforting to dress like my role models. It was easier when I bent over and did not have worry that my young students would see my underdrawers. One hapless day, it simply happened. Bending over to help another student, a curious little boy flipped up my skirt, but to his great horror and surprise he exclaimed, “Miss Lynne, you wear shorts under your skirt!”
His little voice was filled with shock, as if I had worn a Victoria’s Secret’s outfit beneath my conservative dress.
I turned calmly toward the student and replied, “I wore my pineapple patterned shorts so that boys like you who dare to peek beneath my skirt will only see what you wear normally as outer clothing.”
The boy looked at me with his mouth still open in an “o”. The other students giggled. Having had a full view of my uninteresting shorts beneath my skirt, I knew that this student would never attempt another peek and the students who had overheard the conversation would also never try this again on myself or perhaps even on other teachers.
Like Queen Elizabeth II who has lead weights sewn into the seams of her dresses to avoid her clothes lifting ungracefully in the wind, I too was armed with clothing that would stand to trial of time and weather. Neither rain, nor strong wind, nor hot days would make me look uncomfortable. Cool and calm and always ready to teach and care for my students, I too would be collected and a terrific role model. With most of my hair in place, having been held down by gel with a neat short cut, wearing clothing that would stand a hundred washings and even a few stains from paint, ink, and other kindergarten hazards, I too would hold up under all sorts of weather.
Teaching kindergarten for the second time after a lapse of seven years, I saw quite a few changes. It was no longer an extension of a nursery school but more of a prep school or classroom for the rest of primary school. My new students came to class prepared, with the exception of a few who were far too young and developmentally unready for academics. They were able to recite the whole alphabet and count to twenty, with some even able to count to one hundred. They also knew sight words, read simple books, and identified objects and colors. Some even knew simple math.
I was amazed at how advanced these new kindergarteners were in the 21st century, and yet, I saw a great need for the traditional good stuff. Gone was the siesta hour. There was only a brief ten to fifteen minute of quiet time with soothing music for each of them after the two recesses and lunch. Each day was a day of work, where students pushed on to learn new things, new concepts, and to polish themselves for higher learning.
Morning consisted of morning business, where the teacher gathered with the students and allowed a monitor of that week to take the attendance, do the calendar, check the weather, and make a few announcements. There was then an hour of writing, where creative drawing was coordinated carefully with “fearless writing,” a way to write as best as one can with the letters one knows. Following writing was a discussion of morals and then daily drills in letters and numbers. Math came after lunch, and it was not simple writing of symbols but manipulation of blocks, chips, recording by drawing objects or numbers, and doing some group work.
There was also Japanese culture and language once a week. There was also time for science, which first consisted of exploration with the five senses. They had music once a week, and PE once every six days. Library visits were also a highlight for the students, who were already beginning to develop a love for reading. Yet, there was something amiss. I could not put my finger on it. It is this missing element that I will try my best to remedy.
Once I became used to my students, I would teach bits and pieces of Hawaiian language and culture. The hula I continued to learn from my kumu (teacher), the ukulele that I learned after a lapse of thirty years (learned how to play in elementary school), and stories of old Hawaii, sharing of experiences, and old times would begin to permeate my kindergarten classroom. I would make it a point to always share, even if only for five minutes at the beginning or the end of the day, to relate a story with a moral.
In my spare time, I make homemade games for my students to play in the spare time. Those who have finished all their work and are bored and have the tendency to misbehave would test out my materials. I have flash cards made on the back of pancake and cake boxes. I made counters out of bottle caps that cannot be recycled that are thrown into empty plastic peanut butter jars. I lovingly made three-dimensional rulers out of toothpaste boxes turned inside out, and rolling dice with numerals out of aspirin boxes cut into cube size that was also turned inside out. For a clock to teach time I used my old standby—a thin paper plate with needles made of cardboard and secured with a twist-tie.
Like my frugal and resourceful former mentors teachers, who are now of retirement age, who remember the times when educational materials were scarce, I too, in this very frugal and impoverished time, turn to discarded materials such as wrapping materials, magazine or brochures, food containers, and many other things that would be a treasure trove for individuals living in impoverished countries. In the process, I would like to teach my students that frugality is not wrong or shameful. Being practical, conserving, and recycling materials is a valuable skill to have. Each day, my eye shines like that of a crow, as I reach into my parents’ wastebasket to retrieve things that are brand-new like food containers and boxes, junk mail, and others things. Plastic milk and juice jugs will become drums, baskets, toy containers, organizers, and planters. Plastic soda bottles materialize into terrariums. Acetate sheets become tracing sheets for learning how to write. Junk mail becomes cut outs for collages, posters, and artwork. Egg cartons become places to organize small objects or counter trays for learning numbers.
Little by little, I hope to teach students to have more respect for things that they use, the food that they eat, and the people that work to help them stay in school. And daily, I hope to teach my kindergarteners how to become responsible citizens who can contribute, no matter how little, so that they will be proud of themselves and understand how they have come to this earth and what they must do in the future.
Each day, I am filled with enormous hope. Like seeing a flock of angels descend from the Heavens, I am filled with joy. School is a place not only to learn academically but also to learn that each person is a part of a greater whole. If schools connected with other school nationwide and worldwide, our earth would be a happy, friendly place, filled with kindergarteners present, past and future. How wonderful such a world would be.
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