Kindergarten Issues
I entered kindergarten in Carmi, Illinois. My mother used to say I was a happy child until then. When she said it after I married Cliff, a kindergarten teacher himself, he asked me what I remembered about my first year of school.
My earliest recollection with the teacher happened when she sent us to the classroom’s play area. Boys built and smashed block towers. Girls formed instant circles of chatter. Both choices scared me, so I slipped off to the far wall and stared out the window. When the teacher asked why I wasn’t joining in, I said I liked my toys better. She walked away.
“What do you remember about the playground?” he asked.
“I waited my turn on the swings or I stood by the fence and watched the other kids.”
He didn’t have a thermometer, but he was clearly noting some kind of temperature equivalent when he then asked if anything changed by the end of the year.
“I didn’t finish because we moved to Ohio for my dad’s job change. The teacher told my mom not to bother re-enrolling me because I could finish the workbooks on my own. I did, too. I was happy working at a desk in the hotel with my mother.”
“Of course you were,” Cliff said. “You were a classic Superior Immature.”
Not to get overly definitional about developmental levels, but the long and short of it, he explained, was that I began school too early. Children had to be five by September 1st. I turned five on September 2nd. Well-behaved, nicely dressed, smiling girl that I was, they passed me through the gate.
Of hell.
No one considered that some of my classmates were a year older than I was. Nor did they understand that an only child had an added level of limited social experience. Cliff explained the teacher didn’t know how to integrate me socially, so she left me alone once she realized I wouldn’t become a troublemaker.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “Teachers and parents don’t understand the importance of proper school placement. Kids like you never catch up.”
I’ve written about kindergarten before and how I learned to skate by because I was smart enough, but I was lonely–confined to isolation in my plaid dresses and Buster Brown shoes. Some part of me has never moved beyond those sad months, which I learned on a recent trip to Southern Illinois. I asked Cliff to find that school in Carmi. My five-year-old’s dread overtook me as we approached the building.
The chain-link fence.
The looming brick walls.
The sparse, dusty playground.
The somber cave entrance.
He stopped on the inclined parking spaces, and my soul flattened instantly, recalling my angled dread in the back of our car as I’d lean forward to rest my chin on the front seat and stare at the bleak doorway. Each day my mother quietly encouraged me to go in, although she gradually realized I looked forward to nothing in there. Some days were harder than others. For both of us.
Then a playground moment occurred to me.
A classmate named Bonnie always arrived in fancy clothes. Pale cotton-candy hair puffed around her head, and her voice sounded like marshmallows. I never knew what to make of her. I don’t know the precipitating circumstances because I stood frozen by the fence, but one day after a skirmish, Bonnie commandeered the slide and started down in her blue dress. When the fabric caught on a sharp edge, she shreiked all the way to the bottom as the ruffles unraveled.
It was the most beautiful and the most awful thing I had ever seen–yards of unfurled organza waving in the colorless playground air. What if it was her favorite dress? Or, worse yet, her mother’s favorite dress?
Bonnie stood wailing, as the teacher gathered the flapping blue streamers.
Recess had clearly ended.
Inside and seated, we sat spellbound as the teacher regathered and taped the ruffles back in place. No one spoke while Bonnie whimpered. It went on forever.
I didn’t get much out of kindergarten, but that day I learned kindergarten could be worse for someone other than me.
For the most part, I’ve stayed close to the fence ever since.
