© stay-at-home toddler

tadpoles, tents, and marigolds

2010-04-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

we can barely see the tadpoles through the murky early spring water, but there they are: tails flickering and wakeful. sophia stands by the pond's edge, transfixed. she crouches, breathless but still. she has just run across a field of wildflowers, practiced her balance beam routine on railway sleepers, and wide-eyed scouts setting up tents for the night. the birds have felt her thundering feet coming and scattered low, far and wide. sophia has seen the birds scatter and has thought to hug them back into her little heaving body. her arms flung out wide She is Alive. herself a winged wildflower, perhaps. in the corner of this field of mother nature and slanted tents, sophia looks for tadpoles. too, an empty snail's shell striped and hollow. too, a moving snail. poke poke go sophia's tiny toddler pointers, the riparian critter awoken. oooh goes the toddler voice.

yesterday it was a windy day, but we planted marigolds anyway. the seeds: so hard to control with their thin whispy bodies, like playful fireflies. oooh went the toddler soul, divine magnifyer of it all.

2010-03-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

too happy?

2010-03-04T13:31:00.000-08:00

no such thing...

mother montessori and classrooms on clay

2010-01-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

"it is this personal and yet universal force of life, a force often latent within the soul, that sends the world forward"(23).

i am reading the montessori method (1964) and reflecting on years of teaching in a brightly lit, carpeted classroom with plenty of windows. class size capped at 28. students separated into neat little
groups: standard, honors. average age 16. my classroom was in one building of four. all buildings were heated and cooled and had bathrooms on the ground floor. there were fire alarms but no fires.

near the end of 8 years of teaching in such conditions, i made my way to east africa.

on the blackboard: today is wednesday
walls: sticks woven together
floor: cool clay, uneven
seats: a few benches here and there
light source: strips of sunshine through gaps in the sticks
students: hungry with huge smiles
feet: dirt-soled
teacher: big heart

on the way to another village school, a year earlier, we passed a boy who'd been sent home because he'd lost his pencil. when we arrived at his school, i was impressed by the size of the courtyard, plenty of space to kick balls and chase your sweetheart. inside primary 7 more than a hundred pupils sat copying a test on 'finding the circumference of a' that the teacher had written on the chalkboard. paintings of the human body and maps of the country were fading. lunch was porridge in a bright plastic cup if your elders could afford it. there were text books here and there, but there were certainly no MP3s, mobiles, or fancy backpacks. my favorite part of the visit was hanging out in the field behind the L-shaped school where the kids were free to run off the hours sat glued to those hard benches copying down notes. this particular school prioritized AIDS education over all other subjects. it had to.

my most meaningful moments while teaching were when there was a question of the single soul, not the group en masse. i recall with deep sorrow a young girl who lost her mother. i recall the months leading up to the funeral, lunches spent with this dear teenager whose education had lost its scope and sequence, its syllabus. what were 'objectives' and 'outcomes' and 'grades' in the face of a mother gone? i remember drawing up a reading list and handing it to her and saying something like, "maybe you could take a look at these? if you feel like it?" there was thomas moore's care of the soul and mitch albom's tuesdays with morrie. there were essays too but i can't remember them now and there might have been a suggestion to take nature walks and spend time listening to birds. meanwhile, the rest of the class read the required curriculum and had begun work on the final senior project. at year's end, the girl insisted on doing the class project, saying it gave her something to take her mind off things. what she did was wonderful. she created an open-hearted curriculum that a teacher could give to a grieving student, much like herself. there was a reading list, field trips, guided meditation. in considering how she might help heal others, she was healing herself.

a decade later, i hold my not-so-baby girl in my arms and think of babies in east africa and a former student in arizona who are all motherless. i wonder about the connection between curriculum in my old classroom, east african infants who grow up to be knock-kneed children who walk miles to school to learn that today is wednesday and there is or there isn't any pencil or porridge, the circumferance of this is that, learn the hard way that AIDS kills and high school students in the USA who grow up in some of the world's richest but most soul-deprived conditions.

dr. maria monetssori began her work with Italy's poor and neglected bambini but her ideas transcend age, epoch, economy, and country. mother montessori's art of teaching was heart-centered and healing.

_____________________
© copyright 2010 stay-at-home toddler by kresta k.c. venning
all rights reserved

red head, bed head, big heart

2010-01-24T18:14:00.000-08:00

at 10 months she flips off the changing table. i am right there but she flips anyway. then i flip out and slip her close, my chest and body and brains heaving ahead of this moment in which she is actually okay. no broken bones, no smashed face. baby belly breathing in and out.

but when she is born, she isn't perfectly normal. labor lasts four days. thursday morning in the wee hours she is weighed and handed to me, the operating room lit up with headlights. a baby girl! blushed cheeks forceps-marked, blood-encrusted crown beneath scratchy cap. baby's right arm is crimped at her right side; every week we will take a bus across town, snug against mother breasts her body is a soft-boned copy of my own. she will be all right.

somehow i end up calling her honey bunny bunny bear princess sophia which eventually gets shortened to bear bear. a mother's love is exuberant in those early days. then grows infinity-fold. the love names swelling in the mother's heart. boosie boo. boo boo. phee phee. bunny bear. bear bear.

first thing, i am there with milk and a bowl of cheerios and raisins. she is standing in her white cot bed, about to leap out from the excitement of waking up. mommy! in my arms, she helps me open the curtains. down below, in our neighbors' yard, we see chickens loose in their cage. we do not hear them.

then she is on my lap, tiny hands around a pink bottle, a thin book open to page one. arusha has just spotted a leopard and again, bear bear points with delight. this book, then that one, we flip through eloise at the plaza, see george float away, poke fingers into caterpillar holes. more! more! sophia knows her sky (she waves her right hand in the space above the simple house and tree), says woof woof to the puppy in the birthday basket. she sniffs ferdinand in his bed of flowers. bumble bee! gulp gulp goes the little throat as a free hand traces my face, chest, then arm. little legs still swathed in their sleeping bag, sophia is both still and pulsing, comfortable and joyful in her mother's morning lap.

red head, bed head, big heart.

_____________________
© copyright 2010 stay-at-home toddler by kresta k.c. venning
all rights reserved