i had eleven kids today, and even though yesterday i had ten, today had me sighing, wanting to swear and cry at moments, wishing to be fired, exhausted intelligence from the chaos and my own ineffectiveness at gathering the kids and keeping them occupied with learning activities, albeit i'm sure playing in the water fountain and looking wonderingly at a basketball team flag hanging on the wall by the front entrance have some learning purpose (?). it's pretty mysterious why one day will be much harder than another--the alchemy of different combinations of kids i suppose. like today taja and dion and also seth and dion proved to be particularly difficult combinations. dion is a strange kid--violent in a gleeful uncomprehending kind of way and pretty much doing whatever he wants. but it's not really that he's a 'bad' kid. i think probably something is developmentally off in his language skills and he also seems to have alot of angry impulses, but also caring impulses towards other kids, wanting other kids who are crying to stop crying and feel better but then becoming angry when his efforts at hugging the other child (who may be very unresponsive or hostile to his hugs, seeing as a moment before he was hitting or biting them or laughing at them) don't work. sometimes he'll smile in a very fake way at me, in a kind of gesture of seeming like a happy okay kid, or some kind of way he's learned to manipulate adults with his cuteness. i feel wiped out just writing about him.
one really good moment from today though--cooling down from our twenty minutes of gym/dance scrunching into little balls then growing up into trees swaying in the breeze to the soundtrack of a rising scale growing up then 'shhhh' sounds for the wind, then a descending scale shrinking down and more 'shhhh' sounds with hands softly over eyes, over and over. when something like that captures kids they just want to keep doing it. sometimes it's hard to know how long to keep repeating the activity, or when it's time to transition to something else.
posted by Liza 18.2.04