Reschool Yourself

Tag Archive: imagination

Reschooling with Poetry: Fern Hill

This is one of several poems I’ve come across lately about childhood, school, and growing up.

I read “Fern Hill” for the first time in high school English. It captured my nostalgia for what I remember as a fairly idyllic childhood, which gave me a bit of a Peter Pan complex. Why grow up if being a kid is this magical? I’m sure it wasn’t actually quite so perfect for any of us, but like many, I tend to romanticize the past. I especially love the last line of this poem.

Fern Hill
By Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

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December 23, 2008 Childhood, , 2 Read more >

First Day of Kindergarten: Part 1

Today, for the first time in 23 years, I went back to kindergarten.

I slept 20 minutes through alarm and woke up with that blasted Billy Madison song stuck in my head (my own fault) and hurriedly got dressed and ate breakfast. With my backpack, notebook, and brown bag lunch, I walked the few blocks to my elementary school. I passed a few kids holding their mothers’ hands. I was surprised to arrive at school in just a few minutes. Apparently my legs are a lot longer now than they were between the ages of 5 and 10.

Everything at the school seemed to have shrunk. I almost have to kneel to get a drink of water at the fountains, and the classrooms and cafeteria seem half the size that I remember them. When I arrived on campus, I watched the principal greet parents and kids as they pulled up at the bus circle and observed a group of girls looking at the class lists posted in the hallway. My mom and I used to walk to the school a few weeks before classes started to look at these lists. One of my strongest memories is the apprehension I felt as I searched for my name, since my experience in the upcoming year would largely depend on my teacher and the kids in my class. I remember feeling relief when I spotted my friends’ names alongside mine, or anxiety when they’d been assigned to a different teacher. Though we’d see each other at recess, our friendship wasn’t quite the same as when we were in the same class.

At around 7:45 am, I headed to the kindergarten room where I’ll be volunteering through next Monday. My original kindergarten room now houses a first-grade class where I’ll volunteer next week, and the kindergarten is now in a portable next to the play yard. Barbara, the teacher and a family friend, is honestly one of the kindest people I know. Someone recently said, “People can’t mention Barbara without adding, ‘She’s so nice!'” Barbara asked me to help greet the families as they came in and get the kids settled, helping them hang their backpacks in cubbies and showing them puzzles that would occupy them as their parents left.

To my surprise, not one of the kids cried, and neither did any of the parents. One mom looked back at her son a few times as she walked down the ramp of the portable. Another mom ended up staying the whole day as a volunteer because her son didn’t want her to leave. While Barbara very much appreciated her help on the first day, she expects that if the mother continues in the classroom, the son will have a fit when she finally leaves him.

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August 21, 2008 Elementary School, Video 3 Read more >

All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten

“All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten” was just a cutesy saying for me until I actually spent a day with kindergarteners. Now I understand.

I visited the kindergarten class in order to generate ideas for the first phase of Reschool Yourself, to decide  what I’d like to do in my old classrooms. I spent the day observing and interacting with the kids, ages five and six. I cut a cardboard box into a stage for a puppet show, listened to a story, and watched the kids practice movement and dance. I agreed to play tag at recess, and only then was informed that I was “always it.” As I chased the kids around the jungle gym, they joyfully teased me by sticking out their tongues and taunting me with singsongs of “Nanny nanny, foo foo.”

The day’s activities began with Kid Writing, a time for students to draw pictures in their personal journals and practice writing about them.

Max 2“Do you have a kid journal?” a boy named Max asked me. I told him that I didn’t.

“I’ll make you one,” he said.

He disappeared and then returned within a few minutes, presenting me with a paper booklet neatly stapled down the side. He had trimmed the side of the page “to make it look nice” and had printed the words, “Melia AND THE” on the fluorescent pink cover.

“Melia and the what?” I asked him.

“That’s up to you,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows, impressed by this 6-year-old sage. “Hmm, I’m not sure how to finish that,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Max looked me straight in the eye. “Sometimes it’s good to just do what you want to do,” he told me. “Sometimes that’s the best thing.”

I told Max that this was such great advice that I would write it down. I printed his words in oil pastel inside my new journal, on the paper with dotted lines for handwriting practice. When I showed him his own words on the page, he said, “This will be on the first page to remind you, for life.” This kid was a regular Yoda. I wished I could shrink him down to pocket-size and carry him around with me—my own insightful little Pez dispenser.

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March 1, 2008 About the Project, Childhood, Elementary School, , , , , , 9 Read more >