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46
School
Days and Preschool Days, Too:
A treasury of anecdotes culled from my work
and play as a preschool worker and an elementary school after- school
activities supervisor
______
WATER RIGHTS
(continued from previous page)
Then there are "water rights" disputes,
which turn me into a judge whose territorial jurisdiction is as
precisely bounded as any. I contemplate conflicts and arguments that
can be as thorny as those faced by anyone wearing judicial robes.
The most frequent and simplest complaint
I deal with is involves two groups building on opposite sides of the
sandbox, both "needing" the hose. Without my intervention, older kids
always wind up with it. I ask the groups to alternate at five or ten
minute intervals. My "decision" brings peace in a fair way, the same
as it might if I weremaking a ruling to insure that desert countries
get equal water from the only river in the region.
More difficult are the situations like
a boy coming to me crying because the builders his age "won't let me
work with them." I approach the kids accused of banishing the boy: "Jason
says you won't let him work with you."
Before I'm even finished, one of them
says "There's no room." I look and see a place where no one's working
and say "What about over there?"
"So-and-so is working there," comes the
response.
"But so-and-so is over there," I say,
noticing that the person mentioned is working across the sandbox.
Finally, someone says, "Jason always
destroys what we build!"
I look at Jason. "Do you destroy what
they build?" He plaintively denies it, while three or four other boys
are simultaneously glaring at him, saying "yes!"
I don't know what to do. It breaks my
heart that the children can't get along. Shall I make them accept
Jason, though there is surely some reason for the unanimous protestations
of his presence?
As I'm thinking, I see another spot where
no one is working, a spot that's not quite as centrally located as the
first. "Jason," I say, "Why not try working there? Let me know if people
try to shut you out. And boys," I continue, looking at the others, "Tell
me if he destroys anything."
One of my colleagues, when sought by
some fourth grade girls once to adjudicate some infinitely complex interpersonal
conflict, refused, saying "Even King Solomon wouldn't know what to do!"
Though judgments sometimes seem impossible to make, he and I, as well
as all the parents and teachers who've ever lived, continue to make
those our roles demand.
One afternoon some third
and fourth grade boys made a very sophisticated "city", alternating
hose use with some first and second graders. The older boys used the
hose to create a network of canals that, Venice-like, connected the
parts of their city, while the younger boys made some structures but
soon flooded them.
At the end of the day I saw before me,
side by side, two "civilizations", one of which was thriving, the other
of which Nature had reclaimed (in the form of our ubiqitous "dirty lake")
into primordial ooze. I saw more Creation and Destruction there in our
microcasm than any of us could ever see in one human lifetime—felt I
had temporarily been given eyes with which to witness geological epochs!
The builders of the thriving city had
made a dike of sand to guard their metropolis against The Flood that
had claimed everything beyond their border. I thought our drama of the
day was complete. I had not reckoned on young imaginations needing to
experience Shiva, the god of Destruction, as robustly as Brahma and
Vishnu, gods of Creation and Preservation. Before we left, the city-builders
deliberately inserted the hose back into the already-full lake until
its waters rose over their dike. Nature reclaimed their civilization,
too. Brown water spilled over the fine canal-avenues and buryied flower-topped
pyramid-temples and clusters of homes. I felt I'd watched the Fall of
Atlantis.
There was something profoundly satisfying
for young minds to see their own creations dissolved back into the Ocean
of Potential...to witness Mahapralaya, when the entire Universe dissolves
(only to re-emerge later). And as all our works and lives are in the
end written in sand, I tried to take home this lesson of impermanence,
as I do all the lessons I see dramatized in the sandbox, where I wield
the water key only that I may seek another key— the key to the maturity
needed to be a positive role model for these boys and girls!
*****
continued back contents title
page
"What Remains Is
the Essence", the home pages of Max Reif:
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