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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
______

IT TAKES A CHILD TO RAISE A VILLAGE
(continued from the previous page)

     It wasn't long before children began asking, "May we go up the hill to look for more sticks?" Just past the village grove, a large hill begins sloping upward, rising twenty feet in about thirty yards. At the top is a thick grove of tall bushes.
      The hill is an ever-present lure. Our Kick the Can phase had allowed boys and girls to scurry up and hide out like guerilla warriors in the tall grass and the bushes on top, as long as a teacher was watching down below. The general rule was that children could climb the hill only for Kick the Can. I reasoned, though, that since the entire building project was taking place, with permission, in an area usually out of bounds, I was free to allow whatever I could supervise safely.
      Safety meant that a party of stick-gatherers needed an adult actually leading them. Fortunately, the teacher who'd gone inside had now returned. She agreed to watch home base as I led a rag-tag party of young explorers up into the highlands.
      The sticks up there were more difficult to come by than the children had thought. Roaming inside large clumps of bushes and low trees yielded only a few. We traipsed the fenced-in athletic field at the very top and found it, too, stick-poor.
      Then we came back out of that enclosure and followed a narrow trail through a dense area of vegetation and trees. This trail skirted what in our Lilliputian geography was something of a cliff, a very steep grade of earth from the top of the hill down to the school building, thirty feet below.
      Concerned about their safety, I brought the children back from this trail. And there, at the trail's head, on safe, solid earth, we found several sizable, dead, felled trees from which it was possible to break off branches of all sizes. This mother lode seemed an inexhaustible resource for the architects and builders below. We had struck it rich!

      The children dragged and carried large quantities of sticks, branches, and even small logs down the hill. Plentiful new materials quickly stepped up the tempo of hut-building.
      Grass-gatherers, mostly girls, also began to range the hill. They began tying pieces of yarn around their chests and carrying sheaves of long grass wedged between the back of their shirts and the yarn.
One of our supervisors, who had recently returned from a Peace Corps mission in Africa, was astounded. She'd seen women do that very thing in the village where she'd lived! She had yet another déjà vu when our children began dangling plastic water bottles from pieces of yarn they'd tied to sticks thrusting out from the backs of the huts.
      Work on the village continued steadily for several afternoons, until up to thirty children at a time were busily involved. Cory, one of the pioneers of the building brigade, shocked everyone one day by suddenly pulling down the whole hut that was the pride of the village. He wanted, he said, to rebuild it where it could take shape on an even more elaborate scale, against a larger tree.
      Within an hour or so, he and his collaborators had constructed a hut six or seven feet high. The new one had the same pleasingly round structure and was large enough for two or three children to sit in at once.

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      As our village became more sophisticated, the social structure of its community of builders did, too. Among the many inspiring phenomena, I began to notice some disturbing ones, as well. A spontaneous division of the children into "tribes", each working on one of the 3 or 4 separate projects, gradually got sharper. To some degree such a "division of labor" was inevitable. Big though the huts were, thirty bodies could not work on one at the same time.

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