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The Most Precious Gift
What the innocent joy in the heart of a child can teach us
He was an adorable child.
I was a nervous, inexperienced teacher.
In the two weeks I taught him and his classmates, I had one of the most memorable encounters of my life.
It happened like this:
Fresh out of college in the 1970’s I was unable to get a job interview, let alone a job, as a qualified high school English teacher.
Desperate to find any kind of job in education, I naively applied for a job teaching kindergartners in a poor neighborhood. The Catholic elementary school was so desperate for teachers they were willing to hire an unqualified instructor, at a very reduced rate of pay, of course.
No, I wouldn’t be teaching Dickens or Shelley to high school students.
I would be teaching a gaggle of five year-olds. How tough could it be?
The answer ,of course, is unbelievably tough. Frustrating. And life- changing.
I knew nothing about teaching at the elementary school level. Nothing about organizing curriculum for such young children. Nothing about how to control a large class of sweet but restless youngsters.
At home I blundered through a few books about teaching kindergartners, desperately trying to figure out what to do.
In class, each day, I did what I have always done best. I read to the children.
I asked them questions about their lives. And I read to them.
I had them draw pictures of themselves and their families. And I read to them.
I asked them to tell me about their favorite things. And I read to them.
I put up a huge mirror and asked them to tell me what they liked best about themselves when they looked in the mirror. And… I read to them.
They seemed quite happy with me. There were lots of smiles and hugs. But nagging at the back of my mind was the knowledge that I was not really serving them well.
These children came from large, often immigrant families. They lived in poverty, often without adequate food, in crowded tenements. But for most of…
