School Daze

The kindergarten teacher was in the back room with her boyfriend, the door shut. It was naptime and the children were expected to select a red and blue mat from a pile in the corner, then find a place to lay down. There were no mats left when the smallest and least confident little girl finally went to get one. She was afraid to open the door and bother her teacher, she somehow knew the intrusion would not be welcome, and the teacher already didn't like her. The other kids were always telling tales about her and because she was too shy, she never spoke up and denied anything. Even when the kids tried to throw her out of the second story window, she never said a word. She stood still with tears running down her cheeks when the teacher was yelling at her for opening the window. The other kids had scattered when they had heard the teacher coming into the room, and she alone stood there by the window while the kids starting tattling on her for something she had not done. So now, she needed a mat, and they were all gone except for one which lay underneath the chairs piled up on a table to make room for the children to lay on the floor. She didn't know what to do. She was afraid of getting yelled at for not laying down, but she was even more afraid to ask for help with getting the mat. It wasn't a hard decision, and she reached out for the edge of the mat to pull it out from under the chairs. That was the last thing she can remember. In fact, she did not remember any of it at all until one day when she asked her parents about the scar which lay close to her left eye. Her parents sighed and told her that it was caused when she was running in class and had fallen and hit the edge of a chair. They told her it was lucky that she had not lost her eye, because the wound had been so close...it would only have had to have been a fraction of an inch more. They also told her that she was lucky that more things did not happen, that her kindergarten teacher had told them about all the bad things she had done in class, how she was disrupting class all the time when the teacher's back was turned. As they started to tell her about all the things that she had supposedly done, it all came flooding into her mind and she was suddenly very glad that she had only had to attend that school for half a year.

Sometimes, during parent-teacher conferences, I am surprised to hear about some of the things my kids have done. I guess you could call me a strict parent who has a lot of expectations, especially regarding the behavior of my children. My resolve is to deal sternly with problems as they occur, but I am always aware of the scar which jaggedly frames my left eye, and I remember that there are always two sides to a story.

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This page last updated on May 5, 2003