“I don’t know how you do it,” a preschool mom says to me in exhaustion after dropping her screaming 3 year old off at the classroom door marked “Preschool” in funky shaped lettering. Preschool teachers have been hearing this for years. We know. The tantrums, sticky hands and the rest of the mess are always front and center when you’re looking from the outside in, but there’s more to it than that, I promise.
20 tiny chairs, four crayon colored table tops, one sandy alphabet carpet with 20 small three and four year olds wiggling all about while trying to find the perfect next piece to their rocket ships out of what seems to be 300,000 Lego Duplo-sized connector toys. Some are talking, most are happy and a few are neither talking nor happy but rather screaming in disgust as their favorite color piece is taken by a friend.
What you can’t see at first glance is the friend who took the toy, did it on accident. The friend who got upset yelled, “I wasn’t done using that. It’s mine.” It was reluctantly, and even maybe after some tears, given back to the rightful owner, and an, “I’m sorry,” was given and accepted. That was it. There was no grudge. They still ate lunch together right next to each other. They didn’t go to another friend and gossip about who did what or why they didn’t like them anymore. It was over. That’s what you’re supposed to do. If you don’t like something someone does to you, say it. If you do something to make someone else upset, fix it, and don’t do it again. It’s that simple. Life just like preschool goes by too quickly to hold grudges.
At first glance, as a first time mom in the classroom, you might hear the tantrum of one of my friends in the middle of the carpet. That’s my friend getting his noisiness out. You see, he has a new baby sister, and he’s really good about being quiet at home, but when it comes to school, sometimes he just needs a minute to get it all out. School is an outlet for all kinds of things, and for this week, for that friend, it’s a place to be noisy and be emotional. When he calms his body down and dries his tears, he’ll go back with the group, and he will be ready to go in the hallway in line with his hands still at his sides and a bubble in his mouth. That’s what we do in preschool. We learn when to keep our thoughts to ourselves to save them for a good time to share them with everyone else, but sometimes it’s okay to take some time to get it all out. There’s only so much you can hold in. Sometimes we even laugh loud. You just have to!
You definitely won’t notice how much they care about each other until you see a friend from another class bump into them in the hallway or another friend from a different class take a toy from their friend on the playground. “Hey! Be nice to my friend!” or “You hurt my friend!” they’ll say as they wait for an apology to be given. Again, no grudge is held, and that will be the end of it, but for just about 8 hours a day, sometimes longer, they are one class with a whole lot of personality, but also a whole lot of love.
One of the absolute best parts of preschool is that everyone is the same when you walk into the door. No matter what you look like, how you talk or what you wear, you are a friend. They don’t see color or class or handicaps. You are their friend. Now I saw this in a way that gives them all the credit. Do they notice some of these things? Absolutely. Do they care about any of these things? No.
Curiosity is natural, but hate is learned. In preschool there are questions that arise but only out of completely innocent curiosity. “Why does he have these blue lines on his forehead but I don’t?” a friend once asked. “He has a different color of skin than you do. Those blue lines are called veins and they are inside your body, not on your skin, so you have them, too. They’re just a little harder to see,” I replied. “I have them, too? That’s awesome!” he exclaimed in amusement. Nothing more. No wishing they had different skin or thinking one skin was better than the other just knowing they were different and thinking it was cool to be different.
We have friends in wheelchairs, and we have friends who wear braces and glasses and the color blue on their shirts or boys who wear fingernail polish. It makes no difference how you come to preschool, you are a friend, and that’s how you are treated. We have friends with all different needs, just like every class in America, and while kids are curious about different things, they aren’t judgmental. They just want to know more so they can understand the infamous “How?” and “Why?” questions most preschoolers ask hundreds of times a day. No judgement, they just want answers. To those questions, we answer without offense taken as they are just simply looking for ways to relate it to themselves for better understanding.
We know that, “sorry,” and a Band Aid can’t fix every problem, and sometimes we are a little messy. We know that it gets loud and hectic when all our thoughts come out at once, and sometimes even our teachers need a break, but it is so worth it (for everyone).
Of all the things you may see as you walk into the classroom door to what seems to be noisy chaos painted with glitter, dirt and water, we ask you to come see what we really do and who we really are because the world needs to be more like preschool. For all we learn in preschool, maybe the adults around us still learn the most.
