Thresholds

We often had student teachers in our preschool. At the end of the semester they would be evaluated by one of their supervisors and consequently, so would we. One of the stranger comments I ever received was also one of the best as far as I was concerned. The supervisor seemed surprised that we treated all the children equally.

We always had an open house before school started, when fifteen three year olds and their parents converged upon my classroom like those little Amish dolls without faces. The minute they stepped into the room, those faces began to take on personalities with unique markers that made each one impossible to forget.

My goal? I wanted to make each child fall in love with school and look forward to learning new things. Unless a child showed up with stitches, or distressed in some way, I barely noticed what they were wearing, or how they looked. I was looking for smiles, bright eyes, and confidence, the rest just naturally follows those. By the end of an average school year we generally had fifteen little leaders, ready, willing, and eager to participate in almost everything and sorry to be going home at the end of the morning.

The funny thing is that I did strive to treat them equally, but not at all the same. You don’t treat a fish like a bird, or a drum like a saxophone. I wasn’t running a drill press, I was simply opening doors and encouraging fifteen new human beings to walk through them and try things out. My job was to give them the starter set of tools they needed to cross those thresholds that would continue to appear for the rest of their lives.